In the race for the next big thing, what’s the most critical component most tech companies overlook until it’s almost too late?
It’s not the code.
After nearly two decades of building teams from the ground up and finding the Unicorns everyone wants but rarely exists, I’ve learned that the real foundation of any company isn’t its product or its balance sheet; it’s the people.
Moving to a global tech leader like Canva crystallized this for me.
I was no longer just finding talent; I was responsible for nurturing it, for building the high-performing engineering teams that were creating the future in real-time.
This is where the art of leadership truly reveals itself.
It’s not about command and control. It’s about coaching. It’s about creating a framework of psychological safety and trust where brilliant people feel empowered to take risks, to fail, and to innovate.
My role shifted from being a finder of talent to a builder of teams.
You learn that a team’s velocity isn’t just measured in lines of code or feature releases, but in the strength of its internal trust. High-performing teams are built on a foundation of human connection, a shared understanding that you have each other’s backs.
That’s the secret sauce you can’t replicate with a bigger budget or a new tech stack.
But the pace of change was accelerating.
I started to wonder: how do you coach and build teams when the very nature of ‘work’ is about to be fundamentally transformed by something as powerful as AI?