Canva’s CEO on what happens when AI does the design

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Why do all my clients want to kill you? What do they have against you? What did you do to all of them? I mean, I can't comment on those other companies, but I guess when you do something that's going pretty well, you've got a quarter of a billion people using Canva. I think maybe they want a piece of that. Is Canva tech's most underrated company? Nine years of profitability, hundreds of millions of normie users outside tech that are so hard to get, and now a big pivot from design platform to AI platform. Today on Access, we have co-founder, and CEO Melanie Perkins to discuss everything they just announced today at their big event here in LA. But first, Alex and I discuss our waning interest in OpenClaw, my new addiction to the AI-assisted poke, which was made by last week's guest, and the big reputational crisis facing the AI industry. Welcome to Access. My name is Ellis Hamburger, and I'm here with my lovely co-host, Alex Heath. We've got Melanie from Canva on the pod today. With some actual news, which isn't always the story of our show. We're trying to get the real talk and the real takes, not just the embargoes. But we have a bit of both today. But first, Alex, will you be attending ClawCon in Los Angeles tonight? We need to make LA tech happen. Hell no. I was going to. I think it's going to be a madhouse. I'm too old for this shit, man. Really? A madhouse? Part of me really wants to go, especially when it was first announced. So these ClawCon pop-ups have been. It's been happening all over the world, really, for the last couple of months. I thought you'd live for the claw. Ain't no laws when we're using claws. We've talked a lot about the Clawfather, Peter Steinberger, and OpenClaw. I have been very interested in it. But my view of it has actually changed in the last, I would say, couple of weeks. And I would say our episode with the CEO of Poke, Marvin, last week, actually played a role in me souring on going to this event as well. I just feel like Claw is a thing that we're going to look back on and go, wow, wasn't that a really cool, nerdy time? Like when people used to jailbreak their iPhones, but then. Nerdy two weeks? Yeah. And then Apple started adding stuff to the OS and opening up over time. And I think the analogy here is services like Poke, which again, we featured on the show last week, basically simplifying what OpenClaw is for people like me who don't have. who don't have the time to chain together a bunch of stuff with a Mac Mini, you know? Okay. So maybe we can cut in all the times you've talked about OpenClaw and me being unimpressed for this exact reason from previous episodes of the show. Because it just felt kind of so inevitable and also weirdly surprising that it didn't already exist in some way. And we're already starting to see people just natural language it and have the agents hook up MCPs on their own and have it all just work in the server with no Mac Mini. But yeah, I've been pretty poke-pilled. As well since last week. I mean, it's honestly been pretty mind-blowing having a tool that's just built for this. I think, I mean, it is, it is shockingly ahead of the game and was a few months ago. I think my first exposure to some of the agentic natural language programming every morning, do this, look at this, add to this. My first exposure to that was actually with Notion Custom Agents. But seeing with Poke that can handle Notion MCP pretty darn well, if not in some ways as well as Notion AI at this moment. It's like now I can do things like, hey, Poke, when you see client invoices hit on my Mercury account, shout out to Mercury, who I'm also a new customer of. I just use whatever's on the show, I guess now. Is this the third guest company that you've shouted out in our intro so far? We've got Ivan from Notion, Ahmad from Mercury. We have good companies. We do have good companies. And so I say, when you see the bill hit my account on Mercury, market is paid in my Notion database. And just like little experiments like that. And I think one of the things Marvin said that was a good prompt was just think of it like an EA. Like, what would you ask an EA to do? And so that's one of those things, you know, that I would have asked an EA to do. The other thing I would have asked an EA to do is update all my goddamn services with my new Mercury credit card instead of my Chase one. And Poke said it could do that and then messed it up. Whoa, you're going full full Mercury, like with the credit card and everything? Yeah, I mean, dude, my overhead. With meaning is like insanely low. It's it's like it's like a thousand dollars a month. But what about those Chase points? I mean, come on. I mean, my personal spending is going going crazy on Chase. Okay, that way. Shout out to my business spending very low. Okay, all right. And when Poke doesn't do so well, I say, hey, Poke, draft a bug report email to the team and send it, which is also very satisfying because I've been a bug reporter for my entire life, Snapchat browser company, etc. And I spend a lot of time reporting. And now I can just fire it off, have Poke do it for me. So I try not to do this, but sometimes when we have people on the show, I haven't had time to really dig into the product that they build. Poke was one of those things where it just looked cool and I figured it was going to be a thing people were talking about. And I think correctly. So I think I saw poke in the news quite a bit last week, at least in our little bubble, but I hadn't quite tried it. So it's good to hear from you that you think it's legit. I've also been getting. Like the daily summaries from it and it's decent. It like forgot that I'm back on the West Coast after a trip to the East Coast last week. So it's not quite as smart as I would like. Still a little rough around the edges, but you're right. I mean, the form factor and the, I don't know if taste is the right word, but just the approach that it has with the way it communicates and where it decides to prompt you a little more or go the extra mile seems to be quite good. I honestly didn't know the tone. Could be as much of a lever as it is in poke. People talk about having a nicer tone, right? But people talk about Claude having a nicer tone, but poke isn't just a nice tone that actually in some ways is the closest thing to it is probably the friend AI pendant. It's a little sarcastic, a little pushy fourth show. Definitely briefs mentioned you've made now. Yep. And it, and it makes fun of me sometimes, which I actually genuinely appreciate, but it also just knows when to be quiet and work. So I was like talking about some. Potential dinner spots. I was looking at for some trip and I said, which one looked best to me. And it said, Hmm, that surprises me. Not very Rick Rubin of tech of you. I'm like, Jesus, you're pulling quotes from my website and roasting me for that. So, wow. Yeah. You weren't looking in Malibu for a restaurant. No, that would make you record. And it does feel like it knows me better than the others. It feels like they have some good prompts in place to remember your taste and things like that. So it's given me very good recommendations. And it really does feel like a friend as opposed to your AI assistant. Who's going to write you a five paragraph essay every time. Okay. So we're, we're long poke, short open claw. I mean, different audiences, right? It's like, it's like iOS and Android, Android. People want to tweak their home screen with interesting widgets that don't work. Well, that's great. Uh, another thing that I wanted to talk about with you, Alice, is that the social network sequel is apparently going to be good. I regret to inform you. So there was a teaser shown at cinema. This week, I saw a friend of the show, Matt Bellany said that it might be the thing that actually breaks the internet referring to Jeremy Strong's Mark Zuckerberg in this movie, gave it five stars, which is high praise from Bellany. Couldn't be better. Yeah, man. Kindle Roy is going full Zuck and I'm here for it. I think, uh, you know, I think Zuck can't wait to see the haircut. Oh yeah. Cut out the haircuts, not out. So I think everyone had to have their phones put away to see this. I see. Okay. But I assume a teaser will drop. The movie comes out October 9th. I'm sure it's going to have awards buzz. I'm all for this. And, you know, I think Zuck, uh, shout out to our now our fifth, uh, access guests, uh, in this intro should embrace this. You know, he famously back in the day for the social network, the first one rented a theater, uh, for Facebook employees to go watch it and really leaned into the, the ridiculousness of it. And look, it's. It's not going to be a favorable movie. It's about Francis Haugen, who I've met and interviewed and the Facebook files, which I covered extensively that were all the internal documents that came out about all the, you know, uh, what's the right word? Uh, rough things that, uh, Facebook was doing and the way it was hashtag as I reported, as I reported as a, you know, shout out really to Jeff Horowitz, uh, the wall street journal reporter who, uh, famously wore a headband on. on national television He was breaking this story, looking like he was in a dojo. I know Jeff as well. Why was he wearing the headband? Just the vibe, man. Oh, just in the arena? Yeah, he's just in the arena. And now he's being played by the Bears, Jeremy Allen White. And Francis Haugen is being played by Mikey Madison, which will be, I think, a very great cast. And yeah, I think Zuck, even though this is going to paint him as a savage, monopolistic capitalist who doesn't care about children, I think you should lean into this. I think you should rent a theater again. I think you should play into the memes because it's going to be, obviously, a hard one. And I think if you just ignore it, you kind of give it more life. I mean, what choice do you really have as, I think, an executive these days? But to laugh at the joke as well. Yeah. I mean, Aaron Sorkin's obviously goaded. I love a lot of his early stuff. I haven't liked some of the movies he's done in recent years. There was one set in a courtroom that I can't even remember. I think I fell asleep a couple of years ago. He hasn't had a ton of great stuff. So I'm hoping this is actually a return to form. And I didn't actually look to see if Trent Reznor was doing the soundtrack again. That would be dope. But yeah, we'll have to go see this all. We'll have a little access premiere. I cannot wait. For any number of reasons, Social Network is one of my top 10 movies ever. And it really is hard to overstate how influential it has been on the tech industry. Probably even more so than her and many others. Because it incorporated music that has set the tone of coding for 15 years since then. So many of the archetypal narratives that executives take part in or have to, it really has just been so influential and really just a stunning movie. And so I'm hopeful that Aaron Sorkin is not washed and can make this happen again. Yeah. And we're going to keep the tech meets Hollywood theme going next week on the show. We've got Jonathan Glatzer, who is the showrunner of The Audacity, a new show on AMC that is the spiritual successor to Silicon Valley, the former HBO show, I think. I talked about it briefly on the last episode, but really excited to have him on. He'll be on. He's our first non-tech founder type on the show. So we're branching out. Can I get like a pre-read, pre-watch? I've got the screeners. I'll send them to you. Is that legal? Did you just cause yourself a problem? If my poke was working, it would have already sent them to you. But we'll make sure to address that. So I had poke send a calendar invite to someone. And I asked the person if they successfully received it. And they said, yeah, but I think poke misspelled the name of my company. And I was like, ha, ha, ha. Yeah. No, that was my fault. See, that's also what I'm terrified with agentic AI. Is it just really messing something up or compromising a deal or really embarrassing me? Oh, it asked me for permission. Don't worry about that. Yeah, but you're not going to look at everything. You know, you're giving your life over to this thing. Well, the only other thing I wanted to talk about before we get into our convo with Melanie was, I think, a confluence of two things that to me. Molotov Mondays? Yeah, gosh. For those who didn't see, it's important to laugh, I guess, but this is pretty serious. There were two attacks on Sam Altman's home. One of them through a Molotov cocktail over the gate. And then another was like a drive-by, you know, firing rounds into the side of the property. Thankfully, no one was hurt. And Sam posted a blog about it over the weekend that I'm sure a lot of listeners of the show have already seen. To me, this is obviously a horrible thing and attacks on tech executives. I mean, I think it's a horrible thing. I think it's a horrible thing. and recruiting and virtue signaling to everyone in the bubble that they aren't paying attention to the fact that people are rioting about this stuff. Has Dario written the only bad news essay? I guess the Citrini, as you say. But that was not a frontier lab. Ullman has a lot of stuff about, you know, needing universal basic income because of such mass unemployment that's going to come, right? He has that world coin startup that he's involved with. I mean, they all talk about this stuff. I just, I think there's a recalibration that needs to happen. And I'm not really sure what it's going to look like. But I mean, I think the attacks on Ullman really show the stakes here. And I just hope that the industry wakes up. I mean, you kind of probably get, if I had to guess, you get lulled into a sense of this is just the way it is when you're an open AI employee and you're leaving the office and you see a sign. Reminding you to hide your badge as you walk out, which is something I noticed when I was walking out of open AI a few weeks ago. I remember even going a couple years ago, and this was well before all this mass unemployment rhetoric. And I was asking, like, why is this an unmarked building? Like, why is like, there's no way of knowing that this is the headquarters. And people were telling me at the time that they were already getting crazies showing up talking about AGI and trying to find AGI. And, you know, this is just the stakes of this technology feel so high now. That I just hope that people don't get used to going into their own marked office every day and ignoring it, you know? Well, on a lighter note, today, we have Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins to talk about some upcoming news they're dropping. Excited for this one. It's been in the works for a while. We've wanted to have Melanie on the show. She's obviously a super impressive founder and Canva is a very important company. We recorded this last week, right before their big event in LA, which is, happening the day this episode drops. And they've got a lot of big AI news, which we get into. So thanks again to Melanie. Let's roll it. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery, and access better data across the business. The result? You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Hi, Melanie. How are you? Great to see you. I'm well. How are you doing? Good to see you. Are you in the throes of Create Rehearsals, or what's going on? Yeah, it's all happening. Create Rehearsals, keynote prep, like the products, coming. It's all happening right now, but it's exciting. Ellis has done some keynote prep in his time. Yeah, I'm curious, like, what does that look like these days? I feel like some folks, including Apple, are just like, we're just going to do this all in post and just record it and then make everybody sit in an audience and just play the video. But there seem to be a lot of different approaches on, like, where is the leverage with the keynote these days? I don't know. What's your take? Oh, that is totally, that would be a very relaxed approach, wouldn't it? We are having an audience of 5,000 people in our community come. It's a big event. We have a whole day of workshops and training, and it's a very live experience. I think the keynote goes live, like, an hour or something after it's recorded. So it's minimal post. I got to see Jensen do his keynote at GTC a few weeks ago, and he doesn't have a script. He just freewheels it for, like, almost three hours. Are you very scripted? How regimented are we talking? The masculine urge to freewheel your two-hour keynote. I have to say we're a little more prepped than that. But we also have a lot more, let's say, creative flair you might see coming out next Thursday. There's a lot of elements and creative industries coming together, which we're excited to bring to life. So there is a little more than just freestyling it for two hours. How many cooks are in the kitchen approximately at this moment? Because I feel like keynotes are just so high pressure because they're live, and I feel like everybody wants to have their two cents, which can get a little crazy at times. It starts off pretty small, but then as we come up to the day, we've now got hundreds of people working, because there's going to be, like, hundreds of people on stage. I don't know exactly the number on stage. So there are a lot of people prepping all sorts of things to bring to life on the day. So there's. I'd say hundreds of people involved, actually, at this point. Melanie, how big is Canva these days? Like, how many users do you guys have? I don't know if you disclose revenue. I know you're private. But give us a sense of the scale. Because Crate is such a big thing. I mean, thousands of people. We've got more than a quarter billion people using Canva each month, and we reached four billion in annualized revenue in December. How do you think about the growth? Like, has it always been kind of, the last few years, pretty steady? Or have you had kind of an inflection moment recently? Pretty steady for the last decade. We've been in the launch for 12 years now, and it's just been growing rapidly, actually, since day one, which has been pretty epic. And continuous and steady. But I think because so many people have been using Canva, like, one of our favorite charts is this cohort chart. And you can see people that joined in 2013. There's more people using Canva and paying for it today than there were back in 2013. There's more people from that cohort upgrade to our paid products and use it more over time. But then the same for every year since. So I think that's why it has been very continuous over the last year. I'm curious, how would you describe the growth? Is it moving into new teams within companies? Or is it just kind of more companies using the baseline stuff that's been there and been popular? Or how are you thinking about that? It's all of the above. So it's new people that have never used Canva before. It's people using Canva for more of their workflow. So they might come in to create a presentation and they stay for all of their docs and whiteboarding and all the other things that you can create in Canva. So having that interoperable visual suite at the heart of it, it means you can learn one product and then you can take that to every other product like websites and so forth. And we've got 100 million teachers and students using the platform around the world. We've rolled out into 21 countries and then thousands upon thousands of districts, small businesses, individuals. It's really the full gamut. It's quite fun when you look at a chart breakdown of the different departments of a company using Canva. It actually mirrors their company. So there's more sales folk at their company. There's more sales folk using Canva. There's more engineers that they're working with at the company. There's more engineers using Canva. So it really is a very broad split. Ellis has a question that he needs to ask you about his clients. I just want to make sure you ask this. Thanks for teeing me up, Alex. I work with tech startups and I feel like we've got the deck ones. We've got the video ones. We've got the doc ones. We've got the design ones, obviously. There's such a vengeful spirit. Is it really? Is it really vengeful or just like people want what Melanie's got? You just made two acquisitions, right? We did, yes. Yeah. So maybe you could buy some of these that Ellis was talking about. Well, I think part of the question is just about the classic bundling/unbundling idea. Every company starts small, gets big, adds more features, becomes a suite, wants to be for everybody, and then the startups come and peel out the individual use cases, make them simple again. Where do you feel like you stand in that trajectory right now? I think if you look at the first decade of Canva and the genesis of the company, there was a very fragmented industry to just create a piece of design. You have to go to all these different products, go in different template sites, photography and illustrations and layouts, create a piece of software for everything you want to design. Our whole thing was taking all of that fragmentation and bringing it into one simple platform and making it accessible to the world. I think what's really interesting is actually if you look at the parallels of creation today, actually that fragmentation is occurring now with all the different AI tools, all the different things that have your memory and your context. The modern process of creation, we're really excited, again, we bring it all into one simple platform and making it accessible to the world, which is exactly what we've been doing with Canva AI 2.0. We're really excited about that. We're really excited about it. We're very excited about everything being in one place once again. Melanie, you're from Perth, right? That's correct. It's one of the most remote cities on earth, if not the, right? You're correct. I would love to know how people feel about AI in Perth right now. I don't know if you still live there or you spend a lot of time there, but Perth and Australia in general, I mean, we talk about it. We talk to people in the SF bubble all the time. Obviously, Ellis and I are pretty AI-pilled. We're using stuff constantly. I'm curious in Australia. I mean, we don't have many Australian founders on the show and I would just be curious to hear what it's like down under great question i so i live in sydney now and i think that like everyone has their own experiences with ai and with different products and you know i guess some people find it if they're using a certain tool one of the issues that a lot of people have is they have to prompt and reprompt and go over and over again to try to get the output that they want i think there's a lot of problems that we're trying to solve with the existing tools um with canva ai 2.0 so for example that prompting reprompting thing now with canva ai you can just prompt it once and then you can create the design that's in a fully editable layered format and then you can just go in and edit any aspect of it and you can have the normal tools that you know and love in canva and so i think that like everyone has their own experiences i can't speak for all of australia here right now but you know in in the states where it's always like oh like you know non-technical people are pretty negative on ai they fear about job loss they don't see it as like an uplifting thing and then in other parts of the world it's a little different i was just curious if it alex thinks everybody has heard of open claw when no one has that that is fair i think you know for everything with like old technology it's like is it help people aren't except for perhaps in silicon valley waking up and thinking about ai every single day it's waking up and like they have a job to do a teacher has a classroom to teach and so yeah a small business has a small business to run a and so forth like everyone has their own job to do and so where we really the way we really think about it at canva is like how do we empower people to achieve the goal that they have in the real world um with technology and ai is another tool in our toolkit to help people achieve their goals it was why we were so excited to launch learn grid which is specifically for teachers around the world um so it has curriculum aligned content materials so if you're in year five you're teaching maths in a certain district or in a curriculum aligned content thing i would get created really easily and then if you're a small business being able to come into canva ai and just like get research done on something get a debt created um have things happen on brand and to be able to collaborate with your team i think sometimes it can feel a little scarier when it's like away from you and you're kind of hearing about these things you know and the messaging and the media but then when you actually can use it and actually helps you to achieve your goal and you help your helps you and your team to be more efficient and work done i think that's when it becomes a lot more approachable you know our goal is always to make complex things simple and so we're really excited about bringing the power of ai to help people achieve their goals in the world i think that sometimes it can sound like there's this thing that's going to happen to us but actually what we are really working very hard at is ensuring that that thing is actually just another tool to empower you to achieve your goals so it's a very strong focus for us actually yeah i uh i have a lot of respect for anybody who's building for everyday folks call them normies or otherwise because i do feel like that's a lot harder realistically to do what do you think i mean you talked about making the complex simple but do you have any like internal principles for that bar or what it means to design something that you feel like everybody from the teacher to the professional could use because i feel like that's quite a hard skill this is one of the other reasons i appreciate apple's you know forward moves with ios and otherwise they've been able to stay up to speed on a lot of this stuff while i don't know about i don't know about liquid glass and the new phone app in particular but um yeah i mean it's a tough line isn't it to try and like bring new tech to everybody how do you think about that it's what we've been doing really for a decade so like we've always tried to give people the latest and greatest technology but in a really accessible way that helps them to achieve their goals you know when we launched ai back in 2019 with a background remover and people of course loved it because they didn't have to do this manual task but you like have a photo and you want the background room class like banger feature yeah you just disappeared um but even if you'd be fast rewind even further back to canvas chef which was actually canvas name before we launched canva um and that was all about being able to like you would have a search box and the idea was you could just search for whatever you want from a lab report to a brochure or whatever and it would be able to create it on the fly and then you'd got jump into the the canvas chef editor and be able to um like move things around and drag and drop and collaborate exactly as you are today it was just like my prototype before we actually built canva and i think it's kind of interesting that like now if you look at canvas chef and you look at canva ai 2.0 the ui is actually remarkably similar that you've just got a search box you can jump in but then you would go into the editor and you can collaborate and do all the standard things that you want so i think like while ai is obviously very new and certainly generative ai and all the things that are now is able to happen with i think to the standard person they're just trying to get their goal done and so if we can help facilitate that um it's pretty powerful are you telling teachers about agents are we just letting that be a word that just kind of doesn't need to exist in their mind space you know they don't need to know about it we're going to talk about agentic orchestration but we also don't expect them to specifically care um i think that like you know we've got hundreds of people working behind the scenes to make this agentic orchestration really awesome but from a user's perspective they just like say the thing that they want they get it in a layered format that works the way they know and love from canva and then they can just use it how they would normally use canva are you going to have an actual orchestra at create though yes so we have uh we one of our team members said it is like an orchestra and so um for the internal team celebration we put together like a a team orchestra it was hilarious um but we're actually getting a professional orchestra which i am yet to see that are going to be coming on stage next thursday and they're dressed as agents like from the matrix or how are we i think we're giving standard standard orchestral uh uh blacks i believe but there will be a little glitter there's gonna be a lot going on this is a big moment for you guys i mean looking at uh what your team sent over there's a lot here and how you're changing the interface and it really is consistent with i think a lot of the themes else and i've been covering on the show for the last six or so months you know we've had dylan field from figmon and we've had a lot of these kind of platform tool companies talking about how they're adapting to ai and a line that struck me from your all's release that the team sent was we're moving from a design platform with ai tools to an ai platform with design tools what does that actually mean that is a really great question so from a user's standpoint there's a lot of things that just stay exactly the same as canva our mission is to empower the world to design is to empower the world to design is to empower the world to design is to empower the world to design if you come into canva and you hate ai you actually can just completely use canva exactly the way you always use it but i guess behind the scenes canva ai is a new tab that you can access on the home page or inside the editor while you're actually designing and that is where all of the power of that agentic orchestration comes to life so you can type it whatever it is that you want in um and then you can get your job done and so previously in canva you had all these different really great ai tools but they're all like quite fragmented and i think that's where you're going to end up i think that's where you're going to end up i think that's where you're going to end up and so you have to you'd get the tool at your hand when you needed that tool you have to know where to find it um and so with canva ai 2.0 it brings that all together um into like the one the one space and so you can just type it in and it will go and find you the tool rather than you having to go in oh my god this is incredible it's pretty cool i literally had this problem where i'm not like a power user i have canva installed and i needed to get something updated with my logo for my newsletter to send to someone i needed to do it faster than i needed to do it and i needed to do it faster than i needed to do it faster than i needed to do it fast and i was like how fast can i do this what tool do i need to use i used google i was like you should try canva and then i open it i look at all the menus and i'm like this is going to take me like a while to figure out and it was melanie it was so basic i don't even know what it was it was like confer it was like increasing the size of something i feel so dumb about it it's one of the main ai use cases is being able to click all the buttons in the menus for you that you didn't even know existed and that applies to like literally every product and it's pretty wild like now with dictation you can just like literally speak into your phone like i've been designing presentations like when i get an idea at midnight it's like literally on my phone and i can just dictate what i want and then it will just like create it for me and then i can do iterative editing because of the way it now works inside the editor oh actually i didn't mean that i wanted this other thing or i want to rearrange or try out this idea and so all of a sudden you can have all of the design happening just by dictation on your mobile phone which is pretty wild well so let me ask you i know you know with the mission about empowering everybody to design then you have some new use cases here one of the ones that y'all mentioned was building a custom pitch deck for a customer based on every email you've ever exchanged with them sounds great but it also sounds like is that not the work that that person was already you know is that not their job and like where's the design left in that in that type of world or are you thinking of design as potentially something bigger than that like coming up with the framework for the decks and then that gets adapted you know or customized like what is that job that that person's doing anymore i think that's what's kind of exciting in this new era every like in our company every role is changing what it actually means and in fact if you look at the role of a designer over the years that's changed like if you go back to the in each of the different ages like the role of a designer has been completely different depending on the tools that are available i think that what we're going to see is a lot more brand system designers coming to bear as a really important role so things that might have been a graphic designer before just like creating a one-off graphic is all of a sudden creating the brand system for the entire company to operate from and it means that the sales team that often gets neglected by the brand designers all of a sudden can have this system where the brand designers are working on the templates that then the rest of the organization are able to utilize and then all of a sudden every single customer can have a personalized pitch deck with all of the up-to-date information that can feel a lot more personal to that person or to that customer and so I think you know we look at a lot of the jobs that are disappearing but with AI and in fact with every technological revolution a lot of new jobs come to bear and so things like a brand system designer I think are exactly in that category where it's there's so much of a brand that is instilled in the template and in the way it's actually laid out and the information is like a much more of a curation job as well. Is what you're describing how Canva is changing internally too like are you are you creating new kinds of roles? Very much so pretty much like every role today is different from the other. The way it was three years ago if we look at the way our engineers work it's completely different if we look at what our product designers do they're creating prototypes if we look at what our PMs do and the way they do their research it's completely different. It's all you know the same like underlying principles are the same like building great products for our customers that doesn't change but the way we actually get our work done or the way we create brand templates across the organization like all of these things are certainly changing and you know we've invested very heavily in upskilling our team upskilling our systems to help everyone get the job done. I can definitely vouch for the fact that all designers just want to design brand systems or design systems. I think that's definitely true but I know like one big question with this kind of like the whole debate if you've heard it about friction versus frictionless and what you might gain or lose. Where do you feel like the design creativity is going to live? I mean is it that clear of a wall between the exploration stage and the scale stage? For me design is always about like taking an idea and turning that into reality and there's so many stages of design. Sometimes I can think because I just have an idea that I like actually going through the prototyping phase actually helps bring that to life and adds more color and then I refine like sometimes 100 times after after that point in time and sometimes for me I have an idea but actually writing it out like prose is really helpful and sometimes so I think you know at its essence we're always taking an idea from chaos all the way to clarity and there's lots of different tools and mechanisms that help to bring that to life and so I think that the role of design is actually more important now than ever before. When we launched Canva at the start people were like what are designers going to do? Canva is going to take away all design work and actually if you look at the last decade there's way more design it's creating way more visual content than ever before and I think that next leap is also going to be true. Brand designers are going to be creating, there's going to be a lot more brand designers required because they're going to be creating the templates. Actually the brand intelligence that we're launching right now it really leans heavily on the template side because a template actually imbues so much design principles and brand knowledge in a template itself so we yeah we're really excited about the way that will come to life as well and the new roles that will be created because of this. When your advertising operations fall out of sync everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result less time spent on operations more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. You think you know a browser but Gemini and Chrome that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. You've got all these connectors that you're plugging into Canva now where it's sucking in context from Google Slack CRMs etc right so it's like the through line of create this year seems like Canva is becoming this hub and I'm curious about that philosophy because just to bring up like Figma again he started basically making Figma like an MCP node where all of a sudden like Claude can talk to Figma. Do you want that? Do you want the big assistance AI assistance to be kind of at a higher abstraction level level of the interface into Canva and vice versa because right now it seems like you're wanting everyone to bring stuff into Canva not necessarily have Canva open up. Is that is that fair? Am I understanding the philosophy? Oh it actually works both ways so we already collaborate really closely with OpenAI and Anthropic. Canva is one of the top apps on both platforms. But then equally on the other side of the fence having Canva be the platform that is able to bring all the information in so when you're creating that pitch deck it can you know bring in the latest calendar invite in your Gmail context. So it's both. I was I was curious if it's going to be both because this seems more like pulling in and I know you had the open the chat app and all that but I wasn't sure if this was a shift. Yeah no no very much so bi-directional. Are you able to break down what people are asking for when they're doing it through ChatGPT or Claude? I wonder just like how much design work is actually the stuff that gets marketed like generating logos and stuff like that or if if that's just kind of the flashy piece and most of it is is scaling executing automating. Yeah so one of the things that was pretty cool like the more content that is being created on these third parties like on Claude and ChatGPT actually the more content that then gets brought into Canva is actually so much so that we launched something called Magic Layers recently because so many people are creating images in all sorts of places on the web and then actually get really frustrated because they want to be able to like actually edit the text or you know edit whatever format it might be. We've had eight million uses of that in the first four weeks of um since that product launched so I think that you're across in Canva you can design presentations and I think we've had 100 million people creating a presentation each month now so yeah there's it's a very large plethora I think um being able to take something take an idea and turn that into a design we kind of have a lot of time to do that. We kind of cover that cover that full gamut. What's your view of the sas-pocalypse convo right now uh being someone who is very AI native and you're working with the assistants and the chatbots but you're also doing your in-house AI uh you probably are pretty glad I've had to guess if you're not a public company right now because uh it's rough out there uh but curious yeah how you're viewing all that what you think people are maybe getting wrong where they're getting right. I know we've been doing this for a while now we've been you know Canva's been around for 12 years and we've been kind of things like go um yo-yo like you know at one stage they'll be like growth at all costs and then the next stage is like profitability we've been fortunate we've been profitable for nine years so we've kind of avoided that yo-yo but at one stage people like spend all your money in the bank account and you'll be fortunate you've got a very sufficient bank balance so it kind of means that we don't need to worry too much about what's happening in the macro economic environment and we just really focus on what we can control which is delivering a great product to our community and I think like being out of Silicon Valley it does create a little bit less noise for us um and we just really focus on delivering a great product to our community and I think that they're going to love hopefully what we're bringing out. Well being profitable certainly helps that's definitely not in vogue in Silicon Valley so uh no and sometimes it is like I think after COVID it became cool but we're like we've been profitable for like you know five years now now it's nine years so yeah it's we kind of just we really focus on just building a good company. I know there are a lot of rumors of the one person billionaire company are you seeing the team size actually change as a result for camera users as more people are able to do stuff on their own? For us like having we've got very very large ambitions we always say we're one percent of the way there and so actually our team's like way more productive and can do way more things but that we say one percent because we just keep growing our dreams for what we'd like to be able to do with the company and so it just means that we're able to do a lot of things. We're able to do more things and like serve our customers better. One of my favorite things is we get one million requests from our community each year of things that they'd love to see in the product and we're actually launching I think it's 41 at our event and so you know just being able to serve our customers better to be able to help them achieve their goals. We've been really investing heavily in our team in upskilling everyone we have something called AI Discovery Week we have specialty training so each specialty is going through the transition of learning the new skills for this new company and we're able to do a lot of things. We really see it that we can do so much more. Let's coin it right now long tail feature development. I feel like you're going to be able to just come up with ideas and as long as you can get sign off I mean it doesn't even have to live somewhere in the app. If someone can ask for it it could still work you know and obviously that's still resources but I do think that is going to be fun. Well she gives the sign off Ellis so that's easier for her. Yeah I mean to the point about one percent I mean it's in the press release up high it says the ambition is simple to be the place where all of your work gets done. I mean that's putting you competition with everyone? I mean, how do you think about that? I mean, is Canva, is your goal really to have Canva become like everything that, you know, Microsoft and Google and Notion and all these companies are doing? Like you want all of that activity to be possible inside Canva? The way we think about it is just like, what, what do you, what was best for a user? And like having to go and navigate lots of different systems and lots of different tools is kind of annoying. And so having that all in one place kind of makes sense. But then that doesn't mean we don't go and like have access to lots of different tools and places that you might be doing your work elsewhere, but being able to have that all at your fingertips or at the end of your query and it just having all that context. For a long time, our goal has been just to bring productivity and creativity together in a way that hadn't been done before. And so that's where we saw as a huge gap in the market and we're certainly doubling down on. Seems like it's got to be a stressful. Time to be a founder right now. How big does the sweet go? What do we try and eat? What do we let leave? You know, I don't know. She seems pretty Zen Ellis. You don't seem too stressed, especially a week before create, but are you? Yeah. To that question. Are you at all about any of this? I mean, open, open AI, you know, as, as you may have read on sources.news is kind of going through a bit of a, you know, simplification retraction of some of these, some of these bigger ideas back towards simplicity. Um, it's tough to know when to stop when you can kind of create everything. There's a lot of things that have changed, like that, what we can do technologically has changed radically for the better as far as like actually being able to bring our mission to life. But our mission is actually very stable. Our mission to empower the world to design, we break down into what we call our mission pillars, empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device. And then every year we pick off, like, what is the next most important strategic goal under each of those mission pillars to bring to life? And so, you know, we see a lot of people start off with social media, graphics and marketing materials, and those presentations, docs, whiteboards, websites, Canva code, and so forth. And so it's kind of like, there's some things that change radically. And then there are other things that are like, actually quite, quite the same. And you know, because we've been pursuing the same mission, the same strategy for such a long time now, it, it does take a little bit of the pressure off because you kind of know that, like, how these things will play out. It's tough, though, isn't it? I mean, you guys have a scheduler inside the product now, right? For scheduling meetings for yourself? Oh, it's so cool. Yeah. It's actually crazy. I can schedule with 15 different apps right now. I don't know which one to choose. I mean, or is the idea that it's just whatever one's in front of you? Yeah. So what's really cool is like, so for the other day, I was, I had, we just got connectors to work. And I was able to like, I was like, tell me about my week coming up and create me a docker unit about it to help me plan for the week. And I was able to go into my calendar, like, look at my schedule, actually tell me how to optimize my time. Yeah. And I found out, like, I was like, it said that I had a massage coming up. It said I had a hectic week. And I was like, I didn't think I had booked a massage. And I was like, Is there a problem? I looked at my calendar, like, actually, my partner had booked me one. And so it's kind of fun just being able to have, like the document that you typically have to go and like have, go and create with like all these disparate tools, just like be able to be created on the spot. Or even like research. Usually, if you're doing research, you have to go and scour lots of different places. And all of a sudden, the research can actually just get handed to you in a document that you can just like, share and collaborate on. It's kind of cool. You might be able to tell, I kind of love being able to take technology, like utilize it to help achieve goals. And like the amount of new technology that we now have inside our product and have built. It's pretty extraordinary, like the way these things will come together in completely unexpected ways. A lot of what you just described, I'm using cloud for right now. And I'm curious, since you've been using, you know, the AI 2.0 stuff, are you using the other big assistants less? Do you think this eats into their time if Canva users embrace all this stuff? I think we're just at such the early stages of all of this, like the number of people that are currently using AI tools or even using, you know, is like quite small compared to the number of people on the internet, for example. I think there's going to be a lot that transpires over the years to come. That's a very diplomatic answer. I mean, because I think, you know, it's tempting, right, to like add some of this stuff to the product, just philosophically. I mean, shout out to a couple clients, Cosmos and Mobin, you know, which are two very different types of inspiration, like one for kind of like more lifestyle art photography design, one for user interfaces. And, you know, that's kind of what they want to be is the research workspace where you can assemble stuff using powerful tools, better libraries, this or that. And then, yes, there is certainly a value to not have to copy and paste to be able to have it within your workspace. Yeah. I don't know if the jury is still out on kind of how people are going to use each of these. But it's interesting. There's just so much overlap right now, I feel like. And indeed, I mean, you have a huge edge just being the place where a lot of people already are. And you have the edge of trying to bring it to them seemingly successfully in a simpler way. You know, so there's that as well, just kind of the first mover advantage or even the distribution, if you will. Yeah, I think we're so early in the innings of like, what is the new software stack for companies? What's the new software stack for people at home? What's the new software stack for a teacher? I think, you know, it's so early for all of this that I think there's going to be a space for a lot of companies over the years to come and companies that serve the community really well. You know, Canva AI, like is obviously the goal is like everything in one place to like help streamline fragmented workflows, which we think is hopefully a pretty compelling proposition to our community. I saw that you all trained your own model for this. I'm curious what that process was like. Had you done a foundational model before? Like what was what was that like? A huge effort over many years. We have a team of researchers of over 100 people now that have been working really heavily on this goal. We had this interoperable format between all the different types of products in Canva, which was a huge investment for last decade. The same format for representation as a website, as a video, as a document. So we knew that if we could crack that, it was going to be a huge unlock for what we could do with AI inside our product. And so it was really exciting to crack that. And then in October last year, we had this really exciting breakthrough as to how we could actually bring that to life in our product with Identik editing. And so that was a pretty significant and exciting unlock, which is where we think. Do you have a good name? You know, these frontier models, they need names. You got a good name for a model. The Canva design model. We haven't put like a scale. Well, this gets to your idea of like simplicity and the user shouldn't know. Right. I'm being kind of facetious, but like it, I'm just curious, too, for these for, you know, these big consumer companies that invest in their own models, you know, it's the AI race is always contextualized by the labs and the models that people can name. And it's like, well, there's a lot happening with these other big scale companies and not all of them are models, but some of them increasingly are. Well, you could do what all the L.A. parents are doing and name their child like Picasso or Matisse. You could always just do that. I mean, I think it brings back to your earlier point around like simplicity, like customers don't really care what's underneath the hood. They come in with a job to do out in the real world, teach a classroom, you know, market their business, whatever it might be. And I think that's what's exciting is that we're able to obstruct a lot of the complexity like Canva uses our own models in where we need to have expertise around design. And then we partner with a lot of other great companies and we're able to bring that technology in. But from the customer standpoint, they don't need to know like the hundred different things that are happening behind the scenes to help deliver their goal. They just need to see the thing at the end looks great and helps to achieve that original goal that they set. So we try very intentionally to abstract a lot of the complexity behind the scenes. I know any model has its own expertise and tastes. Do you feel like you've identified any? Because I mean, there's got to be something, right? In the world of design, there are just so many opinions on what good design is. What's the bent of the model that you've trained? So with the heritage, it's really fun. Does it like liquid glass? One of my favorite things, I don't know if this particularly answers your question, but it is my new favorite thing. We've got this thing, it's in the onboarding for Canva AI, and you can create what's called an about me page. And it goes, it's the first book in your memory library. And what it does, it takes all of your designs, like you have to click the buttons, they like create my about me book. And then it creates all of your designs and documents. And it actually creates a page that explains your preferences for things. And it's so fun because it like, I didn't actually believe until I saw it with my very own eyes, how much knowledge about you as a person is instilled in all of your designs and documents. And it was really interesting. So I guess, and then that actually becomes the memory that then powers all of your other designs. So what's your aesthetic? It actually got into my aesthetic, but it also got into my, it like kind of felt like a fun, weird personality profile. Cause it like, it understood like that I have a two-step plan, build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can do. And like, it understood like the way I think behind things. So I guess the idea is that it doesn't have a stand preference, but it really is your preference. It's like, you've got your brand system in there, and then you've got your memory documents. Says Mel. I personally think vaporwave is pretty passe, but if that's your thing, all right. Well, actually I'm going to have to say you're a Batman jockey, minutes on the product. I'm curious. Mel, you have a keynote rehearsal to get back to and I have to catch a flight, but I did want to know, maybe we can end it here. You do this big event every year. You get thousands of people. It's a spectacle. You're going to have an agent orchestra, et cetera. I'm sure there's going to be other special surprises. What do you do right after all this? Do you immediately go on a vacation? Do you do not disturb and you disappear? What's your post create flow? It's a great question. Immediately after, I'm actually an introvert and I really just like a dark room. Well, thank you for being on with us. Just like low stimulation because it's always, it's so fun. And there's like, we've got 5,000 people there and like lots of, a lot of really high energy. And so there's like a very, very relaxed, very chill at home. Maybe a massage. Exactly. What's happening in the cave? Are you reading, gaming, catching up on reality TV? Meditating, it sounds like. Yeah, I've actually, I've got into meditating. I've got into singing balls recently, which has been a very, maybe that's why I've seen them. Singing balls are great if you haven't ever tried one of them before. We'll have to give that a try. Well, Mel, we really appreciate your time, especially this week. Congrats and good luck on the keynote. Thank you so much. Break a leg. That's it for this week's show. Thanks to Melanie for coming on. It was a great time. If you liked the show, don't forget to like and subscribe everywhere you get podcasts. We are access.show online, and you can find us in video at AccessPod on YouTube. If you really liked this episode, we would just love a five-star review or even a share with a friend. It really helps us grow. Indeed. You can find my newsletter at sources.news. And you can find me @hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.company for all the stuff we do. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. All your startup storytelling needs. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and this show is produced by Hooked Creators. Bye. Booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise to a stay surrounded by nature. That's nice. Go on. Book it. It's easy. Booking.com. Booking. Yeah. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space. 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