It was March 12th, 2020, and Lauren McCann's manager asked a simple question: who looks after Google Meet? The answer was no one, the video tool had roughly 30,000 weekly users in education, mostly for staff meetings. Three weeks later, that number was 92 million, and Lauren was the person in charge of holding it together.

The Call That Changed Everything

Lauren McCann, now Head of Figma for Education, was a marketing manager on Google's education team when the pandemic sent the entire world's schools scrambling for a way to keep teaching. Her manager asked her to take ownership of Google Meet almost on a whim, since nobody else was covering it. Within three weeks, weekly users exploded from 30,000 to 92 million, a scale-up most products never experience in their lifetime, let alone in twenty-one days.

The product simply wasn't built for it. Google Meet had been designed for adult staff meetings, not classrooms full of kids, and every gap in that design surfaced at once.

Within three weeks, it went from 30,000 weekly users to 92 million. And it was painful. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. The product was not built for kids at all. Kids were muting each other. They were kicking the teacher out of the classroom. They were loitering in the digital hallways. Creepy people were coming in and joining classes and finding links online.

Lauren McCann

"Everything That Could Go Wrong Went Wrong"

Some of the problems were security failures, outsiders finding class links online and joining uninvited, students booting teachers from their own meetings. Others were quieter and, in Lauren's telling, more heartbreaking: the product had no option for a virtual background, so students whose home lives they were embarrassed to show simply refused to turn on their cameras. Small product gaps became real barriers to kids showing up to learn.

The team had to rebuild trust and safety features on the fly, train teachers who had never used the tool and had no time to learn it, and do all of it while morale wore thin. Google had a policy letting any employee with a child take four months of caregiver leave, and most of Lauren's small team had kids. That left her and one other teammate to run point through the worst of it, going from what she described as a fun, low-stakes job with free sushi and massages to working roughly 100 hours a week for more than a year.

From Penn to Google: Finding the Intersection

Long before Google Meet, Lauren arrived at the University of Pennsylvania torn between film school and Wharton, drawn to international development and the intersection of healthcare and education. A summer with the Penn International Internship Program working at a school in Botswana redirected her: she watched how dependent nonprofit work was on whether a wealthy donor felt like giving that particular year, which pushed her toward sustainable, tech-driven models for social impact instead.

Her senior year job search was brutal. She estimates roughly 70 rounds of interviews and 30 final rounds without landing a single offer, and says more than one interviewer, including at Microsoft and American Express, told her outright that she seemed "too nonprofit" for corporate culture. Then, within about a week, everything turned: she met her future husband on a blind date, won a Fulbright fellowship to teach in India, and got her offer at Google, all in rapid succession.

That year teaching in India, at a public school with 750 students across four classes and, at first, a single decades-old computer for the entire school, became a formative reference point for everything she'd build afterward.

That year that I taught in India was the hardest year I ever had. That is harder than anything I do at Figma, harder than anything I ever did at Google. And I only taught for a year.

Lauren McCann

Midway through that year, Lauren and her school raised money for a small tablet lab. Watching students who had never touched a tablet start building projects within minutes convinced her that the right tools, put in the right hands, could open entirely new worlds, a conviction that shaped her path through Google and, later, Figma, where she now leads the team giving away design tools for free to students from age five through career-switching adults in their fifties.

Three Lessons for EdTech Entrepreneurs

Asked what she'd tell anyone building for education, Lauren pointed to three recurring lessons from her time at Google Classroom, Google Meet, and Figma for Education.

1. You need both top-down and bottom-up buy-in

She points to Google Classroom's early days as a cautionary tale: teachers loved it organically and started spinning up their own instances using students' personal Gmail accounts, which alarmed school administrators over safety and compliance. Winning teachers over isn't enough without institutional buy-in, and vice versa.

2. Stay community-driven

"The teach your product will live or die based on the champions that you do or don't have in the community through your teachers," Lauren said, arguing that products need to be shaped around teachers' actual, current needs rather than treating them as a marketing channel to be leveraged.

3. Stay close to the classroom

Classrooms have changed more in the last five years, and especially the last two, with AI, than in the previous fifty, in her view. Products need to keep pace with what's actually happening today, not what was a problem three years ago.

Teachers are just so underappreciated. It's honestly sad how excited they get for such basic things. So just treat teachers well and they will treat you well in return.

Lauren McCann

Finding Your First 100 True Fans

For founders intimidated by finding their earliest users, Lauren's advice is to start small and stay personal, she recalled emailing and DMing "every random person on the planet" when she first joined Figma, including making a custom GIF for each individual outreach message just to get a response. Her broader rule: find a few well-connected people, be shameless about reaching out, and never make it transactional. Teachers, she noted, trust other teachers most of all, and a handful of genuine advocates can open far more doors than any conference booth.

FAQ

What happened to Google Meet during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Google Meet went from about 30,000 weekly users in education to 92 million within three weeks in March 2020, as schools worldwide shifted to remote learning almost overnight. Lauren McCann, newly assigned to oversee the product, described it as her most challenging period at Google, marked by security gaps, unprepared teachers, and a product never designed for classrooms full of children.

Who is Lauren McCann?

Lauren McCann is Head of Figma for Education. She previously worked on Google's education team, including overseeing Google Meet, Google Classroom, and Google Workspace for Education during the pandemic. She is a University of Pennsylvania graduate, a Fulbright fellow who taught in India, and previously interned at a school in Botswana.

What lessons does Lauren McCann share for edtech entrepreneurs?

She emphasizes pairing top-down institutional buy-in with bottom-up teacher enthusiasm, staying deeply community-driven by treating teachers as genuine partners rather than a marketing channel, and continually staying close to what's actually happening in classrooms today rather than solving yesterday's problems.

Why did Google Meet struggle when it scaled so quickly?

Google Meet was originally built for adult staff meetings, not children. When it scaled almost overnight, problems emerged that ranged from security issues, like strangers finding class links online and joining sessions, to product gaps like the lack of virtual backgrounds, which led some students to keep their cameras off because they didn't want classmates seeing their homes.

From a crisis call on March 12th, 2020 to leading education efforts at one of design's most influential companies, Lauren McCann's path has consistently run through the same conviction: put the right tools in the right hands and remarkable things happen. This conversation is from an episode of Changing Reality with Harsha, where she shared the full story behind that chaotic three weeks and everything it taught her about building for teachers and students.