Canva

“And another one that more recent one is Canva, which are building a video insights for the users on, on top of tiny bird.”

“Like you actually can't templateize video because the nature of it is completely, it's unknown, right? It could be saying anything. It could be doing anything. Anything would be happening. The, template just can't fit with, it can't understand what's happening…”

“So Mel, ah, has a two-step plan for Canva, which is to create the world's most valuable company, and then do the most good in the world that we can.”

“The key is to find ways for teams in, kind of, incompatible time zones to be autonomous, as autonomous as possible. Usually that means just finding the right seams in the product, so there's real ownership in, in these locations, and that's what we've strived …”

“We have a very important rule that you need to own the output of the tool. That means you have to understand it as if you'd written everything yourself, because ultimately the generated source is the source of truth, and it's going to go, go into the repositor…”

“We think that, you know, once upon a time in software teams, you'd have a DBA on the team, but now a DBA is not really a skill anymore because everyone, that the abstractions above databases are such that you don't really need that deep skill unless you're dea…”

“A lot of niche AI startups are finding is a fantastic distribution channel. So, they've got their niche their niche product, they can come and build a rich integration into Canva, and then suddenly they get distribution, they get a lot of users.”

“We went through a huge re-engineering effort. Two years of, to rebuild this editor without adding really much of any new features.”

“Very early in Canva's architectural journey, we put a quite good abstraction in over our AWS infrastructure, but I do think back now and wonder, oof, we could have just spent a little bit more time Really abstraction, abstracting region-based storage. It would…”

“We do have a creators fund I think it's two hundred million dollars and it's designed to reward creators.”

“We are integrating VO three, which is Google's new amazing video generation model natively into Canva.”

“Now we have about 2300 engineers.”

“We use weights and biases for our evals. And we have our own eval framework that we've built.”

“Internally, we have agentic solutions deployed, for instance, in our customer support, We're using a lot of agentic solution there, where First line support when a query comes in from a user that goes through an agentic flow and quite often we can handle user …”

“Look, we're certainly alert to the rise in visual AI, but we feel we're actually really well positioned. We can Use third party models when they become available, integrate them into our platform very, very quickly, and provide a really rich, cohesive experien…”

“We have slowed down hiring a little bit for a number of reasons. We are looking at, you know, we wanted to just take a pause and understand where the market's going with these AI tools. We are still hiring, but it's not hiring as fast.”

“We have billions of very unique opt-in data points Around design creation, design intent, ingredient selection.”

“So maybe that advice of kind of like, don't be in the foundation, foundational model Space is good general advice, but we think that we are in a quite unique position in terms of the data that we have to pursue that particular avenue.”

“So we have about 400 engineers right through Europe through our acquisitions.”

“We've invested enormously in putting a platform abstraction over a lot of the third party AI that we use whether that's kind of like base layer infrastructure like Bedrock or SageMaker, or whether it's third party AI providers like OpenAI, and that allows us t…”

“We have our own model context protocol that we've stood up just in internally, ah, and we're certainly talking to the big vendors about, ah, interactions there that are possible.”

“So I think at Canva we'll be focusing on probably just more careful onboarding, more careful peer review of grads. We will be more picky. We will be looking for the grads who bring deep first principles thinking strong, really strong CS fundamentals, but also …”

“We primarily acquired Leo for their research capability, though.”

“And that's, so there is the Canva foundation that given the vast majority of their equity in the company to the foundation, and the foundation does supports charitable causes all around the world.”

“We're seeing about 30% more PRs merged for, from engineers who are using these tools predominantly.”

“I think certainly Vertex or Bedrock really impressive inference serving.”

“Canva code is, is an interesting feature that we've just launched just back in April. That's a feature that allows users to build little intelligent interactive widgets in their designs. That went from kind of first idea through to production in about three mo…”

“We are investing heavily in our own model development.”

“We have, ah, over 200, ah, machine learning engineers on staff.”

“Enterprise customers want sophisticated admin controls. They want sophisticated auth. They want data residency. These kinds of considerations, if you haven't baked them into your product early, they become quite expensive to retrofit.”

“5000 employees.”

“We had Brendan Humphreys, CTO of Canva, who was talking about that exactly, which is, okay, this is great that you can create code, but, like, we had one guy who submitted a PR that was 50,000 lines and they have a peer review culture, and Yeah. They basically…”