The Ledger
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Conversational AI interfaces have natural limitations for visual design workflows
“If you are doing any kind of visual communication, then there are going to be natural limits to a conversational interface. And people are going to want to be able to collaborate. They're going to want to be able to control for brand. They're going to want to …”
AI coding tools pose serious quality risks when used by junior engineers
“There's a challenge for our industry in that we do see kind of slightly bipolar results for these tools in the hands of a senior engineer who can tell good code from bad code. They're very, very powerful, but for graduate engineers, for junior engineers, ah, t…”
Canva's proprietary design data uniquely positions it to build foundation models
“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.”
Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins aims to build the world's most valuable company
“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.”
Canva built an internal implementation of the Model Context Protocol
“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.”
Dedicated AI engineers will eventually become obsolete like database administrators
“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…”
Canva engineers using AI coding tools merge 30% more pull requests
“We're seeing about 30% more PRs merged for, from engineers who are using these tools predominantly.”
Humphreys: Critical thinking cannot be taught without domain experience
“Critical thinking is something you can't really teach. It's something that you need to build around a domain of knowledge, and the only way you get a domain of knowledge is to work in that domain.”
Humphreys: The AI foundational model race has not been won yet
“On the question of foundational models, I don't think that race has been won.”
Canva's CTO doubts that AI model hallucinations will ever fully disappear
“The hallucination problem is interesting. It's minimized, but it's still there, and I'm not sure it's going to go away.”
Software engineering will evolve into orchestrating AI agents for mundane tasks
“I don't think software engineering goes away. I think software engineering changes to actually a much more fun job. Where a lot of the mundane kind of plumbing of software engineering is handled for you, and you're able to orchestrate software with these agent…”
Canva established a $200 million fund to compensate AI training contributors
“We do have a creators fund I think it's two hundred million dollars and it's designed to reward creators.”
Distributed engineering teams need autonomous product seams to function across time zones
“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 …”
Humphreys: Canva is well-positioned to integrate third-party visual AI models
“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…”
Humphreys: Niche AI startups gain mass distribution through Canva integrations
“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.”
Canva Code went from concept to production in just three months
“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…”
AI development requires shifting from deterministic tests to probabilistic evaluations
“I think a lot of software engineers are trained, particularly the more senior engineers are trained in, ah, wanting to write a whole set of unit tests based on a deterministic system. But when you've got a non-deterministic system, you have to kind of move you…”
Canva mandates that developers fully understand and own all AI-generated code
“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…”
AI-assisted code review will inevitably match AI code authoring at scale
“Author with AI superpower will be matched by reviewer with AI superpower. I think that's an inevitable path that will go down at scale.”
Canva is slowing hiring to evaluate the impact of AI tools
“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.”
Humphreys: Empathy is a teachable and vastly underrated engineering skill
“You know empathy in engineering is a vastly underrated skill. And it is a skill. It's not a talent. It's something that you can teach engineers.”
Steel-manning arguments resolves technical differences and builds trust in engineering teams
“Educate people about techniques like steel manning, ah, that is listening to someone else's argument that may be different to yours, ah, and then being able to restate it in its, in the strongest possible terms with genuine intent. You know, one of two things …”
Canva possesses billions of unique opt-in design data points
“We have billions of very unique opt-in data points Around design creation, design intent, ingredient selection.”
Canva CTO praises inference serving on Google Vertex AI and AWS Bedrock
“I think certainly Vertex or Bedrock really impressive inference serving.”
Retrofitting enterprise admin controls and data residency is extremely expensive
“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.”
Failing to abstract region-based storage early cost Canva a monumental re-architecture
“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…”
Canva is natively integrating Google's Veo 3 video model
“We are integrating VO three, which is Google's new amazing video generation model natively into Canva.”
Canva has roughly 400 engineers across Europe via acquisitions
“So we have about 400 engineers right through Europe through our acquisitions.”
Canva employs over 200 machine learning engineers
“We have, ah, over 200, ah, machine learning engineers on staff.”
Humphreys: Canva built AI model abstraction layer over OpenAI, Bedrock, and SageMaker
“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…”
Canva uses agentic AI flows to handle first-line customer support queries
“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 …”
Canva will raise its hiring bar for junior developers due to AI
“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 …”
Canva is investing heavily in proprietary AI model development
“We are investing heavily in our own model development.”
Canva acquired Leonardo.ai primarily for its AI research capabilities
“We primarily acquired Leo for their research capability, though.”
Canva spent two years re-engineering its core editor without adding features
“We went through a huge re-engineering effort. Two years of, to rebuild this editor without adding really much of any new features.”