The Ledger, every show

“In five years time, I would say that AI innovation will have slowed by then, and a lot more will be standardized. Social patterns will be established of like how we interact with AI. The possibilities of what LLM can do are very well understood and known, and …”

“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, p…”

“We don't really have managers.”

“We were first product to like truly scale generative images to over a hundred million people.”

“Oh, not 10%. I would say less than one percent.”

“Wedgetail is focused on the nature crisis, which is kind of the next big thing coming after the climate crisis. And it's probably going to be even more seismic.”

“Got to the stage where every other investor in the round had signed on. They were like super excited. They'd wired the money into our bank accounts already. They'd signed all the long docs, but the lead investor hadn't, and about two days before they were due …”

“So we've got probably close to 800 or a thousand coaches now at Canva.”

“I think we officially spent two hours in person, two separate Skype chats, and that was it. A few emails. We didn't have any working sessions.”

“Going from zero to two hundred and thirty million people that now use Canva every single month.”

“So we've never built like a community, like a forum. We don't have this spot on Canva where people come to talk about design. We've fostered community where it arises.”

“Our top five markets now are the US, Brazil, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.”

“I think within three months, so our one dollar image revenue at that stage is, I think, about two million dollars. Within three months, our subscription tier had already eclipsed that and was growing far more rapidly.”

“So since then, we've put a premium on being a profitable company, making sure that we don't need funding, that we can run the company without having to go to someone else and put our hand out. And that has informed the next eight years of profitability that we…”

“It actually only took us six weeks to launch from woe to go, from someone saying, let's do, crazy idea, let's do, like, type in a box and you get an image out of it. Six weeks later, we deployed all the infrastructure, we'd integrated into the product, and we'…”

“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…”

“It wasn't until about year six or seven where we actually had product managers.”

“It also took us four or five years before we even had another product owner who wasn't us.”

“Brazil, India, Indonesia, they're all in our top five markets, and they grow way faster than the US does.”

“We've got hundred and seventy million people using the product every single month.”

“We've got 95% of the Fortune 500 using Canva.”

“An amazing amount of organic traffic comes to Canva. You know, it's only a minority that comes through marketing or other paid channels. It's really about Canva users bringing new Canva users into the fold that continues to drive the success of Canva.”

“We went from about five under that first day. I think by the end of the week, we had about 5000 people who'd signed up. End of the month, we had about 20,000. I think by the end of the year, we'd had The number of designs that had been created was something li…”

“Startups became a really vital part of Canva's growth through year three and four. And that's when we really started opening up Canva as a real work tool, not just something that created some pretty graphics, but a tool that helped you rally people together, e…”

“And we started seeing returns on that within Three months and it's scaled up over the next couple of years to become a massive driving engine for us. And it still is a massive source of traffic for us.”

“We launched eight languages in that year, and then the following year we launched Canva in a hundred languages, and this totally opened up new markets to us.”

“We operated on that business model for the first two years of Canva. And it was going pretty well. We had like, 30% month on month gross on revenue.”

“We had 200,000 people on the waiting list, which was awesome.”

“Inside some companies, like, 50,000 employee companies, we already had like 5000 people using Canva. They just didn't do it in a structured way.”

“There was this one period where we decided to rewrite our entire editor code base, which was particularly trying. The reason was it took us like close to two years to do that. And in that time, we essentially launched nothing. We didn't put out any new functio…”

“Launching something at Canva that people will spread, that they will tell others about has been the biggest growth driver for us.”

“We always roll out features as a percent, so if something is going out so we launched the Glow Up recently which is a total re, revitalization of Canva's interface. We start by rolling that out to one percent, then five percent, 10%, 20%? Hundred percent. That…”

“We've got about a hundred machine learning engineers and then, you know, product, product, product managers and designers get involved at all stages.”

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

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

“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.”

“Now that we're at the size of a hundred and ninety million people using Canva”

“We've been profitable for seven years, and one of the reasons is that We never want to be put in the situation where we have to go someone, have to go to someone for money to ensure the survival of the business.”

“We've got 4500 employees now”

“Organic word of mouth growth was the biggest driver of Canva's growth for many years, and Probably still is, I think.”

“We had a goal of being in five different languages within the first year of localization, and we actually hit eight in that first year, and then we set ourselves a goal of being in a hundred different languages the next year, and the internationalization team …”

“So it was a really unique innovation for us, and for the first two years of Canva's life, that was how we derived our revenue. It grew pretty well. It was still like, I don't know, 30% month on month growth in terms of revenue, but like you can do that in the …”

“So much so that three or four years later, we made image element payments part of the subscription. And again, that was like a second hockey stick in gross in terms of the revenue from the subscription, because all you can eat images inside the Canva Pro subsc…”

“And that's when I got an introduction to my Canva co-founders, Melon Cliff, and it was actually through my old boss at Google called Lars Rasmussen. He had bumped into Melanie at a startup event over in Perth in Australia. And they got in talking, he was reall…”

“I think it did two or three million dollars in revenue.”

“We also had a waiting list of about 15,000 people who had signed up already, not even knowing what Canva was about.”