About Carly
Carly McGinnis is the driving force behind one of the fastest-growing tabletop companies in history. As CEO of Exploding Kittens, she’s helped lead the company to over 25 million games sold and dozens of successful launches, all while keeping the promises of the most-backed crowdfund ever. Carly’s path—from surviving the Hollywood talent-agency grind to building a global game business—has given her a rare blend of resilience, humor, and no-nonsense leadership. In this episode, we discuss how she scales teams, navigates creative chaos, and builds a culture that can actually deliver on big ideas.
Related episodes with Elan Lee, Creator of Exploding Kittens
Justin’s Ah-Ha Notes:
Slow Down to Grow Faster: Carly reminds us that speed isn’t the same as progress. When you rush just to keep moving, you create confusion, rework, and stress that ultimately slow you down. The real skill is learning to pause long enough to think clearly, set the right priorities, and avoid doing things simply for the sake of doing them. When you give yourself and your team permission to slow down, you actually create the conditions to grow faster and make better decisions.
Define “Good Enough” and Move Forward: One of Carly’s superpowers is knowing when to push and when to ship. Perfection can quietly kill momentum, especially inside a fast-scaling company. By clearly defining what “good enough” means for a project, she empowers her team to keep moving, learn in the real world, and avoid getting stuck polishing details that don’t matter. Progress comes from clarity and clarity starts with setting a bar everyone understands.
Leadership Is Repetition: Carly makes this point beautifully: leadership isn’t about a single breakthrough moment, it’s about reinforcing the fundamentals again and again. Whether it’s reminding the team of the mission, encouraging fast feedback loops, or surfacing hard conversations, the job is to repeat what matters until it becomes part of the culture’s DNA. A great leader is patient, and presents enough to help their teams grow in the right direction.
Show Notes:
“It’s that… fail-fast mentality, which I think is super helpful early on.” (00:22:02)
Carly explains how Exploding Kittens grew out of a pure startup mindset: figure it out as you go, move fast, and learn from mistakes before they become expensive. Early in the company’s life, she and Elan operated with that scrappy “do whatever it takes” attitude toward shipping, logistics, manufacturing, customer support, all of it. However, the deeper lesson is that “Fail fast” is empowering when you’re discovering what works but there comes a moment when you must slow down, build structure, and replace improvisation with process. The art is knowing which phase you’re in and evolving with your company instead of clinging to what used to work.
“It’s not about being perfect. It’s about moving forward and making sure the team knows what good enough looks like.” (00:49:37)
This is one of Carly’s core leadership philosophies, and one she learned the hard way. She’s open about being a perfectionist, and how that instinct can quietly sabotage growth. Perfection leads to bottlenecks; clarity leads to momentum. The turning point for her was realizing that leadership is about empowering the right people to do their jobs well. Defining “good enough” gives your team the opportunity to execute, surface issues early, and learn by doing. As I’ve discovered myself, sometimes that means they’ll make decisions differently than you would, but that’s how they grow.
“Leadership is repetition.” (00:56:21)
This is one of the most powerful lines in the entire conversation. Carly describes how processes, values, and expectations naturally decay unless leaders continuously reinforce them: not once, but endlessly. Teams don’t absorb things because you said them; they absorb them because you say them consistently, in different contexts, until the culture internalizes them. Being a great leader means returning to the fundamentals over and over, with patience, humility, and clarity.
