Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions About this episode Cliff Obrecht is the Co-Founder & COO @ Canva, the free-to-use online graphic design tool that makes it easy for anyone to design anything from presentations to videos and social media. Cliff and Mel have scaled Canva to over 60 million monthly users, 2,000 employees, and 500,000 teams from companies like Intel and Zoom using Canva. During this incredible growth journey, they have raised over $580M with their last round valuing the company at over $40BN. In Today's Episode with Cliff Obrecht 1.) From Teacher to Billionaire Tech Founder: How did Keith make his way into the world of tech with his founding of FusionBooks? What did the process with FusionBooks teach him about how to run Canva? How did the early fundraising days for Canva go? Why does Cliff think they got over 100 no's? What are Cliff's biggest pieces of advice for founders today, not in Silicon Valley, looking to raise from Silicon Valley VCs? 2.) Scaling to $40BN: The Biggest Lessons: What does Cliff mean when he says the secret to successful hiring is looking for "distance traveled"? How does he determine this in the interview process? What have been some of the single biggest lessons in what it takes to acquire the best talent? What are some of the biggest mistakes Cliff has made in talent acquisition? How has his process changed as a result? What do Canva do to get the best operators as advisors in the company? How do they compensate these advisors? What does Cliff advise founders on how to do the same? 3.) The Art of Deal-Making: How does Cliff think through what makes a "good deal"? How does he approach negotiation? What are the biggest mistakes founders make when negotiating and doing deals? What have been Cliff's biggest lessons on successful investor relations over the years? How does Cliff and Canva approach acquisitions? What do they look for? What is their process? Why do most tech companies approach acquisitions the wrong way? 4.) Cliff Obrecht: Money, Fatherhood and Marriage: How does Cliff analyze his relationship to money today? How much money is enough? How has his relationship to money changed over time? Why have Cliff and Mel given away over $10BN to their foundation? Why is philanthropy so hard to do effectively? Why would Cliff hate for his children to be brought up in excess wealth? What does "great fatherhood" mean to Cliff? What are the most challenging aspects of parenting? What are the secrets to a happy marriage? How does co-founding a company with your other half work well? How does it work poorly?
Transcript 11,128 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Where do we get money from? Silicon Valley's got heaps of money. Let's go to Silicon Valley. And then we went to Silicon Valley. We spent over a year there and we got rejected over a hundred times by VCs before we finally convinced some people to invest in us.
0:13 Harry Stebbings? This episode today is one of the most remarkable stories in technology. How a couple from Perth in Western Australia built a business from nothing to a valuation of $40 billion last year and getting many no's in the process. I'm so thrilled to welcome a friend in the form of Cliff O'Bright, founder and COO at Canva, the tool that makes it easy for anyone to design anything from presentations to videos and social media. Now Cliff and Mel have scaled Canva to over 60 million monthly users, 2,000 employees and 500,000 teams from companies like Intel and Zoom using Canva. During this incredible journey, they've raised over $580 million across rounds and their last round valuing the company at over $40 billion. But before we dive into the show today, the single most important element of any team
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2:26 Harry Stebbings? With Brex, you get fast access to high-yield business accounts, high-limit cards, and rewards like cash back and billboards to fuel your growth. Beyond that, Brex has the venture debt, financial modeling, and spend management solutions you need to run your startup globally and well. So are you ready to make your future CFO proud? Learn more at brex.com/20vc. That's brex.com/20vc. And finally, if coder and Brex make your team work more efficiently, Intercom makes modern customer service software that really redefines how businesses support their customers. And their platform connects businesses directly to customers using powerful messaging and automation.
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3:53 Speaker 02 You have now arrived at your destination.
3:56 Harry Stebbings? Cliff, I am so excited for this episode. I know you've listened to the show before, so this is going to be one of the most special shows. Thank you so much for joining me first.
4:04 Speaker 00 No, thank you. Longtime listener, first-time caller. I feel privileged.
4:07 Harry Stebbings? Not at all, my friend. We have quite a schedule in place. So I want to start with a little bit on you, though. We see this incredible brand today that is Canva that you and Mel have built. Taking me back to the beginning, though, what was that founding aha moment? With the very first day of Canva.
4:22 Speaker 00 Oh, it probably goes back earlier than Canva. Mel was teaching design at university and realised that it sucked. It was really complex. It took about six months to learn the professional graphic design tools at the time. Whilst at the same time, people were using, I think it was MySpace at the time, Facebook, they were collaborating, they were sharing content. And she gets all the credit. She was like, in the future, creation is going to be totally different. It's going to be online, it's going to be collaborative and it's going to be easy. We were based in Perth, Western Australia, which is, I think, the most isolated city in the world. And there's no such thing as venture capital there. We had no idea. We didn't know what a startup was. We were like, we should create a small business around this. And I was studying school teaching at the time. And so I was like, well, why don't we do school yearbooks?
5:04 Speaker 00 And so we took the idea. It was the idea from Canva. Mel had this 15 years ago. But we said, we can't create this big global thing. Why don't we solve a real problem people had? And I'm like, I've seen school yearbook coordinators really struggle to create a yearbook. We did that and we created a company called Fusion Books, which became Australia's largest school yearbook company. For a while there, we were kings and queens of the Australian yearbook market, which is a small kingdom to be overseeing. And then it was about four or five years into that business, we realised, hey, people are using our yearbook software for all kinds of different things. They're creating newsletters, they're creating posters. The world needs this. Maybe we can scale this idea and take it to the masses and really solve visual communication.
5:45 Speaker 00 As the web and the world were becoming increasingly visual places, the world needed this tool to be able to allow people to express their creativity and turn it into a design.
5:53 Harry Stebbings? It's a big jump to make. Were you nervous making the jump from yearbooks, even though very successful yearbooks, to actually like a full kind of collaboration software suite eventually?
6:02 Speaker 00 The thing with me is I just don't think too much and I don't think through how hard things are going to be. And that naivety probably plays well because I'm just like, oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Let's go for it. What do we need to do? Let's unpack this problem we need to solve. Okay, we need some money. Where do we get money from? Silicon Valley's got heaps of money. Let's go to Silicon Valley. And then we went to Silicon Valley. We spent over a year there, back and forth, still trying to run our other business. And we got rejected over a hundred times by VCs before we fin- Finally convinced some people to invest in us and that was a journey.
6:33 Harry Stebbings? I literally just got a message before this show like 10 minutes ago from Doug Pepper saying, ask him about kite surfing in Maui and Bill Tai and the rest of us putting in money in the very early days. Kite surfing, Maui fundraising?
6:47 Speaker 00 So that was our ticket into Silicon Valley and it was really fortuitous. Bill Tai is a venture capitalist in the Bay Area. You should have him on the show. He's an awesome guy. But Mad King Kite Surfer and Perth being the most isolated city in the world is amazing for kite surfing. So I think he just made an excuse to have a junket in Perth where he could kite surf. And he called in a tech event and we had our Fusion Books company at the time. So we sort of rocked up and went in this pitch competition for Fusion Books. We lost. He rejected us as the winners in that competition, but we got to know him over time. And then we got invited over to a conference in Maui and that was, at the time, it was quite funny. So we were super, super green. I was listening to Tony Robbins at the time and one of his philosophies is you are who you hang out with.
7:31 Speaker 00 We couldn't afford to go to Maui, but I'm like, fuck it. This is a huge opportunity. We're going all in with all our money from our Fusion Books bank account. We're going over there. And we stayed in, got to stay in this house with some really cool people. I think they must have had someone pull out. That's why we got invited. And that's how we made a bunch of connections and we were talking before the show started about just grinding it out. We just ground it out and there was one point in the journey where we'd been rejected by everyone in Silicon Valley. When you're pitching, everyone that's pitching, especially for early stage rounds, they have this spreadsheet and it's all the leads they have and where they're at. This spreadsheet slowly started turning red, just rejection, rejection, rejection. And Mel and I got to the bottom of that list and we'd been rejected by everyone and we're like, wow.
8:12 Speaker 00 We've spent six months and nearly all our money sleeping on people's couches, not succeeding. What do we do? So we sort of had a day of misery. We were kind of a bit upset and then pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and went back at it.
8:23 Harry Stebbings? I told you before this, the recording, that I just got rejected by someone and you said something to me. What would you say to me again if I asked you? And what do you say to founders out there who see the reds on the sheet and look pretty demoralized?
8:36 Speaker 00 Well firstly, persistence pays off. You need to have some semblance of a good idea. But persistence really pays off. And then what I was saying to you before the show was, it's really a marathon, not a sprint. The amount of times we've been rejected from candidates and it's broken my heart because you know what it's like. You spend so much time investing, taking these people out and you know how good they're going to be and what impact they're going to have on the business and getting rejected by those people really hurts. But I've been in the game long enough now where if you leave a nice taste in those people's mouths and you always be the good human and be the honest, honourable person and speak truths, people come back and they remember you. And when they are ready for that career change or when an opportunity does arise, they often come back. And I really think about business as a really long game. And one of my biggest philosophies is just be
9:20 Speaker 00 honest. And if you say something, stick to your word. There's nothing I can't stand in business more than people that go against their word. If I say something and make a commitment to something, then my word is my bond. I don't need a term sheet. I don't need a legal document. And I think that integrity over time hopefully pays off as people start to recognise that you're a straight shooter.
9:39 Harry Stebbings? If you said the word marathon there, I've obviously known you before this show. There's one thing that we have in common. We are both peak performance athletes.
9:47 Speaker 00 If anyone's watching this, that was me.
9:51 Harry Stebbings? The joys of a podcast is that no one actually gets to see us. Actually, now we have TikTok with.
9:55 Speaker 00 Actually pretty ripped them.
9:56 Harry Stebbings? But my question to you is, when we think about high performance, when I apply that to business and you're 15 years running businesses, what does high performance in business mean to you?
10:06 Speaker 00 Oh, that's a really deep question. It's changed a lot over time. So I used to, for the longest of times, have this philosophy of work hard, play hard, grind it out. Everyone else has just been weak. Why wouldn't you go out for 20 beers after work and then rock back into work at 7am and just grind it out again and just get through it. As you get older, you realise that's not quite sustainable. So you need to start looking after all the things that really matter, like actually getting sleep. And having just had a kid, I've never appreciated sleep so much in my life. And then exercise and all the good things, they really do matter. Through your twenties, you can get away with pretty much anything, I feel. But as you get into your mid 30s, I'm turning 37 in a couple of weeks, you need to start looking after yourself a bit better. And then constantly learning when it actually comes to the career side, the best.
10:50 Speaker 00 Performers I know are just constantly learning and they feel they don't know everything and they're constantly on a journey striving to increase their knowledge.
10:57 Harry Stebbings? How would you describe your leadership style today? You mentioned it changing over time there. How would you describe it today?
11:03 Speaker 00 I think it was very much used to be lead by example, work hard and accomplish things. And hopefully people would follow. I think now it's just like honesty and how it's changed is I used to just have high expectations of people and used to wilder me when people weren't good. And I used to think a lot of things like this is just common sense. Why don't you get this? As I've grown, you realise really frank and transparent feedback and coaching is really important. Sometimes people just don't know and just being really transparent around, hey, you did this way, have you thought about doing it this way? Really helps people and also understanding personality types. I'm pretty just straight up with things and some people are more sensitive. So you need to adapt the way you communicate to the people receiving that communication.
11:43 Harry Stebbings? You said there about expectations and kind of other people's performance. I'm intrigued. Trust is an interesting thing. A lot of people start kind of binary. They either have lots or they have none. How do you think about your starting point for trust?
11:56 Speaker 00 Mel and I are completely, so Mel is my wife and the CEO of Canva, so my boss and definitely the worthy boss. But we have totally opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to trust. So I trust by default and you can lose that trust. Mel, it takes a lot of time to build her trust, but once you build it, it's wow, it's there and it's there for a long time. So that's how I think about it. I fly by the seat of my pants a little bit, wear my heart on my sleeve and quick to love. That's my style.
12:19 Harry Stebbings? I think what I was going to, speaking about quick to love and the trust that we imbue within people, when I spoke to many of your investors, they said that I had to talk about talent with you. You said to me before about distance travelled when it comes to talent. What did you mean Cliff when you said distance travelled? Can you unpack that for me?
12:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, I actually think I heard this from someone on your show a long time ago and it really resonated with me. Distance travelled is if you grew up in a privileged family, went to an Ivy League school and you end up as an investment banker, that's great. I'm sure you worked really hard. I was a school teacher before, I couldn't use computers before we started our first, I hated computers to be honest, before we started our first business. But I used to be a school teacher and I Taught at one of the most underprivileged schools in Western Australia, a lot of the students there were refugees from Africa, Middle East and parts of Asia. These people, ex-child soldiers, they'd been through the most horrific things. They started life with a really big disadvantage.
13:15 Speaker 00 They had everything stacked against them. They had often spent years in a refugee camp. Then they'd travelled to a new country, they couldn't speak our language. To see these kids evolve, educate themselves, learn a new language, sometimes just getting a job is like the distance travelled from being a child soldier to getting a job. One guy I met on the street years after, he said, "Oh, I'm a roof tiler." And he was so proud of that. And I was so proud of him because coming from being a child soldier to actually having a full-time job being a roof tiler, probably being paid really well, that's distance travelled. I really look out for that in the hiring process. And so if you have come from a obscure background, like non-traditional tech or whatever, and have taught yourself the tools, I find those people, once they figure out the game,
14:00 Speaker 00 because this all is just one big game, once they figure out how to play the game, they are some of the best people we have.
14:06 Harry Stebbings? What do you mean when you say it's a game?
14:08 Speaker 00 Most things are just a game, really. We're fortunate, we live in Australia, we have a social safety net. If you have no job, you can go on the dole and get enough money to live and eat and have a roof over your head, which is a great system, by the way, that many other countries should follow that can. With business, we've just always treated it like a game and it's a serious game. Like, I'm very competitive. So when I play a game, I play to win. I absolutely play to win. But at the end of the day, the business doesn't define me. I would be just as happy if I was a fisherman. It would be my dream job, just going out fishing every day. I was in the construction industry before I started teaching. I think I'd be happy out on site, digging holes every day. Often I long to dig a hole and not have to think about things and manage people.
14:48 Harry Stebbings? Sometimes with some of the companies in 2022, I want to dig a hole and get the fuck in it. Or push them in it, either one. I want to ask, man, this is personal, but fuck it, we can do. I was not trained for this in any way. And respectfully, you didn't go to Stanford and the usual Silicon Valley, you know, graduation mechanism. You're a teacher. Were you insecure moving into this world? And did you have imposter syndrome and do you have imposter syndrome about not being trained in the classic mould?
15:15 Speaker 00 So short answer, yes, absolutely. And still have it very much to this day when we meet sort of fancy people. One thing you realise though, and so I used to have it tremendously, sometimes it's crushing. And that's why like I would often go to some of these social events, have a couple of drinks because you'd need that social lubrication to be able to function. Because these people, you're dealing with people that have created billion dollar businesses or venture capitalists and they all seem so intelligent. You don't think you're that smart and super, super intimidating. But what I've found is as you get to know these people over time. And this probably sounds conceited, they're not that much smarter than you. Sure, they've got experience in a thing and they sound really smart. Because they're talking about the thing they've spent 10 years doing. If you've spent 10 years doing something, you should sound smart talking about that thing.
15:57 Speaker 00 And so it's hugely intimidating going into a new world, a new industry. I think you've got to start backing yourself. And this really hurt us in hiring actually throughout the early years of Canva. Because we used to have all these, I call them fancy people with the fancy titles coming from fancy companies. Interviewing at Canva, I'm like, oh shit, I'm not worthy to be interviewing you. You are so good. You are like a senior VP this or that. At one of the Fang companies, I'm not worthy. I'm lucky to be interviewing you. And I guess that came across. And we made a bunch of really poor hiring decisions because we just assumed these people were smarter than us. And then like they're in the company like a year and we're like, fucking hell, you're not really smart at all. Like these ideas you're coming up with that we've been listening to are stupid and they're taking us on a massively wrong direction.
16:42 Speaker 00 We've come full circle there and realised that actually we're not bad at some of the stuff we do. And Mel, I think she's the best product person in the world and her product vision is just impeccable. She's seeing around corners 10 years into the future that no one else is. We've really learned to trust each other and trust our judgements a lot more. Which has been a huge kind of U-turn from where we were before.
17:02 Harry Stebbings? How do you think about hiring internally versus bringing someone in?
17:06 Speaker 00 I love hiring internally. We love building talent. My EA is now our head of people. Zach, our CMO, joined Canva as content writer, a contract content writer. He was in at the time. He's been with the company about 10. He is now, he's now our CMO, wouldn't change him for any of the best CMOs in the world. He's absolutely phenomenal. Same with Jenny, our head of people, world class, absolutely world class. And these people didn't come from fancy tech companies. But that being said, there are great companies that have built great people. We definitely complement homegrown talent with really amazing people we bring into the business. It's the yin and the yang, it's the art and the science, it's all about the vibe.
17:42 Harry Stebbings? Photo Zan before this episode and Zan told me about your strengths and weaknesses. And he said, when it comes to strengths, one of your biggest strengths is your deal making ability. I wanted to touch on this because it's a specific strength. What do you think is good deal making and what makes you so good at it, do you think?
17:59 Speaker 00 So firstly, I think people's strengths are whatever comes natural to them. We didn't grow up with no money, but we didn't grow up with a lot of cash and stuff when we were kids. We had a great little family upbringing, mum was a teacher as well. Dad was a boilermaker welder who got into work safety stuff, worked for the government doing inspecting building sites. And so do you have Kmart over in the UK, like big W and Kmart?
18:20 Harry Stebbings? This is like supermarkets, right?
18:22 Speaker 00 No, they're kind of like Walmart, I guess.
18:24 Harry Stebbings? Yes, we do, but they're not called Kmart.
18:26 Speaker 00 So think of it like a Walmart, we'd go into Walmart with my mum and she would haggle at the equivalent of Walmart. I'm like, mum, I was so embarrassed, but she's like kind of haggle for everything, was always trying to get a good deal. Was always trying to find the best value in things, but was also like honest and open when she did it. So I learnt a lot from her just about, I guess it was the art of getting a good deal. She's Italian and so I think Italians are good at the haggle. And I think I just grew up in that environment. As that sort of skill transferred into business, I had a few just really simple revelations. And this applies to acquiring a company, growing someone through your business and helping with their career or hiring someone. You essentially just need to align the company you're acquiring or the person's goals with your goals.
19:09 Speaker 00 And I just find being really transparent, here are our goals, what are your goals? If we can get our goals to align, magic can happen and one plus one can equal 10. It's a really simple philosophy, being super transparent, like any acquisition we make. A lot of people don't believe it upfront and I say, talk to all the other companies we've acquired. Because you'll find that what I say is actually true. I'm just going to be super transparent with you from day dot. Speak to corp dev people and we've spoken to a lot of them from lots of the big companies. There's a lot of bullshit there. That's not what you'll get from me. I'm going to be super transparent. This is why we love your company. This is why I think it's great for us to partner. And this is the value we see and these things aren't valuable to us. And this is how we value it from a dollar perspective or an equity perspective or whatever the deal terms are going to be. And let's just talk about that. And I do that very early and I say I'd rather a fast no than a long no, but better is a fast yes.
19:54 Harry Stebbings? Man, I'm naive. What's the normal bullshit in acquisitions corp dev? What's the normal bullshit?
19:59 Speaker 00 They'll reach out and say, oh, I just want to chat, learn about your business or whatever. You're like, okay, you're the corp dev person. I don't know exactly where this goes. And then, oh, let's talk about a partnership. Okay, what kind of partnership? And they can't articulate an actual partnership. And after three or four meetings, they'll go, well, would you consider an acquisition? You could have said that in the first thirty seconds of us chatting and I could have told you, no, we're not looking to be bought. That's the bullshit.
20:22 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, in terms of integration, integration is really hard. And you said about aligning goals there. People will sometimes say goals that may not be true to get acquisitions done. How do you ensure that the goals they say are the truth? And you're a very trusting guy, but you also have to be savvy enough to know when someone wants to get a deal done and say what you want to hear.
20:42 Speaker 00 I like to get to know the human behind the business and that's probably the most important thing because the business speaks for itself. You can look at SimilarWeb and you can look at their traffic, you can look at their metrics, you can outside in how a company is going. You can then understand how their culture is outside in as well. You look at their attrition through LinkedIn, who's jumping jobs, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of knowledge you can kind of assess just from sort of outside in analysis. And then it's really around what are the motivations of the founder? What are they like as people? I mean, it was hard through COVID because you couldn't go out and spend some time with them and really get the cut of their jib. But we find we have a real philosophical alignment with the founders we've acquired their companies of. And we've acquired some amazing founders. Maybe we've just been really lucky, I think, but we've had a lot of luck in that regard.
21:27 Harry Stebbings? Have you ever made a bad acquisition? And if so, why was it a bad acquisition?
21:31 Speaker 00 Not really.
21:32 Harry Stebbings? You said there about kind of the importance of the human. I think one thing that I heard a lot from your investor base was exactly that. When you think about investors. Relations. What have been some of your biggest lessons as you reflect on the investors that you have on your camp table now?
21:45 Speaker 00 The most important thing for me is trust. You can garner any knowledge and skills you like through commercial means. I've actually, having listened to your podcast for a long time, heard a lot of really smart people and just reached out to them and say, hey, can you be an advisor to the company or can I pick your brain on this thing? You can get a lot of great advice around certain domains from just reaching out to people. And obviously, as you'll get more leverage with your company, that becomes easier and easier. Even in the earliest days, we used to pay people with generous equity grants, and we still do to this day, to get them on as an advisor. Canva, to give you an example, three years ago, we were like a big bodybuilder that had not done a single leg day in their life. So we had a huge upper body and that was our user acquisition, that was our product and that was our organic growth.
22:30 Speaker 00 But our two weak little legs were marketing and sales. Me and Zach were like, hey, let's figure this out together. Who are the best people? Who does marketing better than anyone else? Let's go speak to as many of them that will speak to us. We started by building our own knowledge and then we hired a few people and we made a few bad hires and we made a few great hires and we just figured it out. And then now we're doing that with sales and I would actually think we're pretty damn good at marketing now, traditional marketing. And sales is definitely on the right trajectory, but these things take time and a lot of learning. Are you asking about investors? Yeah, trust is the most important thing. And once again, it's a marathon, not a sprint. This is cliche, but you really see investors' colours in the tough times. Good times, everything's easy, but it's in the tough times where people's true colours come out.
23:13 Speaker 00 And the age old do some reference checks with companies that haven't done well for that firm, et cetera, et cetera. All actually makes a lot of sense.
23:22 Harry Stebbings? Cliff, I look at Canva's journey and it doesn't look like there have been tough times. And I know there's always tough times in a business, but it kind of looks up and to the right. What was the toughest time that comes to mind?
23:32 Speaker 00 Oh, I've had a few. I'll tell you, the toughest time I've had recently was putting up this Christmas tree that I bought. It got the better of me. I'm terrible for not reading instructions and I did it all wrong, just like Ikea furniture. And it took me about four hours to put up this Christmas tree. It was 11pm and I nearly gave up, but I didn't. The next biggest challenge in our business journey was we had our first version of Fusion Books, the school yearbook company, built in Australia by contractors and that was becoming very expensive. We couldn't afford it anymore. So we outsourced it through Odesk, which is now Upwork at the time, to a team in India. And so we had about 400 schools on the platform at the time. And the whole concept of, I guess, Canva for yearbooks is the teachers and students create their yearbook together using this WizyWig software.
24:15 Speaker 00 It's all amazing. And then they hit publish and that exports a PDF document that gets printed. The WizyWig part worked, but it couldn't export a PDF. We had to recreate over a hundred thousand pages with Photoshop and InDesign, where we had to hire a team of designers on Upwork to essentially eyeball these pages and redesign them in Photoshop and InDesign. And then we had to convert those into a PDF and publish them. So that was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done. The other hardest thing we ever done, we're about five years into Canva and we realised, when you're a startup, right? You have to make trade-offs. And often when building technology, that trade-off is a speed for tech debt. And we'd accrued a lot of tech debt, particularly in our front-end code. And it got to the point where it was untenable. We couldn't scale our team.
25:00 Speaker 00 Our user base was scaling massively and we were like, I think we need to rewrite this whole thing. And we obviously analysed pulling it to bits and recreating it component by component, but that wasn't going to work. We had to down tools and ship no features for a full two years. It was supposed to be one year, but it took two years in the middle of Canva's growth journey. Call it from year four to six, we're at year 10 now. And that was a death march for a company that's so used to shipping product and shipping value to customers. That was a really dark time. How did that impact your growth trajectory? For the first year, we had all the tailwinds. It was a great product, but we had people copying us. We have had so many copycats over the years. Mel doesn't ever look at competition. She's like, fuck the competition. We've got this 10-year vision.
25:42 Speaker 00 They're copying where we were. I'm like, yeah, that's nice. People are copying us in there. It looks pretty good. So I'm probably a bit on the other side, but I've learned more to be like Mel. And seeing these copycats just ruthlessly copy you. And then one of the copycats, they introduced video. And that was a core part of what we were going to launch. It was like, fuck, they've launched video. They're going to beat us and blah, blah, blah. But ultimately we just stayed the course and while it was tough, we got through it. And now our product velocity, because of this new free platform is faster than anyone else. And once again, we're off to the races.
26:11 Harry Stebbings? Cliff, how important is first to market and how do you advise founders on how to think about competition?
26:16 Speaker 00 First to market is important, but user acquisition is just as important. You can have a great product, but if you haven't cracked the user acquisition channels, you've got nothing because customers need to be able to find your product and use your product and love your product. And we grew Canva through a couple of different ways. Primarily, our product was our biggest marketing channel. So we built Canva over the course of a year before we launched anything. At the time, the lean startup was really in vogue. So our investors were all going, what are you doing? Launch, iterate, do all the lean startup stuff, hack your way to success. And Mel was like, absolutely not. We are going to launch the most delightful product to our users and offer it for free, which is the freemium model. And our users are going to be our biggest marketing channel.
26:59 Speaker 00 And that's what we did, despite all that pressure from investors. And we picked a really good target audience when we were starting as well. We're like, who has the biggest need for visual content creation? Social media marketers, because social media is our visual content beast and you need to keep feeding the beast. So we approached social media marketers and one of the people I cold outreach to was Guy Kawasaki. And he responded, we were nothing at the time.
27:22 Harry Stebbings? He was my first ever guest on the show.
27:25 Speaker 00 Oh, I've been hearing that, yeah.
27:27 Harry Stebbings? Eight years ago, yeah.
27:28 Speaker 00 He's an absolute legend and good on him for giving a chance to underdogs that have no leverage. Most people you need enough leverage to, for them to pay any attention. But Guy Kawasaki responded to my tweet and he responded to whatever you sent him. And so, yeah, kudos to Guy. Let's have a homage to Guy movement.
27:44 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, when you think back, I heard you there say you focus on social media marketers. As a VC straight away, I just think a load of VCs would say, huh, small town.
27:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:52 Harry Stebbings? When you look back, were there commonalities in why VCs said no?
27:55 Speaker 00 Oh, there were so many reasons why VCs said no. Two non-technical founders from Perth, we got every reason under the sun. But we have a philosophy around that, it's start niche and go wide. You don't want to boil the ocean, you want to solve a problem for someone that has that problem. Solve that problem really well. And then, once you've solved it for them, what are the adjacent industries, people, professions that have that same problem? And let's go pick those off. And that's what we've done with Canva. And the other sort of user acquisition channel we cracked in the early days was SEO as well. We're a content company and we figured out a way how to propagate that content onto the internet. So people searching it can find it and then drive people to the product like that.
28:32 Harry Stebbings? When I think over those reasons, the two technical founders on a CCliff is one where I might slip up on. I do like to see a technical founder. I like to see someone like deeply rooted in engineering and products. And I know Miles will see a product visionary, but it's not technical in that way. Why am I wrong and why does it work?
28:49 Speaker 00 You're right, it's a huge risk, actually. It is an absolute huge risk because if you don't have the right technical foundation of your business, then it's like a house of cards. We were incredibly lucky to bring on a third co-founder Cam and he was at Google. He wasn't quite technical, but we palmed him off as the technical co-founder. Cause he could write JavaScript and he did write JavaScript. He built a lot of the first front ends in Canva. We had a couple of early commitments, but getting him on board really tipped the needle in regards to investors and also allowed us to get on our CTO, who is also another amazing human, Dave Handen, who's still with the company and absolutely phenomenal and really built the technical foundations that are still there today and we can build off.
29:28 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned prioritization earlier when you said about kind of the technical debt versus performance and new features. When you think about what you have ahead of you today, there are many different angles that you could go down, but also quite a challenge. How do you think about product prioritization today when you look at the different avenues that you have in front of you?
29:45 Speaker 00 Two ways, the greatest good for the greatest number. I always think to the product, I don't want to give away all our secret sauce here, but as a funnel, this is like super obvious. People sometimes. Love to pitch ideas and features. My first question is, how many people are going to see this feature? You can't build a feature nestled so deep in your UX that it's only going to be seen by sub ten percent of your user base. I think there are a lot of things as funnels and around product development, what is going to have the greatest good for the greatest number? And then the other product philosophy is a lot of the time, and this is like Mel's strengths, and I've learned this from her. People don't know what they don't know. It's the whole Henry Ford, if you ask them people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. You need to be looking at the future and understanding trends. We're thinking twenty years into the future, not just two years into the future.
30:30 Speaker 00 And if you think how industries coalesce over time and what that's going to mean to your business, it allows you to be really strategic and make long-term bets as well as short-term. How that applies now is really relevant in AI. So Canva was created because before Canva, the design ecosystem was incredibly fragmented. You had to go to a stock photo site to get your stock photos. You had to go to Vistaprint to print your stuff. You had to use three different softwares to create your design and you had to communicate over a whole different communication layer, like email, et cetera, et cetera. So we brought all of this industry together in one simple page to create Canva. And it was the aggregation of that disjointed industry that really enabled us to help the everyday person to achieve their goals
31:14 Speaker 00 and their visual communication goals. The same is occurring in AI at the moment. There's all these cool tools, but it's really how those tools show up in a workflow where people get their job to be done that really adds the most value. And that's why we're investing so heavily into AI as really the co-pilot to help people achieve their goals. Because people don't open their computer at the start of the day or wake up in the morning thinking, I want to use AI. They wake up in the morning thinking, I have these certain jobs to be done. And we see it as our job as a company to help them achieve those jobs to be done.
31:45 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask you, when I hear about the different products and tools, the thing that I think of is bundling versus unbundling. And respectfully, and you're going to probably kill me for this, when you unbundle, you get increased product quality in a lot of cases. The hyper-specialized, yeah? Whereas very detailed functionality, and you often can't have that in more bundled products. What do you think about that trade off? And are you trying to take people away from the vertically specialised tools? Or is it not that it's for the general populace who needs Good Enough?
32:14 Speaker 00 We hate Good Enough. Good Enough is not good enough. We aspire and are world class across our key product areas. And we've built the entirety of Canva on the one unified platform. And that comes with a bunch of benefits. When you use a video creation tool, a whiteboarding tool, a presentation tool, a social media graphic tool, whatever, you don't want to learn a whole new interface. You don't want to upload all your stuff to a whole new content library. You want the interoperability of designs. We've built all of Canva off this one ecosystem and one graphics engine. So every doc type is built off the same interface and it's very interoperable and easily understood. That also allows you to actually convert a presentation with one click into a video. It allows you to convert a doc into a presentation.
32:59 Speaker 00 It allows us to do all these crazy things that you can't do with these point and shoot tools. Particularly going into this economic downturn. People are looking to aggregate their visual communication tools just from a pure simplicity and jobs to be done perspective, but also a cost cutting perspective. You shouldn't have to pay $20 for this tool and $20 for this tool and $30 for this tool. When you can get Canva for essentially $14 a month. And we only charge you based on active users. How do you add the most value to customers? Our pricing even is aligned to customer value. So we don't try and sell an organisation a thousand seats. We only charge you based on the number of active seats in a particular quarter. Value is aligned with value. And we really believe over the long term, that really builds trust and allows good things.
33:43 Harry Stebbings? Cliff, I want to take a little bit of a different turn, actually, away from the business. With the incredible success of the business, one's financial profile changes. When you think about your relationship to money today, you've had many people answer this question on the show before, but it's one that I grapple with. How would you describe your relationship to money and how's it changed over time?
34:01 Speaker 00 I've always felt rich. My favourite wine is what we call an Australia goon bag. It's like boxed wine. It costs $10 a box. And I know it's my favourite wine because the last blind wine testing thing we did, it had everything from about Five hundred dollar bottle to this boxed wine. The blind wine tasting test was my favourite. And so I've always felt like I've had abundance. We've always had enough money to travel. Mel and I used to be carnies. We used to do airbrush tattoos at carnivals. We used to work our arse off and make enough money to go to India or Thailand for three months at a time or Africa. Especially when you travel to those countries, you realise how lucky you are and like, we've always felt lucky and rich. As the company's grown, we're all in on Canva. So it's not like we've cashed out tonnes and tonnes of money and all that kind of stuff. We're very long on Canva.
34:46 Harry Stebbings? What do you think of founders who are actively angel investing? You see a lot today with funds. I have very strong views on those with funds who take external money. What do you think about founders who are actively angel investing with or without funds?
34:58 Speaker 00 I actively don't angel invest. I do do some just because it's like a great person. I don't do anything to make money. I back ideas that I think the world needs to see. In regards to the money stuff, it started to become really uncomfortable for us when Canva started really growing in valuation. The papers started writing about us as billionaires. And we were like, that feels horrible. We don't really want to be billionaires. We have more than enough with what we have. So Mel and I, we own thirty one percent of Canva and we put thirty percent, so like ninety nine percent of what we own into a charity that we can't spend on our own stuff. Because it's selfish in a way, because we get the most joy, I guess, or our most fulfillment
35:38 Speaker 00 from helping others rather than sort of buying a PJ or that fancy car or thing like that. Yeah, that's kind of.
35:45 Harry Stebbings? How do you manage the ninety nine percent? Do you have someone who manages that philanthropic activity?
35:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, we very much aligned it with the Canva Foundation. And so the team now that runs the Canva Foundation, we just pool that capital. We draw down some capital every year where we pick projects we believe in. A really great one we've been focusing on for the last couple of years is in conjunction with GiveDirectly that essentially gives cash to the world's poorest people and aims to lift them out of poverty. And our first sort of big pilot was in Malawi. And it's a journey though. It's like building a business. Ten years ago, we knew jack shit about building a business. Now we know jack shit about philanthropy. We know we've been incredibly fortunate to have this pool of capital. That isn't ours. We're custodians of that capital. And now it's on us to figure out how to deploy it through projects and investments to have the biggest positive impact we can on the world. And that sounds really wanky, but.
36:35 Harry Stebbings? I'm the VC. I just don't get it. It's very strange to me. And what I mean by strange to me, not the giving to charity, obviously, I think that's fantastic. You're not custodians and it's not yours. It's not like inheriting money.
36:47 Speaker 00 How much money do you need? We had a kid recently and the last thing I want her to do is grow up rich. There's so much joy, like yourself made, Harry. You built this business by grinding it out from the early days. I remember you saying one time, your first podcast, it must have been with Guy Kawasaki. You got your mum to take the phone off the hook and.
37:03 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, exactly.
37:05 Speaker 00 I am a fan, see. But how is the joy in actually like building something for yourself that you've earned? Imagine getting everything handed to you on a silver platter. I would not take that right away from my daughter to not earn her own self-worth.
37:19 Harry Stebbings? I have a genuine question for you that I think about a lot. Would I work as hard as I do if I had 200 million from my family in the background? And I would like to think I would.
37:28 Speaker 00 Probably a drug addict. It'd mess you up. I'd be messed up. I would have gone off the rails. Imagine growing up knowing you're super rich and you can do anything. You see some of these kids that grow up rich and entitled. That's not what I want for future generations.
37:42 Harry Stebbings? How much money is enough?
37:43 Speaker 00 I think you need enough to have a nice house, travel, do all the things. But to be honest, we.
37:48 Harry Stebbings? I would say 100 million.
37:50 Speaker 00 That's a lot. I don't think you need that much. I really don't think you need that much. You can do some cool stuff with 100 million. I'm on your private jet, Harry. That'll be fun. I've never flown on a private jet before, but I'm very keen to be invited on someone else's. I'm such a tight ass. I told you, my mum used to haggle at the Australian version of Walmart. I still fly economy unless I can get a points upgrade. You want 10 grand for a five hour trip? I'll tough out that 10 grand and I'll spend that 10 grand on something else. I never do spend it on something else, but I just don't value, I guess, comfort that much. I've never thought about this, but yeah. I'm a tight ass. I'm not a tight ass with others. I'm just a tight ass with some decisions.
38:25 Harry Stebbings? One of the things that I did learn though, actually, and a friend taught me very wisely, is that some things are better to pay for now you can afford it. Cause it makes you better. An example of that is I spend on a personal trainer because it makes me fitter and healthier. And I could never afford to before, now I can, and it makes me better as a business person. Are there any things where you invest there that do actually make you better?
38:47 Speaker 00 We invest in experiences. I've recently got a personal trainer as well because we work a lot and you often put off exercise. So having someone you're accountable to actually helps with that. But no, we really invest in experiences. Some of the coolest things we've done in recent years is we rode motorbikes across Bhutan, went, what do you call it? Zip lining in Laos, rode motorbikes again, dirt bikes on the China-Vietnam border. We used to have experiential holidays and that means a lot to us and that's where we get the most of our joy.
39:16 Harry Stebbings? Tell me, my friend, you've mentioned Mel obviously many times. I'm just fascinated. You have the most incredible relationship. And it's also a very rare one because most people I interview aren't also co-founders with their other half. What's the secret to a successful marriage, do you think?
39:29 Speaker 00 I don't know. If there is a secret to a successful marriage, please tell me. Like anything, it's always a work in progress. Mel and I have only been married two years, but we were dating 16 years before that. So we've been together for 18 years. So we've really grown up together and she's really my best friend more than anything else. And I think that's important, but shit, we're getting heated debates. It's not all roses and teacups. There's lots of challenging moments.
39:54 Harry Stebbings? Do you have like separation? And when you go to family Sunday lunch and it's fuck, we lost that fucking big enterprise deal, cleft dam. Are you like, ah, ah, ah, nah, not on Sunday. Do you have the Chinese walls of separation?
40:06 Speaker 00 We endeavour to. We have this thing where we're like, no work talk. And then we're not talking about work. Can't be talking about work tonight. And so we often try and do that on weekends and stuff. Inevitably it creeps in. But we used to do it a lot, talk about work a lot. But now we try not to and we do. And often it's fun, but sometimes you just need to not talk about work. If you're on a date night or if you're doing something fun, you need that division. And like we've said a few times, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And as you've been doing it for a long enough period of time, you actually need those recharge moments where it's not about work.
40:37 Harry Stebbings? I'm going to get you in trouble here. What's the biggest pro and the biggest con of co-founding a company with your other half?
40:43 Speaker 00 Oh, I think if either of us were dating anyone else, we would both be dumped because we're both kind of neglectful partners at times. So many times in the style, someone's making dinner for the other person and it's like, I can't come up for dinner. I'm flat out on this thing. I need to get it shipped, but we understand each other's you go girl, you're doing this for the team. And so if we're with anyone else, it'd be terrible. So that's, I guess, a pro where we can really work really hard and not get in trouble for it. I know other people that have demanding businesses whose partners aren't in the business, struggle with that because it's just a dichotomy of who's more busy. The biggest con, yeah, we both work a lot. I don't know. It's all fun. It's all in the mix.
41:20 Harry Stebbings? Final one for you, a quick fire, but I do want to touch on it. You mentioned the newborn. What does great fatherhood mean to you and how do you think about being the best father you can be?
41:28 Speaker 00 I always really valued my independence, liked to cut my own course. I think you need to give that space to kids to find their own path and cut their own course. What you can instill on them is a set of values. Be honest, be a good human, be kind, work hard. And if you leave them with those values or those guiding principles or guardrails, you would hope they can then make good decisions for themselves.
41:52 Harry Stebbings? What's the hardest thing about being a father?
41:54 Speaker 00 Oh, no sleep. She's just super young. So it's just getting better now. The first five months were very trying in regards to not getting much sleep. And I guess I underestimated.
42:06 Harry Stebbings? Split that between Mel. Is it alternating nights? Who gets up in the middle of the night?
42:09 Speaker 00 No, Mel breastfeeding, she has to get up and breastfeed. I don't have boobies. We tag team it, right? We both work incredibly hard. So we tag team it. She had a lot more of the load in the early days by nature's default, but it's starting to even off a bit more.
42:23 Harry Stebbings? That's a great example. I would invest in a night nanny for your sleep and for your sanity and best in a night nanny.
42:29 Speaker 00 We kind of tried that, but didn't really work. We ended up getting a lady in for a few hours for about a week and she really just whipped us into gear. Turns out it's all about routine and Mel and I are not very good at following structure and strict routines. And apparently kids need that and it actually works. So anyone out there that's got a kid that doesn't sleep, yeah, do the whole routine thing.
42:49 Harry Stebbings? I want to move into a quick fire. I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
42:54 Speaker 00 Perfect.
42:54 Harry Stebbings? What's your favourite book and why?
42:57 Speaker 00 Oh, I've read a lot of business books over the years, but now when I'm going to bed at night, I want some trash and I read Jack Reacher.
43:04 Harry Stebbings? Oh, wow. I had in my head that you were going to say Sapiens or something. I was like, oh. Oh no.
43:08 Speaker 00 I do like that book. I know the business book I'm really enjoying now is Working Backwards. It's about Amazon, but for me, business book's a lot flavor of the month.
43:15 Harry Stebbings? I like Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and I like it because I don't read more than the page. And it's a page per day, literally. You go brush your teeth, read a page while you're doing your business and. The reason.
43:26 Speaker 00 But I don't wanna bury that book after you.
43:29 Harry Stebbings? I would try to, I'll send, I'll give you a signed copy of my.
43:32 Speaker 00 My toilet, my toilet copy, please.
43:34 Harry Stebbings? Tell me, my friend, what do you most want to achieve from your philanthropic endeavors?
43:38 Speaker 00 We've just got a lot to figure out. I think the world has enough good intentions and capital to solve the world's problem. I think what we need to solve and not just us, but the gap we need to bridge is connecting those good intentions and that capital with the problems. And I feel it's a very inefficient system. So figuring out a way to connect the world's goodwill to the problems and solve those problems.
43:59 Harry Stebbings? Would you ever do another startup?
44:00 Speaker 00 I don't think so. It's hard.
44:04 Speaker 00 Although my glum's a punishment, like we, we'll probably do, will run projects, philanthropic projects that are built like a startup based on technology.
44:12 Harry Stebbings? What have you recently changed your mind on, my friend?
44:14 Speaker 00 How hard having a kid is. I used to tell Mel when she was pregnant, which she used to hate, having a baby's gotta be easy. People have been doing it since the dawn of time. There wouldn't be so many humans on this planet if it wasn't easy. And that didn't go down well. And, and now I know why it didn't go down well.
44:29 Harry Stebbings? Oh man, that's a risky place to go. What three traits would you most like your child to adopt?
44:34 Speaker 00 Perseverance, kindness, being curious. And I said the adventure, like a real sense of adventure. I want my daughters to have a real sense of adventure.
44:41 Harry Stebbings? If you could add anyone to your board, who would you add? Dream ad, doesn't have to be real.
44:45 Speaker 00 Oh, I think probably Bob Iger. I love Bob Iger.
44:48 Harry Stebbings? What have you learned from Bob?
44:49 Speaker 00 Bob has a very values first approach to business. It really resonates. What's best for the customer? What's best for the employees? What are we actually trying to do here? So he often relates things to Disney and they're in the business of telling beautiful stories that engage people. And I think this is one thing that people get really distracted by. They focus on the art of running a company rather than the art of creating value. And that's why people and a lot of founders lose sight of why their business exists. Often in tech, it's like you create a product that solves a problem and people, especially as their business grow, they get caught up with internal politics, hiring the next big hire, blah, blah, blah. But what do your customers see? All your customers sees at the end of the day is your digital product.
45:33 Speaker 00 And if that product is not delightful and amazing, your business is going to go to shit. That's a common misconception that people have and focus too much on their company and not enough on their actual product and the value that they're creating for their customers.
45:44 Harry Stebbings? What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started Canva?
45:47 Speaker 00 I'm glad I don't know how hard it all is because that would be a challenge and all the hurdles we would have had to jump over. If you knew, then it would be sort of harder to start. Well, I guess a lot of the people management stuff, I've really evolved. How to get the best out of people, that whole thing I was talking about before, aligning goals and just being transparent. They're probably some of the things I wish I sort of could have brought into my toolkit earlier.
46:09 Harry Stebbings? Penultimate one, my friend. What would you most like to change about the world of startups?
46:14 Speaker 00 The thing I would like to change is changing. And it was this concept of everything used to have to be in the Bay Area. You had to be a Stanford grad, all that bullshit. The amount of investors that rejected us because they said, I like to ride my bike to the most startups. I'm like, fuck off. That is changing though. I think COVID really accelerated that change. And now investors are having a more global approach and seeing that unorthodox people in unorthodox places can and often do solve big problems because they have unique perspectives, different to those perspectives that are grown in the Bay Area.
46:48 Harry Stebbings? Man, I love that. I've heard it so many times. I'm like, wow, you must be a very good cyclist. I live in Mumbai. Final one for you, my friend. What do the next five years look like for you and for Canva? If we sit down in 2027, where will we be then?
47:00 Speaker 00 We're just going to keep on keeping on, man. We love this journey and we love where we're going. We really believe as the web and the world become increasingly visual places, Canva is in prime position to really help through that transition and help people achieve their visual communication goals. And that goes in a variety of different paths, but we're just excited to follow those paths down to their end.
47:21 Harry Stebbings? Cliff, I've loved doing this. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for opening the kimono on so many different topics that were not on schedule. You've been a star and I loved it, my friend.
47:30 Speaker 00 Legend. Take care, Harry. It's always a pleasure.
47:34 Harry Stebbings? Cliff is just such a wonderful, awesome leader, such humility, such authenticity. If you want to see more from us, you can find us on YouTube by searching for 20VC. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. But before we leave you today, the single most important element of any team is their ability to work together in the best and most efficient way. And Coda is the doc where teams can work on entire projects from start to finish with everything they need, all in one place. Think about the way your team works today. If all the work is spread across different documents, spreadsheets, and a stack of workflow tools like they are in all of my teams, it's tougher to focus on getting things done, let alone getting them done together. And that's why I realised that I have to have Coda and why you need Coda. Coda is the doc that brings it all together.
48:18 Harry Stebbings? By putting data in one centralised location, regardless of format, with Coda, you'll never need to ask, "Where are the latest project updates? Anyone know where the performance stats are?" This is what really slows teams down and prevents collaboration. With Coda, your team can operate on the same information and collaborate in one place and get projects done much, much faster. Take advantage of this special, limited time offer just for startups. Sign up today at coda.io/20vc and get a $1,000 startup credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/20vc to sign up and get a startup credit of $1,000. And speaking of tools we cannot live without, you probably know Brex.
48:59 Harry Stebbings? Brex was the first corporate card for startups, but Brex has grown a lot since then to scale up right along with its customers. Now 90% of Y Combinator grads trust Brex as their all-in-one financial stack. I get to speak to founders all day and I know how important having the right financial stack is to their success. With Brex, you get fast access to high-yield business accounts, high-limit cards, and rewards like cash back and billboards to fuel your growth. Beyond that, Brex has the venture debt, financial modelling, and spend management solutions you need to run your startup globally and well. So are you ready to make your future CFO proud? Learn more at brex.com/20vc. That's brex.com/20vc.
49:43 Harry Stebbings? And finally, if Coder and Brex make your team work more efficiently, Intercom makes modern customer service software that really redefines how businesses support their customers. And their platform connects businesses directly to customers using powerful messaging and automation. Intercom enables teams to scale support without investing more resources, leading to happier customers and more efficient support teams. And Intercom is used to send over 500 million messages per month and enables interactions with over 600 million monthly active end users, trusted by customer service teams at more than 25,000 global organisations, including Atlassian, Amazon and Lyft Business. Check out this amazing offer.
50:26 Harry Stebbings? Eligible startups get advanced Intercom features at a 95% discount. So do not miss out. Head over to intercom.com/20vc to find out more. As always, I so appreciate your support. And my word, what a show we have for you on Monday with two incredible guests, Hunter and Satya at Homebrew.
Previous 20Sales: Why You Should Not Do PLG and Enterprise Sales at the Same Time | How To Move Into Enterprise Sales Gradually | How To Make a Comp Plan For Sales Teams | Why Discounting is Good and Can Be Used with Stevie Case, CRO @ Vanta Next 20VC: Homebrew's Hunter Walk and Satya Patel on Why $100M is Not Enough To Execute a Seed Strategy Today | Why They Decided not to Raise New External Funds | Where Are We in the Cycle & What is Truly F***** | Why Founders Should Take Secondaries Earlier Page updated October 25, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
