Rapid Response: The quiet reinvention of a $42b business, with Canva’s Cameron Adams

0:00Cameron Adams:AI is everywhere, and so is the noise around it. Hype, fear, jargon. I'm Jess Love, host of the new podcast Life Automated, thoughtful conversations about AI that go deep without getting too technical, because you shouldn't need to be an AI person to make sense of the future we're building. Life Automated is produced by Kellogg's Ryan Institute on Complexity and distributed by KQED. Find it where you get your podcasts. Hey, folks, Jeff Berman here, co-host of Masters of Scale. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale Summit. They are the leaders driving the most pressing conversations in AI.

0:46Replit founder and CEO Amjad Massad, Cloudflare's Matthew Prince, Signal president Meredith Whitaker, and many, many more who will take the stage this October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. We want you there with us too. Join us at mastersofscale.com slash pioneers. That's mastersofscale.com slash pioneers.

1:13The business world is moving faster than ever. And when change hits, we need to learn in real time. On Rapid Response, you'll hear candid conversations with CEOs and leaders making tough calls about AI, human talent, responsibility, and the bottom line. How they navigate uncertainty, pressure, and high-stakes moments. I'm Bob Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company, and I'll be your host as each episode breaks down what you need to know right now. You can find Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts.

2:06that Canva empowers the whole world to design through everything that we do and that the AI that we use and develop truly represents the world as well. The real power that we've seen with AI is when you can amplify ideas and when you can take what AI gives you and build on top of it, put your own stamp on it, make it authentic, and make it connect with the real people that you want to connect with.

2:36That's Cameron Adams, chief product officer and co-founder of Canva. I talked with Cam on stage at the CanLions Festival about Canva's dramatic last year as it redefined itself from a design company to an AI company. Cam challenges the idea of the so-called saspocalypse, talks about how product cycles are accelerating, and argues that Canva and its kin help everyday users stay up to speed as technology shifts. He also shares specific steps we can each take to get more impact out of AI, plus the power of exploiting what he calls each organization's unique unfair advantage. It's an idea-filled romp through technology and creativity, so let's get to it.

3:23I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

3:33I'm joined this morning by Cameron Adams, who is the chief product officer and co-founder of Canva. Cam, thanks for doing this and inviting me to your house this morning. It is amazing to be chatting with you here in the amazing cabana behind the docks. I was talking to Cam backstage about the challenge of this year of living dangerously with AI changing so much and Canva itself being under a different kind of pressure. Has it been a good year? What's made it a dangerous year? I'd probably say it's been an interesting year. And I think we've always been running a marathon at Canva. Like we've always had an incredibly long term vision.

4:14This year feels like we're sprinting that marathon just a little bit. You said that you now consider Canva to be an AI company that does design rather than a design company that does AI. That seems like a big change to make in a company as big as Canva is. It has been a big change. Having a strong bench of AI researchers and ML engineers has enabled us to rapidly move on the product, and particularly to develop our own unique blend of AI. It's not just repackaging an LLM. It's like deep technical research and unique IP that now exists within the Canva platform. The last year, both the team has scaled up, which has enabled us to ship more.

5:00But also we've entered kind of a new cadence of product shipping. And to me, it feels really exciting because it's almost a return to our startup roots. It's not thinking about 6 ,000 people and moving them all like the Titanic. It is literally a bunch of speedboats that are now going around and shipping as much customer value as we possibly can on a week-by-week cadence. When you're moving at the pace of AI, I guess your product pace has to be faster than it was. How much do you worry about what that means to your users? Like if the product changes too fast for them, you know, they're not looking for it to change.

5:38They're looking for it to continue to do the things they want it to do. Is all the change behind the scenes or how do you get the customer to be up to speed with you? Definitely there's a lot of behind the scenes change in terms of how quickly our teams are putting features out and particularly just how quickly we get it out to our own internal team. Because every great software company, every great AI company is shipping to themselves first. so we're literally shipping every day new stuff to the Canva team to try out to see if it's good quality enough to see how we need to change the experience to map to it but as you say if you did that to your customers they would be incredibly frustrated because they just want to turn up get their job done so you have to be careful with when you do roll out a very major change to like app architecture or anything like that but you can roll out smaller stuff quite easily so you can roll out improvements to models.

6:35You can roll out a new filter that you could apply to an image or a new kind of workflow that you can apply to your images. So try not to like move all the pieces around too much, but adding in new pieces you can do fairly scalably. And when you think about the playbook of how you've had to refocus the company and the product, do you look at some of the companies in Silicon Valley and say, oh, we're going to do it that way or we're not going to do it that way? I mean, you guys are far from Silicon Valley in Sydney. We've made, I think, a couple of really pivotal changes to the way that we work with our teams to enable that.

7:13Firstly, it is use whatever tool you need. So we're not mandating Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever tool you want to use in your part of the company. You can figure it out. You've got spend to try out on tools, to figure out your workflow, your process, and tackle the problems that you have. Giving people that freedom is really important because they need to feel comfortable experimenting. And if you force a tool on them, they're just going to do that very begrudgingly. And they're not going to enter into this very experimental mindset that we need them to. And the second part is giving them the time to just explore and try things out.

7:55I'm sure we're all terribly busy and trying to get 101 things done every single week and you naturally fall into the patterns that you would normally do things in. You've got your tried and trusted tools, you know how they work, you'll always reach for them. So you're not looking for that medium term and long term improvement that you can get through some of these tools. So we give our staff plenty of time to just sit back, put down their tools, get out of the business as usual and get stuff done. And something we did a month ago called AI Discovery Week really speaks to that. The whole week, we said to people, please don't do your normal work.

8:33We want you to think of the problems that you have, the tools that you've heard about, the opportunities that you've heard from colleagues in other industries. And we want you to try those out for the entire week. And at the end of the week, we did a massive show and tell where people showed off what they did. And we had about four or 500 different projects that people showed off, employing AI in different ways from our legal team to our finance team to, of course, our product and engineering teams. And it was super energizing. Are those tools that you're actually implementing or are they more like prototypes for things?

9:05I think almost half of them are now pretty much in production, in production internally or in production actually going to our customers. So our legal team rolled out a trademark checking application because they spend thousands of hours every year thinking about our product names, what we're shipping and whether all across the world we can trademark that and legally use that. And they've now rolled out a tool which has literally saved them 1500 hours of work. How do you think about sort of being disciplined about experimenting with and growing and using these tools, but not having it? I mean, I know it's supposed to make me more efficient, but sometimes I find I just I'm doing so many different new things that maybe I'm not being isn't efficient.

9:50Personally, I don't like just picking up a tool with no random use case and just experimenting with it. I really like to take something that I'm working on now or a problem that I'm feeling and then bring a tool to bear on that and learn through that process. That's how we've seen our staff also get the most value out of AI experimentation is when they're dealing with the real problem. So you launched Canva AI 2.0 in April, which is a conversational assistant, right, that helps to generate designs from descriptions rather than from templates. How do you know when you're amplifying creativity versus kind of automating it away?

10:33I mean, that's some of the anxiety that comes around with using AI tools. One of the principles that we adhere to as we're developing an AI product is that we need to keep humans in the driver's seat. We don't want to create a product that automates everything away, that automates creativity and taste and judgment and purports to give you a solution where you don't need to interact with it at all. The real power that we've seen with AI is when you can amplify ideas and when you can take what AI gives you and build on top of it. We've seen many dead ends in other products where you ask it for something, it gives you something back and you can't do anything with that.

11:15You either take it or you leave it. It's a flat image or it's a swathe of text that you then have to copy and paste somewhere else. And Canva is all about enhancing people's creativity and getting them involved in that creative process. So yes, AI can give you 101 generated images. It can generate copy lines for you or it can help you draft a blog post. But you need to take that, put your own stamp on it, make it authentic and make it connect with the real people that you want to connect with. So every part of AI in Canva is editable. Anything that you produce, you need to be able to take into a normal Canva design, share with your team, collaborate with your marketing folks and your sales folks and your HR team and bring them into it as a first-class citizen, not as a tack-on to technology.

12:06I always felt like that part of Canvas Promise, it like helped me as a user to have better taste. How do you, with AI, you're sort of providing that originality and maintaining soul at the same time? Like, can you teach an AI model to sort of have empathy, to understand the emotional reaction that humans are going to have? I'm not sure whether you can teach it empathy, but you can give it some understanding of the context which we're living in and the goals that we're trying to achieve. And that's very much what we do when we're integrating this AI into our platform. When you talk about conversational AI, it literally is designing a conversation, which is kind of a new field for many different people.

12:54but designing a conversational interface is quite different to something that you point and click at. Right, which is the way I used to engage with Canva. Exactly. So you need to put a lot of thought into it and there's new ways that you can shape that conversation that you're having with an AI. There's a ton that goes into the system prompt. There's a ton of orchestration that you have between different agents and all of that forms part of the experience. So it's definitely like a frontier land for building product but one that our team have been really excited about entering. And when you see a well-designed conversation that gives you insight into the creative process, like an AI that helps you understand better font choices, why it chose this color, so that you can then roll that into your taste and judgment.

13:39I think that is the type of conversation we want to be having with AI rather than just quite a mercenary or functional interaction. When you're sort of tuning the models for your use, You're putting guardrails in to say, yeah, don't put these things together. There are certain design principles that are baked in behind it. We have an amazing understanding of design, both from an internal experts level, whose knowledge and experience we can bake into the AI experience. And we also have a tremendous amount of data from our customers as they've interacted with designs. That can also help the AI understand what people want to achieve.

14:20So we've baked all that into what we call the Canva design model, which is actually the world's first foundational design model that we released last year. It goes far further than many of the general purpose models that you have access to. And it specifically knows what good design looks like and what you're trying to achieve with your design. I want to pause here to underscore what Cam is saying. Canva's AI platform is bespoke to its users, to the craft of design. In that way, it's like a window into how AI is evolving to be more purpose and project specific. So is there a competitive advantage in working across multiple AI models like Gemini and ChatGPT and the like?

15:06And what's it been like to help lead Canva through the storm of the so-called SaaSpocalypse? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

15:20On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds. Asking really strong questions is a superpower. You want to show up with something radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights. The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks. That's hit the gas. Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death, and more. Hear from the founders who've changed the game. It's anything but business as usual. Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts.

16:15Cameron Adams:Because you shouldn't need to be an AI person to make sense of the future we're building. Life Automated is produced by Kellogg's Ryan Institute on Complexity and distributed by KQED. Find it where you get your podcasts.

16:31Before the break, Canvas Cam Adams talked about a year of dramatic change from being design first to being AI first. Now he explains why he's not phased by the so-called saspocalypse, what Canva needs in its pursuit of a billion users, and the power of exploiting each organization's unique unfair advantage. Let's dive back in.

16:59There's that phrase that became popularized or talked about earlier this year, saspocalypse, right? That businesses based around software, not unlike Canva, were suddenly vulnerable to obsolescence because of what the models could do. Is that something that worried you, that spurred you in a different way? I don't think it worried us, but it certainly gave us an interesting viewpoint to take as we thought more deeply about building an AI platform. I think this notion that there's going to be one place that the entire world goes to to do all of their work, I don't think is going to be a reality.

17:43And tools like Canva that focus on particular areas like visual communication and visual content creation will be able to create an experience that is far deeper, far richer, and gets you better results. At the end of the day, that's what we all want. We want better results for what we're trying to do. And Canva can certainly do that with visual AI. There's a lot of talk these days about the responsibility of AI companies. It's sort of just because you can do something maybe doesn't mean you should. What kind of responsibility do you feel like Canva has? we feel a very deep responsibility. We now have a quarter of a billion people that use Canva every single month.

18:21And being able to fuel more of that through AI, through better product development is an incredible responsibility we feel. We are very optimistic that Canva will get to over a billion people using Canva itself. That puts a responsibility on us to make sure that every person in the world can access that. Not just the rich few, not just a few people who can speak English, but literally everyone in the world who speaks different languages, who has different economic capabilities, who operates on different devices. We need to make sure that Canva empowers the whole world to design through everything that we do, and that the AI that we use and develop truly represents the world as well.

19:03I will say that when I speak publicly at this event of creativity that we're at here, people talk about all the great things that AI can do. And more privately, People worry about their creativity being taken away or how AI is going to step in and take jobs. Do you have advice for people who sort of want to stay creative, but also don't want to fall behind technologically? Can we just trust that the canvas of the world are going to sort of take care of that for us? Or do we have to be learning these tools and figuring out how to do it in addition to that? You can definitely trust the camber of the world to enable your creativity, but you also need to take your own hand in this moment and in the change that's happening.

19:53And I can fully understand why a lot of people feel a bit fearful or hesitant about what's going on because that always happens in moments of change. But speaking personally, I've been through a tremendous amount of change in my life. And embracing that change has, without a doubt, been the most important part to shaping a better life for myself. And in this moment of AI, looking at the tools, figuring out how it integrates into your creative process is really important. Because no one in this room has the same creative process. Some of us think in images. Some of us think in words. Some of us sketch, some of us entirely work on a computer.

20:38And that is a legitimate creative process. Your creative process is your own creative process. Figuring out how AI fits into that is the most important thing you can be doing right now. And that doesn't mean you need to use AI for everything. It means you can use AI to convert your sketch into 15 other variations. Or you can brainstorm on a whiteboard about what an event space looks like. or you can use it to give you the first draft of a marketing email. And you don't have to embrace a conversational interface if you don't want to? It doesn't have to be conversational. And that's one of the things we focus on at Canva is not everything needs to be spoken or written.

21:18You need to be able to work visually with your tools as well. You talk about all these new things that Canva can do now. It's still early days with AI. How far along are we? How much do you feel like Canva is going to change from here? We are just started. And it's actually a phrase we have inside Canva that we're only ever 1 % of the way there. Because the other 99 % just keeps growing and evolving and changing. And it's honestly exciting because that means that there's still an incredible amount of opportunity ahead for us. Do you have a favorite model? Or are you model agnostic? we're pretty model agnostic.

22:01There's like constantly leapfrogging all the time. Yeah. And it's great to have both Gemini, Claude, and ChattoVT duking it out because that's what drives innovation. Innovation is never driven by sitting on your laurels and thinking the world is fine. Innovation is driven by people pushing you. And it's great to have folks like that pushing us, us pushing them. It creates, I think, a better world for users because they get more choice, they get more innovation, and they get better things out of it. One of your colleagues said to me, every company needs to understand its own unfair advantage in this platform shift.

22:40What defines an unfair advantage? What's Canva's unfair advantage? I think our unfair advantage is being able to tap into people's creativity at scale. We can ship incredibly impactful features at the switch of a button. That goes out to a huge audience who then immediately take that and start deploying it on real projects all over the world. We've got over 500 designs created in Canva every single second. And every one of those designs has a story behind it. It has a story of someone trying to build their company or it's the story of someone trying to teach a better class in a high school down the road.

23:23and I feel very privileged to see those stories coming through the Canva platform and we use it to inspire our users with the stories of other design creators and we use it to improve the product as well. For the folks who are here listening, they may be creators, they may be running or building their own businesses, their own products. How do you think about your business differently maybe than you did a year ago and what advice do you have for them for what they should be focusing on in the year ahead? Probably the way I think about business differently is that we're now closer to the goals end of what people are trying to achieve rather than the design end.

24:07So a lot of people used to come to Canva just to get a picture out of it. Like I wanted something for my social media channel or I want a flyer that I can send out to my customers. Now we're getting closer to the goal. The goal is finding more customers, increasing sales of products, having more impact through my nonprofit, finding more volunteers. And with AI in that creative workflow, we can now get closer to those goals because people can come to us and ask, how do I get more customers? Given my product, given the photos I took yesterday, given some video footage that I took at this conference, What can I create that is going to get me closer to my customers?

24:49And that's a really exciting question to be able to ask inside a product. Cam, this has been great. Thanks again for inviting me to your cabana. No worries. Thank you.

25:08AI's role in moving Canva users from being image-focused or design-focused to being goals-focused, it's a pretty radical step and one not everyone's going to be comfortable with. But it does offer the promise of helping us to be more sophisticated and strategic in our decision making. I was struck by Cam's assertion that Canva is still only at 1 % of its potential. That's both terrifying and reassuring. I mean, if a$42 billion company is only 1 % evolved, the future ahead of us is pretty murky. But on the other hand, moonshot aspirations are what lead to progress and opportunity. Plus, they're fun.

25:47So here's to practicing gratitude for the infinite starting line. Even in an AI world, we've got to take some creative license. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.