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 49 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Tech companies shouldn't build proprietary LLMs because they are now commoditized
“You don't need to create an LLM because it's a commodity thing now, and there's a bunch of providers who can do it way better and have way more resources to do it with than you do.”
Perkins: Most early investors knew nothing about design or Canva's market
“Most investors knew absolutely nothing about design or the industry that we're in.”
Perkins: Canva donates $1.5B worth of software annually
“Between our education product and our nonprofit program, where we also give away our paid product for free, We've, we're giving away 1.5 billion dollars of product a year now”
LaPointe: Canva's coach-based management model outperforms because it aligns with neuroscience
“If you look at this coaching thing at it's going on at Canva instead of managing, like you load that in the simulator and you're like, boy, this looks pretty nice. This is a higher performance thing. Like we've advocacy instead of, you know, regulation we have…”
Canva employs 800 to 1,000 internal coaches instead of traditional managers
“So we've got probably close to 800 or a thousand coaches now at Canva.”
Lead investor demanded a 50% valuation cut two days before Canva's closing
“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 …”
Lemkin: Canva waited until surpassing $500M in revenue to build sales
“Canva didn't really build a sales team until they were well north of five hundred million in revenue because it's epic self-serve, right?”
Community succeeds when products generate shareable, self-expressive artifacts
“Like I think that community lends itself particularly well if you have something that your product creates that people want to share because it exhibits something about themselves.”
Perkins: 100 million people design presentations in Canva monthly
“Like a hundred million people, I design a presentation in Canva for each month now.”
Perkins: Copying organizational playbooks from other companies rarely fits your company's foundation
“And it's kind of like building a house that you want every brick in the house to match. And if you go and try and take some bricks from someone else's house and stick it in your house, it's probably going to not look very matched. And so trying to find things …”
Perkins: Canva spent two years without shipping product during codebase rewrite
“We were doing a front-end rewrite, and we thought it would take about six months. It was really important because it was critical for cross-platform, it was critical for right to left, it was Critical because we could only have five people working in our edito…”
Perkins does not keep work email on her phone
“I don't have emails like on my phone, and so when I shut my laptop, I actually tune out, and then I, if there's a real issue, I'll get an emergency call or page.”
Perkins: Co-founders pledged 30% Canva equity to philanthropy
“Cliff and I owned a little over 30% of Canva, and so we decided we were going to take 30% of Canva and use it to do the most good we can do.”
Perkins: AI shouldn't be front-and-center just for investor hype
“Just because AI is all the rage and investors really like AI, doesn't necessarily mean it should be front and center
in, but if it can genuinely help your customers to achieve their goals, so, you know, the thing that I was mentioning before, enabling people…”
Perkins: Internal systems break every time a company doubles in size
“Like every time the company doubles in size, pretty much all your systems break, all the things that were working don't work.”
Perkins: Canva sits directly between creativity and productivity suites
“From a macro perspective, there was creativity tools and productivity tools, and what Canva really does is we're literally smack bang in the middle of that Venn diagram of creativity and productivity rather than making a Customers have to make a choice between…”
Perkins: Transformative building requires working backward from an ideal future
“Most planning is often done by looking at the bricks and trying to stack them. And then you kind of, you know, you can create only so much. And so I guess the column B thinking is thinking about what is that magical, wonderful Future. That you then want to inv…”
Perkins: Canva's free education product reaches 100M monthly users
“Education product is now used by a hundred million people each month.”
Perkins: Canva achieves ambitious goals despite inaccurate delivery timing
“I think with a crazy big goal, the thing we have been really great at is achieving them. The timeframe that we achieve them on has not always been very reliable. We have certainly not been able to have pin dart. What's the, what's it? We have not been very acc…”
Adams: Canva has 170 million monthly active users
“We've got hundred and seventy million people using the product every single month.”
Adams: Canva took 4-5 years to appoint non-founder product owners
“It also took us four or five years before we even had another product owner who wasn't us.”
Brazil, India, and Indonesia are Canva's fastest-growing top-five markets
“Brazil, India, Indonesia, they're all in our top five markets, and they grow way faster than the US does.”
Canva operated without product managers until year six or seven
“It wasn't until about year six or seven where we actually had product managers.”
Canva board decks use only one financial slide due to massive growth
“In terms of board meetings, I think it's been very helpful that our financials and our growth have been amazing for so many years that we don't need to focus on it. And we can just have that one slide with the graph going up and up and to the right.”
Working with Canva's married co-founders requires transparency around after-hours alignment
“It is always tricky working with a couple because They're on it 24 seven. When you leave the office and they head home, they're still talking about product business strategy, all the things. I think they've done a really good job of Evolving those ideas overni…”
Canva hits $2.3B ARR, exceeding Figma, Miro, and Webflow combined
“Ok, so Canva is bigger than Figma and Miro and Webflow combined. Both in terms of valuation and in terms of revenue, you guys are generating 2.3 billion dollars in ARR per year, and you're profitable. You've been profitable for about seven years at this point.…”
Tan: Canva's revenue ownership was initially managed by finance
“So early at Canva, it was owned by finance and that's because finance had a view on everything happening in the business.”
Timen: Disciplined companies like Grammarly will win from ad market contraction
“But even right now, during contraction, there are going to be some winners. The companies that had strong cash positions, had strong unit economics, strong payback periods already, right? Grammarly, Canva, to name two that I know personally, a couple of others…”
Perkins: Canva's 2012 pitch deck still captures its current work
“When I look back at our 2012 pitch deck, it's so valid and really still captures what we're doing today.”
Perkins: Canva employs 2,500 engineers
“We've now got, you know, two and a half thousand engineers, and we're able to deliver amazing things that would have just, like, been completely infeasible.”
Perkins: Canva receives over one million community requests per year
“We get more than a million requests from our community every year, and we then, we've got a whole incredible team that then tallies them breaks them down, And then deliver them to all of our product teams, and then those actually get closed. So this year we've…”
Perkins gave over-the-phone tutorials to early Fusion Books customers
“We spoke to every single customer. We gave them an over the phone tutorial. We understood. All of their pain points, we got continuous customer feedback, and then we tried to iterate and improve.”
Perkins: Canva operates on a two-step plan to maximize value and philanthropy
“We've got this two-step plan, build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can do.”
Perkins has personally run hundreds or thousands of user tests
“I've personally run hundreds, if not thousands of user tests myself, and it's been deeply embedded in our product teams also.”
Perkins: Canva plans by defining wild success and failure over 10-year horizons
“An exercise we often do is like, what is wild success for X or what is wild success for Y? And then equally, what is terrible failure for those things? And you can apply that just to abstract thinking in different industries. You can do that, apply that for we…”
Perkins: Canva Elements tab sees 900 million monthly uses
“Inside the Design tab which is used by a 170 million, it's used a hundred and seventy million times a month. And then on our Elements tab, which is used nine hundred million times a month”
Adams: Bundling unlimited assets into Canva Pro caused a second revenue surge
“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…”
Canva has operated profitably for seven consecutive years to avoid fundraising
“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.”
Co-founder Cameron Adams personally teaches 'giving away Legos' at Canva onboarding
“Molly wrote a great article which I actually refer everyone who joins Canva to in, ah, the cultural onboarding session which I give them. So I run everyone through the culture at Canva and what they conspect over the next few years as they work here. And one o…”
Canva discovered social media managers were its initial core audience six months pre-launch
“With a team of 10 people in the space of a year, building something that really got social media managers excited was what we could pull off. And that's something we kind of realized in the last six months of that launch year. We didn't quite know who our audi…”
Canva is launching a dedicated enterprise SKU and verticalized work kits
“So we're we've kind of redesigned Canva for this collaborative enterprise age. So we'll be pulling the covers off that alongside work kits, which are a whole verticalized experiences, People inside marketing and sales and HR that want to use Canva, as well as …”
Canva integrates interactive 'learn and play' modules into every product launch
“With every launch that we do now, we think about how to teach people about that feature and how to get them really involved in it. We have a whole series of learn and plays where when we launch AI photo editing, they can try it out right then and there. They'v…”
Cameron Adams: Word-of-Mouth Remains Canva's Biggest Growth Driver
“Organic word of mouth growth was the biggest driver of Canva's growth for many years, and Probably still is, I think.”
Canva localized its product into over 100 languages by end of 2017
“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 …”
Canva grew 30% MoM initially, hitting hockey-stick growth only with subscriptions
“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 …”