The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 51 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Obrecht: Canva to hit $4B revenue at 40% growth rate
“We will close the year very close, if not at four billion growing, ah, close to 40% growth rate and re-accelerating growth.”
Obrecht: Founders should stay overcapitalized rather than running ultra-lean
“This is a high risk maneuver and I don't recommend this to founders anymore. I say be a bit over capitalized, but we would run it kind of to the bones in order to take as little money as possible.”
Obrecht: 90% of AI Queries Will Shift On-Device or Self-Hosted
“For the most premium queries where you need that answer, but 90% of it will be run on device or be self-hosted.”
Obrecht: AI SaaS Pricing Must Shift to Hybrid Seat and Consumption Models
“You can't charge 20 bucks a seat for that level of breadth. So, so then it hits a certain, you give that functionality for a per seat price, but then over that, it needs to be based on consumption. So it's a hybrid seat and consumption based model.”
Obrecht: AI Energy Demand Will Accelerate Transition to Nuclear Power
“And so while I see AI pessimists and environmental pessimists saying, oh, so much more energy, it's going to be bad for the environment. I actually think it's going to rapidly accelerate our shift to green energy, particularly nuclear which we're just going to…”
Cliff Obrecht claims Canva has never made a bad company acquisition
“Not really. Not really. Not really. No, I'm saying no.”
Canva halted new feature releases for two years to fix tech debt
“So 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, about year 10 now.”
Canva co-founders pledged 99 percent of their equity to charity
“Mel and I, we own 31% of Canva, and we put 30%, so like 99% of what we own in, into a charity that we can't spend on our own stuff”
Investors rejected Canva because it was outside Silicon Valley biking distance
“The amount of investors that rejected us because they said, I like to ride my bike to my startups, I'm like, fuck off.”
Obrecht: Canva at $42B Valuation Is Barely 10x Revenue
“Well, that's barely 10 X for us. We sound very cheap.”
Obrecht: Canva holds over $1B cash and 8 years profitability
“We've got over a billion dollars cash in the bank. We don't need to raise money, primary funds. We've been a profitable company for eight years.”
Obrecht: Canva valuation dropped from $40B to $26B in 2022
“We in 20, 21 were worth forty billion dollars, which was a, I think it was a 50 X multiple on our revenue at the time. 20, 22, everything came crashing down. The market came crashing down and that took us down to 26.”
Cliff Obrecht: Enterprise AI Tool Subscriptions Will Consolidate Within 24 Months
“Over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, we'll start consolidating down as the clear winners take charge, and so to answer your question that way, hundred percent there's going to be consolidation down from yeah, year two renewals.”
Obrecht: Canva has received acquisition offers but will remain independent
“I'm not doing it, but we love OpenAI. We love them, but there's just not, I mean, we're cutting our own course. We've had acquisition offers.”
Obrecht: Canva is actively gearing up to be IPO-ready
“I mean, we're gearing up to be ready to IPO. We want to be an IPO ready company. We recently, you mentioned Zoom. We brought in Kelly, who led their IPO, and she's been a fantastic addition to the team. She was their CFO. So, so our goal is to be ready. When w…”
Obrecht: No historical direct listing has succeeded in the short term
“And if you look at all the historic direct listings and how they've gone over time, I believe the data proves that none of them have been greatly successful. A lot of them have been really successful companies Over a long period of time, but that period post d…”
Obrecht: Canva Is Transitioning to a Unified AI Credit Model
“We're moving to a unified credit model around AI. So your premium subscription, free gets a certain amount, premium subscription gets you a certain amount. And then if you're a super active user, and so that means it can't eat into our margins too much. So you…”
Obrecht: Canva is ChatGPT's fifth most referred domain overall
“We're the number one productivity app on ChatGPT, and we're the fifth Highest domain that ChatGPT refers to.”
Obrecht: Early investors who raised SPVs for late rounds saw highest returns
“And the best investors that have done best out of Canva, like they were early stage funds, but they realized, holy shit, we're onto something here. So they raised SPVs or additional vehicles to move further up the value chain, like going later and later stage …”
Obrecht honors business commitments without term sheets or legal documents
“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.”
Canva had zero formal sales and marketing teams until 2020
“Canva until 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. But our two weak little legs we…”
Obrecht: Founders outside tech hubs solve big problems with unique perspectives
“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.”
Obrecht: Anthropic's $13B funding round was heavily oversubscribed and exclusive
“This round was also super oversubscribed. It was, I know folks in the industry have been clamoring over this and it was hard to get into.”
Obrecht: Fidelity is the largest check in Canva secondary round
“They're the anchor of the round. They're the largest check in this round.”
Obrecht: Scaling companies must not treat user bases like wet tea towels
“One thing you need to buck the trend of as you become a larger company is insular thinking and treating your user base like a wet tea towel that you need to wring out.”
Obrecht: Employee liquidity is Canva's primary motivation for an IPO
“I think it's probably liquidity, and there are restrictions, particularly around employee liquidity and what you can do in the U.S. And whatnot around that piece. And so, We do believe in, we're 13 years old as a company. Our employees should have liquidity. T…”
Obrecht: Canva has 240 million monthly active users
“We got two hundred and forty million monthly active users.”
Obrecht: Canva's AI Widget Generator Has 20 Million Active Users
“So, so we've got the equivalent of Lovable, it's more for creating widgets and for education purposes, et cetera. It's got twenty million active users already it's going really, really well.”
Obrecht: Canva Is Price-Insensitive on AI Coding Tools for Engineers
“We encourage all our engineers to use the best security certified Coding tools that can increase the efficiency and we're not price sensitive around that at all.”
Obrecht: ChatGPT-generated images on Canva rose from 0.2% to over 5%
“A year and a half ago.2%, I think it was, of the images uploaded to Canva were from ChatGPT. That's now over five percent.”
Canva was rejected by over 100 VCs before securing its first check
“We spent over a year there, like back and forth, still trying to run our other business. And we got rejected over a hundred times by VCs before we finally convinced some people to invest in us”
Obrecht: Treating rejected job candidates with integrity brings them back later
“If you leave a nice taste in those people's mouths, like, and you always be the good human, and be the honest Honorable person and speak truths. People come back, and they remember you, and when they are ready for that career change, or when an opportunity doe…”
Canva's Obrecht: Melanie Perkins and I take opposite approaches to building trust
“Mel and I are completely, so Mel is my wife and the CEO of Canva. So my boss which is 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 l…”
Obrecht: Candidates From Obscure, Self-Taught Backgrounds Become Canva's Best Performers
“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, cause this all is just one big game. Once they figure out how to play the game, they are S…”
Early Canva made terrible hiring decisions by deferring to big tech titles
“And I guess that came across and we made a bunch of really, 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. Like you're not really smart at…”
Obrecht's team manually recreated 100,000 pages in Photoshop after software failed
“So we had to, I think, recreate over a 100,000 pages with like Photoshop and InDesign where we had to hire a team of designers on Upwork yet again. To essentially like eyeball these pages and redesign them in Photoshop and InDesign, and then we had to convert …”
Obrecht: AI adds value through workflow integration, not standalone tools
“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 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 the…”
Canva disrupts enterprise SaaS by charging only for active quarterly seats
“We don't try and sell an organization a thousand seats. We only charge you based on the number of active seats in a particular quarter.”
Obrecht: I do not angel invest to make money
“I actively don't angel invest. I do do some just because it's like a great person that I know, or it's like, I really like, I don't do anything to make money. I do, I back ideas that I think the world needs to see.”
Obrecht: Global philanthropy lacks efficient systems connecting capital to world problems
“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 bridge we need to, the gap we need to bridge is connecting those good intentions and that capital with the problems. A…”
Obrecht: Canva co-founder will not build another commercial startup
“Well, I don't think so. It's hard. Although, glance for punishment. Like, we will probably do, we'll run projects, philanthropic projects that are built like a startup based on technology.”
Cliff Obrecht: Canva Uses Four Coding AI Tools, Led by Cursor
“We're running four coding tools at once, right? Cursor seems to be the one that's kind of leading the pack.”
Obrecht: SEO now accounts for 15% of Canva organic acquisition
“SEO is about 50, 15% of the 90% organic to date, so it used to be our number one channel, but now our sort of like user flywheel, word of mouth, and people sharing designs are our biggest.”
Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht hated and couldn't use computers before starting up
“I couldn't use computers before we started our first, I hated computers to be honest, before we started our first business.”