Canva's 'biggest shift': AI, design and the future of work

0.1% of the world that's truly tapping into what AI and agents and everything can do. And even they're still scratching the surface, I think of what we're going to see over the next few years. To us, that just means there's a huge amount of opportunity. Today's guest is Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of Canva, the company that has simplified the world of online design and become one of the world's fastest growing tech platforms. What began in 2013 has grown into Australia's most valuable private tech company worth more than $40 billion and backed by investors like former Disney CEO Bob Eiger. Something I always say is that Canva and any success is really luck. Every moment of that was a moment of connection where we reached out to someone, they reached out to us, we put ourselves in a position for the luck to come to us. It's transformed how people create everything from presentations and social posts to party invitations, taking a once gate-kept industry to now serve more than 265 million users each month. In this conversation, we'll explore the early days of Canva, how it's scaled while maintaining simplicity. The company's next phase of growth, how are you thinking about the company's readiness to go public and what can you share about the time table now? And Cameron's own journey as a product designer, entrepreneur and even DJ. If you really want to do something for the rest of your life and something with passion, you just need to go with what you believe in. Just say yes, you'll figure it out later. Cameron, thanks so much for joining us. It is so good to be here, Michelle, thank you. So, Cam, you are clearly someone who has worn many different hats. For some initial context, I recently learned that you started out studying law and science. Is that right? Can you walk us through that journey and the point that you realized design was the true passion? I think we both have Asian parents, so we know that either being a doctor or a lawyer is kind of the path that is set out for you. I got the marks to be a lawyer, so I went to law school, but my real passion at the time was computer science. So I tacked on science to the side of my law degree, ultimately planning to go and do that rather than the law part. And I got both degrees, but I wasn't fantastic at law. I actually forgot to apply for any law jobs. So by the time I got around to it, everything was gone. So I ultimately actually ended up starting my own business, because through university, I also picked up graphic design, which was a real passion of mine as well. And I managed to fuse computer science with graphic design into web design, and that enabled me to start getting clients. And after university, I actually didn't land a job. I just kept going with my clients, put up my own business. And it wasn't till five or six late years later that I actually started working at anyone else's company. So you were an entrepreneur from the get go. Did you always kind of have that itch to start your own venture? I didn't consciously recognize it, but I think it was always there. I remember back in grade four in primary school, I started drawing lots of different comics and ended up selling those to the kids around the school. So there's always a bit of a business flavor in there. Actually, it's so funny that you say that, because obviously, as you mentioned, we are kind of have the same heritage here. And what you were saying about, you know, obviously, the pressure to become a doctor or lawyer is so relatable. How was it for you choosing what some may have seen as a quote unquote, you know, risky path? For me, it was just where I needed to go. And I think if you really want to do something for the rest of your life and something with passion, you just need to go with what you believe in. And design and technology was always where I found the most joy. And it was the only thing I could imagine doing for the rest of my life. I didn't want to be sitting in some law firm somewhere, chained to a desk looking at contracts, which I actually do a fair amount of nowadays. So it's kind of useful that I got that degree in my back pocket. Even thinking about doing a startup, you need to think about doing a startup that you can remain passionate about for the rest of your life because building something of scale and impact requires you to be passionate through the ups and the downs, the dark nights, the successes, like it has to drive you more than just getting a paycheck at the end of the day. Definitely. So you started your own agency. I saw and did that for a few years and then went on to work at Google in San Francisco, where you worked on a project called Google Wave and ambitious tool for communication editing, though it was sadly shut down after a surprisingly short period of time. Looking back Cameron, do you think it was just ahead of its time and what did you take away from that experience? I definitely think it was ahead of its time. It actually was public for a very short time, but it was being built for a really long time. And that's one of the lessons I kind of learned is that you need to balance building the right thing with getting it in front of the right people. So with Google Wave, we actually built it in Stealth for three years. And when I say in Stealth, I mean Trillion Stealth. No one at Google knew what it was. Only the people on the team, Larry Sergei and Eric, who were the CEO and the co-founders at Google at the time, knew what Google Wave was. We actually had Google as hacking into our repository to try and figure out what the product was. And we eventually launched it internally. We learned a lot through that internal release, but we also kind of said it wasn't built for businesses. So even though it wasn't quite getting traction inside Google, we always said this is for consumers when we launch it to a public audience, it'll be a lot better. We ended up launching it to a public audience. It actually got an amazing reception on its first day. We debuted it at the first ever. I think Google I/O event. It was a product demo that went for 60 minutes at the time. It was the longest video on YouTube. YouTube didn't allow 60 minute videos, but they upped the cap just for this product demo. And we had like 10 million people watch it on YouTube, which is like one of the biggest videos on the platform at the time. So there's a men's demand for it. And we built up a huge weight list for it. We had 8 million people on the weight list. Product wasn't ready to go. It took us another six months to actually launch it. We brought on that weight list. The product confused a lot of people. They didn't know what to do. It was so powerful that they didn't know where to start. And that was one of the problems that we had with it. It was the whole onboarding of the product and helping people understand what it could do. We struggled along for like another year probably. And then we basically got dismantled to fund other projects at Google. So you might remember another bad Google product called Google Circles, which was their social network. A lot of the engineers ended up going there. Me and a couple of other folks on the way of team 100 around for stuff to do inside Google. But I think that entrepreneurial passion just kind of really took hold of us. So we decided to leave Google and we started another startup. Yeah, I was going to say just to take us further through your professional journey. You then went on to co-found fluent and a startup that sought to rethink emails with a more streamlined interface as I understand. You have been really open, Cameron, about the challenges that you kind of faced as a first-time founder. Are you guys maybe not first time because you had done your agency before? But at first time, tech founder, let's say, at the time, you know, what potential did you see back then? And why do you think that that vision wasn't fully realized at the time? I was actually talking to one of our camera investors last night at the create after party. And he reminded me that I talked to him during the fluent days. So I approached him with this idea for an email product. He thought it was amazing and he actually started hunting around for other people to join the team who had email expertise. And he actually talked to one of the founding engineers for Gmail. And he was like, you should go talk to these guys. They got an amazing product vision. You can really help them out. He obviously didn't join us. And it was one of these sliding doors moments. And Bill, the investor, he's like seminal, seminal investor. It was Bill Ty. Yeah. He actually said, if that guy joined, he would have funded fluent and things would have been totally different. I think fortunately for me, fluent didn't get funded. We spent like a year building the product, getting people on. We had really incredible demand for it, but the costs of running an email service at the time were incredible. So you needed funding to actually make it a reality. We didn't ultimately get up funding despite spending two months sleeping in our car in San Francisco and traipsing up in Dan Sandhill Road. And through that process, I eventually got to meet Mel and Cliff. And that's when the idea for cam became across my radar. And when we started talking about working together. Well, actually, it's so funny that you mentioned Bill because I had read that he was the one who put you in touch with Mel and Cliff. Is that right? It sounds like he kind of plead a role in a lot of your journey. It was a combination between Bill and Lars Rasmussen. So Lars was one of the founders of Google Maps. And I worked incredibly closely with him on Google Wave because Google Wave was really what he wanted to build after Google Maps. And Lars put me in touch with Mel and Cliff. Bill Ty had put Lars in touch with Mel and Cliff. So it was this really unique combination of connections and networks. And once I started chatting to Mel and Cliff, just their vision for taking design to the world really resonated with me with my background as a graphic designer, my technology skills. And I could see how the three of us could fit really neatly together to create something amazing. So shout out to Bill. It sounds like for and Lars for changing your your lives. But you know, what's interesting cam is that I heard that when when you met Mellon Cliff. You spoke with them about the opportunity, and then initially passed it first, is that right? - We were still in fluent, and we were just about jet off to San Francisco to come back with briefcases full of cash. So we were certain we were gonna get funded. We'd had lots of interests. We kind of got outed out of our stealth mode for fluent by an article that got written by a journalist about it. So we thought investors were knocking at the door and we're just gonna throw checks at us. We went to San Francisco. I turned Malin Cliff down. Turned out to be a lot harder to raise funds than we initially thought. I went through that whole two months process. Eventually came back to Australia. We're figuring out whether we continue doing this. We couldn't afford to bring on any more users to fluent because it was costing us $100,000 a month. So we were paying that personally in order to continue doing it. We needed cash from somewhere and it just wasn't coming. The founding team of Fluent started getting a little friction fooled at that stage. And the idea that Mal had pitched to me about Canverd been bouncing around in my head through that whole time. As I mentioned before, you need an idea that really resonates with you. And this notion of bringing design, democratizing it to the whole world was something that I felt incredibly passionate about. And I realized that I'd been building creative tools for 10, 15 years at that stage. And that was really what I wanted to be doing. I'd always experimented with pixel tools and ways for people to build things with little 3D blocks and things you could do on an iPad and just giving people different ways to create and unlocking their own creativity. And Canverd just fit really beautifully with that. So I got back in contact with Mal and Cliff. They were in Hawaii, I think, at the time. We were on a Skype call. That's how far away it was. It was back when people used Skype. And we decided to band together. That was July 2012. And we started working to get funding. We got funding in November. And then we launched a product a year later in August 2013. I should say, Canva went live in the summer of 2013. But right before that, I heard it was kind of a crazy story. Two days before launch, you were hit by a car and knocked unconscious. I need to fact check this. Is that right? Those facts are correct. Yes. OK, can you take us back to that launch period? So we had spent a year building the product and doing a fantastic amount of technical investigation, working with users to understand what product we actually needed to launch to be valuable to them. And we had notified press about a couple of weeks before we were planning to launch. So the launch date was locked in. It was Tuesday, August 26, 2013. In order to hit that launch date, we needed to make sure the product was good. So we were ironing our bugs, adding in new features, working weekends. And I'm a passionate cyclist. I love writing to work, writing as much as I can. So I always used to ride to the office. And Saturday night before the launch, we'd been working late. It was late at night. I'd decided to ride home. And I was coming down this hill at about 40 kilometers an hour. I don't know what that is, to your audience, about 30 miles an hour or something. And this taxi just decided to cross three lanes of traffic and T-bone me. It's one of those moments where time just slows down. I could clearly see the taxi coming. I just knew I couldn't stop because I was on this very steep hill. And I just hit the side of the taxi. And that's the last thing I remember. I woke up on the road. A bouncer from a club had come across, stopped all the traffic so that I didn't get hit by any further cars. And I was just dripping blood onto the asphalt. The bouncer couldn't get hold of my wife on my phone. So he ended up calling Cliff. And Cliff came, my co-founder picked me up, he called my wife, Lisa. We all ended up at the hospital. I got some stitches. I'd lost the tooth. But needed to be coding. So it was back the next morning finishing the product. You were not. That is crazy. Cliff has a great photo that you can maybe pop up on your passcars. I hope you don't. But it shows the damage. And yeah, it soldered through. Oh my goodness. Well, I'm so sorry to hear you went through that. But also so glad that you made it out seemingly with just pretty minor injuries after all that. Yes, made it. And we managed to make that launch on Tuesday. And that started the long journey of the product. So you got to launch day. Let's talk a little bit about growth. We're skipping forward a little bit here. But obviously, it's been many years now. And Canvas trajectory is often described as a fairy tale, right? I mean, I mentioned earlier, you have more than 265 million monthly active users. Yeah, all around the world. Plenty of companies have tried and failed to scale the same way. What do you think that you guys got rate that others didn't? I think we thought about growth from day one. So when you're an Australia, population there's about 25 million people. It's about the tenth the size of America. So if you're building anything, let alone a tech product. If you build just for Australia, it's never going to be a success. So we always had to think beyond our borders and think about who was ultimately going to use the product and how to get it out to them. So we always had this growth mindset. And we built Canvas as a global product. We had that ambition. It was part of our mission, which is to empower the world to design. And we always built with that scale at the forefront. So we've focused incredibly on international markets, which I think a lot of US startups don't buy default, because you've got an amazing audience right here. And you can build pretty much for them for maybe the first 10 years of your startup, maybe the first 20 years. But we had to think beyond our doorstep at every stage. So we focused on internationalization very early on. It was like 2016 when we launched our first languages outside of English. And that drove an incredible amount of growth. As soon as we got our first 10 languages in Canva, that opened up entirely new markets for us. Canva was big in the United States, Australia, the UK at the time, but translating into Spanish opened up South America, translating into Portuguese, opened up Brazil, French, Indonesian, like all these languages and different cultures enable you to push beyond the bounds of what you know. Yeah, very big populations and communities that you're able to unlock. I was actually curious beyond the language piece of it, which sounds like that's obviously the first step. Were there any other techniques that you guys employed to localize your product across the different markets and user behaviors that released it out to you that helped? When you talk about internationalization and localization, which are technically two different things, but you can kind of think of them in very similar terms. It's about making an experience that is truly local, which doesn't just mean language. It means what images do people see when they first come to the page? What templates do they use? What messaging do you send them? What events do they celebrate? You know, if we're offering them a template, do they celebrate Ramadan or Independence Day or Carnival? Like you have to think about these things at a very deep level and then make sure that when they land in your app or on your web page, they feel like it was built by some developers down the road from them that it is a truly local experience, whether you're in Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo. And we're focused incredibly on that. We have a team who think about the language, you think about every piece of content that people see in Canva, the templates they use, the marketing that we use to invite people into the product. All of it has to be truly local. Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. Personally, summer is my least-service season of the year. I live in LA where it gets up to 110 degrees, which means I'm looking for quality pieces that are breathable, lightweight and affordable. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality, not brand markup. Right now, I have on the Quince Organic Contank, which to be honest, I was not expecting to love as much as I do. They set ultrasoft and they meant it. I wear this to work as much as I can just because it's so comfortable and it's perfect for surviving the California Sun. And it's not just a peril. Quince also brings that same everyday elevation to everything they offer from hotel quality bedding, kitchen essentials, to thoughtfully designed furniture. Upgrade your everyday. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com/btb. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com/btb. I've worked for small businesses. We're re-tried to stay on call 24/7, but life happens and sometimes that's not possible. So what happens when a customer is trying to reach you and no one is available? I'll give you a hint. They're not waiting for you. They've already gone to your competitive answers. And that's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled q-u-o. The business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90,000 businesses to rely on so they can stay reachable at all times. Quo has a built-in AI agent that handles all your mundane tasks from after our calls to booking appointments, so you can focus on the bigger things. Money. is on the line. Always say hello with quote. Try quote for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quote.com/btb. That's qeu.com/btb. You know, we did an audience call out for this interview and a couple of product designers and engineers actually wrote in with some questions. So the next two actually come from them. They want to know in Canvas early days, were there moments when your intuition overroad user feedback and how do you build conviction in those decisions? Essentially, how do you decide which features to green light versus what to scrap? Interesting question. I think there's definitely feedback we got from investors that we sometimes took on and we sometimes didn't. One piece of feedback that we somewhat unfortunately took on, which taught us a lesson, was that Canvas needed to be a social network. So 2013, Pinterest was hot. Instagram was hot. The whole notion of visual social networks was just really part of the mainstream narrative. And when people saw it all like Canva that created visuals, they naturally thought it needed to be a social network as well. Create the visuals, send them out to people, capture the audience. So we actually spent six months building kind of a social network in Canva based off this investor who really wanted us to push in that direction. It ultimately proved to be a dead end for us. Creating a social network is very different to creating a productivity and creativity tool. And it wasn't really our passion. That wasn't why we got into this to create something that generated more likes and more comments. We created something to help people express themselves in all different channels and walks of life. So we weren't passionate about it. Plus the product that you needed to build to fulfill that kind of dopamine cycle that's familiar now for social network. It just wasn't part of our product DNA. So we ended up shelving that. We actually reused some of the technology underlying it. So to do that kind of stuff, you need to be distributed databases that track all these events. So we actually reused some of that technology to engage our creator community, which is actually working really well right now. We have lots of teachers who create content for Canva, as well as professional graphic designers who create content for Canva. So managed to parlay that, but the notion of Canva as a social network never got off the ground. Sounds like you had that gut feeling from the start. At what point did you realize, okay, this isn't it? Let's not make this our main focus going forward. When we started getting a ton of spam on it, it was just like really hard to manage. People using it for bad things. And we just didn't want to head in that direction. Like everything we wanted to build to empower the world to design was heading in a totally different direction. So every time we had to think about this social stuff, it was just like the worst part of that day. And it's so interesting that you mentioned that this was an idea from investor because it just makes me think about how a lot of founders tell me that they feel like people don't appreciate quite how cyclical the fundraising processes and how there are just these themes that will run through Silicon Valley. And if you're not part of what seems hot at the time, then you just might be out of luck. And it sounds like, you know, obviously, that you weren't immune to that process. That's a really great observation. And I think you know, something I always say is that Canva and any success is really luck. Like you can put yourself out there. You can make sure that you're in a position to receive that luck. But there are so many different moments and sliding doors that happen to enable this to happen. You know, if I hadn't met Lars at Google, if Mel and Cliff hadn't met Bill Ty, if Bill Ty hadn't introduced them to Lars Rasmussen. And a hundred other stories of that from connecting us to investors, to our first staff that joined us at Canva, to the users being ready to receive a product like Canva, Instagram taking off, Pinterest taking off, which meant that Canva was a great tool for those platforms. Like all of that swirls together into this one moment that enables Canva to be a success. What I love about your story, by the way, is the fact that you're so real about what you went through before finding Canva, you know, like, I feel like it's just so relatable to what a lot of other founders have gone through and the kind of struggles even with fundraising and whatnot. I'm just curious because obviously over the years, as I mentioned there, Canva has become Australia's most valuable private tech company, which must be still surreal for you some days. With investors, I include, as I mentioned, big names like former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Hongshan, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China. What have you learned about fundraising at this level and what advice would you give other founders listening? You really need to get into a position where you don't need to take funding because when you're desperate for funds, that's when you can make really bad decisions and things that affect the long-term future of your company. So we have quickly gone into the position of being profitable. We've been profitable now for nine years and that means that we pretty much never have to take funding. We only take funding when it is strategically useful to us, which means that when we're pitching, it makes it a lot easier because we can always walk away from a deal. We don't need you. So if you're going to put some irrational demands on us, we can go find someone else that can help us truly fulfill our mission. So that's one of the most important positions to get into when you're raising funding. There are tactics, particularly in the early days, you talk about the mathematics that investors are looking for right now. So you need to tap into those. You also need to practice your pitch. Talking to an investor is very different to talking to an everyday person and they're looking for different signals around team, product market fit, any moat that you have or unique insight into the market and you really need to highlight that to them. The other thing I would highlight is that not every investor is like every other investor. It will take a long time for you to find the right investor who immediately gets your idea and understands where it's going. So don't take that first rejection or the tense rejection or the hundredth rejection as a signal that you're heading in the wrong direction. You have to find the right people and to do that, you have to kiss a lot of frogs. Yeah, I think also it's like quite like a well-known that Mel said that she's gone through like a hundred knows or something from investors before she kind of got luck here. So that's great to hear. And also I think I read that your mom cam has described you as like a shy kid growing up. So I'm also really curious like for you, you know, just personally going into those pitch meetings initially, you seem very like, you know, well spoken. But you know, did you have any rituals to get into the zone mentally before going to those events? When did you speak to my mom? We, you know, we do our homework around here. I can't reveal my sources. Mom definitely did describe as a shy kid in school. I don't know when it happened, but I just became a lot more comfortable with public speaking. I've done a lot of bad public speaking, which I think set me up for doing some good public speaking. So yeah, now I've been doing it for like 30 plus years. And again, I think it's just putting yourself in a position to stretch yourself. We have this great market home, which is actually a quote from Tina Faye. And it just says, just say yes, you'll figure it out later. And that's a mantra that me and my wife take into all aspects of our life. If you put yourself in an uncomfortable opportunity, you'll figure out how to make the most of it. Well, as Canva has moved further into the enterprise space, you are increasingly going head to head with incumbents like Adobe and Microsoft. What is the strategy for gaining more share there and displacing tools that teams have used for years? We really don't see it as displacing tools. So Canva basically created an entirely new category because there was this underserved market or a market of zero at the time, which was creative tools for non-creatives. And we truly believe that when you put design in the hands of people who haven't been able to access it before, it gives them superpowers to achieve their goals. And when we say design, design isn't just about making things pretty. Design is fundamentally about helping people bring ideas to life. And when you give people a tool like Canva, it enables them to create a business that they never saw they'd get off the ground, to help their nonprofit grow in ways they could never imagine, to help them teach a classroom that truly engages their students and makes them hungry for learning. And we've seen that time and time again. 265 million people use Canva because it is this unique fusion of productivity and creativity that no one else is offering. So we really see it as a green space to move into. Yeah. And I think a lot of the success is really in its simplicity, which obviously you guys have retained over the years. I'm curious, you know, Canva has built a really powerful global community around its product. And that's something that pretty much every company wants, right? How do you actually hang on to that and make it stick? And what's the most valuable piece of feedback that you might have received from a user? We had our biggest event of the year, just yesterday called Canva Create, which is where we invite our community in to see the latest big launches that we're putting out. We launched Canva AI 2.0 yesterday, which people are incredibly excited about. And I said it on stage, the energy that we feel at Canva Create is just incredible, because we do literally have an amazing community, consisting of chief marketing officers, to teachers, to non-profit champions, people from Brazil, to Los Angeles here, all around the world, they come together for this. And when we get to turn up to these events, it's an amazing lifeline into our community to like talk to them and hear from them, hear their excitement, hear about new features that they want us to build. And it's truly one of the best parts of Canva. And we've constantly focused on building that community. So even before we launched the product, we were talking to bloggers. We were talking to social media managers about the problems they had, and the problems that we could solve with Canva itself. We tested the product with them before it even launched to make sure it was the right product for them. And we've done that for the last 13 years. We talked about it on stage yesterday that we grant people's wishes, because we get millions of pieces of feedback every year from social channels, email, bumping into people at the airport. And we file all that and make sure that the product features we're building are what they've been asking for. It's also a real balance between a huge vision as well, because we have this massive vision that we're still building out for how to bring people's ideas to life, which means there's big vats of product we're also building alongside the feature requests that we hear from our community. Well, this segue is really well into my next question, because I was going to say it's a huge week for Canva with the company just announcing yesterday the launch of Canva AI 2.0, which you guys have called the biggest shift to our product and business since we started, and a fundamental change in what Canva is. So much to unpack here, but talk us through kind of what this entails on a high level and the thinking around it. So Canva AI 2.0 is the culmination of an incredible amount of work by the team, both in deep AI tech, as well as this incredible, agentic orchestration layer that we've now built across Canva. We've been building up the AI research team at Canva for a few years now, and it's now over 120 people, just dedicated to AI research. We have thousands of people building the product itself, and research and product have gotten into a really good cadence now of spinning out really innovative ideas on the AI side, which then the product team takes advantage of to bring to the people that use Canva. So at Canva Create yesterday, we launched deep AI tech, including our Canva Design Model, the next iteration of that, which is a foundation design model that no other company has, that enables us to generate new designs, as well as edit existing designs. So people can come to Canva, they can type in any idea or goal that they might have, and Canva AI will figure out what that goal is and create the content that they need to do that. At any stage, you're creative workflows, well, you can call up Canva AI. So even if you didn't ask it to generate something, you just started a pitch deck by yourself, or you started some social posts. Halfway through, you can be like, I don't have the right ideas, or I just want some color suggestions, or I want you to tidy up the layout on this, you can ask Canva AI to do that, and it can jump straight in the middle. And it can do that because it understands the design. It knows every single layer in there, it doesn't just see the flat image that most other AI systems produce. It understands the text, the images, the foreground, the background, the colors, and it can manipulate all of it alongside you and your team, which creates this really unique productivity, creativity, and AI platform that people can now access. On top of that, we now have an agentic orchestration layer. So Canva AI can now do more for you and help you achieve your goals in broader ways. I can now ask it to do web research. So if I'm researching a business plan, maybe I want to do a new wellness product. I'm running up my business plan, halfway through, I want to do some market research. Like, what does the market look like? What's the breakdown by geography? I can get Canva AI to go off and do that research. You can find the information in seconds, bring it, put it right into the middle of my document as a table or as a graphic, and I can continue editing it from there. I can even schedule Canva AI to go and do stuff for me regularly. So if I had a weekly tech newsletter, I could get Canva AI to go and do that research every single Monday and deliver to me a newsletter at 9 AM. That is ready for me to edit, drop in a photo, type in my own thoughts, and then send out to my audience. It's a game changer, and I think it's going to revolutionize people's workflows. Just hearing you talk about all of this, it sounds fascinating, but it also kind of sounds too good to be true. Like, I'm just curious, was it initially, like how long did it take you guys to build this out? What hurdles did you guys face in creating this? There was so many blockers and dead ends along the way that the team has had to figure out. Just one of those, the Canva Design model was taken as well over two years to create something that is truly at a quality level that we're proud of and that meets people's needs. And we had many missteps along the way in terms of finding the right technology, being able to co-operate the rate data, trying to work with third-party models, not succeeding with that because they didn't quite do what we want, and then deciding to in-house it with our own research team. So that was a whole journey in and of itself. And releasing the Canva Design model has unlocked a huge amount of innovation just within the company just by that alone. Then increasingly, you're seeing agents become a bigger part of the picture of both AI and people's work. So building an agent that can sit on top of that Canva Design model that can do research, that can schedule things, that understands your brand, does all the things it needs to be an effective creative partner. That in itself was a whole project that's been running for many, many months. And yeah, all of these things have now come together into Canva R2.0. So it's a real weaving together of a tapestry of all the work that the team's been doing. Yeah, presumably many sleepless nights here. What do you say to those who might be skeptical that say that using AI for design has been persistently buggy until now? Because we've all seen, at least also in the last few years, those demos where people get on stage, it doesn't work exactly as they wanted. Was there a fear of that? And how do you answer skeptics? It is like moving so fast and constantly evolving. And people's perceptions of what AI can do from six months ago, totally outdated. Even three months ago, even a month ago. So even myself, I'll often try things out in different AI tools and won't quite be what I want. I go back a month later and it just blows it out of the park. So you need to constantly be reassessing those tools and reframing what you think they can do. And Canva R2.0 is a great moment for people to do that because it is literally the next 2.0 of Canva. We view it as basically starting an entirely new product again and coming in at the ground floor. And it will set the foundations for an incredible beck at a head. Almost like relaunching the company. Exactly. Yeah. The AI boom is all anyone seems to be talking about right now, yet, interestingly, at the same time, you've kind of noted that more than half the world still isn't using AI at all. And on the agentic side, less than 0.1% of people globally are engaging with these agentic tools that dominate the conversation. How do you reconcile hype with reality and do you think that there's a chance that we are in that AI bubble? It's actually way less than half. It's like a sixth of the world that's even using anything like a chatbot. And as you said, 0.1% of the world that's truly tapping into what AI and agents and everything can do, and even they're still scratching the surface, I think of what we're going to see over the next few years. To us, that just means there's a huge amount of opportunity and also a huge amount of responsibility to democratize it because that is a signal to me that's the way that we're framing products and what AI can do isn't the right way and that there's a better way forward. And we think that that's what camera AI 2.0 is going to enable. We've got 265 million people that immediately going to be able to access this. And it's been our job at camera to make complex things simple. That is literally one of our company values. And the reason we do that is because when you take these complex technologies that require markdown files and running servers and coding knowledge and all these maintenance costs that you have to put into maintaining agents, it's far beyond the reach of most people. And when you take that and turn it into something simple enough that anyone can pick up in under five minutes and rely on for their business day in and day out, that is where magical product gets made. You recently started your own podcast, Prompted, which argues that human creativity will remain king even in this AI era. I thought this was really interesting because we're seeing a new wave of graduates, designers, writers, marketers who feel like the entry level rung of the ladder might be sought off by AI. If the work that you should do is now automated, how do they get their foot in the door and what skills do you really believe will differentiate people going forward? I actually just had a fascinating conversation with Debbie Millman about this on the podcast. And she is. an amazing designer and amazing creative and amazing writer and she teaches a course in visual design. So she's talking to University graduates about the skills that they need and seeing how they're thinking about creativity, how they approach problems and how they can then take it into market and she is extremely confident that tools like AI will only enable more creativity and there's still a fundamental need for creative skills in people to foster those and get them to think about their craft, particularly about design, make sure they have that skill grounding before they then unleash themselves with AI and then go out into the job market and we're seeing even on our own team and through conversations with our customers that human creativity is still at the heart of it. AI can let you scale things, it can amplify your ideas but if you have a terrible idea to start with, that's a problem. So you still need to come with a great idea, you still need to be the seed of that creativity whether you're going to feed it into AI or you're not and that will ultimately dictate the success of what you're trying to do. Looking ahead on the road map, you're definitely always asked about this but there has been talk of an IPO for years. How are you thinking about the company's readiness to go public and what can you share about the timetable now? So as I mentioned before, we've focused a lot on profitability and making sure that we are the masters of our destiny that we're never forced into a situation that we never want to go into. In terms of an IPO, we don't feel a huge amount of pressure to go down to the public market right now. Our investors love where we're going. They're very bullish on where we're going. In fact, we have a hard time getting them to sell stock when some people want to capitalize on the value. So they want to hold on to it and they're very happy with our approach. So we'll go public when we're ready. On a personal note, I hope you don't mind my asking this, Cam, but you and your wife Lisa reportedly joined the giving pledge last year committing to give away the majority of your wealth. What led you to make that decision? And is there a specific global problem that you're really hoping to tackle with that? Yeah, so we joined the giving pledge and the founders pledge, which are quite similar. Giving pledges quite established here in the States and founders pledge is quite well established in Europe. And we thought it was great to send a signal out to other founders and other fortunate people being in this, you know, similar situations or growth that you don't just have to think about yachts and private planes. We're never going to have either of those. And there is so much that you can do with the fortune that is delivered at your doorstep. This is something that we have taken on as individuals, as well as something that we've built into the culture of Camber itself. One of Camber's values is be a force for good, which means that we're constantly thinking about how the decisions and the steps that we take can have positive ripple effects throughout the world. And that's in how we build the product. It's how we think about investment. It's how we think about our team and the time that they volunteer. And it's how we think about deploying any wealth that we have. So Camber itself has its own foundation that focuses on eradicating poverty. We've deployed over $100 million into that now. And that foundation actually owns part of Camber. So as Camber becomes a more valuable company, the foundation gets to do more good. And that's something that we call the two-step plan. Build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can. So that is built into the DNA of the company. For myself and my wife, we take the same approach. So we are putting our fortune towards nature because we love nature. We love being in nature. We love seeing what our kids do when they're there and how they grow as they experience the world. And making sure that the planet is in a healthy state for future generations to come is super important to us. So we're deploying a lot of our funds into biodiversity, conservation and regeneration all around the world. Well, I'm sure that's been such a joy for you as well on a personal note. It's been amazing. Like being able to help others who are looking after nature in different parts of the planet is really rewarding. And when we get to visit those people and the places that they inhabit, it's an incredible experience. We got to take our kids to the Dominican Republic recently, which is where one of the projects that we find it is. And being able to experience both the nature and the people there. It was incredible. Our kids got to meet some other kids who are living there and they just had an immediate connection. And it's beautiful when you can bring people together like that in an amazing ecosystem. Zooming out, I suppose, what is your endgame here? You know, if we were to sit back down in let's say 10, 20 years, where would you want yourself and can about to be? I think that two-step plan really sums it up. Having one of the world's most valuable companies that is doing the most good it can. And that step two is a huge part of why we do what we do. Making one of the world's most valuable companies means that we need to deliver on the promise of impairing the world to design. We're currently at 265 million users within 10 years. That'll definitely be a billion hopefully far beyond that because we think that pretty much every person on the planet can use design to have an impact in their lives and the lives of others. So it's a tool that has broad appeal whether you're using it for personal use cases for a big event in your life or whether you're using it as one of the Fortune 500 companies to drive your brand, connect with your customers and find new audiences. Camer can help you do it all. All right, this brings me to a segment we're calling What It Takes. Where an audience member gets to ask for advice or hear more on what it takes to get where you are. Love to hear it. Today, Gloria, a creative tool startup founder also based in Sydney asked what is the biggest piece of advice you would have for a product leader getting an early stage startup off the ground working with limited resources and runway. Well, firstly, AI and camera AI 2.0 can be a huge enable for you. The ability for people to scale themselves and the impact that they can have through these tools is incredible, but I still think there's fundamentally human connection that needs to be at the heart of it. And every moment that I can think of where we had these amazing things happen for both me and for Camer, where when we connected with other people, when we went to a meetup and we met someone who became our first backend engineer, when I put my hand up for a job at Google and met Lars. When Lars introduced Mel and Cliff to me, when we met, you know, our fifth investor, when we found a great evangelist who wanted to sing the praise of the camera to the world. Like every moment of that was a moment of connection where we reached out to someone. They reached out to us. We put ourselves in a position for the luck to come to us. Thank you, Cam. Now we're going to do a quick rapid fire round. Don't overthink it. Let's go. It comes to mind. All right. What's one feature at Canva? You wish you had launched sooner. Background remover. What is a trend in design you think is overhyped? Ah, synth wave. As a DJ, what kind of music do you put on to unwind after a long day? Something kind of classical. I love motion picturescores. Ah, pet peeve in the workplace. We editing these? Your employees will be listening very intently. Pet peeve in the workplace. Somebody who doesn't clean up their mugs. Ah, what do you like to ask when you're hiring? What's the last challenge that you confronted? Is there a piece of advice you come back to often? To say yes. Well said, Cam. Thank you so much. I've enjoyed this. Thank you. It's been really good fun. Thanks for joining us on Behind the Business. For more stories on business and leadership, follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next week. (upbeat music)