EP15 - Unicorn Files - Miro: From Perm's Whiteboards to Global Future

Story of Miro, the collaboration software scale-up born in Perm, Russia: from its origins as RealtimeBoard in 2011 to rebranding as Miro in 2019 and the explosive growth during the COVID-19 pandemic that made it a global reference point for distributed teams.

Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin founded RealtimeBoard with a clear idea: physical whiteboards are one of the most powerful thinking tools that exist, but distributed work made them unusable. The digital version wasn't supposed to be just an online whiteboard, but a system of collaborative visual thinking in real-time. When COVID forced the world to remote work, Miro was already the most mature product in this category.

In this episode we explore growth from 3 million to over 60 million users in just a few years, the $17.5 billion valuation reached in 2022, and governance challenges and the 2024 layoffs that marked the transition from hypergrowth startup to sustainable business. We analyze the integration of generative AI features, the enterprise strategy that brings Miro into Fortune 500 companies, and IPO prospects. An episode on how to build and defend leadership in a product category you're inventing yourself.