Canva's 'biggest shift': AI, design and the future of work

0:000.1 % of the world that's truly tapping into what AI and agents and everything can do. And even they're still scratching the surface, I think, of what we're going to see over the next few years. To us, that just means there's a huge amount of opportunity. Today's guest is Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of Canva, the company that has simplified the world of online design and become one of the world's fastest growing tech platforms. What began in 2013 has grown into Australia's most valuable private tech company, worth more than$40 billion and backed by investors like former Disney CEO Bob Iger.

0:34Something I always say is that Canva and any success is really luck. Every moment of that was a moment of connection where we reached out to someone, they reached out to us, we put ourselves in a position for the luck to come to us. It's transformed how people create everything from presentations and social posts to party invitations, taking a once gatekept industry to now serve more than 265 million users each month. In this conversation, we'll explore the early days of Canva, how it scaled while maintaining simplicity, the company's next phase of growth, how are you thinking about the company's readiness to go public, and what can you share about the timetable now?

1:12And Cameron's own journey as a product designer, entrepreneur, and even DJ. If you really want to do something for the rest of your life and something with passion, you just need to go with what you believe in. Just say yes, you'll figure it out later.

1:30Cameron, thanks so much for joining us. It is so good to be here, Michelle. Thank you. So Cameron, you are clearly someone who has worn many different hats. For some initial context, I recently learned that you started out studying law and science. Is that right? Can you walk us through that journey and the point that you realized design was the true passion? I think we both have Asian parents, so we know that either being a doctor or a lawyer is kind of the path that is set out for you. I got the marks to be a lawyer, so I went to law school, but my real passion at the time was computer science.

2:04So I tacked on science to the side of my law degree, ultimately planning to go and do that rather than the law part. and I got both degrees, but I wasn't fantastic at law. I actually forgot to apply for any law jobs. So by the time I got around to it, everything was gone. So I ultimately actually ended up starting my own business because through university, I also picked up graphic design, which was a real passion of mine as well. And I managed to fuse computer science with graphic design into web design and that enabled me to start getting clients. and after university, I actually didn't land a job.

2:44I just kept going with my clients, brought up my own business and it wasn't until five or six years later that I actually started working at anyone else's company. So you were an entrepreneur from the get-go. Did you always kind of have that itch to start your own venture? I didn't consciously recognize it but I think it was always there. I remember back in grade four in primary school, I started drawing lots of different comics and ended up selling those to the kids around the school. So there's always a bit of a business flavor in there. Actually, it's so funny that you say that because obviously, as you mentioned, we are kind of have the same heritage here.

3:16And what you were saying about, you know, obviously the pressure to become a doctor or a lawyer is so relatable. How was it for you choosing what some may have seen as a quote unquote, you know, risky path? For me, it was just where I needed to go. And I think if you really want to do something for the rest of your life and something with passion, you just need to go with what you believe in. and design and technology was always where I found the most joy. And it was the only thing I could imagine doing for the rest of my life. I didn't want to be sitting in some law firm somewhere chained to a desk looking at contracts, which I actually do a fair amount of nowadays.

3:54So it's kind of useful that I got that degree in my back pocket. Even thinking about doing a startup, you need to think about doing a startup that you can remain passionate about for the rest of your life because building something of scale and impact requires you to be passionate through the ups and the downs, the dark nights, the successes. Like, it has to drive you more than just getting a paycheck at the end of the day. Definitely. So you started your own agency, I saw, and did that for a few years and then went on to work at Google in San Francisco, where you worked on a project called Google Wave, an ambitious tool for communication editing, though it was sadly shut down after a surprisingly short period of time.

4:34Looking back, Cameron, do you think it was just ahead of its time? And what did you take away from that experience? I definitely think it was ahead of its time. It actually was public for a very short time, but it was being built for a really long time. And that's one of the lessons I kind of learned is that you need to balance building the right thing with getting it in front of the right people. So with Google Wave, we actually built it in stealth for three years. And when I say in stealth, I mean truly in stealth. No one at Google knew what it was. Only the people on the team, Larry, Sergey, and Eric, who were the CEO and the co-founders of Google at the time, knew what Google Wave was.

5:14We actually had Googlers hacking into our repository to try and figure out what the product was. And we eventually launched it internally. We learned a lot through that internal release, but we also kind of said it wasn't built for businesses. So even though it wasn't quite getting traction inside Google, we always said, this is for consumers. When we launch it to a public audience, it'll be a lot better. We ended up launching it to a public audience. It actually got an amazing reception on its first day. We debuted it at the first ever, I think, Google I.O. event. It was a product demo that went for 60 minutes at the time.

5:50it was the longest video on YouTube. YouTube didn't allow 60 minute videos, but they upped the cap just for this product demo. And we had like 10 million people watch it on YouTube, which was like one of the biggest videos on the platform at the time. So there's immense demand for it. And we built up a huge waitlist for it. We had 8 million people on the waitlist. Product wasn't ready to go. It took us another six months to actually launch it. we brought on that wait list the product confused a lot of people they didn't know what to do with it it was so powerful that they didn't know where to start and that was one of the problems that we had with it was the whole onboarding of the product and helping people understand what it could do we struggled along for like another year probably and then wave basically got dismantled to fund other projects at google so you might remember another bad google product called google circles which was their social network.

6:46A lot of the engineers ended up going there. Me and a couple of other folks on the Wave team hunted around for stuff to do inside Google. But I think that entrepreneurial passion just kind of really took hold of us. So we decided to leave Google and we started another startup. Yeah, I was going to say, just to take us further through your professional journey, you then went on to co-found Fluent and a startup that sought to rethink emails with a more streamlined interface, as I understand. You have been really open, Cameron, about the challenges that you kind of faced as a first-time founder, or I guess maybe not first time because you had done your agency before, but a first-time tech founder, let's say, at the time.

7:22What potential did you see back then? And why do you think that that vision wasn't fully realized at the time? I was actually talking to one of our Canva investors last night at the Create After Party, and he reminded me that I talked to him during the Fluent Days. So I approached him with this idea for an email product. He thought it was amazing and he actually started hunting around for other people to join the team who had email expertise and he actually talked to one of the founding engineers for gmail and he was like you should go talk to these guys they've got an amazing product vision you can really help them out um he obviously didn't join us uh and it was one of these sliding doors moments and bill the investor he's like seminal seminal investor bill ty yeah he actually said if that guy joined he would have funded Fluent and things would have been totally different.

8:15I think fortunately for me, Fluent didn't get funded. We spent like a year building the product, getting people on. We had really incredible demand for it, but the costs of running an email service at the time were incredible. So you needed funding to actually make it a reality. We didn't ultimately get up funding despite spending two months sleeping in our car in San Francisco and traipsing up and down Sand Hill Road. And through that process, I eventually got to meet Mellon Cliff. And that's when the idea for Canva came across my radar and when we started talking about working together. Well, actually, it's so funny that you mentioned Bill because I had read that he was the one who put you in touch with Mellon Cliff.

8:58Is that right? It sounds like he kind of played a role in a lot of your journey. It was a combination between Bill and Lars Rasmussen. So Lars was one of the founders of Google Maps. And I worked incredibly closely with him on Google Wave because Google Wave was really what he wanted to build after Google Maps. And Lars put me in touch with Mel and Cliff. Bill Ty had put Lars in touch with Mel and Cliff. So it was this really unique combination of connections and networks. And once I started chatting to Mel and Cliff, just their vision for taking design to the world really resonated with me with my background as a graphic designer, my technology skills, and I could see how the three of us could fit really neatly together to create something amazing.

9:47So shout out to Bill, it sounds like, and Lars for changing your lives. But you know, what's interesting, Cam, is that I heard that when you met Mellon Cliff, you spoke with them about the opportunity, but then initially passed at first. Is that right? We were still in Fluent and we were just about to jet off to San Francisco to come back with briefcases full of cash. So we were certain we were going to get funded. We'd had lots of interest. We kind of got outed out of our stealth mode for Fluent by an article that got written by a journalist about it. So we thought investors were knocking at the door and we're just going to like throw checks at us.

10:29We went to San Francisco. I turned Mellon Cliff down. We went to San Francisco. Turned out to be a lot harder to raise funds than we initially thought. I went through that whole two-month process, eventually came back to Australia. We're figuring out whether we continue doing this. We couldn't afford to bring on any more users to Fluent because it was costing us$100 ,000 a month. So we were paying that personally. In order to continue doing it, we needed cash from somewhere and it just wasn't coming. The founding team of Fluent started getting a little friction-filled at that stage. And the idea that Mel had pitched to me about Canva had been bouncing around in my head through that whole time.

11:11As I mentioned before, you need an idea that really resonates with you. And this notion of bringing design, democratizing it to the whole world was something that I felt incredibly passionate about. and I realized that I'd been building creative tools for 10, 15 years at that stage and that was really what I wanted to be doing. I'd always experimented with pixel tools and ways for people to build things with little 3D blocks and things you could do on an iPad and just giving people different ways to create and unlocking their own creativity and Canva just fit really beautifully with that. So I got back in contact with Mal and Cliff.

11:54They were in Hawaii, I think, at the time. We were on a Skype call. That's how far away it was. It was back when people used Skype. And we decided to band together. That was like July 2012. And we started working to get funding. We got funding in November. And then we launched a product a year later in August 2013. I should say Canva went live in the summer of 2013. but right before that I heard it was kind of a crazy story. Two days before launch, you were hit by a car and knocked unconscious. I need to fact check this. Is that right? Those facts are correct. Yes. Okay. Can you take us back to that launch period?

12:34So we had spent a year building the product and doing fantastic amount of technical investigation, working with users to understand what product we actually needed to launch to be valuable to them. and we had notified press about a couple of weeks before we were planning to launch. So the launch date was locked in. It was Tuesday, August 26, 2013. In order to hit that launch date, we needed to make sure the product was good. So we were ironing out bugs, adding in new features, working weekends. And I'm a passionate cyclist. I love riding to work, riding as much as I can. So I always used to ride to the office.

13:17And the Saturday night before the launch, we'd been working late. It was late at night. I decided to ride home. And I was coming down this hill at about 40 kilometers an hour. I don't know what that is to your audience, about 30 miles an hour or something. And this taxi just decided to cross three lanes of traffic and T-bone me. It's one of those moments where time just slows down. I could clearly see the taxi coming. I just knew I couldn't stop because I was on this very steep hill and I just hit the side of the taxi and that's the last thing I remember I woke up on the road a bouncer from a club had come across stopped all the traffic so that I didn't get hit by any further cars and I was just dripping blood onto the asphalt the bouncer couldn't get hold of my wife on my phone so he ended up calling Cliff and Cliff came, my co-founder, picked me up.

14:16He called my wife, Lisa. We all ended up at the hospital. I got some stitches. I'd lost a tooth, but needed to be coding. So I was back the next morning finishing the product. You were not. That is crazy. Cliff has a great photo that you can maybe pop up on your podcast. I hope you don't, but it shows the damage and yeah, soldered through. Oh my goodness. Well, I'm so sorry to hear you went through that, but also so glad that you made it out seemingly with like just pretty minor injuries after all that. Yes, made it. And we managed to make that launch on Tuesday and that started the long journey of the product.

14:52So you got to launch day. Let's talk a little bit about growth. We're skipping forward a little bit here, but you know, obviously it's been many years now and Canvas trajectory is often described as a fairy tale, right? I mean, I mentioned earlier, you have more than 265 million monthly active users. Yeah, all around the world. Plenty of companies have tried and failed to scale the same way. What do you think that you guys got right that others didn't? I think we thought about growth from day one. So when you're in Australia, population there is about 25 million people. It's about the 10th the size of America.

15:24So if you're building anything, let alone a tech product, if you build just for Australia, it's never going to be a success. So we always had to think beyond our borders and think about who was ultimately going to use the product and how to get it out to them. So we always had this growth mindset and we built Canva as a global product. We had that ambition. It was part of our mission, which is to empower the world to design. And we always built with that scale at the forefront. So we've focused incredibly on international markets, which I think a lot of US startups don't by default because you've got an amazing audience right here and you can build pretty much for them for you know maybe the first 10 years of your startup maybe the first 20 years but we had to think beyond our doorstep at every stage so we focused on internationalization very early on it was like 2016 when we launched our first languages outside of english and that drove an incredible amount of growth as soon as we got our first 10 languages in Canva that opened up entirely new markets for us.

16:32Canva was big in the United States, Australia, the UK at the time, but translating into Spanish opened up South America, translating into Portuguese opened up Brazil, French, Indonesian, like all these languages and different cultures enable you to push beyond the bounds of what you know. Yeah, very big populations and communities that you're able to unlock. I was actually curious beyond the language piece of it, which sounds like that's obviously the first step. Were there any other techniques that you guys, you know, employed to localize your product across the different markets and user behaviors that really stood out to you that helped?

17:09When you talk about internationalization and localization, which are technically two different things, but you can kind of think of them in very similar terms. It's about making an experience that is truly local, which doesn't just mean language. It means what images do people see when they first come to the page, What templates do they use? What messaging do you send them? What events do they celebrate? If we're offering them a template, do they celebrate Ramadan or Independence Day or Carnival? You have to think about these things at a very deep level and then make sure that when they land in your app or on your web page, they feel like it was built by some developers down the road from them, that it is a truly local experience.

17:55whether you're in Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo. And we're focused incredibly on that. We have a team who think about the language, who think about every piece of content that people see in Canva, the templates they use, the marketing that we use to invite people into the product. All of it has to be truly local. Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. Personally, summer is my least favorite season of the year. I live in LA where it gets up to 110 degrees, which means I'm looking for quality pieces that are breathable, lightweight, and affordable. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80 % less than similar brands.

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19:43Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90 ,000 businesses to rely on so they can stay reachable at all times. Quo has a built-in AI agent that handles all your mundane tasks from after-hour calls to booking appointments so you can focus on the bigger things. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash BTV. That's Q-U-O dot com slash BTV. You know, we did an audience call out for this interview and a couple of product designers and engineers actually wrote in with some questions.

20:19So the next two actually come from them. They want to know, in Canva's early days, were there moments when your intuition overrode user feedback? And how did you build conviction in those decisions? And essentially, how did you decide which features to greenlight versus what to scrap? Interesting question. I think there's definitely feedback we got from investors that we sometimes took on and we sometimes didn't. One piece of feedback that we somewhat unfortunately took on, which taught us a lesson, was that Canva needed to be a social network. So 2013, Pinterest was hot, Instagram was hot. The whole notion of visual social networks was just really part of the mainstream narrative.

21:07And when people saw a tool like Canva that created visuals, they naturally thought it needed to be a social network as well. Create the visuals, send them out to people, capture the audience. So we actually spent six months building kind of a social network in Canva based off this investor who really wanted us to push in that direction. It ultimately proved to be a dead end for us. You know, creating a social network is very different to creating a productivity and creativity tool. And it wasn't really our passion. Like that wasn't why we got into this to create something that generated more likes and more comments.

21:45We created something to help people express themselves in all different channels and walks of life. So we weren't passionate about it. Plus the product that you needed to build to fulfill that kind of dopamine cycle that's familiar now for social network just wasn't part of our product DNA. So we ended up shelving that. We actually reused some of the technology underlying it. So to do that kind of stuff, you need these big distributed databases that track all these events. So we actually reused some of that technology to engage our creator community, which is actually working really well right now.

22:23We have lots of teachers who create content for Canva, as well as professional graphic designers who create content for Canva. So we managed to parlay that, but the notion of Canva as a social network never got off the ground. Sounds like you had that gut feeling from the start. At what point did you realize, okay, this isn't it. Let's not make this our main focus going forward. A, when we started getting a ton of spam on it, it was just like really hard to manage people using it for bad things. And we just didn't want to head in that direction. Like everything we wanted to build to empower the world to design was heading in a totally different direction.

23:01So every time we had to think about this social stuff, it was just like the worst part of our day. And it's so interesting that you mentioned that this was an idea from an investor because it just makes me think about how a lot of founders tell me that they feel like people don't appreciate quite how cyclical the fundraising process is and how they're just these themes that will run through Silicon Valley. And if you're not part of what seems hot at the time, then you just might be out of luck. And it sounds like, you know, obviously that you weren't immune to that process. That's a really great observation.

23:30And I think something I always say is that Canva and any success is really luck. You can put yourself out there. You can make sure that you're in a position to receive that luck. But there are so many different moments and sliding doors that happen to enable this to happen. If I hadn't met Lars at Google, if Mellencliffe hadn't met Bill Tai, if Bill Tai hadn't introduced them to Lars Rasmussen, and a hundred other stories of that from connecting us to investors, to our first staff that joined us at Canva, to the users being ready to receive a product like Canva, Instagram taking off, Pinterest taking off, which meant that Canva was a great tool for those platforms.

24:14Like all of that swirls together into this one moment that enables Canva to be a success. What I love about your story, by the way, is the fact that you're so real about what you went through before finding Canva. You know, like I feel like it's just so relatable to what a lot of other founders have gone through and the kind of struggles even with fundraising and whatnot. I'm just curious because obviously over the years, as I mentioned there, Canva has become Australia's most valuable private tech company, which must be still surreal for you some days. with investors that include, as I mentioned, big names like former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Hong Shan, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China.

24:49What have you learned about fundraising at this level and what advice would you give other founders listening? You really need to get into a position where you don't need to take funding because when you're desperate for funds, that's when you can make really bad decisions and things that affect the long-term future of your company. So we have quickly got into the position of being profitable. We've been profitable now for nine years. And that means that we pretty much never have to take funding. We only take funding when it is strategically useful to us, which means that when we're pitching, it makes it a lot easier because we can always walk away from a deal.

25:28We don't need you. So if you're going to put some irrational demands on us, we can go find someone else that can help us truly fulfill our mission. so that's like one of the most important positions to get into when you're raising funding there are like tactics particularly in the early days you talk about like thematics that investors are looking for right now so you need to tap into those you also need to like practice your pitch like talking to an investor is very different to talking to an everyday person and they're looking for different signals around team, product market fit, any moat that you have or unique insight into the market.

26:08And you really need to highlight that to them. The other thing I would highlight is that not every investor is like every other investor. It will take a long time for you to find the right investor who immediately gets your idea and understands where it's going. So don't take that first rejection or the 10th rejection or the 100th rejection as a signal that you're heading in the wrong direction. You have to find the right people. And to do that, you have to kiss a lot of frogs. Yeah, I think also it's like quite like well known that Mel said that she's gone through like 100 no's or something from investors before she kind of got luckier.