Duncan Clark on staying purpose-driven in a $42 billion company

0:00I think a lot of what makes a startup feel like a startup is the sense that the founders are still running it to their original vision and they're empowered to make decisions.

0:15Duncan Clark:Welcome back to 40 Minute Mentor, the podcast on a mission to raise aspirations and inspire the next generation of category defining founders, all in just 40 minutes. Today, we're joined by Duncan Clark, head of EMEA at Canva. I don't think Canva needs much of an introduction these days. A global online visual communications platform is on a mission to empower the world to design. Founded in 2013 by Melanie Perkins, Cameron Adams and Clift Obrecht, Canva was built to make design accessible to everyone. And that's certainly been a successful mission to date with over 200 million monthly active users.

0:50Duncan Clark:I am one of them. And a valuation of over$42 billion. dollars. Before leading Canva's EMEA team, Duncan started his career in journalism at The Guardian, became co-author of The Burning Question, a data-driven analysis of climate change, and built Flourish, the leading platform for data storytelling and visualization. Flourish is what brought Duncan into the Canva family following its acquisition in February 2022. So I am super thrilled that Duncan is here to share his career journey, his experience of building Flourish as a first-time founder and of course his journey with Canva so far. So Duncan, a warm welcome to 40 Minute Mentor.

1:27Duncan Clark:How are you? I'm very well, thank you and thanks for the thanks for the welcome. It's great to be here. Well it's great to have you on the show and we always like to warm up our guests with some quickfire questions just to get you going. So please finish the following sentences after me. Number one, the moment that defined my career was when? It was when I realized in my first job as a publisher and an editor that I could reinvent the way it was done and that my instincts on that were right, that it could be done better. The biggest lesson I've learned about leadership is? That it's good to be in the detail and across everything, but when companies get to a certain size, the real role of a lead is to retain and hire great talent.

2:15Duncan Clark:Music to my ears as a headhunter. Love that one. A skill I wish I had mastered earlier in my career is? Hiring. I think maybe that's the same answer to a different question. But I think if I went back, I would focus more on team building at the very beginning. Yeah, it's definitely one that we get often on the podcast. It's in many ways. I mean, I love, I obviously love hiring, but it's not an easy thing to do. And it does take time. And I think we can talk more about that a bit later. And if I could change one thing about how companies build teams, it would be? It would be to embrace the generalist.

2:48I'm a big fan of generalism. I think often the people who bring the most value work across different silos. And as companies get bigger, it can be hard to know what to do with those people. But I think generally that's a problem with the structure rather than the talent. So I would say find a way to get those generalists doing as much as possible?

3:08Duncan Clark:That's a great answer. One of the big things we do is COO search and we have a lot of COOs and ops and generalist candidates that will be listening to this that will no doubt be cheering along to that statement. I certainly have seen the incredible power of hiring great generalists. So yeah, I really agree with that. Well, thank you very much for that, Duncan. We've warmed you up very nicely there and we're going to dive into your career and story. But before we do, I'd love to turn back time and find out a little bit about what your upbringing was like and a bit more about your early career aspirations.

3:38Duncan Clark:Did you always want to become a journalist? No, I certainly didn't have that as something I wanted to do particularly or indeed doing founding a company. I grew up in Yorkshire in a into a Yorkshire comprehensive state school. So the kind of professional aspirations weren't particularly sort of front of mind in that community at that time. I always had the sense that I wanted to do something big and exciting, but it was very unclear to me what form that would take. So I guess the way that expressed itself was my urge to move to London and sort of go and discover the world a bit, which I did as soon as I could go to university.

4:13So I guess my interest in the world and what was possible grew

4:17Duncan Clark:from there. Okay, thank you. That's really interesting. And we mentioned in the intro that you have a background as an environmental and data journalist at The Guardian. So I would love to hear a bit more about that part of your career and particularly what ultimately led you to entrepreneurship and how you knew that it was the right time to go out and build flourish when you did sure so i mean i actually studied music originally so which is quite random so my first proper job was actually working for rough guys the travel publisher when we started doing non-travel books like books about music and so i was that was my first experience working like in the private sector in a kind of company that was a bit startup-y and I loved the sense of innovation that it had.

5:03Mark Ellingham who founded Rough Guys is a good friend of mine. He was always, he was a very natural entrepreneur and always looking for the next thing he could do with the company or the brand. So I learned a lot from him and I guess it was coming out of that experience of working with him that I found myself always keen to reinvent my role. I was kind of hired as a editor but I quickly turned it into a job where I was more focusing on packaging the books then on writing the books and just trying to sort of always think how could this be done differently and so Mark and I actually left Rough Guys together after it was acquired by Penguin and set up an imprint of Profile Books but because that was focused on climate and energy stuff it was very sort of impact led and so we were always thinking how do you get this information into the hands of as many people as possible.

5:53And that was actually my interest of the Guardian was pitching to them, serializing our books and putting them as booklets on the brunt of the Saturday Guardian, which is a thing that was big for a period in the early 2000s. And that never actually happened. But my meeting with Ian Katz, who was the dev editor there, led to him saying he was interested in the way I was thinking about these kind of communication challenges around climate change, which was a big strategic priority for the Guardian at the time. So I ended up moving over to the Guardian.

6:22Duncan Clark:And that was my, my way in rather than any kind of structured plan to become a journalist. Interesting. And tell us a bit about the origin story behind Flourish. Where did the idea come from? And for those that don't know, like, who's it for? How did it work, etc? Yeah, so Flourish is a tool for creating interactive content that can help you tell stories with data. So you know, if you to express it in the most simple form is kind of charts, maps and tables and those kind of things. But it's a bit more than that, because it's charts, maps and interactive content that can animate, that can move through time, that can change state and can bring a potentially dry data set to life in a way that is not only clear, but also kind of engaging.

7:05And the origin story for it was very much my brief at The Guardian. So because I was hired in in a fairly kind of unusual way through a bit of a side door, the brief I was given was to come up with new ways of doing things. And I always found traditional journalism is very much sort of aimed at what can you do by four o 'clock when the paper goes out, whatever. And that kind of obsession with who knows what first, who can break the story. And I was never massively interested in that because I was always a bit more interested in the bigger picture, the sort of analytical take, trying to understand the context for things.

7:41So I kind of pitched a push towards more contextual journalism, Like whenever we're telling a news story, how can we not also be setting the scene for the people who aren't following this obsessively in the way the journalists are? And it's a classic thing in all organizations that people tend to bias things towards their internal culture. And newsrooms, everyone's obsessed with news, so they tend to bias everything towards that. And in fact, people are interested in stories and context and understanding things. So anyway, it was in that context that I started getting very interested in data journalism.

8:13and telling the stories of not necessarily what the news hooks were, but what the kind of data was saying and using data to set the scene for bigger stories that might have a news hook. And what struck me when I started doing that is obviously data journalism needs to be visual. And there was no good off the shelf tool for doing visual journalism. There was hand coded stuff made by a interactive news desk team. And then there was some not very good off the shelf tools like you know you can make a chart in google sheets and embed it with a lot of limitations so i ended up leaving the guardian to start trying to innovate in that space and got together with robin houston who is a amazing engineer who'd actually built the original guardian website about 10 years earlier when he was in his early 20s and we got together and started doing more experimental interactive data journalism that was trying to make the most of what you could do with the new browser technology that everyone was starting to say we can treat this as the default now rather than some experimental thing and so we started that as a side project it wasn't really intended to be a business originally but we ended up with a few projects we kind of needed a brand so we gave it a brand and that grew into a bit of a consultancy business and before we knew it we were full-time working on this thing and all the time doing these bespoke projects we were thinking what's the generalizable pattern here like what would it take to turn this into a tool so it was always front of mind but it took a few years for us to really feel that we'd conceptualized it properly and that was when we flipped it from a services company into a product company raised a VC round and rebranded it and turned it into Flourish.

9:55Duncan Clark:Amazing what a journey and I know sort of being a founder always comes with difficulties and challenges especially in those sort of earlier days and I guess it's even harder if it's the first time you've really founded something before so can you share your own experiences of how you found being a first-time founder and maybe a little bit more about some of the hardest parts of the job at the time sort of getting it up off the ground and scaling it yeah it's interesting because in some ways it felt less like a sort of hard start than I think some founders because we already had the business so the founding team, the 2K founders were there.

10:29We already had clients coming in and they would come in looking for a service and we would have this pipeline of customers. We could say, well, how about instead you buy this product? And so we were able to gradually transition it more than most startups from one thing to another thing. And that also made it relatively easy to get to profitability quite early. So we raised around and we resisted the general culture at the time, which was spend all the money as quickly as possible and do another round within 18 months. I think, again, going back to being a Yorkshire lad who wasn't really from that world originally, I was much more keen to be careful with the cash to make sure that we weren't running through it too fast and to try and make money quite soon.

11:13So we did get to profitability within a year or two and we built the team kind of as things were growing. So it was always quite, in a way, it was quite a sort of traditional business rather than a classic tech startup in that sense. But that also helped us understand the market because people were coming in and asking for things and we would kind of try to understand what they needed and what they wanted. And so we, I guess we did the thing that is often gets described as do things that don't scale and do that on purpose. I don't think we necessarily thought of it that way, but I guess that's what we were doing.

11:44Duncan Clark:That's really interesting. Clearly it went very well. It sounds like you kind of had a faster start because of the nature of the sort of pivot that you made but were there any particular things or people that really helped in those early days to kind of to really turbocharge scaling and on the flip side to that i'd be interested to know if there was anything that you wish you had known beforehand if you would have your time again yeah i think i mean i remember we were making our first proper hire and we were asking around you know in this space whoever i thought was if you'd hire anyone who would you hire and that was definitely the right approach which I think, you know, looking back, something that's definitely true ever after is, you know, just putting job ads up is never the way to get the best people.

12:25Occasionally you get lucky and amazing people apply, especially once you've got a good brand. But actually going out and looking for people is always the best. So I remember that feeling of sitting with this guy who had this really great job as a designer developer in the, he was at the Guardian actually, sort of trying to tread that line between being incredibly exuberant and excited about what you're going to build and sort of selling the dream. And at the same time I was thinking, I've no idea if this is actually going to work. He's actually got quite a good job. So I don't want to oversell and get him to give up his career for something that might not work.

13:00So that, I remember that kind of being a strange feeling at first. And yeah, I guess deep down, I did think it was going to work. So I didn't feel too conflicted doing that. But yeah, he made a big difference. So that first hire, someone just coming in and sort of doubling the bandwidth because my co-founder was building the back end and I was doing everything else so suddenly to go from one to two people if you get again a proper generalist because that person Dan Lauter who's you know still with us still absolutely key in the company is an amazing combination of designer engineer and product person so he was able to really move the needle in that generalist found a way in a way that if we'd hired more deep specialists at that time would have been harder yeah thank you for sharing that's really interesting

13:40Duncan Clark:And I guess before, and we'll come on to talk about the exit, you were building Flourish for sort of six years before the exit to Canva. So tell us a bit more about how you approached the evolution of the business, you know, how the product evolved over those years prior to the acquisition and any other kind of highlights from that scaling period. Yeah, so I guess when we thought about the product originally, we went for a very broadly conceived version of what it could be. So we knew that we wanted it to be a tool that anyone could use to make advanced data graphics. but we i guess the main decision we made early on was realizing that when we thought about what should this tool enable you to do it felt a bit arbitrary any scope that we could pick so we decided quite early to make it infinitely flexible and to make it more like a platform than a a tool so actually anyone can make the visualizations and insert them it's almost like a platform and plugin system.

14:33And although that has never been a really prominent part of how Flourish is seen from the outside, it made a huge difference to how it worked on the inside because it meant that we were able to build things in a really modular way. So we became almost like, it was more like an app development framework and we were the app developers. And there are some customers like major newsrooms who now do a lot of their own coding of visualizations in Flourish too. But But actually, I think that thinking about the modularity of what you're building is a really, really helpful way to scale and to keep things in a tightly ordered way in terms of the code base and everything.

15:14Duncan Clark:So that worked quite well. And it allowed us to just be quite reactive to what was going on in the world and what users were telling us so that we could quickly meet their needs and also we could react to new trends. And one of the trends that was really big for us, this was probably in about 2019, 2020, was bar chart races. John Byrne Murdoch, the very brilliant data journalist from the Financial Times, he's their chief data reporter now, he made this example of a bar chart race, a kind of bar chart that plays through time and the bars move up and down. And it went completely viral. Because of our modular structure, we were able to say, that's called visualization type.

15:53Why don't we just add that as something anyone can make? And we were able to do that in a few days. And that went completely viral and became a lot of our traffic for that period was driven by that, even though paying users were mostly still making more conventional things. So that was a big boost for us. And then the other big boost for us was actually COVID. So if you think back to the middle of 2020, everyone in the world was sat at home pressing refresh on news websites. and our strategy from the beginning had been to be generous to news websites they've got the traffic so anyone can embed a flourish graphic on any site but it does give us a little bit of brand visibility that it was made with flourish and so all of a sudden we were serving literally billions of views of charts and maps about covid made by all these journalists and then embedded on the front page of most of the world's big news websites and that again gave us this second huge wave of visibility so we had a few of those moments and that was kind of probably only a year or so before the acquisition and that visibility i'm sure helped us get noticed by

17:00Duncan Clark:camera as well yeah no doubt i mean that's incredible i think i saw that you kept the team relatively lean as you scaled it so i wanted to ask i guess and you alluded to this that you know often it the the encouraged thing particularly in vc-backed companies is you get a lot of money you scale very fast, you hire lots of people, and you took a more cautious approach to scaling, which clearly worked. So what was your decision behind keeping the team relatively small? And for you, what were the advantages versus the disadvantages of having a low headcount? Yeah, so I guess, I mean, in a way, the culture has changed a lot on this, right?

17:35After the tech market crashed in late 2021, everything flipped back towards being real businesses that had profits and stuff. So I guess it was just a bit of a trend at that time that everyone was just piling in on growth and not thinking much about profitability. I guess for me, always just had this instinct that I didn't want us to be too reliant on other people. I think the VC treadmill where you know that the best case of success is that you're doing another round in two years.

18:04Duncan Clark:Sure, there's a version of that that could be really exciting if you're growing fast enough, but it still puts you ultimately the mercy of someone else and also the mercy of the market I mean there were so many companies who went for that growth model in 2021 and then by the end of the year the market crashed no one could raise and they were totally totally in a difficult place and so yeah I guess I always valued independence and feeling that we keeping the team relatively small and growing with our business felt like that would give us the option to do whatever we wanted at any moment yeah i love that that's super smart and as you said i think things have changed now for the better i think in many ways but there are still of course those hyper growth examples out there but i think uh definitely having in mind growing sustainably is something we would definitely encourage all founders listening to this i guess again let's get to the next part of the story you were acquired by Canva in 2022, which is an incredible outcome.

19:02Duncan Clark:What's the plan always to sell the business? And how did all of that kind of come to be? So we were always kind of open-minded on the long-term direction of the company. I mean, it could have stayed independent. I guess I always thought probably because of the nature of the product, because Flourish is a tool that is really optimized for creating graphics that you then put elsewhere. It fits quite neatly the acquisition model because you could be a quite bad company where the charts could go so it always struck me that that was one path but we were mostly kind of just interested in impact really and we actually had a few acquisition offers before camber that we turned down just because we felt that the it wasn't really making life or the business more exciting it felt more like a kind of sure it might be good in some ways but it didn't feel life expanding so we actually turned those down and decided well if we're going to do this we might as well go big and get to a series a and kind of grow independently and then it was only during that fundraise we got chatting to canva and that just felt like a completely different conversation because they're i mean i say us now but at the time their ambition was really really huge their kind of global reach was really really massive and the fit between what we built at flourish and what canva done was really really good because Canva built this huge user base and this very sort of generically useful visual communications tool was we built specialist data graphics which is something they hadn't really started that could be added to any other platform so it was a really neat fit on the product but actually it was mostly the the sense of culture and ambition and excitement that made us think yeah this is a no-brainer yeah love that and it must be so nice to have that once you start those conversations that it just feels so right because often i guess joining a bigger business there are of course risks to it so how did you know that one the timing was right to join canva and that that it was the right home for you and the team i guess that it was the latter really and then the form about the timing felt almost like a detail i mean as it worked out the timing was really really good but really it was just a sense of knowing instinctively very quickly that this company was fairly deeply aligned with what we'd built and I mean a few of the things that contribute to that there's like things like the product fit like I mentioned before but there were other things like the fact that we were very quickly immediately on a call with the co-founders and that just made us feel that this was about instinctive trust and relationship between founders it wasn't like you know just a chat with a cork dev team or something so there was that sort of cultural side about how it was handled on the canvas side but also other cultural things like the fact that mel and cleft were about to announce that they were giving all their equity to pledging it to good causes so that charity is now camera is now effectively 30 owned by charitable pledges which is kind of amazing and very unique and given that i always been interested that impact side of business, then that was another big draw.

22:10But all of those things really went together. I think Canva is a very unusual organization because it's driven fundamentally by doing good in the world, whether that's through releasing great products that people get value from, or whether it's through charitable objectives that can be achieved as a sort of in parallel with that. And so, yeah, it was all of those things together. And I very much thought of it through the lens also of fire analysis to the team, how are they all going to feel about it? and I knew with camera that the feeling was going to be a good one and it's funny as we then went through and told everyone individually and one of them just died cracking up because he said I've literally got camera open on my screen making a birthday card but yeah it was a good vibe in the conversations with camera but it's also a very good vibe with the team afterwards which is so

22:53Duncan Clark:important my business was acquired into a much much smaller group we're in October last year and my biggest worry I knew that the business that my new partners were going to be incredible and our clients would be really pro it but i was really worried about the team because change is hard and it's that such a reassuring thing when you just feel that sense of excitement and happiness and you know openness to the change and i'd imagine with it being canva i mean i can't think of many cooler companies to be acquired by so uh and actually almost the entire team there are probably about 30 of us when we were acquired that was about you know heading for four years ago and And I think only, you know, of those original 30, there's probably still 27, 28 here.

23:34So, yeah, everyone has found a really good home. And I think, yeah, I mean, just one other thing, actually, which I forgot to mention before, is Canva had almost no presence in the UK. I mean, in fact, it had literally no presence in the UK. And it had scattered presence across Europe, a few contractors working in marketing, including some great people, but there was no infrastructure. and so part of the discussion from the beginning was well you could help us set up there so it it had this sort of secondary startup feeling where we have now a mere organization that has almost 500 people in it it's almost been like running a startup in a scale up in a bigger

24:12Duncan Clark:company yeah what an experience as well for you i guess to you know go from building your own business to 30 people getting acquired and then stepping into a role that gives you the platform to build something so big and so impactful. I'd imagine that was an incredible learning experience as well, which is actually the perfect segue to my next conversation. You took on this head of EMEA role. So we'd love to know what that means day to day for you and sort of, yeah, a bit more about what really excites you about the potential. So, I mean, at the beginning, it was a bit more operational and people focused.

24:44So we had Canva made over the years, maybe six, seven acquisitions across Europe. So we had teams scattered around, but we weren't really very deeply integrated. And we were setting up effectively a European HQ in London, but that was all quite embryonic at the time. So at first it was kind of just getting all that into a good state and making it feel a bit more like a European team that worked really smoothly. But over time, it grew increasingly into a role focused on growth in these markets as well. so we're really doubling down on our local presence in every major market whether that's kind of people on the ground in France or Spain or the Nordics or wherever so that is what I do a lot of now and often when you look through a regional lens it's almost easier to see what isn't working because as companies grow you get these departments which become quite specialized, you might have a content department or a kind of IP licensing department or a comms department or a marketing department.

25:50The value we're trying to add from the regional perspective really is to look across everything and say, well, actually, if you look at it from the perspective of say the UK, how can we make all of those different departments work really smoothly together for the UK audience and the UK press and the UK kind of community generally. So that's been really fun. And I think we're starting to make really good traction, not only in Europe and Amir, but also in the other regions where we're doing similar things around the world.

26:19Duncan Clark:And I guess the other thing I would say is Amir is interesting because we've got quite mature markets in Europe, especially Western Europe, but actually there's vast potential further south. I mean, there are about 400 million Arabic speakers in the world. That's not a group that we've been focusing much on so far. Sub-Saharan Africa is enormous. I mean, Africa overall, there's an amazing stat I read recently, which is that 40 % of the world's school children will be in Africa within 25 years. And so if you think of something like Canberra, where a lot of our impact on the world is through education, we've got 100 million monthly active users among teachers and students.

27:02Yeah, we've got exciting plans to do more there.

27:05Duncan Clark:That's awesome. And how did you personally find this transition from running a relatively small team to all of a sudden setting up and scaling a region that's now over 500 people? That is a big change in role. So what are your reflections and learnings from going on that journey? And I'd love to know if there was anything that you found helped you with that transition from a sort of one type of role to a very different one. I guess for me, it's always been a bit more sort of boiling a frog incremental change, because although that's a lot of change in four, say, years, at the beginning, my role was still mostly focused on running Flourish.

27:39Flourish is still, you know, thriving as a standalone business. and then it became a bit more working on the canva product to build those features into canva then it became more people opsy then it became a bit more growth oriented and then the team grew because we started we acquired another company we acquired affinity the incredible pro design tool maker based up in nottingham and so i guess i got involved in different things at different stages the thing that's made it really fun and i think relatively impactful over time is just having a high level of delegated trust from the canva founders which has made it possible for me to just get on with stuff without always feeling like i need to ask permission for everything and i think that's especially important given the time zone so canva is hq in sydney which in the