Win As The Accidental CEO
David McGavran — CEO @ Maxon
About this masterclass
David McGavran is the CEO of Maxon, the company behind Cinema 4D, one of the most widely used tools in motion graphics and 3D content creation. David never planned to become a CEO. He spent most of his career as a builder and programmer, including years at Adobe where he was still writing code deep into his leadership roles.
What This Masterclass Covers
David arrived at Maxon expecting a product challenge. What he found was a company with amazing software, but everything around it needed to be built: sales processes, billing, facilities, hiring, the full operating environment. His masterclass is about that gap between building a great product and running a great company. In this masterclass, David walks through his unexpected path into leadership, what he learned from working with world-class creative users, and what it actually means to become a CEO when you never wanted to be one:
- Why becoming CEO felt like "CEO for Dummies," and how he learned finance, marketing, sales, and HR on the job
- What sitting with David Fincher and elite editors taught him about product standards, and why world-class users stretch your team in ways nothing else can
- Why surveys and internet comments are not enough: the case for physically watching your users work and finding friction points in real workflows
- The difference between building a great product and building a great company, and why most technical founders underestimate the second part
- Why leadership means responsibility for the environment in which people succeed, from payroll to office buildings to support systems
- The story of arriving at Maxon in a shiny purple rental car on announcement day, and what the early days of a CEO transition actually feel like
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Transcript
Introduction
My name is David McGavran. I'm the CEO of Maxon. I've been here for seven years. We're located in Hamburg, Germany, which is my second home. I've been in Germany for a total of 15 years. Originally, I grew up in the United States, from Connecticut and New England, went to school in Maine for computer science, and moved to California for my first job.
How I Got Into Computer Science
When I went to university, I actually had no idea what I wanted to do. I accidentally became a computer science major — the dean of science took me in, interviewed me for a bit, and told me I should study computers. And I really enjoyed the art of programming and figuring out how to solve problems.
After a couple of changes early in my career, I ended up at Adobe and was able to work on Adobe Premiere Pro, which is a video editing application. I loved the opportunity to work directly with artists and help them tell their stories better through software — to allow them to do things that weren't possible before, and to work interactively with artists as we developed the software.
When I was in university, I was privileged to work for a company called ASAP Media Services. It was a student organization trying to use computers to tell multimedia stories — this was before many of the technologies we take for granted today. We worked with the American Sign Language organization to create a game to help students learn sign language. We were trying to figure out how to mix hand signals and computer graphics to make an engaging learning experience. That opportunity — to do something that hadn't been done before, to help people tell stories in a way they'd never been told — was really what engaged me. Through that work, we met a lot of people at Apple, they introduced us to others in the industry, and we got to do things no one had done before. That was probably when my desire to work with artists began.
Early Career: Apple, Claris & Landing at Adobe
As I was graduating, things got a bit bumpy. I was offered jobs at Apple and was going to be working in the QuickTime organization, which was really exciting — moving from Maine out to California. And right before I graduated, Steve Jobs laid off a number of people at Apple, including the people who were going to offer me the job. So I had to quickly change direction.
I ended up taking a temporary job for a bit. But luckily, some of those same people landed at a company called Claris, which did web page software — brand new at the time. I moved to California to work on video playback inside web pages. Unfortunately, Steve Jobs came in and fired us all again. At that point I didn't have a lot of extra money and wasn't sure how I was going to afford to live in California. But luckily, the best thing happened: Adobe looked at everyone who had been laid off from Claris and hired almost all of them. About 300 of us moved over to Adobe.
That was a very lucky thing to happen. I met a ton of great people, and being at Adobe was probably the coolest thing that could happen to a young person in California. If you think about the early days of the internet, the early days of computers — desktop publishing, video editing, photo editing — this was a company, Adobe, with just a few thousand employees. We worked nonstop all day and all night, but we mixed our life with our work. There was a lot of partying, a lot of fun. The founders were spectacular people. John Warnock and Chuck Geschke would come and be with you in your office. I remember in my early days on Premiere, John sat down with me and told me all the things that didn't work in the software, and I was able to program the fixes so that the CEO at the time could actually use it.
It was a very exciting time. Everybody wanted to do something that hadn't been done before, and we had so much fun being at that point in the industry when things were just starting to happen. We were meeting amazing editors and storytellers and working directly with them to create technology that didn't exist.
Growing at Adobe: From Programmer to Engineering Leader
When I first got to Adobe, I briefly ended up in the Photoshop team, but that didn't last very long until I met the person running the engineering organization for what at the time wasn't yet called Premiere Pro. There were only four or five of us on the program, and I was the Mac programmer — a great time to be young and coding nonstop.
Over time, as Premiere became more relevant to the industry and the product team grew, I became a lead for a couple of other programmers, guided some features, developed some major features, and then we started working more closely with another Adobe product, After Effects. Working across Premiere and After Effects — making them work better together — was when I started to take over larger areas of the product, and that was my first real leadership experience: designing features, working with other people to get them done, and working much more directly with customers.
After a stint in Germany, when my family and I decided to go back to the United States, Adobe asked me to lead first the core media engine team and then shortly after, the entire engineering organization for Premiere. That was when I had to learn how to step back from programming — maybe doing a little less of the direct work. Some of my colleagues might disagree with how much I actually stepped back. But as I ran the Premiere engineering organization, after a few years it developed into running the entire audio and video group at Adobe — about four or five different products and around 150 people, building the full suite of media, video, and audio products.
That was a lot of change — going from being just a programmer, to leading a small team, to leading an entire organization, and then having to have conversations with Adobe leadership, going out to meet CTOs, talk to large customers, and be present in the industry. A lot of change that happened in maybe four or five years.
The Most Important Lesson from Adobe: Listen to the Customer
The most important thing I was able to learn at Adobe was this: what you think you need to add to a product, what you think will make the artist or the customer happy, isn't always correct. Sometimes it's completely wrong. It's a challenge to learn how to sit with the person who's going to use your software and actually understand their needs — not just try to explain why what you think is right is right. The customer or the artist knows much more than you do as a programmer, and you need to be able to translate what they're saying into the language you need to build the product better for them. That tight feedback loop was very hard to learn, but I think it was the most important thing I took from my career.
As Premiere got more relevant to the industry, we started working with TV stations around the world — going to Europe, Asia, meeting different styles of TV editing. But then came a pivotal decision: Adobe decided to go after key filmmakers and directors and have them tell their stories with Premiere. It was a challenging piece of software to make — we had to step up our game significantly. But that's when things really got interesting, because when you're sitting down with the best filmmakers in the world and discovering the techniques they need to tell their stories, the standards they hold, and what it actually takes to make them happy — that's when you realize that a lot of what you believed about how to write software isn't what they expected at all.
We were on-site with them for days, sometimes weeks at a time, working directly with directors, editors, and assistant editors to make our software work. The quality they bring to their work, the expectations they have — knowing that if you don't deliver, the whole film falls apart — that's when you realize how important your job truly is. You need to understand what the assistant editor needs, how that interacts with the editor using the software, what the director expects when watching the cuts. Truly understanding the highest expectations for your software changes the way you go about your job, the way you talk to the people on your team, and the inspiration you have to give them. You have to help them understand that things need to work the way the customer wants — not just the way they believe is right.
One of the most interesting examples was sitting in while David Fincher was working with his editor making selects on a TV commercial. They were going through 300 shots of someone opening a package of sugar for a perfume commercial, and the quality they could see in those shots — I couldn't even tell what was happening. I just realized I didn't have that skill set. They had it all. But at the same time, there were problems in the software I needed to fix. It was an extraordinary experience to watch people working at the absolute top of their game and to realize your job is to work alongside them in a completely different but equally critical way.
Becoming an Accidental CEO
I loved my time at Adobe. It was 20 years of my life and it shaped me in so many ways. But I was living in Germany for the second time, my children were in school there, and we wanted to stay. At some point at Adobe, I was reaching a level where there was an expectation that I'd move to headquarters. So I started looking at other opportunities — mostly thinking about a senior technical role, maybe a CTO or director of engineering, something similar to what I'd done at Adobe.
At that time, a friend of mine was being recruited to be the CEO of Maxon — not me. When I found out he was being considered, I actually thought Maxon was a US company, because we'd worked with their US team quite a bit. When I realized they were headquartered in Germany, pretty close to where I was living, I told him to go ahead and take the job — and then he could hire me and we could work together again and have fun at a different company. So we went through the whole interview process together, thinking we'd both get what we wanted. We even had a couple of schnapps together to celebrate the opportunity. And at the last second, it fell apart. We both walked away from the deal — we weren't going to let anyone put us against each other.
About two months later, they came back and asked me to be CEO. That was something I'd never even considered. It didn't make sense to me. My friend had been a CEO before — he knew that role. I didn't. I talked to him and he told me to go for it. I told my wife, and she basically told me I had to. So I went to Nemetschek for the interview and told them they would be making a huge mistake if they chose me. In the end, my wife and my friend essentially forced me to do it. And that's how I came to refer to the whole thing as becoming an accidental CEO.
When I was asked to become CEO of Maxon, I explained to Nemetschek that I didn't actually know anything about that job. I knew how to create a product. I knew how Adobe went about selling software to artists and how we worked with artists to improve it. But I had no finance experience, no sales experience, no marketing experience. I explained all of this clearly. They convinced me to do it and offered me guidance. I was very lucky — they assigned who is now our CFO, Enrique Glass, as a partner to me. At the time he was at Nemetschek, and he was tasked with teaching me the finance piece.
When I rang the doorbell for my first day at Maxon — which is itself a unique experience, showing up and ringing the doorbell at the company you've been asked to lead — I literally had no idea what I was going to do that day, or the day after, or the day after that. Everything that happened in those first few months was unexpected. I didn't expect to be figuring out how to get carpets cleaned, or that I'd literally sit down and sign people's paychecks. The basic things it takes to run a company aren't things you think about when you're just a programmer making software for artists.
Around that time, my friend who I'd mentioned had left to join Amazon — in video as well, as it happened. We both found ourselves in new roles simultaneously and became a bit of a support system for each other. He's been a great mentor throughout.
Since I knew I didn't know what I was doing, I also formed an advisory board for Maxon and brought back some people I'd been lucky to work with in the past — a VP from Disney who became a mentor to me, my friend, and several others. One of my favorite things about being at Maxon is that it's in the same industry as Adobe, so going back to the trade shows means getting to see and hang out with all the people we built our lives with in those early years.
The First Day and What I Found
I remember the day they announced to Maxon that I was joining as CEO and that the founders were retiring — it was a very emotional day for people there. I had rented a car to go on a quick vacation with my family and showed up at Maxon in what turned out to be a purple Citroën Cactus — a very shiny, funny-looking car. People there for the announcement saw me driving away in this purple car, and I had to go home and explain to my wife that the first impression I made on the people at Maxon was driving up in a purple Cactus. I don't worry too much about those things, but it was a funny experience.
When I got to Maxon, we had one product. It was created a long time ago by our Chief Technology and Product Officer — when he was 15. It's called Cinema 4D. It's what's called a DCC — a digital content creation application — basically designed to create 3D scenes, objects, games, videos, and motion graphics, mostly for the TV and film industry. Nemetschek, which is an architecture company in Germany, originally wanted software that could turn buildings into photorealistic versions — going from a CAD model to a photorealistic render. Cinema 4D had rendering technology built into it, which is what made it interesting for Nemetschek. So Nemetschek acquired Maxon to bring realistic 3D rendering to architecture software. At that point it was used for architecture, but also for film, games, TV, motion graphics, and product design.
In the 3D artistic software segment, there are now a number of companies — it's a very competitive space. Each has carved out its own specialty. Maxon became very well known for motion graphics. The example I always give: if you watch the opening of any sports program — the World Cup, basketball, football — you always see a trophy spinning in or a player appearing on screen surrounded by text and statistics. That look and feel is motion graphics. That's what Cinema 4D is mostly known for.
After I got settled and chose my office — also its own unique decision — I went around and talked to everybody. I wanted to get to know the people, understand what they were thinking and what was on their minds. There were concerns about this new person, this American from Adobe who didn't know anything about 3D software.
But most of the concerns people raised and most of the problems I was asked to think about had very little to do with the product. We were looking at how we were selling our software — there were piles of invoices being sent to customers in paper form. Windows needed cleaning. The offices were too hot because they were running high-power computers without air conditioning. There were dirty carpets. Walls were literally falling down, things falling on cars. Almost none of these problems had to do with making customers happy, because the software was amazing. That part was solved. Building a successful modern company around it was the real challenge — and that's what I hadn't actually thought about before becoming CEO.
Learning Every Corner of the Business
When I got to Maxon, I was extremely lucky that many of the people there had been there a long time. They knew the company, the people, the products, and were more than willing to help change things for the better. I had a spectacular finance person, a great HR partner, a strong Chief Technical Officer, and excellent engineering leadership — and all of them were willing to sit down and help transform the company.
The most important thing for me was to truly understand what each person did. I honestly had no idea how anyone used Excel for professional purposes — that just wasn't something I'd ever done. But I had to sit down with my CFO and have him painstakingly teach me what deferred revenue means, why you do revenue deferral, what the taxation reasons are, why we handle cross-border charges the way we do. All of these things I had no idea about. And they influence the decisions you make about the product and how you sell it. Each person at the company was willing to sit down with me, and as I understood their area better, we could bring it into more modern workflows together.
If you weren't generous, you might call what I was doing micromanagement. But I don't think the team saw it that way at all. We sat down together and looked at every single decision we were making, trying to improve upon each area of the business so things would run smoother, we could automate more, and we could make better decisions as a group. Through that process, I learned more than I could have imagined — more than if I'd gone to school for it. If you understand what every person at the company does and how to help them do it better, the company itself can get much better.
There's also a very specific subject called transfer pricing. We had a company in the US, a company in Germany, and one of the companies we'd acquired was also in the US — so we now had intellectual property sitting in two countries. You have to understand what that means, or you can make very costly mistakes.
Switching to Subscriptions: A Business Model Transformation
Back at Adobe, leadership came down to us one day and said: tomorrow, we're changing the way the company does business. We're switching from selling a version every 18 months to selling subscriptions. None of us knew what that meant at the time.
When I was asked to lead Maxon, one of the early conversations was: can we do with Maxon what Adobe did with subscriptions? A lot of people, when they think about subscriptions, only think about the revenue model — if you can take money from customers on an ongoing basis, it's better than taking it once a year. That's true, and it's not something to dismiss. But what's really interesting about subscriptions — and I think one reason my team was trusted to do it — is that subscriptions aren't a financial model. They're about changing the way the entire company works.
In a traditional perpetual or upgrade model, every 18 months you go back to a customer and sell them something new. You need to put new things in the product — things they might not actually want or need. You're doing that because the sales cycle demands it. But when you become a true subscription company, you change the entire relationship with the customer. You're no longer asking: what can I build for you so you'll pay me more money? You're asking: what can I build for you so you stay a customer of mine?
They're already paying you. And so you don't need to create monster new features to put in an advertisement. You just need to give them what they actually need — and those can be small features. Life-improving features. Save the person using the software a minute a day. Make them happier. Make it crash less. Things that would be hard to put on a feature list if you were selling boxed software. When we switched Maxon to subscriptions, it wasn't just about changing the billing pattern. It was about rebuilding the company to design features so that customers stay customers, rather than constantly selling them new software every year. That's a fundamental shift. I think we've done a pretty good job at it.
The Importance of Going Directly to Customers
Most customers of any company aren't going home after work and yelling about their frustrations on the internet. So if you think listening to unfiltered online feedback is all you need, you're only hearing a very small part of the story. Usually the unhappy people are the ones who make noise online. The happy people are quiet.
It's about finding your way to the actual customers who are successfully using your software to make a living. If they're using your software 40 hours a week, you have to find time in their schedule to ask for feedback in a way you can actually use to make the product better. It's not a survey. It's not just reading internet comments — you can't ignore that, but it's not enough. You have to go to them, to their place of work, watch them work, be part of their daily reality, sometimes even participating so you can see what they actually do all day.
In doing that, you might find one small thing that saves them two hours or makes them twice as happy. Or you might get in trouble because you made something faster and they lose a coffee break — that has happened before. But in general: go out with your customers, watch them use your software, and work with them to make it better.
Expanding into Architecture: Targeting a New Customer Segment
The biggest thing we've noticed recently — as some of the traditional segments have slowed down — is how many other industries are looking at our software. Architects and the construction industry in particular are shifting very dramatically towards digital storytelling, and I think that's going to make Maxon very successful in that space. But it's not just architecture and construction. We see all sorts of industries starting to realize that 3D storytelling is critical — jewelry designers, currency designers, medical visualization, product designers. So many people are now digging into 3D as a new storytelling methodology.
Knowing that Nemetschek is our parent company and that we have sister companies operating right in the architecture space, we can leverage that. Maxon already has a significant architecture business in Japan and Italy. But how do we take the 3D technology we have — built for film and TV — and bring it to an industry where people maybe don't do as much visualization as they should?
When you want to switch industries or target new customer segments, you can't assume you know what you're doing. You can't just say: we can make a building look beautiful, so our software will work fine. You need to sit down with those customers and understand their world. It started with me and a couple of people from Maxon going to trade shows where architects were present and visiting the customers of our sister companies. We actually sat down with the architects who were designing our own new headquarters — they were using Graphisoft for the renderings, but we weren't happy with the quality, so we spent time understanding their workflows and figuring out how we could help them do things better.
Visualizing for an architecture company is very different from visualizing for a motion design company. When you're designing a commercial for a new shoe or a toy, you have an enormous amount of artistic freedom. When you're telling the story of a physical building, the rules are different. CAD models aren't free-form 3D art objects — they have to have physical dimensions, accurate light behavior, realistic materials. The kitchen has to be the right size. You need to be able to move through the space and understand how people would actually live inside it. And you have to integrate directly with CAD software, whereas in the commercial world, an artist might spend their entire day inside Cinema 4D. So while there are many similarities, the differences matter and make the work more specific.
But when I talk to the Maxon team or to customers, I always say our strategy is about helping artists be more creative. And that encompasses everyone who uses our software. If you're using a visual or audio toolset to tell a story, you are a creative person. Architects are absolutely in that category — they're telling the story of a building, whether it's a private home, a company's identity, or a new part of a city. That fits our customer segment perfectly. We want to enable them to tell that story through full-quality photorealistic renderings and walkthroughs, bringing everything we've built for the film industry to architecture.
Managing Through Crisis
About a year or two after I got to Maxon, we had just finished a significant merger — putting two large companies together. We had a whole integration plan, three months of careful preparation, bringing teams to different locations. And then we started hearing news about a virus in China. We were working closely with our Chinese partner and suddenly couldn't get them on the phone. Shortly after, we started having difficulty reaching partners in Italy and Spain.
We made the decision to shut down the office and send everyone home. At the time, that wasn't widely discussed. I had talked to people at Nemetschek about it — they weren't taking it that seriously yet. But looking at everything that was happening with our business, we made the call. We spent a lot of time, even as we were sending people home, thinking about what kind of company we wanted to be coming out of this. We sat down every morning during those first three months to look at our business performance and ask: can we pay the bills? We were a young team. We had just put three companies together. We didn't know if it was an existential crisis or not. It took an enormous amount of emotional effort to make sure both that the company could survive and that our employees were safe and able to do their jobs from home.
Then, earlier this year, something quite different caught us off guard. One of our key suppliers called and told us they weren't going to pay their bills anymore — they were going insolvent. Part of the software we used to run our business was suddenly going to stop working. We couldn't run our web shop. We couldn't sell our software to customers. If we didn't react correctly, our software would actually shut off for existing customers.
We should probably have had more redundancy in place, but this was a very large partner — not some small company — and their insolvency was something we simply hadn't anticipated. We had to put a crisis team together and work day and night for about three weeks to keep the lights on and get back to being able to sell again.
What made it work was trust. We brought a few of the leaders out to headquarters, sat down with the team, explained exactly what was happening and exactly how critical it was. The moment they understood the real impact on their daily work and what it meant for them, they came together. They appreciated that we trusted them enough to explain the full situation and then asked them for help. We spent a lot of time together in person — pizza, occasional beers, building the teamwork. And honestly, I think most of them came out of it feeling proud. It didn't feel like extra work. It felt like they'd achieved something important.
That said, as CEO, the fear that never entirely goes away is the fear of making a decision that screws things up and means you can't keep your employees employed anymore. People's livelihoods, jobs they love, work they're proud of, customers who love the product — you don't want to be the one who breaks that. That crisis was the one where I genuinely wasn't sure we'd make it through. We did. The team was spectacular.
What Cinema 4D Creates in the World
Every year we put together a showreel of everything artists have made with our software — Lego animations, the best movies in the world, the most creative architecture, incredible stories told through our tools. One particularly meaningful thing: Maxon's software has plugins for medical visualization. During the COVID crisis, most of the coronavirus animations you saw on the news — the visualizations of the virus itself — were made with Cinema 4D. That was something that stuck with me. From the very beginning of my career in video to today at Maxon, the most meaningful moments are when unique stories get told that hopefully make the world a better place: documentaries, scientific explanations, nature shows, medical visualization. Any time we're using this technology to help people learn and understand more, there's a special pride in that.
Every Person at Maxon is Part of the Product Team
Every single person at Maxon helps make the product. At some companies, people outside the product division are referred to as "general administrative," and that makes me genuinely sad. If you're sitting in finance and working with customers or with managers on a budget, you need to know why you're there. You're not just processing bills. You're trying to make the company more successful, and the company's mission is to serve artists. Whether you're in finance, legal, or HR — you need to understand the company's mission because you're part of the solution. You're part of getting our story and our products out to our customers. Every single person matters.
There's actually much more common ground between artists and programmers, or between programmers and people in finance, than you might think. An artist is trying to figure out how to tell a story. A programmer is trying to figure out how to build software for that artist. Once you help people see that common ground and communicate around it, they work together really well.
The Weight of Being CEO
Going from programmer, to leading a small team, to running an organization, to becoming CEO — I sometimes didn't fully realize the weight that the title carries early on. I'd still walk into meetings and behave just like Dave the programmer or Dave the leader of a small team. I'd ask questions or make a joke the way I always would, not realizing that people who'd just joined the company and didn't know me yet were thinking: that's the CEO — I don't know how to respond, I don't know if that was a joke. There's a concept you have to develop: knowing the difference between when you're the manager and when you're just someone in the room. Getting that wrong can get you in trouble.
The biggest challenge as a company grows is communication. When you're five people, you can talk to each other all day and have no problems. As the company gets bigger — we've tripled in employee count since I arrived, and grown much more than that in software and revenue — communication becomes a constant challenge. If people don't know what's happening on the other side of the business, it slows them down. If they know too much, that also slows them down. You have to constantly adjust that balance. The best thing you can do is talk to people constantly. Walk around the office. Visit the different areas. Ask what people are doing and find out what's frustrating them. You can't solve every problem, but if you're aware of them, you can slowly make things better.
If I looked back and had to describe being a CEO to someone else: we've all heard "lonely at the top." I wouldn't go with lonely, but there's truth in the sentiment. You are responsible, at the end of the day, for the decisions you make. And if you truly understand what could go wrong if you don't make the right calls, you don't leave this job — you're thinking about it constantly. A mentor of mine often calls me up and checks how I'm doing, because it's a constant weight. Not loneliness exactly, but a continuous sense of responsibility for everyone around you. It's a great job — but it's also exhausting at times.
Still a Product Person at Heart
If I had to say I was one thing, I'd be a product person. Someone once criticized me in a senior leadership meeting by saying: "You're just a programmer." I don't think it was meant as a compliment, but I took it as one. I love being the kind of CEO who stays close to the product — who understands why we're talking to our customers, why we're building what we build. That's where my heart is. But as I always say: everybody at Maxon is part of the product team.
I joke a lot about the book I'm going to write someday — I'm too lazy to actually write it, but I have written the chapters in my head. After I said yes to the CEO position but before I started, I went online trying to find a book called "CEO for Dummies." It didn't exist at the time. There was no book for people who didn't know they were about to become CEOs. So "CEO for Dummies" became the unofficial title of my career.
Even though things have been hard at times — both at Adobe and at Maxon — I think my entire career has followed the path it was supposed to. I wouldn't change anything. I've been very lucky to have had the opportunities I've had. And when I get to spend my time on Maxon problems, it's a very great way to spend my time.
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