The Exchanges

Q 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?

A I think 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 their 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, their AI servers. Um, but yeah, we view it as just a way of building a better product, and it's a continuation of democratizing design. 10 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.

AI assessment note: “I think in the short term, it might allow them to make more money.”

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

A 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. And that is talking to people, networking, having the right skills, like working with technology, trying different products, experimenting. So I, you know, Canva, we started in 2012, but my career was 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. 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. It can take over the world. But in 2007, when we tried to do it at Google, it just wasn't the right time.

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't necessarily call it luck. I think it's about putting yourself in a position”

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

A 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. And that is talking to people, networking, having the right skills, like working with technology, trying different products, experimenting. So I, you know, Canva, we started in 2012, but my career was 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. 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. It can take over the world. But in 2007, when we tried to do it at Google, it just wasn't the right time.

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't necessarily call it luck. I think it's about putting yourself in a position”

Q 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?

A We do a little bit of that for very, um, staunch advocates of Canva. So we have like, um, little beta pools and, and particular industry pools, like people are super enthusiastic about Canva for teaching. Um, and we will message that out to that very closed audience, um, a bit earlier, uh, just so that they can get used to it, particularly because they often need to talk about Canva to other people. Um, 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 going to 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, you know, we give them a screen saying, Hey, here's the glow up. Here's all the value for it. Here's how it's going to change your design, um, experience. But we give them a skip button. Like, if they don't want to take part in that change, right in that moment, they can click that. And that's often really important because people- What percent of people click skip? Uh, not a huge amount.

AI assessment note: “We try to give people choice when they first come in.”

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

A Uh, product fuck up. I can't think of one recently. There's 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? It had been a little part of our vision, but it wasn't like a part we're passionate about, but we're like, okay, we need to introduce some social layer here. So we spent like 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. Um, and it just didn't do very well. Like it wasn't part of our DNA. 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, their kids' fifth birthday poster. So like, it wasn't a natural part of Canva.

AI assessment note: “We dedicated one whole engineer for nine months to build this whole social experience.”

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

A Uh, product fuck up. I can't think of one recently. There's 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? It had been a little part of our vision, but it wasn't like a part we're passionate about, but we're like, okay, we need to introduce some social layer here. So we spent like 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. Um, and it just didn't do very well. Like it wasn't part of our DNA. 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, their kids' fifth birthday poster. So like, it wasn't a natural part of Canva.

AI assessment note: “dedicated one whole engineer for nine months to build this whole social experience”

Q How important is the speed to delight moment? Does it need to be in the first user journey?

A Definitely needs to be in the first user journey. I don't think it has to happen in the 1:30 seconds, but I think 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 2006, 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. Like 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, and then they realized that through this process of onboarding, they had become a designer, essentially. They had done something that they didn't think they could do before, and that was the trigger moment where they're like, wow, this product is for me, and I can use this in a 101 different ways.

AI assessment note: “Definitely needs to be in the first user journey.”

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

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

AI assessment note: “The most recent example is the rap video that we had at Canva Create.”

Q 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?

A Thinking about the impact that you can have as your organization changes. Um, so 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, you're capable of, the impact that you can have, um, and 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. You know, now that we're at the size of a hundred and ninety million people using Canva, um, and the, the megaphones that we have through interviews like these, um, thinking more deeply about the impact that you can have in your role in that as a leader. That's something that I've come to realize 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, um, and really pushing those forward. Um, so that's something I wish people.

AI assessment note: “Thinking about the impact that you can have as your organization changes.”

Q 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, which is like, 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.

A 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, 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, uh, 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, you know, do every single day. It's about giving them something new in their life that interests them, that unlocks something. And like 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. We have a duck that floats by every time you upload a hundred images. We've thought about all the features that you need. We've 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.

AI assessment note: “those details in the Canva product have driven so much user love”

Q have superhuman powers of design and to democratize design, it has to be simple. In some respect. And I think it's really interesting when I spoke to Andrew, uh, 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?

A 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. Uh, 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 output. 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 80% of the value, but then as you spend more time with it, you unlock the remaining 20%, 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, where it's like 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. 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.

AI assessment note: “simplicity is the top layer, but you also need depth under there”

Q 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?

A We do a little bit of that for very, um, staunch advocates of Canva. So we have like, um, little beta pools and, and particular industry pools, like people are super enthusiastic about Canva for teaching. Um, and we will message that out to that very closed audience, um, a bit earlier, uh, just so that they can get used to it, particularly because they often need to talk about Canva to other people. Um, 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 going to 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, you know, we give them a screen saying, Hey, here's the glow up. Here's all the value for it. Here's how it's going to change your design, um, experience. But we give them a skip button. Like, if they don't want to take part in that change, right in that moment, they can click that. And that's often really important because people- What percent of people click skip? Uh, not a huge amount.

AI assessment note: “more generally we try not to signposts ahead of time because it's just a lot of noise.”

Q How important is the speed to delight moment? Does it need to be in the first user journey?

A Definitely needs to be in the first user journey. I don't think it has to happen in the 1:30 seconds, but I think 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 2006, 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. Like 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, and then they realized that through this process of onboarding, they had become a designer, essentially. They had done something that they didn't think they could do before, and that was the trigger moment where they're like, wow, this product is for me, and I can use this in a 101 different ways.

AI assessment note: “Definitely needs to be in the first user journey.”

Q 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?

A I think 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 their 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, their AI servers. Um, but yeah, we view it as just a way of building a better product, and it's a continuation of democratizing design. 10 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.

AI assessment note: “we view it as just a way of building a better product”

Q So what is the nature crisis versus the climate crisis?

A 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. Uh, 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. Like climate obviously changes where water flows and how rain falls and Desertification on, 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 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 You know, furry little critters that run around the forest and do all these jobs that we're not aware of.

AI assessment note: “Climate crisis is obviously we're pumping out a bunch of emissions... Nature crisis is”

Q 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, which is like, 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.

A 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, 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, uh, 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, you know, do every single day. It's about giving them something new in their life that interests them, that unlocks something. And like 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. We have a duck that floats by every time you upload a hundred images. We've thought about all the features that you need. We've 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.

AI assessment note: “Part of it is that detail... those details in the Canva product have driven so much user love.”

Q have superhuman powers of design and to democratize design, it has to be simple. In some respect. And I think it's really interesting when I spoke to Andrew, uh, 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?

A 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. Uh, 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 output. 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 80% of the value, but then as you spend more time with it, you unlock the remaining 20%, 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, where it's like 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. 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.

AI assessment note: “simplicity is the top layer, but you also need depth under there”

Q How often do you switch your cloud provider?

A Uh, not a huge amount. And there is definitely like a bit of lock in there. Um, but it is possible. And the starting point is also, uh, 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 AWS, you'll start with that. If you, 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, and I think exactly the same will happen with LLMs. 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, and everyone else will rush to catch up and then innovate on top of that, but you'll have choice.

AI assessment note: “Uh, not a huge amount. And there is definitely like a bit of lock in”

Q How often do you switch your cloud provider?

A Uh, not a huge amount. And there is definitely like a bit of lock in there. Um, but it is possible. And the starting point is also, uh, 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 AWS, you'll start with that. If you, 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, and I think exactly the same will happen with LLMs. 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, and everyone else will rush to catch up and then innovate on top of that, but you'll have choice.

AI assessment note: “Uh, not a huge amount.”

Q 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?

A Yeah, there's improvements that you can roll out and you can be fairly confident they're not gonna, you know, upset anyone. So like an improvement to image quality and magic media, you just roll that out, right? Um, something like the glow up, we think a lot about change boarding. So how people perceive the change, how you present it to them and showing them the value of it. Um, we, 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, uh, how people, uh, migrated into the change.

AI assessment note: “we think a lot about change boarding. So how people perceive the change”

Q How has your R&D span changed over time?

A R&D, it's, it's a huge part of our budget. I wouldn't be able to put a figure on it in terms of like, exactly what percentage we spend on. Is it like, I'm so, you don't, is it like, 25%, like 10%, 50%? I'm Uh, If you think of R&D as all product and technology development, be well over 50%. So like half of that, we've got 4500 people at Canva now. Roughly about, I think, 1700 of those are engineers, plus they're now product and design orgs with product managers, product designers. So well over, you know, 2000 folks at Canva are focusing on just building the product. So if you consider that to be R&D, that's like a huge amount. Uh, if you think about like very, very future looking R&D, I wouldn't be able to put a figure on it, but we're, we're constantly, Looking at new experiments, new product features, new innovations, because that's the future of Canva.

AI assessment note: “If you think of R&D as all product and technology development, be well over 50%.”

Q 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?

A Yeah, there's improvements that you can roll out and you can be fairly confident they're not gonna, you know, upset anyone. So like an improvement to image quality and magic media, you just roll that out, right? Um, something like the glow up, we think a lot about change boarding. So how people perceive the change, how you present it to them and showing them the value of it. Um, we, 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, uh, how people, uh, migrated into the change.

AI assessment note: “we think a lot about change boarding. So how people perceive the change”

Q Is there a competitor? Sorry. Can you imagine that for a presentation? So I use pitch for this one. Sorry. Uh, can you, Tell me maybe one that you've been impressed by recently though, where you're like, maybe we should learn from that one.

A 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. Like there's all these tools that you have to pay for. Um, and 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 with all, all within the same platform. So yeah, seeing a few coming through in that space.

AI assessment note: “Recently there's been a lot of activity in the marketing sector.”

Q Is there a competitor? Sorry. Can you imagine that for a presentation? So I use pitch for this one. Sorry. Uh, can you, Tell me maybe one that you've been impressed by recently though, where you're like, maybe we should learn from that one.

A 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. Like there's all these tools that you have to pay for. Um, and 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 with all, all within the same platform. So yeah, seeing a few coming through in that space.

AI assessment note: “seeing a few coming through in that space”