20Product: How Canva Builds Products: Lessons Learned, What Works? What Flopped? The Top 5 Product Lessons in Scaling to 185M Monthly Active Users with Canva Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Cameron Adams

Cameron Adams is Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Canva where he is responsible for heading up the design and product teams. Since launching in 2013, Canva’s global community has grown to over 185 million monthly users in over 190 countries. In 2021, Canva was valued at $40 billion, following a $200m funding round. This saw it become one of the most valuable private software companies in the world. Prior to joining Canva, Cameron found himself working closely with Lars and Jens Rasmussen (co-founders of Google Maps) to realise the design vision for Google Wave. In Today's Episode with Cameron Adams: 1. From Accidental Joining to Most Valuable Private Company: How did Cameron go from working on Google wave with Lars Rasmussen to co-founding Canva with Mel and Cliff? What was the single closest near-death experience in the life of Canva? Why did Canva fail as a social network? What did Cameron learn from that? 2. How to Create Users that Truly Love Your Products: What have been Canva's biggest lessons on what it takes to do world class onboarding? What is Cameron biggest advice to founders on how to create moments of delight in your product? Is simplicity always best in product? What, when made more complex, is better for the user? 3. Scaling Canva into the Enterprise: What are the biggest product changes that are required to move into enterprise? What does Cam know about moving up market that he wishes he had known when he started? What are the biggest product and design mistakes founders make when making the transition from PLG to enterprise sales? 4. AI Changes Everything: More Money or Better Products Only Who will win the foundation model layer landscape? What will it be in 10 years? Will companies actually make more revenue from having AI in products or will it just create better products? How does Canva's implementation of AI in their products impact the margins of their products?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Speed is definitely important, like you can't take five years to launch a product. But it also needs to reach a certain level where people get excited about it. You don't just want to launch something that people feel like it just gets the job done, but they're not that crazy excited about it. Launching something at Canva that people will spread, that they will tell others about, has been the biggest growth driver for us.

• 0:26Harry Stebbings?

  You are listening to 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Product is the monthly show where we take you inside the world's best product teams and sit down with the best product leaders in the world. Today, we're joined by none other than Cameron Adams, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Canva, where he is responsible for heading up the design and product teams. Since launching Canva in 2013, Canva's global community has grown to over 185 million monthly users in 190 countries. In 2021, Canva was valued at $40 billion following a $200 million funding round. This saw Canva become one of the most valuable private software companies in the world.

• 1:07Harry Stebbings?

  It's an incredible story and this is a masterclass from Cameron Adams, co-founder at Canva. But before we dive in, ever wondered what your customers actually do? The team over at They Do have been living it for decades and they have recently built a product that is frankly enabling the world's biggest businesses to literally know what they do. Harnessing journey mining with AI, you can turn unstructured data into structured customer journeys in minutes, saving weeks of work and months of analysis. They Do Journey Management Platform is already helping over 100 leading businesses, including Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Royal London and Home Depot, to know what they do. Don't waste another step, check out theydo.com. But before we continue, let me tell you about OneSchemer.

• 1:51Harry Stebbings?

  OneSchemer is the embeddable CSV importer that will save your team months of development time. While building a basic CSV importer may seem simple, product teams typically spend over three to six months building and rebuilding their CSV import experiences. Why? Customer files are full of unexpected formats for dates, numbers... Numbers and addresses and your first pass at building an importer never has all the edge cases handled. Failed imports lead to unhappy customers and endless emails and tickets for your support and engineering teams. Enter OneSchemer with the largest library of pre-built validations and intelligent transforms. OneSchemer helps you launch a guided CSV import experience in just 30 minutes.

• 2:31Harry Stebbings?

  Get your customers to the value of your product in minutes and say goodbye to frustrating messages like import error online 53. With over 4x faster performance compared with alternatives. It's clear why OneSchemer is the choice for top startups like Ramp, Scale AI and Pave to streamline their CSV import process. Importing clean customer data into your product is easier than ever. Learn more by visiting onescamer.com/20. And finally, we need to talk about Pendo. A really simple way to describe Pendo's value is to simply say, get your users to do what you want them to do. What is Pendo? The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application. What are the features that make Pendo so awesome? Pendo's differentiation is in its platform.

• 3:15Harry Stebbings?

  Every capability from analytics to in-app guidance to session replay, mobile feedback management and roadmapping are all purpose-built to work together. What is the social validity? 10,000 companies use Pendo and we also manage Mind the Product, the world's largest community of product management professionals. Where do we want to drive people? Give it a try and visit pendo.io/20product-podcast to learn how your team can use Pendo to start building better digital experiences. There you can also check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses. 12 hours of in-depth training for your product management teams on topics from AI to product analytics to product-led growth.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:57Harry Stebbings?

  Cam, I am so excited for this. I was just chatting to Cliff beforehand and I was like, why do I take this conversation? He's like, I'm not going to do the accent because he just ridiculed me for it. I was actually gonna do it before, but he said, you've got to ask him, how did he come to meet me and Mel? And he said, there was a little bit of confusion on your end about why you were there as an advisor? Or actually a hire? Talk to me about that.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Well firstly, don't ask Cliff about content, but secondly, I got intrigued to Mel and Cliff through my old boss at Google, Lars Rasmussen. So he was one of the founders of Google Maps. And I worked with him on a project called Google Wave and we did that for like four and a half years. I left Google to do this other startup with a couple of other engineers from Google and we were going very happily doing that. We were in the process of fundraising and Lars said, go talk to these people about some tech that they need. And I went and talked to them. They'd just moved to Sydney over from Perth at the time. They had a school yearbook business, running this thing in Adobe Flash. It helps schools make their yearbooks. And they kind of wanted to take it to the next level, but they weren't going to do that with Flash.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  So I knew a bit about JavaScript and HTML, so I went to chat to them about that. Walked into their office, Mel was sitting at their conference table, trying to look very professional because they had like five staff at the time. I walked in and she's like, oh, you're here for the PHP developer role? And I'm like, no, I'm here to tell you like how to actually run the tech side of your business. So we sat down, we chatted a bit about the latest tech at the time, what browsers were capable of. And particularly in the scheme of creating design. So how can you do visual design inside a browser? Which was quite tricky at the time. We explored it a bit. We went for coffee afterwards. Mel told me about a bigger vision beyond yearbooks and it was democratizing design.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  It was bringing design to people who hadn't been able to access it before. Which was really intriguing to me because my background is a graphic designer and also a computer scientist. So merging design with democratizing technology was perfect for me, but. Me and my co-founders in my other startup called Fluent were like very happy. We were gonna take over the world and we were just about to land five million dollars in funding. Little did we know that we weren't just about to land five million dollars in funding, but that's beside the point. So put it in the back of my mind of what Mel and Cliff were doing and went off to do what I wanted to do. And a few months later, after our startup had kind of cratered a little bit, that idea of democratizing design really came back to me.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  So my wife, we were looking at possibly moving to San Francisco because there wasn't much happening in Australia at the time. My wife wasn't that keen to move to San Francisco, neither was I. So she said, why don't you go hit up Mel and Cliff again and see how they're going with trying to democratize design? So I did and they hadn't got funding or anything so far. They hadn't found a tech co-founder that could help them build the product. So we decided to join forces and that was 2012.

• 6:57Harry Stebbings?

  Weird one. How much of success do you think is luck versus skill? Obviously you're an incredible leader, an incredibly skilled guy, but actually your startup not getting funded was probably the luckiest thing in many ways happening.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's all these sliding doors moments. I wouldn't necessarily call it luck. I think it's about putting yourself in a position to capitalize. That is talking to people, networking, having the right skills, like working with technology, trying different products, experimenting. Canva, we started in 2012, but my career is going for like 12 years before that. And there's a ton of ideas that I tried with a ton of people. That didn't work out because it was the wrong time or there was actually the wrong people. We weren't a good team. Google Wave itself, like the project I work on at Google, was really prescient in what it wanted to do in terms of real-time communications and collaborations.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  But it was early for a bunch of reasons, like browsers weren't quite ready. People weren't quite ready to work in that way. So six years later, launch it, it becomes something like Slack or Microsoft Teams that can take over the world. But In 2007, when we tried to do it at Google, it just wasn't the right time.

• 8:09Harry Stebbings?

  So I spoke to Mike Hebron also before this, and he spoke about creating the first Canva landing page and the amount of time that you spent on it, making it, and I'm kind of quoting him, "just right" and so much attention to detail. My question to you is, we're told in the generation of the lean startup of the importance of speed of iteration, speed, speed, speed, and it feels like it kind of goes in conflict with the making it just right and the time to make it perfect. How do you feel about speed versus quality and that importance and balance between the two?

• 8:42Speaker 00

  The Lean Startup book actually launched in the year that we launched, it was like 2012. Investors were quoting it at us and like telling us to launch as quickly as possible. We kind of ignored them because we knew what we wanted in the product and we knew we wanted something high quality. Speed is definitely important, like you can't take five years to launch a product, but it also needs to reach a certain level where people get excited about it. You don't just want to launch something that people feel like it just gets the job done, but they're not that crazy excited about it. Launching something at Canva that people will spread, that they will tell others about, that they will shout from the rooftops about, has been one of the most important parts

• 9:24Speaker 00

  of our success because those people telling other people what an amazing product it is, what a delightful experience they had, what fun they had designing something, has been the biggest growth driver for us.

• 9:35Harry Stebbings?

  How do you create such fanatical users? I mean, for me, when I look at your growth, one of the most astonishing things is Canva talk, you know, the unbelievable UGC content that your community creates. How do you create such fanatical users? I'm sorry for such a base question.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Part of it is that detail, like creating that landing page that has a great animation on it, that people spend five minutes just on the landing page playing around with that before they sign in. Like it's those things that people, A, feel the love, like they can tell it's a well-crafted product that they want to use, and B, it brings something to their life that they didn't have before. Like it's a very small thing, it's a moment of delight, but it's not. Like using a spreadsheet or doing some boring job that they do every single day. It's about giving them something new in their life that interests them, that unlocks something. Those details in the Canva product have driven so much user love. Like we get tweets about the little things we put in, like the Easter eggs that we have.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  We have a duck that floats by every time you upload a hundred images. We thought about the onboarding process and making that fun so that when people first come into Canva, they discover that they can actually design things. And this moment of delight when they discover that is what we want to trigger. That's like our aha moment.

• 10:52Harry Stebbings?

  How important is the speed to delight moment?

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Definitely needs to be in the first user journey. I don't think it has to happen in the first thirty seconds, but you need to give them a feel for the product right from the very get go. If you have a crappy signup page that looks like it was made on MySpace in two thousand and six, like that's setting the tone for your product. So they don't have to be immediately wowed, but you need to start giving them kind of the vibe of the product right from the very get go, which is where those details really fit in. And then that experience should build up to that wow moment. They've signed in, they're giving you some details. And for us, that wow moment was when they had created something that felt unique to them, that they had put enough of themselves into. Then they realised that through this process of onboarding,

• 11:39Speaker 00

  they had become a designer essentially. They had done something that they didn't think they could do before. That was the trigger moment where they're like, wow, this product is for me and I can use this in a hundred and one different ways.

• 11:51Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of that ability to have superhuman powers of design and to democratise design, it has to be simple. And I think it's really interesting, when I spoke to Andrew before, he said that you're a master of making things just simple enough. And I really am always struck with this in product, which is like, is simple always good? How do you think about just simple enough when product designing?

• 12:14Speaker 00

  The way that we think about the product experience is that we want anyone in the world to be able to access design and to get the benefits of it. But also, as people spend more time with your product, it needs to unfurl and unlock more stuff in it. They need to continue to become better designers as they use it, get better outputs. So there's this kind of eighty twenty rule that we apply where When you first get into Canva, you should be able to get eighty percent of the value. But then as you spend more time with it, you unlock the remaining twenty percent, which makes you an expert, makes you put more into the product and what you're doing, and discover things and create those moments of delight constantly. Previously, you didn't care about typography. After using Canva for six months, you discover all these things about typography, and we give you access to those.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  So it's a real power unlock. So like simplicity is the top layer, but you also need depth under there for the people who spend the time to explore it.

• 13:08Harry Stebbings?

  What's been the hardest thing about the move into enterprise?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  We've had a couple of cracks at enterprise. So we actually launched, we had a journalist who did some good investigation and said, you launched Canva Enterprise like three years ago. And what we launched three years ago wasn't really an enterprise product. It was just a way for someone to get in contact with a salesperson. So we hadn't, I don't think at that stage, really listened to the enterprise audience. We're just like, you want to scale Canva to lots and lots of people? Here's a self-service thing that you can do to like get your credit card on and get a thousand people using Canva. It wasn't a true enterprise experience.

• 13:43Harry Stebbings?

  Something that I worry about is the unbundling of this space. We're obviously a content team as well, and we just see so much specialization, whether it's short-form video generators from YouTube links to podcast artwork AI tools. To what extent are you concerned about the unbundling into highly specialized products that do one thing very, very well?

• 14:06Speaker 00

  I think we're seeing, particularly in the AI space, we're seeing a lot of hype and churn and real microservices. And you're also seeing a lot of those startups kind of fall by the wayside as well as the real value of them comes to light, and it's not very huge. For us, we see immense value in creating a true platform that enables proper workflows.

• 14:30Harry Stebbings?

  We mentioned those AI tools. One of the questions that I worry about with those AI tools is just the infinite supply of content that comes out of them. You know, you give them a YouTube link and suddenly you get thirty clips. And they're not great quality necessarily, definitely not nearly as good as what we do say, for example, but just human is still so much better. There's an infinite supply that does gobble up human attention. And to your point on like being able to create thirty brand assets in a world where you used to create one. It's kind of good, but I worry that the value of content decreases as the infinite supply becomes more prominent.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  I don't think the value decreases. There's definitely more people creating stuff. But as you very well know, great content rises to the top.

• 15:09Harry Stebbings?

  But I don't think it does. I think that's like saying build a great product and they will come.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Well, yeah.

• 15:15Harry Stebbings?

  But in a time when there's very few or when there's less great products. I think now discovery is everything and actually discovering consumers finding you is the simple hardest thing. There are thousands of podcasts that are amazing. The podcast is a shit business to be in now because it's so hard unless you started years ago. You can argue with me, Cam.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  I can argue with you. You see the same thing in the music industry. Like what you hear on the radio isn't necessarily the best song in the world. But it's about discovery. It's about being a fully rounded artist. Someone who can have a personality, who offers people something unique. Gives them a different take on the world as well as creating great music. So Taylor Swift is an amazing marketing machine. She she thinks about the attention she can garner, the way that she presents herself, the whole strategy of her tour. Like all of that is part of Taylor Swift. It's not just Taylor Swift sitting at a desk writing a song.

• 16:12Harry Stebbings?

  What was the product change that caused the biggest spike in user adoption? And what did you learn from that?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Oh, that's an interesting question. Text to image was quite pivotal for us. We launched text to image eighteen months ago. We were first product to like truly scale generative images to over a hundred million people. And that was really pivotal for us because it was our first dip of toe in the water of generative AI. And that has since sparked an incredible amount of product innovation and strategy over the last eighteen months. Pretty much every touch point in the product now involves some level of AI.

• 16:48Harry Stebbings?

  What was the response?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  It was amazing. I think we wanted to get it out early. It was it was very early in the piece. And it actually only took us six weeks to launch from where to go. From someone saying, let's do crazy idea, let's do like type in a box and you get an image out of it. Six weeks later, we deployed all the infrastructure, we'd integrated into the product and we'd launched it to a hundred million folks. And we did that because it was an incredible piece of technology that we wanted to like bring to people, but also we wanted.

• 17:14Harry Stebbings?

  But you have that much OpenAI's infrastructure?

• 17:17Speaker 00

  For that one, that was based on stable diffusion. Um, and we've since like iterated upon that a whole ton.

• 17:25Harry Stebbings?

  Do you see a world where you move between different providers?

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. You know, there is a heap of competition now in terms of large language models, image providers, any sort of AI model you're thinking of, there's probably like fifty different versions of it. And I think that's great because not having a monopoly from OpenAI or Google or Anthropic or whatever model you want to look at is beneficial for developing a product.

• 17:49Harry Stebbings?

  I'm naive and the speed and ease to transition between the two is little?

• 17:53Speaker 00

  It's getting a lot faster. Early days, it was a bit harder because there were different infrastructural needs. But for them to be successful products themselves, offering tools to developers, they need to make it easy to just wrap your product around it. So the APIs are getting better, the way that you call different models is getting standardized. So it's becoming a lot easier just to switch over.

• 18:16Harry Stebbings?

  Cas, when you rely on someone else's infrastructure, like many are now on OpenAI or on stable diffusion models or whatever that is, it kind of dictates product roadmap. And before you'd set the product roadmap and really only you and your execution determine whether you're able to complete it.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:32Harry Stebbings?

  When suddenly OpenAI can release a new model and whoa, it changes the game. And we had the CPO from Loom on the show, um, you know, the video.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:41Harry Stebbings?

  And she said, it's the hardest time ever as a product leader because I'm suddenly, my whole product roadmap's turned upside down by an OpenAI improvement. How do you feel that the world of product creation has changed now when this is the case?

• 18:55Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say it's changed. I think that particular area has experienced rapid acceleration. But I think it's the same for any, the early stages of any technology. There's room for innovation, improvement and discovery. In five years' time, I would say that AI innovation will slow by then and a lot more will be standardized. Social patterns will be established of like how we interact with AI. The possibilities of what LLM can do are very well understood and known. And it's just become a part of everyday product development.

• 19:26Harry Stebbings?

  How will we interact with AI?

• 19:28Speaker 00

  I think a lot more than just typing into a chat box and even a lot more than just talking to it. That interface of working with AI, it's a really great demo and it's been a great inroad into exploring it. But it's going to become a lot more nuanced. AI is going to need to, most people aren't great at coming up with the very first idea. It's one of the things we learned at Canva. When you present people with a blank page, they just like freeze up. They don't know what to do. And at the moment, AI is just like that. You have to like go to it and say, I want this thing and it will give it back to you. It's not that great at helping you explore ideas and iterate on them, give you the very first prompt that you should be prompting it with.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  And that relationship between you and the AI needs to get a lot better as a collaborative partner. And that means you need to develop the interface a lot more. So our magic media tool, which is the evolution of text to image, is a great example of that. It started off as a text box, but most people can't describe an image. They don't know the exact style they want it in. They can't tell you the, between the different types of artistic drawing that's possibly available for like a duck that you want.

• 20:37Harry Stebbings?

  So actually on that then, you know, we had Gustav from Spotify on the show.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 20:41Harry Stebbings?

  And he said like, probably one of the biggest questions you'll ask in interviews for product people is, show me your prompts. And that'll be a determining factor of the quality of a product person in the next few years.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:51Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think that's right? And how do you think about that? The quality of prompts being a determining factor in terms of quality of person?

• 20:58Speaker 00

  I think prompting is definitely a skill that we're all going to need. But in terms of it being the defining part of a job interview, I would hope it doesn't go down that path. If in five years' time. The way that we interact with AI is purely just through prompts. I think it will have displayed a total lack of imagination from us as product builders.

• 21:18Harry Stebbings?

  How will we see the stabilization of L L Ms, like you said? Well, how will that end state look in five years' time, do you think?

• 21:24Speaker 00

  I think it'll look very similar to what cloud-based infrastructure looks like now in terms of A W S, Google Cloud, Azure.

• 21:32Harry Stebbings?

  How often do you switch your cloud providers?

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Uh, not a huge amount, and there is definitely like a bit of lock-in there, but it is possible. And the starting point is also very different for different people. Like when you're starting your project, if you're familiar with Azure, you can go on that. If you're familiar with A W S, you'll start with that. If you're familiar with Google Cloud, you'll start with that. But you do have choice there. It's not just one provider that you have to do. And they become monopolistic and they're not rolling out anything new and they just take a bunch of money from you. There's still a huge amount of competition there. Exactly the same will happen with L L Ms. They'll be innovating, you know, Google will add a feature, OpenAI will add a feature. Some other startup that we don't even know about yet will add a feature.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  And everyone else will rush to catch up and then innovate on top of that. But you'll have choice.

• 22:22Harry Stebbings?

  My question is, do you charge more for Magic Media and for AI capabilities?

• 22:27Speaker 00

  It's all wrapped up in our Canva Pro or our Canva Enterprise subscription.

• 22:32Harry Stebbings?

  Does that hurt your margin structure then?

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Not really. It is, it is a tiny bit of-

• 22:36Harry Stebbings?

  Like a hard user of the Magic Media.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:39Harry Stebbings?

  Is creating a lot of images with AI. The idea is that would actually then dampen your margins.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  There is a little bit of cost in there, but it's the approach we've taken for the last 12 years. Putting an immense amount of value into our subscription is why people love it. You need to constantly be adding to your product. Getting people to pay the same subscription for the exact same product as it was seven years ago just isn't going to fly. Plus, we've also seen the costs on AI just continue to shrink.

• 23:05Harry Stebbings?

  But, but do you think AI expands the revenue lines of existing great companies like Canva? Or do you just think it allows them to have much better products with happier customers? That's the question, like, does AI actually allow big companies to make more money or just create better products?

• 23:21Speaker 00

  In the short term, it might allow them to make more money. So like, I think Microsoft and Google both have add-on packages that you pay for to get access to the AI stuff. I think that's a very short-term thing where it'll just become commoditized, people will become used to it, and it'll just become part of the basic package. And I think they've done that to kind of shelter themselves to any possible price repercussions from people just smashing their AI servers. But yeah, we view it as just a way of building a better product, and it's a continuation of democratizing design. Ten years ago, we used the cloud and mobile technology to do that. AI is just the next thing now that enables us to deliver an even better product experience.

• 24:03Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think the structure of product teams changes with AI being such a core part of the development, design, distribution process?

• 24:11Speaker 00

  It does a bit. Definitely the way that we develop products has changed over the last two years.

• 24:16Harry Stebbings?

  How so?

• 24:17Speaker 00

  It's become a bit more R and D focused in the sense that technology needs to be explored a lot more. For the last 10 years, we've pretty much known the technology stack and what the technology is capable of. And you can look at a mock-up of something and go, yeah, we know how to build that. We can get the Java servers to do this, and JavaScript in the browser will be able to do that. So it's kind of a known quantity. Whereas now, you can come up with an idea for a new feature that you want to roll out. So say you want to roll out, we just rolled out Enhanced Voice. So you can take a video, clean up the audio on what someone's saying, and it does it with one click. But when you initially do that, you're not quite sure whether you can pull it off, because the AI model needs

• 24:58Speaker 00

  to be developed to do that. There's a whole bunch of smoke and mirrors that you need to do to get it to work, and there's a lot more uncertainty in there. So you need to be comfortable with that uncertainty, and the product needs to evolve with where you're seeing the technology go. Six months ago, we might have set out to do Enhanced Voice. Some of the engineers will try it out and see how far they can get with the quality. Maybe there's a particular use case where it doesn't work. So say you're in a taxi, it doesn't work for that, right? So then you have to slightly pivot your product, change what you're delivering based on that. So it's a bit more of a dance between product and design and engineering than it was previously.

• 25:36Harry Stebbings?

  What uncertainty would you say you're not comfortable with today?

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Uncertainty in how this helps a user. There's there's space for experimentation where you can throw a tool out there and see how people respond to it.

• 25:50Harry Stebbings?

  But do you test the rollout of new features?

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Do you? Yeah, definitely.

• 25:54Harry Stebbings?

  With respect to Australia, you know, often people are like, ah, fuck it, throw it to Australia first. Or Sweden, or one of these, you know, smaller countries, but is actually relatively reflective of larger countries.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  We do it in a bunch of different ways. We have different experimentation frameworks that we apply. Sometimes it is geographic.

• 26:11Harry Stebbings?

  What's the best experimentation framework that you have?

• 26:13Speaker 00

  Uh, we always roll out features as a percent. So if something is going out, so we launched the glow up recently, revitalization of Canvas interface. We start by rolling that out to one percent, then five percent, 10%, 20%, 100%. That lets you test load on servers. It lets you do quantitative and qualitative analysis of how people are receiving it. If there's any bugs, you can you can quickly catch them. So that's like standard operating procedure to roll out to to increase in cohorts. Depending upon the type of product feature that you're rolling out, you then might look at it, slicing it in different ways. Geography can be useful in some of those examples.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  So in some of our geographies, we've rolled out different payment methods and how people interact with those. You know, whether they prefer to opt for this credit card or a local provider, or maybe they prefer to buy credits from the local newsagent instead of like using their prepaid credit card, like rolling that out. We've done that in a geographic basis to see how that affects how people subscribe and how long they stay subscribed for. So depending upon the feature, you can like slice and dice it different ways.

• 27:23Harry Stebbings?

  When you have ardent fans and you make big changes like Glow Up or like some of the big changes you've made, even if they're technically better, people always hate change, especially when they love the product that exists today. How do you determine between a change that they will learn to love versus a change that is actually just worse, which can be the case sometimes?

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's improvements that you can roll out and you can be fairly confident they're not gonna upset anyone. So like an improvement to image quality and magic media, you just roll that out, right? Something like the glow up, we think a lot about changeboarding. So how people perceive the change, how you present it to them and showing them the value of it. For something like the glow up, we definitely don't just roll it out wholesale without telling anyone about it or explaining what's going on. Because yeah, people wake up, they log into Canva expecting one thing and if it's totally different, they freak out. Particularly if they're like about to deliver a sales presentation and they log into Canva and all the buttons have moved. Like that is a moment you don't want them to have. So we think a lot about how people migrated into the change.

• 28:24Harry Stebbings?

  How do you migrate them well? Is that like newsletters beforehand, like, you know, new Canva coming soon, previews, make them feel a part of it? How do you do that migration pathway well?

• 28:34Speaker 00

  We do a little bit of that for very staunch advocates of Canva. So we have like little beta pools and particular industry pools, like people are super enthusiastic about Canva for teaching. And we will message that out to that very closed audience a bit earlier, just so that they can get used to it. Particularly because they often need to talk about Canva to other people. More generally, we try not to signposts ahead of time because it's just a lot of noise. Like you get so much email, so much social spam, a message telling you about a change that's coming is just gonna fly over your head. So we try not to do that. We try to give people choice when they first come in. So with the glow up, we give them a screen saying, hey, here's the glow up, here's all the value for it. Here's how it's gonna change your design experience.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  But we give them a skip button, like if they don't wanna take part in that change right in that moment, they can click that. And that's often really important because people literally-

• 29:26Harry Stebbings?

  What percent of people click skip?

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Not a huge amount.

• 29:28Harry Stebbings?

  10%, 50%?

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Oh, not 10%, less than 1%.

• 29:32Harry Stebbings?

  Whoa, less than 1% click skip?

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think if you're explaining the change to them and you get them excited enough about it, then they want to enter that. We mainly put the skip button in for those critical moments where someone literally is like, just about to present on a conference stage. And they're like, I do not have time to deal with this, skip this just so I can, you know, deliver the presentation. So that's mainly why we put it in. And that changeboarding, that communication of the value.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Of stepping people through the changes so they're comfortable with it. That is a whole experience that we develop and think deeply about and user test before that even goes to a broader audience. And it's a massive part of rolling out any change.

• 30:11Harry Stebbings?

  What has been the biggest product fuck up that you've made and what did you learn from that?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Product fuck up, definitely one in our early days, which is we were getting a lot of pressure from investors to be social, like Pinterest, Instagram had come out. People were like, you need to be social, like what's your viral coefficient? How are you like engaging people on platform? And it had been a little part of our vision, but it wasn't like a part we were passionate about, but we're like, okay, we need to introduce some social layer here. So we spent a huge amount of time at the time, it's like nine months. We had a very small engineering team. We had like six engineers. We dedicated one whole engineer for nine months to build this whole social experience. And it just didn't do very well. Like it wasn't part of our DNA.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  It wasn't something that we were super passionate about, that we wanted to put a lot of thought into, and it didn't really mesh with our product vision of like people creating stuff. We have a lot of people who create private content, like they never want to share that stuff. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want people to be thumbs upping their kid's fifth birthday poster. So like, it wasn't a natural part of Canva.

• 31:17Harry Stebbings?

  All that Q1 board meeting.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 31:19Harry Stebbings?

  Well done. Good, good, yeah. Lost your head of sales in around 20%. Good job.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Fire.

• 31:24Harry Stebbings?

  Good job. Hard emotion, bae.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  So it just wasn't a natural fit and we didn't invest enough thought to it. It was never going to be successful.

• 31:34Harry Stebbings?

  What did you learn from that?

• 31:35Speaker 00

  We learnt to be a bit more, bit more gung ho in just what we believed in and our instincts.

• 31:40Harry Stebbings?

  When you have a mishap like that, and then you also have amazing moments, like you said there with, you know, the text to image, you have to have product reviews. How do you structure and do product reviews? I'm, I'm really intrigued because they're all done remotely, no?

• 31:54Speaker 00

  Mostly, yes. Every now and then the stars align and there'll be a team that can all get in the same room. But yeah, most of the time they're done over Zoom or through a Canva doc.

• 32:04Harry Stebbings?

  How often do you do product reviews?

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Constantly. We don't have any fixed cadence. So I know a lot of companies have a weekly product review or they do it every two weeks and they get everything together and have a big pitch session and a review session. We don't do that unless we're heading towards a very particular milestone. So for create, we had like weeklies leading up to that where we'd review stuff.

• 32:26Harry Stebbings?

  Who's invited to those?

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Mel and I and our head of product, Rob, are often pretty much in all of them. Depending upon the team, what surface area it is. So if it's an AI part of the product, it'll involve more of our AI folks. If it's more on the end.

• 32:40Harry Stebbings?

  How many AI folks do you have?

• 32:42Speaker 00

  We've got about a hundred machine learning engineers and then product, product and product managers and designers get involved at all stages as part of the experience.

• 32:51Harry Stebbings?

  How long has it taken you to hire a hundred?

• 32:52Speaker 00

  We started really early. So AI has really spiked in the last two years, but machine learning has been part of our product development process for six or seven years now.

• 33:01Harry Stebbings?

  Where are the majority of that hundred?

• 33:03Speaker 00

  A lot are in Vienna, which is out of an acquisition that we did called Collido and they're kind of world leaders in visual AI. But we also have a ton over in Sydney as well. And those machine learning engineers run the gamut from data focused ones who you'd never visibly see their impact on the product, but they do a ton of work behind the scenes, through to the folks that work on our photo editing, our remove background, text to image, magic write, like stuff that's very visceral and obvious in the product.

• 33:31Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned that kind of things that maybe aren't so obvious. I think one thing that's really challenging as a product leader and leader more generally is resource allocation. And you have that question of, you know, I have a constrained amount of dollars always and I can allocate that to infrastructure, which maybe may not be seen, but maybe security, maybe stabilization, whatever that is, or into glossy new feature which could create more users and more revenue. How do you think about that balance between infrastructure, stabilization, not net new revenue, but important versus new features and new revenue?

• 34:02Speaker 00

  We're constantly looking at it. We don't have like a fixed percentage that we assign. Like 15% goes to security, 25% goes to R and D. There'll always be priorities at any given moment. Five years ago, we invested a huge amount in a security team because that was really important to us and like building strong foundations of trust with our users who are like, yes, this is a safe and trusted platform. Like that was really important to us.

• 34:25Harry Stebbings?

  How does your R and D spend change over time as a portion of your budget?

• 34:28Speaker 00

  R and D, it's a huge part of our budget. If you think of R and D as all product and technology development, it'd be well over fifty percent. So like half of our, we've got four thousand five hundred people at Canva now. Roughly about seventeen hundred of those are engineers, plus then our product and design orgs with product managers, product designers. So well over two thousand folks at Canva are focusing on just building the product. So if you consider that to be R and D, that's like a huge amount. If you think about like very, very future looking R and D, we're constantly looking at new experiments, new product features, new innovations. Because that's the future of Canva.

• 35:06Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for you before we do a quick fire, but you're always compared or like put in the same category as the eight hundred pound gorilla of Adobe. What have been some of your biggest lessons on competition in business and effective product marketing when always put in the same two company pool?

• 35:20Speaker 00

  People often, you know, talk about Adobe in terms of of us, like investors will ask us that question. But we really consider ourselves to be in a totally different category, like literally. When we started, design was something that one percent of the world could do and we wanted to bring it to the other ninety nine percent. And we have created this new category of visual content creation, really change people's perceptions of what they need to do to reach their goals. Like you don't write out a strategy document anymore, you like create visuals around it, you inspire people, you create a literal vision of what you're trying to do.

• 35:55Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not think it's helpful in a company to have a common enemy?

• 35:58Speaker 00

  Uh, if your goal is all around acerbically trying to bring someone down, that's not particularly inspiring. We always focus on what is our vision of the future, where do we want to be, how do we want to empower people? Where can we possibly grow and like have a real impact on the world? Thinking about it in kind of that negative lens of taking something away from someone else.

• 36:18Harry Stebbings?

  Do you use competitors' products?

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Not really. We try to be customer zero for everything that Canva does.

• 36:24Harry Stebbings?

  I'm just always intrigued whether founders should intensely test alternative products in the same.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  You give them, yeah, you give them a go, definitely.

• 36:31Harry Stebbings?

  Can you tell me one that you've been impressed by recently though, where you're like, maybe we should learn from that one?

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Recently, there's been a lot of activity in the marketing sector, so particularly in terms of using AI to improve the workflows that you have there. So marketing is kind of infamous for just having a ton of different tools that you have to go through, like one thing measures performance. Another thing helps you with your copy. This other thing helps you like with your ad spend. There's all these tools that you have to pay for. There's a few more tools coming through now that are looking at that whole workflow of like, okay, I want to create something that resonates with my audience. I can measure the performance. I can assign more spend to this one that's particularly like performing well and like doing that is always in the same platform. So yeah, seeing a few coming through in that space.

• 37:19Harry Stebbings?

  Any specifically?

• 37:20Speaker 00

  I won't name names.

• 37:21Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, I've got a lot of from Piers Morgan in some ways, you know, it can't all be nice. I'd love to do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Go for it, go for it.

• 37:29Harry Stebbings?

  So what have you changed your mind and you don't, we can add it out pauses by the way, but what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 37:36Speaker 00

  It's a lesson that I constantly learn, but be a bit crazy. Always do something different.

• 37:44Harry Stebbings?

  What's the most recent example of you being a bit crazy?

• 37:46Speaker 00

  The most recent example is the rap video that we had at Canva Create. Mel pitched it to us. I was like, this could be really awful, but I was also like, Mel has had many great decisions over the years. So I'm like, okay, Mel, you believe in this, let's go for it. So he started developing it and workshopping it and it got to a really great place. It told the story and the message that we're trying to get out through Canva Create about Canva Enterprise and all the SOC two and skim features that are involved in it. Like really dry stuff, but delivered it in a really interesting way. It has gone fantastically well. It's fueled a lot of conversation and debates about like whether it's cheesy or whether it's effective, but for us, it's got tens of millions.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Millions of views. It's got the message out there. It's all publicity, good publicity. I think most publicity is good publicity. There's definitely some bad publicity, but when you think of something like a video that people are saying it's either good or it's bad, that's net, net good. So yeah, most of the time it's good. What's the biggest piece of BS advice that you hear most often? I think something along the lines of lean startup, like just get it out, throw it out there, get some signals back on like, is it working or not? And particularly with the focus on just being able to build a business that way. For us, building Canva is the passion of a lifetime. Like it's something we deeply believe in. It's a problem that we experienced

• 39:12Speaker 00

  and that we wanted to improve. And that constantly drives us to make the product better, to make the company better, to make this a generational organisation. That notion that you can kind of iterate towards a product or even a company or a business model. If you don't have a strong vision to start out with, your heart won't be in it. It won't get you through those dark moments over the next 20 years of building a business where it looks like there's no future and you need to win your first customer. Having that passion and that drive and that belief in what you're trying to create is hugely important for us as founders. And I just couldn't imagine doing it if it was just to like make a few bucks or do 5% more revenue this year. You can swap roles with any other CPO today. Who would you swap roles with just out of interest?

• 39:57Speaker 00

  I would love to swap roles actually with someone, it's not like super scaled, but I would love to swap roles with someone either at Ableton or Serato, because I'm a massive music head. I love DJing, I love making music and just being deep in that music production world would be amazing. What most concerns you in the world today? What most concerns me is our relationship to nature and the planet. So my wife and I have started an organisation called Wedge Tail. She gets to be in it full time. I just get to do it a couple of hours a week. Wedge tail is focused on the nature crisis, which is kind of the next big thing coming after the climate crisis, probably going to be even more seismic.

• 40:38Harry Stebbings?

  So what is the nature crisis versus the climate crisis?

• 40:41Speaker 00

  Climate crisis is, obviously, we're pumping out a bunch of emissions, which is changing the climate on the planet. Nature crisis is our relationship to everything else on the planet. So within the biosphere, you've got forests, you've got animals, you've got our water supply, you've got the air that we breathe. All of that is really coming to a brink of crisis. And you're seeing this, climate plays a role in it. Climate obviously changes where water flows and how rain falls and desertification on continents. But the nature crisis, I think, is our deeper relationship to the environment in which we live in. There is a world where we solve the climate crisis through a bunch of machines and we suck down all the carbon dioxide, but we've destroyed the forests, there's not enough

• 41:24Speaker 00

  land for us, water isn't getting to the right places, there's no more animals exist that we depend on, from bees and insects through to furry little critters that run around the forest and do all these jobs that we're not aware of.

• 41:37Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, do you know Konstantin Kissin? He spoke at the Oxford event about climate change in particular. And he essentially said that actually the UK has 1% impact on the climate and actually climate change and by the impact of that, kind of the organisms around us, will be impacted by India, by China, by Russia. And actually, we have deprived them of economic growth for years and years and years. And there is, you know, millions of children dying in China alone. And Xi Jinping is not going to say, ah, our carbon emissions and the biosphere needs saving, because all he cares about is being re-elected and economic growth is the only thing that China cares about. Do you worry that that is the case?

• 42:17Speaker 00

  People often talk about this, particularly in Australia, where we have even, you know, less kind of economic impact than even the UK does. But the impact that we have in Australia through like exporting coal and The broader impact we have through the resources that we have is huge. And I think that the decisions we make in much more developed countries like where we live actually have huge ripple effects, despite the fact that, you know, the UK is 1% of carbon emissions. The decision that you make here in London.

• 42:47Harry Stebbings?

  Do you worry about that economic ripple effect there, which is like, okay, I move away from fast fashion. So I move away from Zara, from Shein, from any of these companies. And I move to actually much more sustainably produced, often more local providers. There are now thousands and millions of children who will die or move into poverty because of that transition away and the loss of their livelihoods in those countries.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  I don't think you can say just because Britain colonized a bunch of places 200 years ago and extracted a lot of value, we should encourage everyone else in the world to do that, to get to the same level of development. We have learnt and evolved and changed and figured out better ways of doing things. And China and India should be embracing that change. Like, they should know that if they did exactly what we did in terrible ways, it's gonna make the planet even worse. Like, they have an opportunity to do things better in a more sustainable way, not just for the planet in terms of sustainability, but also sustainability for their society, for people to benefit from it, have a great relationship with the land that they live on,

• 43:52Speaker 00

  with the social structures and the cities that they're creating. They have an opportunity to do it better. And the more that we can help them do that, the better we're all gonna be off. So I think, yeah, you can't just like repeat the patterns of the past. We need to constantly be moving forward and creating more sustainable supply chains, making sure that everyone within that supply chain gets value from it, from the farmer to the warehouse manager to the middleman who sells it to, into a European chocolate maker. And just thinking about that whole thing and making sure that it's economically sustainable, we give people jobs, they can live above the poverty line, and we're not destroying nature. We can have all of it.

• 44:32Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you one final one, which is like, you've done interviews before. You speak to so many people, so many people ask you for advice, for questions. What question are you never asked that you think you should be asked more?

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Thinking about the impact that you can have as your organisation changes. People love to drill into the founding story of Canva, the early days. What did you do to get like product market fit and get your first customer? But as you grow your company, as your product becomes more successful, it changes your capabilities, what you're capable of, the impact that you can have, the types of decisions that you can make. And I think as Canva has grown, we've seen the influence that we can have on our employees, like how they do things, how to encourage them to make better decisions, better decisions for the product, better decisions for our customers, better decisions for the planet. And now that we're at the size of 190 million people using Canva,

• 45:26Speaker 00

  the megaphones that we have through interviews like these, thinking more deeply about the impact that you can have and your role in that as a leader. That's something that I've come to realise like over the last few years is that we can have a huge impact now through communicating with people, bringing new ideas like the nature crisis to them and really pushing those forward. So that's something I wish people.

• 45:48Harry Stebbings?

  I think realising the impact of the weight of your words is probably one of the hardest realisation moments. Cause it normally hits you where it's like, oh my God, there's 10 people doing something I said as a joke.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was, I had this conversation with someone in Vienna last year. I barely remember it, but they messaged us recently and they said, I just totally changed my PhD now, based on what you said, and I'm now focusing on finance markets and how they can segue more finance into biodiversity. That just came from like a two minute conversation, which scared the hell out of me.

• 46:18Harry Stebbings?

  You say, great.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  But yeah, it's a great, it's a great outcome.

• 46:22Harry Stebbings?

  I'm glad you touched on that.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  They're now, they're now doing more good for the world. But like, yeah, that power that you have is now incredible and it's something I need to think about.

• 46:31Harry Stebbings?

  And then your partner, you repeat things for years and she never listens. Listen, Cam, I've loved doing this. Thank you so much for putting up with my pressing questions. And you've been fantastic.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Thank you, Ari. So good to be here.

• 46:44Harry Stebbings?

  I just love doing that one with Cam and it was so great to have him in the studio and do it live in person. If you want to watch the full live in-studio episode, you can do that on YouTube of course, by searching for 20VC. I always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, ever wondered what your customers actually do? The team over at They Do have been living it for decades and they have recently built a product that is frankly enabling the world's biggest businesses to literally know what they do. Harnessing journey mining with AI, you can turn unstructured data into structured customer journeys in minutes, saving weeks of work and months of analysis. They Do Journey Management Platform is already helping over 100 leading businesses, including Ford, Johnson

• 47:25Harry Stebbings?

  & Johnson, Royal London & Home Depot, to know what they do. Don't waste another step, check out theydo.com. But before we continue, let me tell you about OneSchemer. OneSchemer is the embeddable CSV importer that will save your team months of development time. While building a basic CSV importer may seem simple, product teams typically spend over three to six months building and rebuilding their CSV import experiences. Why? Customer files are full of unexpected formats for dates, numbers and addresses, and your first pass at building an importer never has all the edge cases handled. Failed imports lead to unhappy customers and endless emails and tickets for your support and engineering teams. Enter OneSchemer,

• 48:07Harry Stebbings?

  with the largest library of pre-built validations and intelligent transforms. OneSchemer helps you launch a guided CSV import experience in just 30 minutes, get your customers to the value of your product in minutes, and say goodbye to frustrating messages like "Import Error Online 53". With over 4X faster performance compared with alternatives, it's clear why OneSchemer is the choice for top startups like Ramp, Scale AI and Pave to streamline their CSV import process. Importing clean customer data into your product is easier than ever. Learn more by visiting oneschemer.com/20. And finally, we need to talk about Pendo. A really simple way to describe Pendo's value is to simply say, "Get your users to do what you want them to do". What is Pendo?

• 48:50Harry Stebbings?

  The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of Application, what are the features that make Pendo so awesome? Pendo's differentiation is in its platform. Every capability from analytics to in-app guidance to session replay, mobile feedback management and roadmapping are all purpose-built to work together. What is the social validity? 10,000 companies use Pendo and we also manage Mind the Product, the world's largest community of product management professionals. Where do we want to drive people? Give it a try and visit pendo.io/20product-podcast to learn how your team can use Pendo to start building better digital experiences. There you can also check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses, 12 hours of in-depth training for your product management teams

• 49:34Harry Stebbings?

  on topics from AI to product analytics to product-led growth. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode this coming Monday with one of the best angel investors of the last two decades, Kevin Hartz.