Hankes: Tiger Global Passed on Canva by Misapplying Enterprise Software Metrics
Vince Hankes · Vince Hankes: Why We Put $300M into OpenAI; Sam Altman's Pitch; Lessons from Josh Kushner | E1009 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 3, 2023 · at 46:05
Vince Hankes is a partner at Thrive Capital and former investor at Tiger Global. He discusses passing on Canva early in his career after treating Canva like a typical enterprise SaaS company.
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“When I was at Tiger, I flew out to Sydney and spent a bunch of time with the Canva team in person. And, you know, it's obviously now people know about it. It's a remarkable company at the time. It was much smaller than it is now. And At the same time, we were so focused on investing in enterprise software as an emerging category at Tiger. And so, as we were spending time with Canva, you know, I very much, and this is early in my career, but I very much let the pattern matching and the DNA of what I was thinking about of a great enterprise software company creep into us looking at Canva. And the learning, I think, just to distill it down to something is, you know, every company is unique, even within the bounds of enterprise software companies, they're unique. We took this lens of what a great enterprise software company was. We've retrofitted to Canva and we said, okay, well, the churn looks a lot higher than what grade looks like. And, you know, the engagement looks very whimsical relative to deep workflows and integrations. And so we shouldn't value this like a highly recurring software business. We should value it like a consumer subscription business. And there's merit to that. But ultimately, because we were so much in this one Dimensional mindset of enterprise software. We missed what was so special about the company.”
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