Today, I’m talking with Canva CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins. Canva is simply a plan software company that makes it truly easy to do plan work, and that means it sits at the intersection of any large conversations right now — especially erstwhile it comes to AI and how it might radically change creative work.
Canva got its start more than a decade ago as a different form of disruptive tech for creatives. It’s a web-based platform that makes plan tools cheaper and more accessible than, say, Adobe’s Creative Cloud, now 1 of Canva’s biggest competitors. It’s utilized by quite a few tiny businesses, quite a few social media marketers, and now even in settings like sales, HR, and increasingly, professional design.
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But that means that Canva isn’t truly experiencing the same kind of tension around the introduction of AI tools that Adobe or another large software makers are facing due to the fact that its core audience has always been firmly outside the conventional plan world. AI is just another tool to make the lives of Canva users easier. Melanie and I spent quite a few time talking about what that means for Canva’s business and how it intends to usage that unique position to break into office and productivity apps with its fresh Enterprise tier.
Canva’s push into enterprise, which it launched alongside a large redesign in May, is central to how the company plans to keep increasing from the about 185 million monthly users it has now. Melanie and I talked about how Canva has transitioned over the years from its freemium beginnings to now having a number of subscription plans — and how she plans to juggle the needs of large luck 500 customers with Canva’s function as a more cross-platform, mobile-friendly plan tool.
You’ll besides hear Melanie and I talk candidly about how being based out of Sydney, Australia, has affected her approach to company culture. It’s given her the freedom to stay above the ever-changing whims of Silicon Valley and its mercurial VC class, even if it’s inactive quite a few Silicon Valley money that’s pushed Canva to a $26 billion valuation.
Oh, and I just had to ask her about that very cringey Hamilton-style rap from the Canva make conference that went viral a couple of months ago. It’s linked in the show notes if you haven’t seen it. But Melanie says the cringe was the point and that it was actually rather successful as a marketing tool for enterprise software.
Okay, Canva CEO Melanie Perkins. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for dimension and clarity.
Melanie Perkins, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Canva. Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.
I am very excited to talk to you. There’s a lot to talk about. You late launched a redesign of Canva, which is simply a large deal. You made a large push into enterprise software, which I want to talk about. In general, I would say the planet of plan is simply a bit angsty right now due to AI, and Canva is right in the mediate of that, too. You’ve had AI features for rather any time, and I want to talk about how you’re reasoning about that and where the audience is. But let’s start at the very beginning. Canva is now 11 years old?
Yeah, we had our 10th year since launch last year.
Tell people what Canva is, why you started it, and how you’ve gotten here.
Canva is an online plan platform. Many years ago, I was at university teaching design, and it was truly complicated and hard. I thought it was ridiculous that people had to spend so much time learning the very basics and wanted to make it collaborative and online and simple. We spent the first decade doing precisely that, and it has gone beautiful well. We’re now utilized by 185 million people around the globe each month.
You started the company in Australia. There are a fewer beautiful high-profile startups in Australia, but Canva is beautiful global. It’s utilized everywhere. How have you thought about that aspect of it, and why haven’t you been forced to immigrate to Silicon Valley yet?
We feel like we truly get the best of both worlds. We have built an incredible squad here in Australia, but then we have offices around the world, including in the United States, and we have quite a few investors over in Silicon Valley. It feels like we’ve been able to get amazing talent and amazing investors and build a truly large squad headquartered here in Australia.
This thought that you were teaching students in graphic plan and the tools were besides hard to usage so you built a tool that made it easy to do graphic plan — that plugs into a beautiful long past of software democratizing hard creative tasks. There’s always any angst about that. That’s just the way it goes. Do you feel like you’re participating in that process?
This is simply a lead-up to the questions that will come about AI, but in the beginning, 10 years ago, people said, “These Canva templates, they’re letting the kids do this work that I usually do,” and that is the communicative of this company. Is that inactive what you’re doing — democratizing plan — or have you moved up the chain?
With Canva, we truly set out to fill a immense gap in the market, and this gap was that people that wanted to make an amazing plan and turn that into something awesome didn’t truly have any tools unless they went and learned truly complicated software that would take a very long time. Canva sits in the mediate of the Venn diagram, right between productivity and creativity, and there was nothing on the marketplace that truly filled that gap. That’s precisely what we’ve been doing for the last decade and will proceed to do for decades to come: to enable people to take their thought and turn that into reality in the end product and have very small friction between those 2 things.
When we were starting out, it seemed crazy that people would gotta go and plan a different product for a presentation and a whiteboard and a social media graphic and printed products and presentations in videos and websites. all single product that they wanted to make would be something completely different, which seemed ridiculous. What we’ve done with Canva is build 1 unified platform that enables you to make all of these things with absolute ease so you don’t gotta go and learn a fresh tool each time. I think that was truly serving a immense gap in the marketplace then, and it inactive is today, and that’s why it’s been increasing as rapidly as it has.
On the 1 hand, that gap, which is democratizing creativity, is very empowering. quite a few people get to open the software; it’s just on the web, so you can just usage it. If you’ve made quite a few assets for your tiny business, you’re off to the races. On the another hand, it’s creativity on rails. You don’t request to know a lot about graphic design. The templates do quite a few the work for you. any of the fresh features you’re rolling out in Canva push people into best practices of design. That stuff is truly interesting, but you don’t request to know about design. The software knows for you. That’s a tension, I think, that’s truly interesting.
I would hazard, though, that creativity isn’t knowing a circumstantial software and it’s not a circumstantial brand of software. Creativity is the ideas that you’re wanting to express, and the tools that we usage to express those ideas have changed greatly over the years. 1 of the first pages in our pitch deck was that [in publishing] there were first metallic pages. Then that changed with typewriting and typesetting, and then that changed with desktop computers, and then that changed again with the web. So this transformation that happens all fewer decades in the publishing and plan manufacture has been going on for a long time and will proceed to do that, but I don’t think that it is changing creativity at its essence.
Bob Iger is on our board, the CEO of Disney, who was telling us about how they utilized to make animations, which were all hand-drawn to start. And then evidently they brought in computers and they could do all sorts of amazing things. I think that transformation is just constant in our industry.
But that part of it, which is the core of what Canva enables people to do, is that the software knows a lot about how to make design. The cognition is embedded in the software, and then you can instruct the software to make what you need. That lets a lot more people make things. But at any point, the professional plan community besides has to adopt Canva.
Do you think of this as a disruptive product in the classical sense, that you’re cheaper, faster, good enough, and then, over time, you will grow the usage cases until you can more straight compete with a professional tool like Photoshop?
Our intention always was to work from the bottom up, but right from the get-go, we knew professional designers had challenges that they were contending with as well. So a professional designer would typically go and send a PDF back and distant with a client, marking up text to be like, “Change that there.” We wanted Canva to become the format that a professional designer could usage to collaborate with their clients. So the professional designer could make an amazing template that then the client could be marking up changing the names in it for business cards or whatever it might be. There was always the full communicative of what we would love to be able to offer for individual that had no plan experience and individual that was a professional designer as well. And we’ve truly seen that play out.
When Canva started out, the first people utilizing it were social media marketers, and then it became all marketers. Since then, we’ve truly grown and been investing heavy in enabling Canva to be utilized for sales teams and marketing teams and HR teams, especially with our most fresh launch of courses. Professional designers can now, and they are, make those templates for the remainder of the organization to use. alternatively than their brand guidelines collecting dust, they can actually embed that through the full organization and have the organization designing on-brand. We truly feel like it gives designers superpowers. So yes, to your point, it is changing the paradigm of what people are doing in their day-to-day job, but it besides is giving them more power to be able to own the touchpoints throughout their full organization and to guarantee that the full organization is designing on-brand.
You said you started with social media managers. That’s how I think of the classical Canva user. Is that inactive the primary client base? How are you acquiring fresh customers? Where’s the growth coming from?
The growth is coming from all over the world, all over beautiful much all industry. We just hosted our event in Los Angeles, and it was actually interesting diving into the LA usage cases. So we rolled out in the [school] districts there. Now, Canva is utilized by 70 million teachers and students in the classroom. We have 600,000 nonprofits utilizing it. We’re utilized by 95 percent of the luck 500. From marketing teams to sales teams to HR teams, it’s truly covering the full spectrum.
In fact, our goal is to get to 1 billion monthly active users in the years to come. erstwhile we first set that as a goal, it sounded completely ridiculous, but we knew we needed to be utilized by 1 in 5 people in all country. It’s been beautiful breathtaking to see that number go from 1 in hundreds to now in the US where we’re utilized by 1 in 12 people each month. In Australia, we’re utilized by 1 in 9, and we’re leading the charge in countries like the Philippines and Mexico as well, where we’re 1 in 8. We’re starting to march toward that 1 in 5 number. If you start to look at 1 billion users, we request to be in all single profession and all single industry.
Expanding in countries is very hard. Why is your goal to have 1 in 5 people in all country, which requires you to have a presence in infrastructure in all country, alternatively of 2 in 5 in a smaller number of countries?
I’ll explain the framework that we use. Our mission is to empower the planet to design, and what we do is break that down into what we call our “mission pillars.” Our mission pillars are things that we’ve been investing in for the last decade and will proceed to invest in for decades to come, which are: empowering everyone to plan anything with all ingredient in all language on all device.
What we’ve been doing is picking off a goal all single year to take steps in that direction. On the “every languages” front, we started off in English, then Spanish, then 20 languages, then 100 languages, then hard languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu. We’ve been truly investing in the localized experience across 40 countries. To empower the planet to design, we request to be in all country, and we’re increasing rapidly in developed and developing markets. So there isn’t a circumstantial kind of country that we focus on. We think that plan is very universal, and that’s surely what we’ve been seeing play out.
Localizing all those languages in all those countries, that’s quite a few effort. Do you have a full-time Urdu translator on staff? Is that something you’re outsourcing? How are you working on that?
We have a immense squad of hundreds of people. It’s a very large initiative. The interior strategy now is truly local, so we want to have everything localized. In Japan, you have localized billing, localized templates, localized fonts. It’s a beautiful large initiative, but evidently it’s a critical part of both our mission and our two-step plan.
We’re going to come to the two-step plan. That’s a hint. That’s a tease. There’s a large uncover coming. So that’s the goal: 1 in 5 in all country. How many users do you have now?
And how many people is Canva?
Wow, that’s huge. And then the valuation right now is $26 billion, which makes you 1 of the more valuable private companies in the world. You’re talking about a beautiful chaotic corporate structure here with everything localized, even at 4,500 people. How is Canva structured?
As I was mentioning before, we’re very much mission-driven. What we then do is we have our teams organized around goals, the long-term goals that we want to achieve. I touched on 1 of them: we have a large goal of being truly local in 40 countries. We’ve got a centralized squad that’s working on being truly local, and then we besides have parts across the full company that are besides working toward that same goal.
As you can start to see, as I talk about all these different mission pillars, there’s rather a complicated organizational structure to guarantee that we’re able to accomplish so many things across our goal of empowering everyone. And we’re picking off all these fresh industries and professions at any given point in time to plan anything and continuously coming out with fresh plan types. A couple of years ago, we launched docs and whiteboards. There’s a lot in the works there. And then another goal is to empower everyone to plan anything with all ingredient, so we’re continuously making investments around these fresh ingredients and partnerships with incredible music companies and so forth.
Then we request to have all of our product teams making certain that Canva is available on all device. That was, again, a decade-long investment, where we started off with web and then iPhone and then Android and then tablets. Then we had a immense cross-platform task where we brought the same product across all of our platforms, which was another multiyear effort. What we’re continuously doing is figuring out the structure that can enable us to accomplish our goals in the most effective way.
We’re going through that process right now where we’re looking at all the goals that we want to accomplish over this next decade. Our first decade was about empowering all person. This next decade is going to be about besides empowering all organization and then ensuring that our full company is structured around those large company-moving goals for the next decade.
Walk me through the specifics of that structure. You have a centralized product squad that’s going to ship any fresh features. You might have a squad in Japan that’s like, “This set of enterprise users is the first mark marketplace for us.” And then you have a squad in the United States that says, “Actually, it’s this set of enterprise users.” In Japan, it’s the sales teams, and in the United States, it’s the HR teams. How do you reconcile that, or do they both get to make the product independently?
Our product squad is very centralized, and I’ll give you a metaphor that we usage internally, which is about having cupcakes and icing. What I mean by that is that we want to have the same cupcake for all platform for all country and then different localized nuances for each of those, so different icing for different countries, professions, and industries. We spend quite a few time making certain that most of our effort is going toward having a truly solid cupcake that is able to be expanded and can service all of these different needs — and that it’s very consistent.
I’ll give you an example of being truly local: we want to have different billing methods, different payment methods, and there’s a squad that’s focused on enabling all of those things. Or we besides have an ecosystem of developers to be able to have local plug-ins for different platforms and to be able to make truly cool AI apps and all sorts of things. We besides have a immense thriving developer community that is able to cater to local nuances.
The cupcake is the centralized product team, and then we have different teams that are focused on adapting that for education markets, for enterprises, to guarantee that we’re able to cater to all of those different things. Our product squad is 2,500 people — engineers and product designers and researchers. And then we have teams that are focused on the different variants of the icing for the different audiences and professions. So we have local teams that are focused on, say, marketing and sales across Europe and in the United States and Japan.
That seems very complicated. It seems like you request to manage an awful lot of communications to make that work. It’s besides kind of familiar. You have a core platform and then it’s expressed in different ways in different markets to different audiences. quite a few the time, the conflict there is the decision about whether something should be built into the platform, part of the cupcake, or expressed in any weird way as part of the icing. Does that decision land with you? That’s usually the tension. How do you resolve that?
I think due to the deep platform investment that we’ve made, we’re in a beautiful good place to be able to do that. evidently there are conflicts due to the fact that 1 country would like a circumstantial thing and another country would besides like a circumstantial thing. So firstly, we have a centralized map of the countries that we’re investing in, so countries that we’re already doing exceptionally well in, and another countries that we consider seed investments that we’re wanting to invest in and we know will play out over the next 5 years. We have this centralized doctrine about the way we’re tackling markets and the way we’re investing and harvesting fruit, and then we are able to make those decisions with both the leads of the truly local squad and then the leads of the peculiar icing.
How much Canva do you usage to run Canva? due to the fact that erstwhile I describe something as a communication problem, you make a communication tool. Are you dogfooding Canva internally all day long to make this work?
Oh, you have no thought how much we usage Canva. Or possibly you could guess — we usage Canva for absolutely everything. So yes, I would say we usage Canva highly extensively. It powers all of our operations. It empowers our full product framework. It empowers our marketing team, our sales team. We usage it highly extensively.
How frequently do you file feature requests for your own individual use?
Pretty regularly, I gotta say. In fact, we have a program called client Zero, which means we usage our product very profoundly even before it’s at the standard that we would have it released to the public. We’re continuously road investigating it. The amount of bugs that I file or that our full squad is filing to each another is beautiful extensive, but it means that the product is truly road tested by 4,500 people before it’s even getting out into alpha or beta hands.
You mentioned being a two-step company. 1 of the pieces of the puzzle here is that you first want to build a giant successful business and then you want to tackle social issues with the profits of that business. You and your partner, Cliff Obrecht, who is the COO, have signed Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge to give your money away.
Is that at all in tension with the fact that you’ve taken a bunch of VC money in the business? You have a valuation, the valuation has gone down. You haven’t done layoffs, but to get to the excess profits backing social initiatives, you request to have the excess profits, and then your investors might want any of that back. How are you managing the two-step company part of the puzzle against having to grow and attract enterprise users and grow in all marketplace to even get to the profits in the first place?
Well, I think what’s rather wonderful about the two-step plan is that the steps work very well in tandem. So, for those that don’t know, our two-step plan is: step one, build 1 of the world’s most valuable companies; and step two, do the most good we can. The large thing about building 1 of the world’s most valuable companies is that it’s evidently very aligned with investors’ interests.
But then step two, being able to take all of our equity and guarantee that it’s being utilized to have the top impact, has been truly interesting due to the fact that it besides has meant that people who would like to aid contribute to the planet in a crucial way are truly attracted to Canva and what we’re doing. We can take the education program or the nonprofit program and the deep investments that we’re doing there to attract people who want to come to Canva and aid accomplish the things that we want in the world.
Obviously, the greater we make the company, the more that we gotta invest in philanthropy. We truly see step 1 fuel step 2 and step 2 fuel step one. We’re just getting started in this domain, but we’re highly excited about what we can accomplish in the years to come. Cliff and I own 30 percent of Canva, so it means that there’s quite a few capital — if Canva continues to do the things that we anticipate it to do in the years to come — to be able to make a crucial difference.
One of the first things that we’ve done another than the things that we’ve been doing through Canva straight is working with GiveDirectly, where we give money to people surviving in utmost poverty. These are people that are surviving on little than $2.10 a day, which is absolutely atrocious that people are not having their basic human needs met, so not adequate to eat and not a basic shelter, not clean water. $550 in their hands to be able to invest and get an education or get a roof over their head is surely the best money that we’ve always spent. We’re surely hoping that we can do a lot more of this in the years to come.
Is the two-step plan a Canva plan or a Canva and then Melanie and Cliff plan? due to the fact that you will make quite a few money and then you can usage that money nevertheless you want, but the company utilizing its money for social initiatives is simply a small different.
We took the 1% pledge with Canva a number of years ago. That’s 1 percent of people’s time, money, product, and profits. The truly large thing about that is that people can spend their time getting hands-on with philanthropy. The second part is we wanted to guarantee that the people that are helping to build Canva are besides able to take individual pride in the work that their hard work is helping to achieve. So all of our donations are going through the Canva Foundation. Then, as we are able to do these incredible things, it’s a shared effort for the squad and shared pride for the squad as well.
It’s notable to me that Canva is in Australia. It feels like the culture of Silicon Valley in peculiar shaded in this direction for 1 minute and now it’s gone. We’re back to full rapaciousness in Silicon Valley. That’s fine; the pendulum swings. Do you feel insulated from that? Do you feel like you don’t gotta participate in the American culture wars, that you can stay focused on this kind of mission?
But you have American investors. I mean, a bunch of American VCs are like, “Cut it out, just make the money for me,” and you can see that reflected in our businesses for sure.
I feel like what’s trendy yo-yos backward and forward. Even if you look at something like growth and profitability, the pendulum swings backward and forward as to what is good in Silicon Valley.
Yeah, and now we’re focused on unit economics for once.
Exactly. For us, it’s always just building a durable, valuable business and being able to have a affirmative impact on the world, and I don’t personally care what’s trendy. They’re basic principles that I’m going to spend my life working toward.
Do you find that, as you manage a company that’s large and getting bigger around the world, those culture differences emergence to your level more often? I imagine you have people in the United States. alternatively unfortunately, we live in a permanent culture war here in the United States right now. You have people in another countries. You mentioned the Philippines. The cultural differences there are real. Australia has a different culture. Is that something you’re actively trying to manage, like “here’s the culture of the company versus the culture of the places you are in and here’s how much of that might be seeping in”?
People are attracted to Canva. quite a few people come to Canva for the values that we have and what we’re trying to do, and the two-step plan is simply a immense attraction for people to join us. That already means that we’re a lot more unified, even from the get-go, due to the fact that people are coming to work for Canva for many, many reasons. People work at Canva due to the fact that they’re attracted to the thought of empowering creativity and being more egalitarian. I think those things aid insulate us a small from that due to the fact that there’s already a unified set of beliefs and values.
One of the challenges for any creative company, especially 1 that is software as a service that is deployed on the web, is that people will usage the tools to make bad things. erstwhile a company has truly strong values, that is where you find the most tension. I always think about it in terms of Microsoft Word, and Microsoft is not going to tell you what to compose in Microsoft Word. And then somewhere over here there’s TikTok, and TikTok is very curious in making certain you don’t make a full bunch of stuff on TikTok. Where does Canva sit? due to the fact that the values of the company are frequently expressed in the tool, but you can’t necessarily tell people what to make or what not to make.
Because we aren’t a publishing platform, that does insulate us a small from the TikTok side of the fence. At the same time, we’ve invested very heavy in our trust and safety squad for all the different reasons that that’s absolutely needed. It’s a small column A, a small column B, as far as taking precautions, and at the same time, it’s not having that same exposure.
One of the reasons I ask this is Adobe is simply a large competitor of yours. It late took quite a few heat for changing its terms of service to make it clear that it would be doing more trust and safety work in Creative Cloud. That was misinterpreted, and it tried to clear that up. It didn’t have quite a few goodwill. It couldn’t trade on the benefit of the uncertainty there, and it had to just be truly loud that what it was trying to talk about was trust and safety work, not training an AI foundation model.
Do you have that problem with the Canva client right now where there’s worry about AI, and so, even if you want to do the trust and safety work, you should be clear that any automated systems are doing 1 thing and any automated systems are doing another?
I’m not going to go into specifics about Adobe’s situation, but I think we’ve built an incredible amount of goodwill with our community. Our free product that is utilized extensively across the planet has built up quite a few goodwill. We’ve been providing that service for a decade and will proceed to do so. I feel like we already have quite a few goodwill and we’ve always continuously acted in the best interest of our customers. There’s been a full bunch of things that we do that mean that our customers feel like we have their best interests at heart. We’ve been very fortunate both to have invested in that and to be able to proceed to have that goodwill that we don’t have rather as an antagonistic relation with our customers, I’d say.
This is the large Decoder question. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?
Internally, obviously, we usage Canva for everything. We have a full process called decision decks, and I’ll explain where the decision decks came from. Often, erstwhile there’s a truly complicated decision to make, it’s a multipronged decision. What we now do is we build out the options and alternatively than just talking at a advanced level, we actually build them out in product. For example, we plan them into small videos and then we compose out the pros and cons. I feel like that means we can go deep on all of the options. alternatively than it being your decision and my decision, we can all get on the same page.
We usage that framework in decision decks extensively in product, but I besides usage it in all sorts of different ways. I find that an incredibly useful framework is: decisions, options, pros, and cons. It helps a large deal. On a macro level at Canva, anything that moves us toward our mission pillars has always been highly valuable for our company. You can most likely see from a number of the things that we’ve discussed, we’re continuously investing in the long term, and things that drive Canva toward our long-term mission have always resulted in very good things. We always effort to make certain that we’re continuously investing in the future.
Alright, let me put this decision-making framework into practice. You just had Canva Create. You announced a major redesign. You announced any enterprise initiatives. You besides had what I think many people have realized is simply a Hamilton-inspired rap. How did you decide to pay for a Hamilton-inspired rap at your enterprise software conference?
So, firstly, it wasn’t an enterprise software conference. We had 1.5 million people tuning in to this event. It was a very massive audience — from students to the full gamut of people that usage Canva. I don’t know if you saw the full event, but it was quite a few fun. It was colorful and we were going into all of our products, and we put on a bit of a theatre show.
Then, at the very end, we talked about enterprise products, and it was kind of dull. It was like, “Hey, we got Enterprise. Here are the features.” No 1 would have cared. No 1 would’ve paid attention. So, in 1 of the rehearsals, we were like, “How could we make this a small more fun?” due to the fact that if you launch something and no 1 hears it, did you even launch it?
We wanted to guarantee that it was something that was entertaining and fun. As a company, we don’t take ourselves besides seriously, so we thought, “Why not make it a rap and present the CIO’s interests?” which is where the full enterprise product has come from. It has been in deep chats with CIOs and admins across the planet as to what they wanted. We thought it would be fun presented as the CIO rap battle, which is precisely what we did.
It got a tremendous amount of spread. There were 50 million views on social in a short period of time, 2,500 more people talking about Canva Enterprise on social, and an incredible amount of influx. Was it a small cringey? Yes, that was the point. But it surely was money well spent. The rapper was a community member. The CIO was an incredible performer. There was a rumor going around that I was the CIO. I cannot rap, for the record.
You do quite a few things. I hear you learned to kite surf. I was assuming you were the rapper.
I did learn to kite surf, but no, rapping is simply a beat besides far.
So you’re like, “We’re all in on raps. all event now is having enterprise-focused raps.”
Every event is going to have a twist and a turn and be a small more interesting. I mean, how many times can people get up and say, “We want to add a small creative flair.” We’re going to absolutely be doing that at all event, so watch this space.
Let’s talk about the actual product. The decision is “let’s go attract the enterprise.” Watching the event, the people onstage were like, “If you’re an executive, your teams are already utilizing Canva. Why not actually just make this an authoritative part of your business?” That was the message.
Does that represent a meaningful increase in revenue? Is that just marketplace share? Is that solidifying your presence and then increasing further within the enterprise? How are you reasoning about that expansion?
I think you’ve precisely nailed it. Canva is being utilized extensively across beautiful much all organization at this point, but what we want to guarantee is that it is not just 10,000 people utilizing Canva but without a centralized account. Obviously, that’s bad for their company’s IP; that’s bad if individual leaves. There are so many different problems that presents for a company. We’ve invested truly heavy for the last couple of years in building a way that an admin at a company can get a dashboard and study for how Canva is being utilized at their company. They can then actually consolidate all of their usage into 1 account, which means that they have visibility. If individual leaves, they can guarantee that they aren’t just losing all their IP.
Pretty much all CIO or CEO we talk to is very afraid erstwhile they realize how much extended usage there is and that they don’t presently have control of that. That was the message that we hope we landed, and it’s surely been incredible to see how many people want to guarantee that their IP is safe. Especially in this planet of AI, IP is king or queen, so it’s truly crucial to guarantee that people have access to all of their content and can usage it for their own purposes.
Do you think that kind of enterprise expansion will change the company? Consumer companies have 1 kind of cadence and attitude. It’s very competitive, especially in the space you’re in. It’s little so with enterprise companies. Enterprise software CEOs don’t frequently want to come on the show due to the fact that I’m like, “Your product’s not good.” That is the reputation of most enterprise software. Do you think that will change Canva?
I don’t think so. What we’re excited to do, and you may have been able to tell by the rap, is bring a bit of fun and energy to enterprise software. Enterprise software doesn’t should be dull and boring and second grade. It can be amazing and fast and be able to feel magical. We want to bring the fun to work, and we want to do that through our product in a way that hasn’t necessarily been a top precedence from what you’re saying.
This puts you in more direct competition with any of the bigger players on that challenge-disruption curve. Adding a bunch of enterprise control features for CIOs moves you 1 step up. It’s not just what social media marketers are utilizing in the corner on their individual MacBooks to get work done more efficiently due to the fact that it’s good enough. It’s now what the organization is going to deploy on corporate MacBooks or laptops.
Now you’re talking about Figma. Now you’re talking about Adobe. You’re talking about possibly their contentious relationships and you can be a happier part of software. Is that the chance — that you’re going to go and take from the more established enterprise players?
There are a couple of pyramids we’ve been working our way up to. surely we started off with consumers and then actually having deep penetration in businesses and working our way up to enterprise. Now, we’re seeing highly large deployments across large enterprises today. So yeah, that is precisely the point. But again, to fill that gap in the marketplace that we saw, there isn’t large software between productivity and creativity, and everyone wants to be productive and creative. We want to be able to bridge that gap and to have a plan squad to truly be able to supercharge their workflows and have deeper scope across the full organization.
I’ll give a more applicable example. A sales squad is frequently profoundly neglected by the plan team, and that is due to the fact that their work isn’t as crucial as, say, the executive presentations or a billboard. So the sales squad just goes off on their own small tangent creating their own presentations, and then a designer would say, “But what is that? That is completely off-brand.” In this case, the designer can make a template the sales squad can then use, so they can put their time into the high-value activities as they would usually but then besides guarantee there are templates for another things.
Another example is being able to make a template that local teams can go and usage — the cupcake and icing. So they can make the template that local teams can usage or marketing or sales teams or erstwhile you’re pitching clients. And we’re surely seeing an extraordinary amount of that today.
You tried this erstwhile before in 2019. There was a bit of an enterprise offering. You scaled that back. Now you’re back at it. Why the step back and why the reapproach?
The first launch of Enterprise, we had any features, but we actually rolled that into our Teams product. We did that very intentionally due to the fact that there were quite a few features that we thought all squad should then use. The latest Enterprise product has truly been built purely for the needs of admins and CIOs, which was a completely separate basket of things to what we rolled into our main Teams product the first time around.
So this is simply a shift in approach from “In the enterprise, you have large teams and they request to collaborate” to “Actually, what we needed was a dashboard so you could deploy the software.”
What brought you to this realization that you were making the incorrect product?
Well, it wasn’t that it was the incorrect product. It was that the product was most likely better in the hands of everyone versus in the hands of the few. Whereas, with this second offering with enterprise today, it truly has been built in conjunction with what we’ve been proceeding from admins and CIOs as to what they actually request to be able to deploy Canva at scale.
In the years since, Canva has been on the education side, deployed across countries, across districts, and so we’ve had a lot more experience in deploying Canva on a very large scale. On the enterprise side, we’re seeing deployments of thousands upon thousands of people at companies now. They evidently have a lot more nuances to how they have their billing set up in immense multinational corporations, how they have admin access. There are so many things that are required to be able to deploy Canva at that scale, so truly the Enterprise features needed to be ticking those boxes and ensuring that mass deployment.
Are you building out Enterprise sales teams? This is another kind of culture you request to have, another approach to the market, another support layer that you request to build up. Is that pure investment or are you immediately seeing returns?
Both. We do have a large sales squad based in Austin primarily and actually 1 in Europe as well. We see that as both an investment and just the way enterprises request to be able to have their hand held through the process of displaying Canva. They evidently have immense challenges and things to figure out to be able to guarantee that it’s deployed successfully across their full organization. Being able to work and partner with them on that is simply a truly crucial part of our process.
Is that a increasing sales team? As you head into enterprise, are you going to grow the scope of the sales team, or is it the same group?
It’s the same group, and we’ve been expanding that team.
Do you think you gotta change the approach as you go to corporate customers, or is it going to be the same approach?
I’ll give you 1 thing that’s the same and then 1 thing that’s different. We have a program called “Closing the Loop,” which means that people complain about something or want they had something or dream about something, and then we do that exact thing that they’ve asked for and send them back an email saying, “Hey, we’ve done this thing.” We’ve done this hundreds of times in our main product. So people are like, “I truly want I could have X, Y, Z,” and then we say, “Hey, we’ve done that.” People are like, “Oh my God, you actually perceive to my feedback. How cool,” so that’s what we do on our consumer side.
But that same thing truly applies on the enterprise side, too. People are like, “Hey, we truly request this feature.” And then we go and build that feature and then they’re truly happy that it has been built. I think that investment in making certain that we’re building things that people want on both sides of the barrier is extraordinarily important, and it’s a culture that truly runs through both sides.
The another thing you announced at Canva make was a redesign of the product. You’ve refreshed the design, you’ve made it a small simpler, you’re expanding any of the things it can do. That’s tough. You mentioned you don’t have an antagonistic relation with your user base. Redesigns are very frequently where the antagonistic relation begins. Walk us through that redesign. What was the decision-making process there to say, “Okay, we actually request to make it look different”?
I mentioned Canva is simply a decade old, and Canva’s interface hadn’t changed much in that decade. As we look at the next decade, there were quite a few things that we wanted to do and introduce to enable people to take their workflows to the next level. We call the redesign a glow-up. With that glow-up, you can star your own content. Your squad content can get starred, too. There are all sorts of beautiful touches that we put through the product. AI is infused across everything. We knew it was truly important. As you mentioned, often, a redesign can go down poorly, and evidently that’s something that we didn’t want to happen. Firstly, we spent quite a few time working with our customers to guarantee it was at the gold standard before we were getting it out the door.
And then secondly, at the event, we announced in a cryptic way that to get into the redesign, you had to click seven… Oh, actually, we didn’t say it explicitly, but I think it might be public knowledge. If you go on TikTok now, you click 7 times on “For You,” and you go through this magical portal and get what number you are going through the portal. So it’s like, “You’re number 1 million through the portal.” We only opened it for the first million customers that went through it, and so there was 48 hours of frenzy to get in.
The large thing about it was that all of these social media influencers were showing Canva’s glow-up and training their community on how to usage it, which I think was truly helpful. People were seeing it and getting acquainted with it beforehand, and we’re going to open the door up more soon. But it was very valuable to be able to build it firstly in conjunction with our community, get their feedback, and open the door just a small to let them in and get people excited about it and besides to get them sharing it with their community in the early days.
You mentioned social media influencers and people training their communities. I think about that world, and I think almost entirely about how in mobile software, for whatever reason, you don’t see quite a few social media influencers in front of a 27-inch monitor doing stuff on desktop. Do you think of Canva as mobile software? Do you think of it as a web app? Where does it live primarily in your head?
As I mentioned, Canva is on all device. So it is actually about 50-50 between desktop and mobile. That peculiar run had more than 50 million views. I think it was 33 hours that the million people got into it, so we have an extraordinarily strong community.
What’s the divided on the million between web and mobile?
Oh, that’s a truly good question. I’m going to guess it was about 50-50, but I don’t know that I have that peculiar stat.
One of the things that truly strikes me about this class of plan software is that it is deployed on the web. Collaboration features are built in as first-class parts of the interface. Links are the fresh file. You can see it has enabled quite a few things to be a web app in this way, and you’re not shipping a bunch of native code on macOS or Windows.
You can’t do that on mobile. You gotta participate in the App store dynamics. You gotta participate in whatever taxation Apple wants you to pay and you run a subscription software product. Is there a tension there between deploying as a web app where you’re free to do all this stuff and take advantage of the web on desktop and then, over here, you gotta participate in a much more closed ecosystem on the phone?
I was talking about the ladder up to all device before. Originally, we had separate apps; Android, iPhone, iPad were completely different front-end teams. We spent a number of years investing truly heavily. The problem at that point was that we had different feature sets available on each of the devices, and it was truly hard to keep it in sync. We then spent a number of years investing truly heavy on ensuring that the same code is deployed across all devices so we have feature parity across everything. It was a very hard investment that took a number of years, but now, the same feature sets are available on all devices. People have the same experience, but again with the cupcake and icing metaphor, it’s the same product with small nuances and differences depending on the device.
But do you see the force the app store model places on smartphone applications being different from what you’re able to do on the web? I talk to another companies and they’re like, “Of course the application model on desktop is the web. We can distribute immediately to the full client base without anyone getting in the way. No 1 has to download anything, and we can just take the full amount of the subscription price without paying a tax, and I can’t do that on a phone. And so, of course, our effort is over here on the web.” Do you feel that same tension?
No. We truly just want to be where our customers are. any people usage Canva entirely on their phone. any people usage it entirely on the web, on the desktop, and then any people usage it as a hybrid. We actually divided our efforts very universally, and we’re fortunate to have large relationships with the app stores, which do quite a few promotion of Canva, too. It’s surely been a net affirmative for us.
I feel like I’m going to ask you, do you think you don’t have a tense relation with Apple due to the fact that you’re in Australia? You’re 1 of the fewer CEOs who’s always been like, “Yeah, it’s fine.” Do you think there’s a reason it’s not rather as tense for you?
I don’t know that I have a peculiar reason, but they’ve been large partners for us.
The App store taxation is just not on your mind?
A certain number of people usage Canva exclusively on their iPhone, and that’s kind of the price through the gate, the price at the door.
I want to wrap up by talking about AI and then a small bit about competition. As I said at the start of the show, it is an angsty time in the plan world. You’ve mentioned AI a couple of times. It’s come up. All the fresh features, I think you said, are infused with AI, and then you mentioned a bunch of people wanting to defend their intellectual property. Those ideas are in massive tension. I think your AI features, you’re partnered with OpenAI, I believe. They have their own troubles with the creative community. Just from the basics, how are you reasoning about the tension between creatives who fundamentally hatred it and then the people who are actually utilizing it at super advanced rates in the actual tools?
If we wind all the way back to 2017, evidently search and recommendations are all powered by AI. The first large AI feature that we put into Canva was background remover. And I’ll dive into that 1 for a second due to the fact that I think it’s rather illustrative of the way we think about it. So people would typically go and spend a long time deep etching an image in something like Photoshop, and we found this amazing company, Kaleido, that enabled that to happen with 1 click.
It meant that something that would take a long time to do and could only be done by a very tiny number of people could all of a abrupt be done by everyone with a click. We baked that into Canva and it was extraordinarily popular. We then acquired that company back in 2021, and it truly was a first foray into this, but it wasn’t truly different from the full intention of Canva, which was to take people’s ideas and turn them into designs and have as small friction as possible between those 2 points.
With all single AI feature that we introduced into Canva, we truly think it’s helping to cut down that time between A and B of getting the thought into an actual product. As we’ve introduced things like Magic compose and Magic Media, where you can make photos and illustrations and vectors and videos, all of these things just enable people to take their thought and turn that into a plan and reduce the friction. I don’t think people wake up in the morning thinking, “Oh, I want to usage AI.” They wake up in the morning with a occupation to do and they want to make that presentation or they want to brainstorm something on a whiteboard. All of those AI features are truly based on trying to aid make shortcuts in that process.
I feel like the deep etching example, the background remover, is simply a truly large example, due to the fact that we were talking about the tools and creativity before. Is it creative being able to go and deep etch the image and have all of that nuance and spend an hr doing that? Or is the creative process actually wanting to take that image and usage that in a truly cool way? I think the latter. With all of these things, the more that we can enable people to take their thought and turn that into a design, whether you’re a professional designer or you’re individual just getting started, we think that gap is worth bridging.
But candidly, this is the same example that everyone gives me. Then the Decoder audience listens to that example and they say, “Sure, but you’re going to take our jobs away. We don’t want this to happen due to the fact that it’s not just removing the backgrounds. It’s showing up and saying, ‘Produce an AI-generated influencer ad run and spam social media with it,’ and that is actually the problem.” Or it’s “train on our images and ask whatever AI tool to produce something in the kind of me, and it will just do it and then my work will be devalued.” And that’s actually the tension. It’s not, “We’ll do any horrible, boring thing for you.”
People usage background remover. The CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen, was on the show, and he told me people usage background remover and generative fill at the same level as layers. It’s not that people aren’t utilizing the tools for that. It’s that the second- and third-order effect of the tool devalues the work over time. Canva, and this is where we started the conversation, has long been on the democratized access part of the spectrum. More people are going to make more creative work, and now the knob has turned all the way to 11. How are you reasoning about that, the second- and third-order effects, where designers are saying, “Look, this isn’t just reducing tedium for us. This is reducing the overall value of creativity”?
Let me start very macro. A decade ago, the number of people creating designs or the number of designs in full being created, let’s say, was 100. I’m just going to make up any stats, but a very minuscule amount compared to the amount of designs created today. A professional designer would be creating, say, just a couple of graphics a decade ago. Now, all single touchpoint is expected to be visual. There’s truly a boom in visual communication that has happened and played out over the last decade. I don’t think, actually, from what we’ve been seeing, that there’s any shortage of the request for plan at all. In fact, we’ve been seeing the exact inverse: it’s across all single vantage point that all single exec now realizes the power and importance of visual communication.
We’ve been seeing those 2 trends. The access to it surely has been increasing, but at the same time, the importance of it has besides been dramatically increasing. I don’t feel like it has devalued the importance of it. In fact, over the last decade, it would be fair to say that it has been absolutely exploding both in popularity and in importance, and video communication is surely at the center of all organization now. We’ve run surveys and studies before and found that two-thirds of business leaders now anticipate their staff to be able to have visual communication cognition and actually want to be doing training with their own staff. We’ve surely seen that change dramatically over the last decade, and those 2 things actually went hand in hand versus as inverse to each other.
So that’s the macro. What about the micro of angry designers today? How are you reasoning about that?
Canva has always been the tool that does the layout design. You can take your beautiful professionally designed assets, your logos and whatnot, and then you can lay them out beautifully in Canva as a template. We actually acquired an incredible company late called Affinity. Affinity is about creating all of those assets for professional designers. We think that it has specified a beloved community that truly loves Affinity — the product and their approach — and it’s something that we’re investing truly heavy in to guarantee we protect. That incredible community can take their assets if they want, and they can usage it on Canva, but those things we think work beautifully hand in hand.
Part of the AI work you’re doing is trust and safety — something called Canva Shield. There is stuff now that you won’t let people make with Canva. Where’s the line for you? Is it “there’s stuff we won’t let our AI generate”? Is it “there’s stuff we don’t want you to make at all”? How do you think about that difference?
We’ve invested truly heavy in our trust and safety team, and there are all sorts of different things that we’ve been having to think through in a large amount of detail. For example, our AI doesn’t do medical or political terms, and there are a full bunch of things that we just don’t think it’s appropriate for our AI to be generating. Canva has been designed to be a platform where you can come in and take your thought and turn it into a design, but there are certain things we shouldn’t be generating.
I’ll choice the United States. It’s an election year in the United States. I’m assuming both parties in our country are utilizing Canva. It just seems like a thing that is happening given the scale of the assets they request to make. You’re not saying, “Well, you can’t usage it due to the fact that we don’t want you to usage it.” But erstwhile it comes to your AI, you’re saying, “We won’t let our AI make political messaging for you.”
Walk me through that. How did you decide that that would be the defining line?
I think with things like deepfakes, creating images — all of those many, many problematic areas, we decided that wasn’t where we thought our AI should be playing. If you want to make a poster to advance your favourite candidate, that’s your prerogative.
If I’m a low-level city admin for the Biden or Trump campaigns, I’m like, “Here’s our candidate’s talking points. Make me any social assets.” I’m assuming Canva’s AI won’t do that. It’s going to admit that this is political messaging, and it’s not going to do it. But if they wanted to do it on their own in Canva, that would be fine. So the line is like, “We won’t make political messages for you with our AI tools.” That is simply a decision. Tell me about that.
Particularly on Magic Media, if individual were to say, “Hey, I want to make an image of my favourite candidate,” or “my not favourite candidate,” which is most likely even more problematic, it just says, “You can’t do that.” The importance of that, it seemed, was beautiful clear. We didn’t want to be creating imagery that may be harmful or inappropriate. So we’ve had a beautiful firm line there.
I think that’s just so interesting due to the fact that erstwhile you decision software to the cloud, and then erstwhile the software starts taking action on your behalf, the lines about what software companies let people to do become vastly more crucial versus moving Photoshop locally on your computer where you can do whatever you want. Have you had broader conversations about where those lines should be with governments and policymakers? This seems ridiculous to ask about Canva, but it seems like where it will be expressed the most frequently given how many more people usage it. Is this something you’re reasoning about at a policy level? Is it just “we’re protecting our brand”? Is it “our values don’t align with this”? Where is this coming from?
All of the above. We’re working in consultation with governments all around the world. all government has a different tolerance of what they want, what comfort level they have. It’s truly important.
This is the worst icing, it seems like.
[Laughs] Yeah, there are many variants in the icing. So yes, all of the above.
Alright. Let’s finish by talking about Affinity. You acquired Affinity. People love Affinity. It is simply a competitor to Photoshop, and there’s long been this thought that you could assemble an indie bundle of things that could take on Creative Cloud and that would be any way to break whatever you perceive Creative Cloud to be. Is that the goal? Is the goal to go get those users and say, “We represent a full alternate to Adobe”?
There’s a full host of things. As I was saying before, we’re working our way up the pyramid, and professional designers were kind of the last step. Even though we’ve been working with them on the layout plan of the fence, on the actual asset creation, it wasn’t an area that we have dived into. erstwhile we met Affinity, and we’ve been proceeding and admiring their work from afar, we knew that they were creating a faster, better alternative. We think that alternatives in the marketplace are a truly good thing for consumers, and they’ve got specified a passionate community. What we wanted to do was to work with Affinity to guarantee that we are able to make an incredibly powerful offering that is truly surviving up to what Affinity uses and the community wants, expects, and deserves.
Do you think that that’s going to lead you into more direct competition with Adobe?
It is crucial for us to always play nicely with all of the different products on the market. So you can bring in your Photoshop files into Canva, you can—
But, again, you’re trying to grow the market. You want to get 1 out of 5 in all country in the world. That’s quite a few people. quite a few those people are utilizing the Adobe Suite right now.
And as you mentioned, any have a very antagonistic relation with that company. Wait, actually that’s interesting. Do you think you’re going to get non-Adobe customers?
Oh, I mean, Canva surely has many non-Adobe customers.
Is that where the growth is, or is the growth taking share?
I always like to think about it more as creating marketplace and solving a problem. If we’re not solving a problem, then why would we exist? If there was no problem to be solved, literally, why would you be a company? For us, we’re always looking at what the problems are to solve, right from our earliest days to today.
Even our Enterprise product, it’s always problem-based. How can we make a more effective solution to a problem that people have? Those problems can take place in many different shapes and forms. erstwhile I was at university in Australia, Adobe cost $1,200, and I was like, “That is crazy expensive. In developing markets, how can people always afford that? As a student, how can you afford it?” I think that any problem is actually a large marketplace opportunity, and it works better for the consumer to have their problem solved.
You get Affinity; that’s growing. You have more competitive surface area against Adobe, nevertheless you want to part it. Adobe tried to buy Figma. It saw the same kind of threat from a very likewise situated company: a web collaboration-first company that was competing in a space it wasn’t strong in. Adobe went to effort to buy them, and fundamentally the governments around the planet were like, “No, you’re not going to do that. You request to have competition.”
Do you feel that same force erstwhile you think about, “Okay, we bought Affinity. There’s possibly something else we could buy, possibly there’s another kind of deal we can do”? Is that something that’s limiting you right now, or is that actually providing you chance due to the fact that Adobe can’t just buy its way out of competition?
In the plan market, there hasn’t been a strong challenger for a long time. It has been a small bit of a one-horse race, and I don’t think that works out well for anyone or surely not well for the consumers or the designers specifically. I think that being able to have another alternate in the marketplace for professional designers benefits everyone.
Alright, you’ve given us so much time. I want to wrap this up with a very challenging question. I want you to confirm lastly for the record, 1 final time, that that was not you rapping in the video.
It was not me rapping. I can promise you, you will never hear me rapping due to the fact that that, unfortunately, is not a skill I possess.
Just wait until the AI gets ahold of you. We’ll have you deepfake rapping so fast. What’s next for Canva?
Our first decade was about empowering all person. We’re extraordinarily excited about being able to empower all organization over this decade to proceed to make strides toward our mission of empowering the planet to design. We want to enable you to take your thought and turn it into a plan and have no friction between those 2 things.
Unfortunately, my thought is that you are going to start rapping. Melanie, thank you so much. This was great. I appreciate it.
Very good. This was great. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. truly appreciate it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel /
A podcast from The Verge about large ideas and another problems.
