When Andrey Khusid cofounded Miro in 2011, the idea was simple: bring a whiteboard into the browser, and let people collaborate visually, not just with text. Now that digital canvas is evolving into what the CEO calls an “AI Innovation Workspace.” More than 100 million people use Miro these days, so the company’s ventures into AI are quickly reaching more than 250,000 organizations, including GitHub, Prudential, and Cisco.
To serve those Fortune 500 companies, Miro now offers a platform for collaborative AI workflows with Sidekicks that work alongside teams on the canvas, and tools for turning rough sketches into clickable prototypes. The company, which sported a $17.5 billion valuation when it raised $400 million in 2022, recently acquired Butter, a workshop facilitation platform, to tackle what Khusid sees as broken meetings.
Fast Company spoke with Khusid about why he believes AI’s real value lies in teams rather than individuals, how Miro can compete in an increasingly crowded software arena, and what he learned from scaling the company from 200 to 1,600 employees.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve said AI’s biggest opportunity lies in teamwork, not individual productivity. Why is focusing on solo work a mistake?
When you work in a company, the company moves not with the speed of every individual. The company moves with the speed of the outcome that those individuals produce together. If I boost my individual productivity but I still wait two weeks between my milestone and the next person’s milestone, it doesn’t matter if I accomplish the task in one hour instead of one week.
Before, you would do a workshop, then someone needs to summarize action items—that takes a week. Someone comes back, the group forgot what was discussed, you chase people—another week or two. Then someone breaks it down into tasks, someone builds a prototype. What AI allows you to do is see the final output in the first workshop. You brainstorm ideas, turn them into a project brief, a project plan, a prototype—and you see it immediately. You work backwards and iterate on the inputs. That’s a completely different game.
With Flows and Sidekicks, you’re embedding agentic AI directly on the canvas. How do you see AI tools working alongside human teams?
We are creative creatures. We like to think about things and come up with things. We’re less into executing repeatable tasks. So even if work can be fully automated, I don’t believe it should be—because what else will we do?
In areas where it’s more defined and predictable, you can do more human-in-the-loop. In areas where you want to explore, you make it human-in-the-lead. It depends on the preferences of the organization and the type of project. We try to build a product that accommodates both.
Miro Prototypes lets teams turn sticky notes into clickable prototypes. What are unexpected examples of how people are using that?
One big unlock is that you don’t need to learn a design tool to express yourself visually. You put several stickies with your ideas and turn them into a prototype. That’s magical because you remove the friction of the learning curve.
Another interesting use case: A lot of internal tooling was built 10 or 20 years ago with no design system. People take a screenshot of an existing product, add a button in one click, then use a Sidekick to validate it with a synthetic persona, check accessibility guidance—all without expensive resources or delays. Before, you’d need an outsourcing company to validate accessibility. Now you can do it with a Sidekick. The most interesting examples are at the intersection of prototyping and the validation work that happens before and after.
You acquired Butter and launched Miro Engage. What’s broken about how teams run workshops and meetings?
What we’re trying to solve is engagement in a distributed setting. When everyone’s in the room, you can observe the audience, call out things. In a digital setting, it’s a completely different challenge. You need to create an environment where people lean in, provide inputs, speak up—even if they’re off camera. Our vision is combining human intelligence and artificial intelligence together. Miro Engage is focused on collecting human intelligence in the most engaging way, then combining it with AI to synthesize and bring out the best insights.
Apple launched Freeform, Figma has FigJam, Microsoft has Whiteboard, and project management tools are adding visual features. What keeps you up at night competitively?
I focus on what we are uniquely positioned to solve. But you do need to navigate the marketplace—you have usage and budgets that can move to other platforms.
I’m focused on how we progress toward our mission to empower teams to create the next big thing, not how we stick to the canvas. We may abstract from the canvas, double down on the canvas—whatever it takes.
Innovation velocity matters. We’re building journeys, not features. And then taste—how we stand out in design, in storytelling, in helping companies transform. Because I don’t think we’re in a delivery competition anymore.
Software development is so commoditized. It’s brand, taste, transformation partnership, thought leadership that will differentiate.
Some argue horizontal platforms lose to vertical ones that go deeper. What’s your take?
I totally agree we’ll see more consolidation. Our strategy is what I call T-shaped: how do you provide an experience accessible to everyone, but solve certain problems deeply that horizontal tools won’t go after because it’s too small for them, but sizable for us. Those jobs need to be connected to one platform, not separate tools creating more silos.
You grew from 200 to 1,600 employees. What was the hardest lesson about scaling that fast?
We had values, but we didn’t translate those values into behaviors. Tightening that up earlier would have helped a lot.
The biggest unlock was bringing more hands-on players—what I call super ICs, super individual contributors. Leaders who know how to do the work end-to-end, not just sit and wait while people bring the job. Today, every manager should manage an army of agents, not just humans. That’s a new skill we’re looking for: hands-on with the craft, but also able to deliver work through both people and agents.
What leaders do you admire or learn from?
Brian Halligan—how he transformed HubSpot several times without fundamentally changing the core business. Jensen Huang—the journey he’s on is impressive. Des Traynor and the Intercom team, how they changed the business from major decline into a new rocket ship. Anton Osika from Lovable—he’s building from scratch with a very new approach to the operating model.
For me, the most interesting are people who did a hard job—escape velocity from the ground up, or transforming the biggest companies into something completely new. The CEO of Axa went from 80% B2C to 80% B2B in a few years. Satya Nadella did an incredible job transforming Microsoft. I’m trying to learn as much as possible from those doing it in 2025 and 2026, not just those who transformed before.
What’s in your personal tool kit?
I spend my entire day in Gmail, Slack, Google Meet, and, of course, Miro. That’s my stack. I’m using Miro more and more because now we have all the AI models available—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google—inside the platform. So I do a lot of work inside Miro instead of context-switching between tools.
For agentic stuff, I’m playing with Claude’s computer use and other tools to experiment with automating offline work. It’s too early to say it’s my tool, but I believe that’s the next horizon of experiences we’ll all bet on.