Canva co-founder Cameron Adams

0:11Hello and welcome to The Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. On today's program, we meet the co-founder of Canva, one of the world's most valuable private software companies that reached a staggering$40 billion valuation by 2021, less than a decade after its launch. We wanted to make a product that wasn't just serving 1 % of the world. We wanted to produce a product that unlocks the power of design for everyone in the world. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

0:52You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Cameron Adams is Chief Product Officer and one of the co-founders of Canva, the free online visual communication and collaboration platform with a mission to empower the world to design. And it's doing just that. Since launch in 2013, Canva has grown into a truly global community, with more than 225 million people using it every month across almost 200 countries. I caught up with Cameron to talk about the brand's incredible growth, its latest innovations in AI-powered design, and what's next for the business and its 5 ,000 employees. Cameron began by telling me how Canva retains its cultural values, even as it scales.

1:35Culture is one of the things that we bang a drum on about very often at Canva because we figured out how important it is. There was a time where we didn't talk a lot about culture. It was just kind of instinctual and driven from our gut. But as we reached about 100 people working at Canva, a lot of stuff started breaking. And the solution that we stumbled across was culture, being able to really talk about our culture, communicate it, pass it on to people, and for people to feel it from their very first day when they land at Canva, understanding how we make decisions how a good meeting is run what a good canvanaut looks like what it is to be a force for good to be a good human to live like many of the values that we talk about being able to really clearly distill those down has been one of our superpowers over the last i think seven years since we put the values in place and being able to then take that around the world.

2:33We've got over 10 offices now, being able to apply those cultural values across all those offices, but also have the flexibility for people in London to bring a bit of their culture that they want to bring that's slightly different flavour to what we have in Sydney or Austin, Texas, or in Beijing in China. It's really important to have the core, but also the flexibility for the culture to adapt as new people come in. You mentioned a force for good. And I think if people don't know this about Canva. That is so much baked into the sort of raison d 'etre of the business. But that's presumably complicated, Cameron.

3:09If we go back, I don't know, say, what, let's think three, maybe four years now, you know, big funding rounds, you have the confidence of investors. But are investors and partners sometimes not sceptical, but are they a bit uncertain? Because you have to, to a degree, you have to try and sort of price in what being a force for good looks like. And that is not in the founding principles of lots of businesses. Has that ever been a difficult conversation? Or I don't know, have you always partnered with people who were sold on that vision from day one? Yeah. So being a force for good for us is distilled down into this two-step plan that we talk to a lot of people about.

3:45Step one is to become one of the most valuable companies in the world. And step two is to do the most good we possibly can. And we have, much like our culture, spend a lot of time communicating about this step two plan and also our value of being a force for good. So people that come into Canva are very well aware of this and it actually attracts some of the best and brightest minds in the world because when you're looking at 15 different technology companies you can join, seeing the points that stand out and that make Canva unique really attract the people that we want to attract and being able to point to positive impact that we are having in the world through both our product, our actions, funds that we deploy, all the aspects that we have of being a force for good is a real sell to people who are looking for a company that they truly want to work at.

4:38It's exactly the same for investors. Being clear in what Canva stands for, what the two-step plan is, what they're getting themselves in for when they invest in Canva has been really important over the last decade, ever since we actually started and brought out our first investors. So we've made sure that when we do bring on an investor, they're very clear about what their money is going to do, what Canva's vision is, what our mission is, and what we're actually trying to achieve. And it's worked out really well. The investors we have now truly understand the two-step plan and all of the values and culture that embody Canva.

5:15And they're along for the ride and they enjoy it as much as we do because they can see that by them putting money into Canva, it is also having this massively positive effect around the world. And I think one of the reasons why that message resonates, Cameron, or certainly from my external point of view, is there's a certain kind of core simplicity, if you like, about not the product, which is highly complex, but about using the product. Just talk to me a little bit about, well, do you agree with that? Is there a core simplicity? And also, how do you ensure that you retain that, certainly for your users, as varied as they are, given there's so many potential opportunities to explore, how do you sort of manage that?

5:53Is there a healthy tension there? You're hitting on all of our cultural values, Tom. So one of our values is make complex things simple. And this one is really derived from the initial underpinnings of Canva. 13 years ago, when we set out to make design simple, we wanted to make a product that wasn't just serving 1 % of the world that could think deeply about design and think about it 10 hours a day. We wanted to produce a product that unlocked the power of design for everyone in the world, what we call empowering the world to design. The first version of Canva that we launched did exactly that, and we spent the next 12 years making sure that the product stays simple but powerful.

6:37It allows people to really easily access it, get something amazing out of it in the first few minutes of using it. But it's also deep enough that when you do spend more time with it, when you bring more content into it, when you put more love into your designs, it also scales with you. So we've increasingly seen both non-designers using Canva as well as professional designers using Canva. And they've really swelled in the last few years as I think professional designers have kind of gotten over the hurdle of not using a tool that they used to use and approaching Canva and understanding what they can actually do with it and how it can give them a new voice, how it lets them scale their design across their customers, across their clients, across their teams if they're working in an internal company.

7:24And they have, many of them have discovered the power that lies in Canva, the great design that you can create in it, and how really wonderful it is that you can create stuff in Canva and then the rest of your team can use it. You can create a template which easily lets the marketing team or the sales team or the HR team express themselves, stay on brand and do so consistently. And lots of brand teams, marketing teams, professional designers using Canva as that tool to help them produce better work across the entire organization. You must chat to some designers who say, well, hang on, what? I then have to share this with everybody and I have to take my hands off the reins.

8:06Is there sometimes a tension there when you speak to maybe some pretty, you know, senior design users who maybe are not used to popping open the toolbox and letting everyone have a rummage around? I guess that's another healthy tension, is it? I wouldn't call it a tension. It's definitely a new world, but it's not necessarily something that Canva is just pioneering. There's lots of new technologies, lots of new tools coming out that designers have to grapple with, particularly as they've moved from print media into digital media into even faster paced worlds like social media. They've had to learn and adapt and figure out how they respond to this world and get out enough content to be able to communicate around the world in 50 different languages, in 30 different markets in which their company is operating on a company that's, you know, 50 ,000 people where everyone's trying to produce decks and advertising materials and flyers and t-shirts.

9:03Like a lot of this has just scaled well beyond what one creative can do. And having a tool like Canva, which enables you to scale your brand to create amazing things and then pass those on to other people, collaborate with them, get their thoughts seamlessly move from something like a website into a presentation deck into a video into advertising collateral that you eventually ship out to market all of that flexibility and that collaborative nature and the kind of the addition of ideas on top of one another is I think a brand new world for everyone and a brand new world particularly for professional designers and tools like Canva have become really popular because of it amongst non-designers and also professional designers.

9:51Well, just on this, that kind of tees up the conversation about AI as a tool slash, you know, replacement or proxy for design talent. I know obviously you guys, we've made some other acquisitions in that space. AI is critically important. AI powered design in terms of empowering your community further. I wouldn't be doing my job, Cam, to ask you about this. AI, look, it is a tool, right? And it has an amazing power to facilitate and to drive collaboration. And creativity is that I keep asking about tensions. There must be a tension here, presumably. Where do you stand on this just from a kind of a high level about, well, actually, it's going to be able to do parts of the job that were creative, creative and enabling force, a replacement for, I don't know, quotidian tasks.

10:36What's the sort of what's the not even the camera position? What's the Cameron Adams position on this one? There's definitely a balance in there. I won't say tension, but there's a balance and there's also a spectrum in there. So we very much view AI as a piece of technology. It's something that you can take and you can do stuff with. Canva has been built on the best technology of the time that we could access. When we launched, that was mobile phones, that was web browsers. Being able to bring people together collaboratively in real time was an amazing innovation for a design tool. Fast forward a decade, you know, browsers, mobile phones, their old hat now, people are used to them.

11:15And AI has come on the scene in the last, let's say, three years, really, prime time. And we very much view it as an enabling piece of technology that we can bring into the product experience, much as we thought about mobile phones. It isn't just enough to slap AI into your product and say, it's now AI enabled, it's amazing, go for it. You still have to think about the experience, you have to think about what people want to do, how they interface with it, how they express their problems and their pain points to use through the product, and then how you enable them to achieve something, to hit a goal that they're trying to achieve, to solve a problem, to get a job done.

11:56Just putting an AI chatbot in your product is not going to do that. So we've thought very deeply about the AI experience across Canva, whether that's on a tiny tool like background remover, which isn't actually so tiny. We've had billions of uses of it and many people love Canva because of it. But through to even bigger workflow pieces like using magic design to just rapidly type what's in your head and get a visual of it through to magic translate, which can translate your content into 100 different languages at the click of a button. Being able to think about the problems that people are experiencing and how AI can enable them to overcome those problems is at the core of how we think about the product.

12:40And that applies not just to non-designers, it also applies to professional designers. And that's why we were so keen last year to make the acquisitions of a couple of companies, One being Leonardo, who are at the very forefront of AI image creation with a pretty professional audience. And the other is Affinity, who create a suite of applications specifically for professional designers. And they're world leading, the best performance you can get, amazing workflows that you can enable through there for illustration, photo manipulation, publishing. and the acquisition of both of those companies was a realization that the world is changing, that AI is coming into every aspect of everyone's job, whether they're creative or not.

13:29It's affecting professional designers. They need new tools to keep up to the pace with what AI is enabling for them and they need new tools to also operate in this bigger team environment that we're talking about bigger collaborative cycles bigger teams that they need to ship content to bigger asks on how much content they need to create how they need to internationalize it and localize it and all the things pulling that entire ecosystem together that spectrum from fully professional design tools through the tools that are simple and easy to access for people who've never thought about design is what Canva is about and we're pulling that ecosystem together now and it's really exciting to be able to shape it and help everyone in the world to design.

14:16Well, you mentioned people who've never thought about design. You're somebody, Cameron, if we look at your track record professionally, that's been thinking, talking, doing design for what seems like a lifetime, obviously at Canberra, Google, fluent, you're running your own shop before that. Can I go way, way, way back? Where does your, I don't know, fascination, passion for design come from? I love to interrogate these things. You know, Were you like reading comic books? Were you one of these crazy kids who's like super interested in brutalist architecture when they're like six years old? Take me all the way back.

14:48Tell me when you, I don't know, were you aware that you had a specific interest in design that maybe marked you out a bit from your cohort? Definitely wasn't a fan of brutalist architecture at the age of six. I don't think I still am. But I think there was always a creative spark in me, which did manifest through kind of traditional art, if you want to just call it that, like drawing. I did read a lot of comic books. I spent a lot of time just sitting at the table, copying pictures out of those comic books and figuring out my own style. Actually, my first business enterprise was selling a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle drawing, which I had drawn and taken to school.

15:28And one other kid offered me$2 for it. That was my very first. a little bit of profit from my creative work. Which turtle was it? I think it was, that's a great question. Surely Leonardo. I think it was Leonardo, but you know, Michelangelo, Donatello, they're all fine artists as well. But you see, look at the circularity and then, you know, Leonardo's part of the stable now. Maybe it was in the tea leaves from the get-go, Cam. Oh, we need to write that into the press voice. But I think it's really in the intersections where I've had the most fascination. So I was interested in drawing. I wouldn't say I was a particularly skilled artist or anything.

16:08But taking that creativity and then seeing how it meshed with computers, seeing how it meshed with computer science, the internet coming along, that's where I really flourished is in the intersections of these two normally kind of disparate things. And it was really at university where that started coming to the fore. At university, I studied law and computer science, two other things which don't normally go together. But I was also a part-time graphic designer. And all of that meshed together just as the internet was coming around. So I quickly learned how to code websites, which enabled me to bring together technology and design, which led into running a small design agency, which you alluded to earlier.

16:51that got the attention of Google. And I went on to Google to start thinking more deeply about product design as a step beyond web design. And then through step by step, that led me down the startup path and eventually wound up in me meeting Mellon Cliff in 2012, which resulted in Canva being born. But again, it was like, there's a massive intersection of things when we think about Canva. It was like right time, right place, internet browsers. I knew a lot of JavaScript. I could design interfaces and create them and prototype them all at the same time. And that really led us rapidly move on the product, explore our ideas and come up with something that enabled people to do things that they couldn't do before.

17:36So it was very much a magic moment in time, married with a lot of time and experience and meeting the right people. Yeah, exactly. And it's interesting, collaboration is so fundamental to what Canva has been, is and will be. And hearing about how you have collaborated with your co-founders is really, really interesting. Can I ask you about misnomers or misheld beliefs, Cam, a little bit? Do you think that there are commonly held beliefs that are wrong? Whether this is about design tools and how they're created, whether it's about SARS companies and how they work. Do you think there are unhelpful misunderstandings about them, which actually are perpetuated for one reason or another?

18:16Or do you think that the world gets it more or less right now? There's definitely misnomers. I mean, there's misnomers about Canva still. I was reading a thread just yesterday, actually, and it was a thread where a whole bunch of professional designers had weighed in on what tools they use. And a few professional designers started saying that they actually use Canva. and you had this wide spectrum of people who came into barrack and support for them and are like, yes, I've made the switch to Canva. It's incredibly useful for doing these things. And then other people who still had quite outdated notions of what Canva does and just thought it was a very simple tool that no professional designer could get any value out of.

18:57So I think, you know, overcoming that sense that the tool that you use defines your job and who you are is one misnomer that I would love to really help people overcome, not just in the design world, in any kind of specialization as well. But tools change, technology changes, Canva has changed drastically in the last 12 years. You know, we've got so many features now that didn't exist five years ago. There's so much that you can now do with AI that's just mind-blowing that you couldn't do five years ago. So you always need to update your mental model of what an application or a tool does. But you also need to think about what your job actually does.

19:42And I think when you look at designers, they often do get too wedded into the tools that they use. And I've been fortunate to talk to some very old-school designers, designers who were around before desktop computers existed. They were doing paste-up and various other techniques. and some of them look at the AI revolution that's happening now and they're very happy to partake in it because they've been through all these technological transitions that changed what it meant to be a designer but each time they went through it they ended up in a better place and it's really great to hear these stories from people who have been through that change and recognize that change is a given change always happens if change didn't happen life would be extremely boring and we would never make forward progress.

20:27And really being a designer is about so many other things other than the tools that you use. It's about communicating. It's about understanding people. It's about digging deeper into your client or your customer and really getting at what they're trying to achieve. It's about so many other things other than just being able to draw a vector on a screen. And I think the more people that realize that and embrace technology to help them out to get that done, the better off they'll be. Well, I love that. And I think it speaks to the curiosity that's informed so much of your work, Cameron. It's interesting.

21:02You mentioned this idea of sort of, you know, being in a, I can't remember what you said, a chat room or whatever, kind of listening in on some of these observations. Do you like to do that? Do you go in a sort of Adam Cameron or something? Do you do a bit of sleuthing on the DL to kind of hear what people are saying? Do you like to engage very transparently and openly with customers or with skeptics? How do you like to drive that conversation to interrogate how people are feeling about the product? And I say feeling, and I use that term hopefully correctly because it's not just about function, right?

21:32It has to be about connecting into something deeper, especially when we're talking about how people are expressing themselves and their creativity. So how do you prefer to sort of do that engagement? Not too much cloak and dagger. So the thread I was referring to is just a thread on Twitter. or X or whatever it's called nowadays. And we do a lot of that, like looking at social media. There's a ton of content on Canva. It's like so easy for us to go out now and find people giving opinions on it, find professional designers talking about it, find marketing folks talking about it, passing on tips and tricks, go find a TikTok video about the latest Canva tips.

22:08So it's pretty easy for us to find that data now. But it's been something that we have sought out ever since Canva began. Listening to people, understanding their problems, understanding their pain points, understanding the jobs that they want to do has been critical to Canva's success. And in the early days, you don't have lots of people talking about a product you haven't even created yet. You have to go out and really seek that. designers would be used to doing this through user research sessions which I've done a lot of going out and actually talking to people who maybe use Canva who probably don't use Canva understanding what their business looks like what they're trying to achieve and how Canva could possibly help them in that taking that back in weaving that into the product design and the features and functionality that we're planning on launching and then putting that out there and hopefully it being a success.

23:03We do a ton of that and we still do it. We have a program that we call Close the Loop, which is basically listening to our customers, bringing in their feedback, iterating the product based on that feedback, and then going back and telling those people that they actually told us something amazingly important and here is the improvement that resulted from that. That final step is something that a lot of companies don't do and we've got so much value out of it because it really engages our community, helps them know that they've been heard and makes them kind of partners in the product creation process.

23:38They're the ones that are helping Canva improve and to become a better tool. So letting them know that has been hugely successful for us. And whenever we tell someone that a bit of feedback that they filed has now resulted in a feature in the product, they go and tell 50 other people about it. So it's also amazing marketing for us. Let's come back to, you mentioned your sort of your two-pronged strategy for growth and for impact, I guess we'd call it. Let's come back to the impact piece, Cameron, because as I said, I think it's a real differentiator for a business of the scale of Canva and of the commercial ambition to dovetail that in with something that is much more nuanced, to my mind, much more interesting.

24:15What does that actually look like? We're in a pretty volatile and challenging world. We're not going to get into all the geopolitics and all the rest of it, But it's a time when it's actually harder to double down on some of those other intangibles, right? And yet I get the sense that you and your co-founders and the business are more sure than ever of its merit, indeed of its essentialism for what you're trying to achieve. Tell me about then what that's going to look like, how challenging maybe it is, but why it's immovable, why it remains this foundational part of the approach. Part of Canva has been about creating a better organisation and being a responsible actor within society is an important part of being a better organisation for us.

24:59Be a force for good is the cultural value that we have. And step two is kind of what we refer to as all the different streams of work that take place under that. Step two includes very grassroots stuff across the company. So encouraging volunteering, setting up volunteering days so it's easy for people to come into the office and cook some meals for homeless people, to sort clothes for people that are going to a job interview, to help out in various different ways. We also have skilled volunteering programs. So we get engineers to use their engineering skills to help out a nonprofit with their website or a designer to do a design sprint with a nonprofit to help them with their communications and their branding.

25:39And then that flows through into bigger pieces such as the Canva Foundation. So this is a separate organization we've set up and the Canva Foundation gets its own funding. So we're part of something called Pledge 1%, which is a great movement, particularly amongst tech companies, but it can apply to any company where you pledge 1 % of your profits, of your equity, of your product and of your time. And with that 1%, you have impact. You figure out what you want to improve in the world and you dedicate those resources to it. The CAM Foundation has access to 1 % of our profit, 1 % of our equity, 1 % of our time.

26:20And we give away our product to any teacher or any student anywhere in the world and any non-profit anywhere in the world. So we've actually given away over$2 billion worth of our product every single year over the last, it's built up over time. So in the last year, we gave away$2 billion a product. And that is to teachers, students and nonprofits all around the world. So even that in itself is an amazing piece of impact that is extremely simple for us to do, because we just flick a flag in our database to give people the product for free. But it actually helps improve their lives. So it's a win-win-win.

26:59And the CAM Foundation also gets a lot of funds, which we devote to two particular streams. One is providing basic human needs and the other is quality education for all. So we do a lot of our own educational work. As I mentioned, we give away the product for free to teachers and students, but we also fund organisations like Prevail, who are doing fundamental foundational work to help teachers in less privileged countries better teach their students, better get access to resources for teaching those students and then also provide students with a better way to access their education. So those are some of the ways in which step two and being a force for good manifest at Canva.

27:44That was Cameron Adams, the co-founder and chief product officer at Canva. And you can find out more by heading to canva.com.