Canva quietly built a $32B empire — now it's redefining how the world creates with AI.
In this deep dive, I interview Canva Co-founder & CPO Cameron Adams about how the company went from a web-based underdog to the OS for visual content, used by over 240M people every month.
You can also watch it on YouTube, Spotify, or X/Twitter:
Some topics we explore:
1. Why Canva is used by over 240M people every month.
2. The 3-tier Canva AI strategy: deep tech, partnerships, and marketplace.
3. How they're bringing AI video and code generation to their platform.
3. How batch creation and real-time analytics enable mass personalization.
5. Why Canva believes the future of design isn’t about features, but outcomes.
Whether you're a founder, designer, or product nerd, this is a masterclass in scaling creativity at global scale. Hope you enjoy!
Transcript formatted for reading:
Bilawal Sidhu: What happens when you take professional design tools out of the hands of the 1% and give them to everyone? You get Canva, a company that's quietly amassed 240 million monthly active users, powering everything from TikToks to Fortune 500 pitch decks. Now, imagine having a graphic designer, video editor, and creative director at your fingertips, all powered by AI. So, how did Canva pull this off and where are they going next? Today, I'm sitting down with Cameron Adams, Canva's co-founder and chief product officer, to dive deep into how they're building the everything app for visual communication. What the future of human AI collaboration looks like and why AI might just create more creative jobs, not less. Let's get into it.
Cameron Adams: The vision for Canva has always been about reducing this job that could take months down to minutes, and AI is letting us take it from minutes to seconds. You had tools that 1% of the world could possibly use. So we set out to create this product that enabled the other 99% of the world to access design.
Bilawal Sidhu: More than 230 million people design with Canva every month. 373 designs created every single second. 240 million monthly active users. That is a flabbergasting number if you think about it. Now it's just table stakes for making a pitch deck, like, that's the tool you use.
Cameron Adams: So that quickly takes one design that you're creating and multiplies it by 500 and then lets you do that in the space of minutes.
Bilawal Sidhu: Do you expect it to change how people build interactive experiences?
Cameron Adams: It is literally months to create some of these things that you can now generate through Canva code in minutes. Companies like Adobe very much approach it from the opposite direction. So when they try and bring something like a Canva to to life, they just don't have the same DNA.
Bilawal Sidhu: Cameron, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Cameron Adams: Such a pleasure to be here, Bilawal.
Bilawal Sidhu: Congratulations, hot off the presses. Canva is number five on the CNBC Disruptor 50 list. Sounds like an incredible validation of the journey you've been on.
Cameron Adams: That is a pretty good reflection of of where we've been and also where we're going. Still disrupting.
Bilawal Sidhu: Well, speaking of the journey, let's go back to the genesis story. How did Canva go from being a niche design tool to one of the largest SaaS companies in the world, almost reframing the entire market for design and creation tools?
Cameron Adams: Started out in 2012. Design for everyone was a category that did not exist. And we all realized the immense power of design to enable people to achieve their goals, but the fact that it was highly inaccessible to most of the world. You had tools that 1% of the world could possibly use, that they could afford and that they could understand and that they could actually get anything good out of. So we set out to create this product that enabled the other 99% of the world to access design. We started small. Uh we mostly focused on social media in the very early days, but in the intervening decade, we've expanded to presentations, you can create T-shirts, videos, websites, pretty much any visual content can be made on Canva. And it has truly inspired people. We've got now 240 million people that use the product every month, and they use it for an incredible variety of things. But it's really fascinating to dive into each and every design story of every person that uses Canva, because they're using Canva for impacting their own lives, whether that's putting a poster up in the window of their store or creating a pitch deck for their first business, or helping their nonprofit get more donations. Every design that's created on Canva has this amazing story behind it.
Bilawal Sidhu: I love that. Yeah, and 240 million monthly active users. That is a flabbergasting number if you think about it, and it goes to show that everyone can be creative if they have the right set of tools. But I have to go back to the start and ask you, you know, one of the unique things about Canva was it's completely web-based. And I still remember back then, you know, of course there's like the Adobe incumbent tools like Photoshop, what not. Sketch was super popular, like native apps were super hot back then. Y'all went web first. Did it feel risky back then betting on emerging web standards to build a freaking design editor in the browser?
Cameron Adams: I I love that you captured the exact zeitgeist of tech at the time. It didn't feel risky to us. It felt like a really interesting thing to explore because one of the things about the existing tools was the kind of barriers to access. Uh and downloading a big piece of software and learning how to use it over six months was just not something that people were going to tackle in order to get a very small job done. So giving them easy access to the tool through their web browser and letting them get up to speed in seconds, not months, um was a really critical part of helping Canva grow in the early days. We think that's the only way that you can truly grow a product and scale it. When you're talking about 240 million people, you need to have all these inroads through which they can reach the product, and the only way that we could think of doing that was through a web based product.
Bilawal Sidhu: Yeah, it's funny. It's like my dad uses Canva for his Substack and like Twitter account now and it's it's kind of wild. It's like the time to first creation is just so low, like it does feel so accessible that you can create something versus, yeah, like you're saying grappling with convoluted tutorials and following stuff along just to get to something that feels like the equivalent of a hello world example.
Cameron Adams: I love that your dad has a substack.
Bilawal Sidhu: It's it's wild, yeah. Let's uh for a while he had more followers than me on Twitter, you know, it's just like he's got spicy hot takes on there. Um, so I am curious about the web stuff. Like did some of your work at Google give you any conviction that web was the way to go?
Cameron Adams: Uh, not specifically my work at Google. So I've been working in the web for probably a decade and a half before I got to Canva. My work at Google kind of touched upon that, and I did a lot of work there prototyping what could actually be done in a web browser. I'd written a few books on JavaScript before that. I've been in the web standards scene. I think as you mentioned, like deeply in the tech, thinking about the types of technology that we needed in a browser to actually create apps and create really interactive websites. I've been pushing the boundaries of that for a while, and Canva was just kind of the next step uh beyond that. It was very much a nexus point of for for me of my experience, what was possible, the idea of Canva itself, and it all just coming together into this neat little package where we could be on the cutting edge of what browsers could do, like we were still testing out how many images you could have in a design, how to manipulate text, like how to have all these moving parts that could be rendered on what was essentially a web page at the time. You know, web apps was still something that was forming. Just on the cutting edge and at the right time to bring that into the browser and make it accessible to people. together with our product philosophies of democratizing design, it was just the perfect storm of technology innovation, bringing product to market and having the right customer base that needed this product just at the right time.
Bilawal Sidhu: Now speaking of democratizing design, I'm curious how have Canva users changed over the years, right? Like when it started out, it was bloggers, marketers, small businesses, um you know, that wouldn't have traditionally, you know, had access to let's say like a like a staff designer or something. But eventually professionals and large enterprises came to the party and along with it immense growth. Uh talk me through the evolution of Canvas's user base.
Cameron Adams: Canvas's user base now is just so broad. It basically encompasses the entire population. And I think that has mirrored the evolution in visual content. So 2012, Instagram was still getting off the ground, you know, it was mildly popular, Pinterest was a thing, but people were mostly consuming visual content, they weren't creating it. Uh and I think in the intervening 13 years, we've seen a lot more participation in the content ecosystem. And now everyone posts photos, everyone posts designs, everyone posts videos, people create websites. You got people spinning up businesses overnight. Like it's become a lot easier to get stuff done and to do it through the medium of visual content. Small to medium businesses started coming on because they saw Canva as a really great cost-saving tool, but also a great tool to start scaling their marketing. Um and from there we introduced presentations, which opened us up to an entirely different audience that wasn't just creating social media um graphics, but also creating presentations that got shared with other people and consumed in different ways. Um we opened up to print products. So people can get uh business cards printed, t-shirts printed, tote bags printed on camera that opened us up to another audience. Um we've added on videos and websites. We have long form text documents. Uh we now have uh camera sheets to bring data into the equation. It's like each time we're kind of building out these shells that push out the audience even further and basically make our total addressable market the entire planet. A few years ago, we um added in real-time collaboration into Canva. um and that was a game changer. We added it in at just the right time. It was pre Covid. So as uh as COVID kicked off, people were looking for new ways to engage both internally, their teams and externally their customers. Uh and they needed new tools to really communicate. Um and visual communication became even more important. So we saw things like video presentations, talking heads, uh sharing your presentation decks, just more visual ways of getting across the message that you're trying to explain became super popular. So our charts for presentations went from like 20 million a month to 50 million a month in the space of a three-month period as COVID started. Um and we started seeing that mirrored across all of our design types such as videos and websites.
Bilawal Sidhu: Yeah, I love that. I mean it's a creativity suite with multiplayer, you know, baked in, you know, at a very core level and I think it makes it so useful. There's so many 3D VFX motion graphics type creatives I know that, you know, maybe previously would have scoffed at using a tool like Canva. now it's just table stakes for making a pitch deck. Like that's the tool you use and just like why go into keynote and have to deal with a bunch of like version updates and collaboration changes. It's just becomes easier.
Cameron Adams: Yeah, we've seen um professional designers really embrace it. Uh we we kind of see it as two sides of the same coin. It's like creating really highly crafted elements. Like you might create a full brand kit, logo, etc in professional software like Affinity. And then we see cameras the other side of the coin where you scale your design work across your team. Um so we constantly see uh brand teams and design teams bring camera into their organizations because they want to scale the work that they're doing across all the other teams in the organization. So when they create an amazingly well-crafted brand or amazing marketing, and then they want to get that out to the marketing team, the sales team, the internal HR coms team, everyone that has to create content and interact with the brand, they go to camera to do that because it's the easiest tool for the rest of the team to use and it's the one that enables the brand team to scale the quality that they first envisaged.
Bilawal Sidhu: Absolutely. I mean it makes a ton of sense. I think Figma is having a similar reaction where it started off as a designer first tool, but then other stakeholders that were touching the product also got into using tools like Fig Jam and other collaboration features. But it's interesting comparing y'all to, you know, your incumbents or competitors, if you want to call them that. Um most of what I'm seeing in the market is sort of like what I describe as the unbundling of the creative suites of Adobe and Autodesk. Clearly, y'all are going in the opposite direction. As you mentioned, you have presentations, photo editing, websites, video, spreadsheets, and now even vibe coding. You know, how do you think about Canva as a product today and where is it headed?
Cameron Adams: We always see that there's this ever expanding pie for us. Uh the need for visual content spans all industries, all specialties, uh and really all goals. Fundamentally, we see Canva as a goal achievement machine. We're helping people reach this end goal which is beyond the app. So when you do a presentation, you're actually trying to land your first customer or get that first investment deal. You're trying to achieve something out there in the big wide world. Behind every design in Canva, we see the goal that people are trying to make and we're always trying to move them closer towards that. When we think about designing a presentation, we also think about how to make it easy to present that presentation in both a synchronous and an asynchronous manner. We also make it easy to get insights on that presentation so you can see who's logged into your presentation, where they were engaged, how you might improve that thing and how you might better get your message out to the end customer. Uh so there's all these nuances of visual content that is being created in Canva, we want to be part of all of it because it's not just moving a few pixels around the screen that determine the success of a design, it's actually about delivering it to customers and producing an outcome, whether that's getting your investor or that's getting a donation for a nonprofit.
Bilawal Sidhu: I love that. Yeah, because visual communication is a means to an end, why not help the user with the end itself?
Cameron Adams: Exactly.
Bilawal Sidhu: What do you think about the startups in the space and also the big AI labs that are doing a bunch of research. Obviously all are working with Open AI and Anthropic and a bunch of others. And we'll definitely come to uh Leonardo and you alluded to Affinity as well. But it seems like similarly in the the startup and AI lab space, everyone's sort of deconstructed the creation problem space into all these little primitives, right? Like some folks are working on the best like sound generation approach, character animation, video generation, image editing. Uh y'all are in a very unique position to take all those Lego pieces and pull it all together. I'm curious like is that the right way to think about your AI strategy and you know, maybe are there examples of recent AI launches that are resonating the most with users as you push beyond just pushing pixels and towards this sort of like goal-oriented assistive uh creation suite?
Cameron Adams: We have a pretty multi-layered AI strategy at Canva. We think about it roughly in three buckets. There's foundational models and deep AI tech that we need to produce ourselves. Um so we are the best design tool on the planet. We have an immense understanding of how people design and the needs they have for creating visual content. We see ourselves to do the deep tech research into how AI can best develop content for that. Um so we've got actually quite a large R&D team who who focus on that and push out
Bilawal Sidhu: Shout out Balaji Joshi.
Cameron Adams: I'm glad you know him. He's one of our amazing R&D folks and I always love chatting to him because he he always blows my mind with uh what's possible right now.
Bilawal Sidhu: He's got the mad scientist energy for sure.
Cameron Adams: He definitely does. He's uh he's one of my favorite characters at Canva. Um and yeah, folks like Botic are are pushing the envelope on what's possible with AI tools right now and doing that right within Canva. Um so that's one area of of of kind of an AI pillar that we have. The other is working with the world's best partners. So you mentioned Open AI and Anthropic. Uh being able to integrate them into our product uh and do so really quickly and rapidly um has been one of the keys to us moving fast in the AI space and really capitalizing upon the opportunity that's available there. And figure out how they can plug in. Like a large language model like GPT, there's 101 things you can do with it, but plugging it into your product in the right way and meeting those user needs, helping them achieve their goals faster, quicker, higher quality, um is really important when you're thinking about developing a product. And then the third pillar we have, um thinking about AI in our product is through our ecosystem. So we've actually got a full ecosystem team who work on our app marketplace and how others can integrate into camera and integrate out of camera. and having that developer community who are really passionate about getting their stuff onto camera because it helps them scale immensely. um has really helped as well. An incredible number of AI developers have integrated into Canva. So we have, you know, talking avatars that you can put in your presentation, AI generated music that you can include in your video clips, uh countless image generation apps, all sorts of different jobs that you can be done uh through AI. Those three pillars are how we think broadly about our AI strategy, but fundamentally, we see AI as a massive unlock for everyone that we're trying to empower to design because the vision for camera has always been about reducing this job that could take months down to minutes and AI is letting us take it from minutes to seconds and really reducing that gap between idea to actual outcome.
Bilawal Sidhu: I love that. Let's let's double click on that last thing you said where, you know, you have an intention, a goal that you're trying to achieve and, you know, kind of how do you turn your mind inside out in the fastest way possible and and share that with somebody else. Um given that Canva kind of the breadth of the Canva suite, right? You know, one of the few places where as you mentioned, you know, you can design a post, edit a promo video, compile data, build a landing page with an interactive widget, all on one platform. That seems exceedingly valuable. When you think about that, are there types of AI experiences that will only be possible on Canva because you have that have that breath? And what are some examples that you're excited about on that front?
Cameron Adams: I think when you think about AI as a collaborator, it really opens up whole pallet of different interactions and product experiences that you can deliver. Um so I think at the moment a lot of people think of AI as this box that you type into and you have a bit of a back and forth with it. But when you think about visual content, there's so much need to craft the experience and allow people to interact in different ways. Sure, you might start in a chat box, you might give it a broad idea that you want to type into a keyboard, but then refining that thing, remixing those those content pieces into videos and websites, inviting others on your team into there to share in that experience, to give their input, to then jam with the AI themselves and and redesign it, change some of the colors, have different brand kits for different brands that you operate on. Like there's this whole long tail of the experience that needs to be offered that goes far beyond a prompt box. And we're thinking about all those aspects of that experience and the different types of products that you need to deliver, the different types of UI that you need to interact with that. um and making sure that it's AI first but ultimately outcome driven. And outcomes can be sharing with your team, so you need a collaborative platform to bring people on to to share your designs with so that they can have their input. Um you need to be able to quickly make refinements to it and often typing into a box to get it to move this little thing in the bottom right corner by two pixels isn't the most effective way of doing that. Um so having that what we call the final mile of being able to generate a design and then edit it just as you would any other camera design is super valuable. Um and it's been great that we've been able to build up this visual suite over the last decade that has this really in-depth design tool that you can manipulate, you can invite your team on to to collaborate with, but is also backed by AI where you can start in AI, you can call up AI at any time through the process to help you out, um and deliver that amazing content that you need at the end of the day.
Bilawal Sidhu: You know, when you start describing this vision, it feels like you're almost building like a graphic design Jarvis. And I'm kind of curious, you know, what is collaboration between human and AI look like? because you're totally right. It's it's definitely more than a prompt box. Obviously there are various multimodal interfaces that are super exciting these days. The last mile edibility that you talked about. At some point, it's easier for you to take your like two degree of freedom mouse and just like move or edit the thing yourself rather than describing it. But like what does it mean to author content at this higher level of abstraction and what's that right creation experience in your mind as you're interfacing with an increasingly powerful AI that can orchestrate a bunch of functionality for you.
Cameron Adams: I think there's these different levels that you're going to step into and get down to and then want to go out. So at the moment, a lot of people start very high in a prompt box. Like they have a very vague idea and they want to give it some shape. So they'll pass that in. gets to a certain stage where it's kind of getting what you want, but you want to add a bit more of your voice in. So you need to like go down into a deeper level to start editing it. Once you're editing it, you might reword a paragraph yourself, but then you want some ideas for different words in there. So you need to be able to call out, hey, can you give me an idea for this word or change this paragraph slightly? So you need that much more granular editing interface, but then you still need to interact with the AI. uh but then you also might need to interact with a human who has some knowledge that you don't have and that the AI definitely doesn't have. so they need to bring their context into it. So it's this really fluid workflow now between talking to a machine, doing some work yourself, getting other people to have their view and their review on it, going back to an AI to refine that a little bit and you know, through that process, you're gradually getting towards that final piece of content that you're going to be happy with. But it is this dance and figuring out the right product and the right UI that maps to that dance, I think is still under development. We're very far towards it in in our uh Canva product, but we're definitely not at the final state that it will be in 2030 or 2050.
Bilawal Sidhu: There's so much mundane work and treachery that goes into, you know, localizing assets, you know, uh formatting them for different platforms. Like do you see a world where a personalization becomes key to the Canva experience where, you know, as you said, pixels or code is like sort of a means to an end, um or the means for final delivery. But is there a world in which the content itself is responsive to the person consuming the content based on the the device that they're consuming on and is that something Canva is going to play a role in?
Cameron Adams: It's something we've touched on a bit uh over the last five or six years of product development. Um we we found it very powerful to personalize our own content. So when we're thinking about marketing for Canva, uh uh landing pages for Canva, uh serving Canva in different countries, personalizing and localizing the experience has been a massive part of our growth. Um so we started thinking about how we could bring that to our own audience, how we could help them scale their content and personalize their content. Uh that manifested through things like magic translate where in any any place in camera, you can get it to translate a text string into any of 100 different languages. So that immediately lets you take this one social post and scale it 100 X to different audiences around the world. We've started thinking about how to like 10X that experience. So how do you go from just a translate tool to enabling people to truly scale their content across multiple axes, not just language, but the visual asset that you use. instead of a shoe, you might use a purse, instead of a purse, you might have a handbag, and then you multiply that by 50 different languages and it quickly like scales. That was one of the impetus behind us launching camera sheets earlier this year. That's like the data layer that sits underneath camera um and enables you to think in a more structured way about the content that you're creating. So instead of thinking about a social media post as a bunch of pixels on the page, you can actually structure that in a camera sheet, which the camera sheet can include images and visual content. So you can have your template that you want to base something on, you can have your big product list of images that you might want to include in that template. You might have your taglines that go with each image and then you might translate each of those taglines into 20 different languages. That quickly scales into like 500 rows in a camera sheet and each of those rows corresponds to a design that you might uh export. Uh and we allow you to batch export those designs as well. So that quickly takes one design that you're creating and multiplies it by 500 and then lets you do that in the space of minutes. Um so that's like how we're thinking about scale and personalization and allowing people to bring their products to a truly global market as well. Uh when you throw AI into the mix, uh AI then has the capability of producing those sheets for you, thinking about your different markets, thinking about not just one design but 50 designs that you might need to go out to that multiply across your entire product inventory, all the languages that you're working in, different variations of tagline that you might want to produce. And then ultimately getting it out to the channels and making sure that it reaches the right audience. There's this massive unlock that AI itself can do and I think combined with data, combined with visual content creates this amazing content engine that you can now power from within Canva.
Bilawal Sidhu: That sounds really exciting and I mean even closing the loop on the thing where you know, you talked about the deck that you share and then you can look at like which parts were people skipping or you know, spending a time on and so you can refine your own pitch for example, having that feedback into the process. So the next time you're building your design, like those analytics are used to refine how you produce the creative next round. It sounds like amazing and like super useful.
Cameron Adams: Yeah, we have a part of the product called camera insights, which uh allows you to see how people are using your particular design. So that might be a presentation, it might be a website and gives you the metrics that you need to track engagement across that. Throw AI into the mix there, you can think of AI analyzing that for you and then automatically optimizing different parts of your design based on the feedback that it's getting. It's like a a really exciting area of development.
Bilawal Sidhu: On this channel, uh we often talk about the lines between code and content blurring. Um where do you see Canva code as a product evolving in the future? Like do you expect it to change how people build interactive experiences? And similarly, do you expect like a lot of the vibe coding first platforms starting to build in design primitives and kind of try to replicate a bit of the magic that you have?
Cameron Adams: Yeah, Canva code is a is a pretty exciting part of the product that we launched through Canva AI uh just two months ago. Um and it came out of us really wanting to democratize the process of bringing uh interactive ideas to life. Um because time and time again over the course of Canva, we've seen the value in prototyping, um and being able to really bring this flat static idea into a real world situation where people can click on it, engage with it, uh and get a much higher fidelity experience. Um and over the last couple of years, we'd seen a lot of our teams start to use some of the platforms to help them with their coding and to bring their their static ideas to life. And much like static design many years ago, we thought that we could democratize this process of creating interactive elements on Canva itself. And it was a natural extension for our presentation product, for our website product, being able to integrate these interactive widgets right into your design has proven to be a really engaging uh piece of content for people. in the case of most interactive content, like the amount of time it takes to engage an engineering team, communicate to them what you need, do the get them to do iteration cycles and actually build the thing. It is literally months to create some of these things that you can now generate through camera code in minutes. When you put this product in front of people, it just totally opens up their creativity. We've seen school kids get excited about ways they can um create games to help them learn. We've seen small business owners been able to um kind of uh take their workflow and their process down into a a simple app that they can they can get their customers involved with, just unlocks so many different things uh and brings a new dimension to visual creation.
Bilawal Sidhu: Yeah, the shareability is cool too. The fact that you have these widgets embedded in the Canva deck that you can then share around and other people can comment on. Yeah, just makes it, like it feels like the hub where you're building stuff. I want to talk about the ecosystem a little bit more. You know, I think I think most people in the AI community may not know this, uh but you've acquired some pretty serious AI and creation tools talent over the past like several years. Affinity, as you alluded to, but more recently, Leonardo AI. Yet these companies are operating independently. Um I'm curious why is that? Like is Leonardo a sandbox to try out the bleeding edge stuff for like the AI native creators before graduating the best ideas into Canva proper? or what's the right way to think about that strategy?
Cameron Adams: See, we take different approaches to different acquisitions based on what their product is like, what the landscape looks like, and how we think we can best work together. Uh in the case of Affinity, which is a professional design tool, uh they continue to have their super high performance uh desktop apps that professionals can use. And we very much see that as the place where professional designers can go to really craft the content that they're trying to create. So detailed illustrations, really complex photo editing, um you know, big print layouts, they can do that all in the Infinity products and then bring it over to camera when they need to scale that as I mentioned before. So when you need to take that uh intricately crafted brand and then get it out to the rest of your team and your global audience, you can do that in Canva. So those two products work really well together. um and we're quite happy to affinity for affinity to maintain its brand and its products as a kind of separate audience. Um for Leonardo, we saw immediate synergies that we could have between integrating the products together, but also keeping them separate as an amazing innovation arm and a really strong research hub. Um so Leonardo continues to innovate on their product and they can quickly move on the foundational models that they've developed for image generation. They can experiment with different UI patterns for interacting and creating those images, but they also have an incredible tech stack that underlies that, which made it really easy for us to integrate it directly into Canva as well. So image, all the image generation in Canva is now powered through uh Leonardo's Phoenix model. um and we're able to get that up to speed in three months right after the acquisition, which is an extremely fast time for actually completing an integration after an acquisition. The main reason we could do that was because they had their well- structured code, which we could integrate with and we had a team ready on our side to just bring it in and start bringing the volume of canvas 240 million users uh to their image generation model. So, I think you need to take each acquisition from different angles and figure out how it fits together like a jigsaw.
Bilawal Sidhu: You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about, you know, the sort of incumbent, the legacy competitors, whatever you want to call it like, um, and some of these are new products, right? Like so Microsoft has designer, Adobe has Express. You know, they've got ostensibly on paper, immense distribution, resources. You know, I haven't really seen these tools take off in the same way as Canva. Why do you think that is?
Cameron Adams: And I think it's because we fundamentally think about the experience that we give customers is to democratize design. We truly want to empower the world to design. Whereas, you know, companies like Adobe very much approach it from the opposite direction. They're a professional design company, they have a very fixed audience that has, you know, particular business model, particular features they need. and it's just a different philosophy in product development. Um so when they try and bring something like a canva to to life, they just don't have the same DNA. Um and you know, we strongly focus on that kind of overarching achievement of goals, which I think is a fundamental philosophy to Canva, which is somewhat different to to how I think a lot of companies approach software development, which is a lot more feature-driven. And I think getting people to that finishing post where they've created something amazing and then felt the impact of it is part of the secret of success for our community and the camera community is super passionate about camera. You go on Tik Tok, you go on Instagram, there's countless people talking about how they use Canva, tips and tricks, what they achieved with it. So I think like engaging that community, understanding their goals and creating the product that helps them achieve those goals is ultimately what camera is there to achieve. It's not to bring a particular typography feature to 500 million people or to like make vector editing democratized for the world. Uh it's really about creating amazing content that has an impact. And I think that fundamental philosophy to our product is what drives the difference.
Bilawal Sidhu: I love that. And clearly the fans of Canva, the Canva community if you will, is very excited about all this stuff. Like in preparing for this interview, I was going through, you know, the last uh you know, Canva event that y'all did where you showcased Canva AI and all these functionalities. Like, you know, AI in service of the creative workflow. And the comments are disproportionately positive, which is very rare in the in the sort of AI creation space. There's a lot of negativity, especially from people who've sort of honed that traditional craft. and it's weird to say traditional because, you know, I'm getting shit from kids who like grew up on blender and I'm like, you know, I used Maya and 3DS Max back in the day, y'all don't know what you're talking about. But the response really has been positive. Why do you think that is?
Cameron Adams: I uh I was also really pleased to see the comments on our on our YouTube video because uh yeah, it was probably the first supremely positive comment thread I have seen on YouTube. Um and it was an amazing reflection of of the community and we focus hugely on the people behind camera, like the people using it every day and who are getting value out of it. And one of the key things that we actually did at camera create was something that we call closing the loop. We expressed it as uh granting people's wishes at camera create. But making sure that we're constantly in contact and listening to our community, hearing what problems they might have with the camera product, what they might wish they could create in Canva. um and what we call closing the loop. So making sure that when they express a desire or a wish, we listen to that, we pass it on to our product teams. Those product teams develop the right solution for them, ship that solution, and then we actually go back and tell every one of our community members who talked about that thing that we now have it. And that last bit is one of the important parts of closing the loop because it really activates your community. Letting people know that something they said had an influence on a product that they use every single day is incredibly exciting for people because it shows that you're actually a two-way product. It's not just shouting into the ether. Um and it creates this amazing connection with our community who then feel like they're building the product alongside us. And when they see that we've improved it, that means they go and tell more people about Canva, which brings even more people into the camera community and it creates this amazing flywheel of positive community interaction and ultimately creating an amazing product because you can only create an amazing product for people if you're listening to those people and responding to them.
Bilawal Sidhu: I love that and and you're right, like especially if you're closing the loop on mundane but also ambitious things. The mundane part makes me wonder if some of the other incumbents have a challenge where some of their beloved software isn't as stable as it used to be. And people are like, why are there stability issues still there? And now you're pushing AI down our throats. I've definitely seen that as being a very common narrative as well. You know, I think I think it was a Patrick Collison interview where you said the real crux of Canva is storytelling. Um clearly you're pushing hard into video. I think most people may not even know there's a video editor built into Canva and you've probably seen this like trend of like the cursor for X. I'm curious, is the cursor for video editing going to be Canva?
Cameron Adams: Well, I hope it's not described as the cursor for video editing. I hope it's just the camera for video editing. Um but video editing is definitely a really important part of Canva. We've got tens of millions of people now who produce videos in Canva. I think it's at this really interesting stage. We're seeing a lot of video generation models come out. Actually, we're we've just integrated V03 into Canva. um is one of uh crucial partnerships that we've developed with Google. giving people powerful access to like video that can produce audio that syncs with the video. It's like what you can create is amazing through it. Um and I think video generation as a content type is definitely going to play an important part in terms of like video creation. But you also have this the exact same sort of problems and opportunities that we talked about earlier around properly creating content, being able to to complete your idea to do the fine grain edits that you need on top of the AI generation that you asked for at the very top, bringing other people in, getting their context, getting their input, having this true creative workflow that works between machines and humans and creates exactly the right content that brands and businesses need at the end of the day. Um and it will be this wonderful marriage between AI, proper editing tools and collaboration tools. And that's what we're aiming for with with Canva video is to have the best of all those worlds. enable you to start with some AI brainstorming, get it to create some content for you. It then puts it into a properly editable canva video that you can move the scenes around, you can extend things, you can change the music, you can edit that bit of text, you can invite your teammate in to drop that product shot in, you can have all the transitions and play around with them exactly how you need them, and then push out the highest quality video at the end of it that is human created, AI enabled, uh and the best piece of content that your organization can utilize.
Bilawal Sidhu: Well, even as you described that, I was just thinking through my current workflow for creating AI generated content and you could really collapse a lot of that complexity with the primitives you mentioned, including the spreadsheet. Like I usually literally have a Google sheet that has like the the shot list if you will, and the various iterations of the prompt that I'm trying. And then I'll go to a Figma board where I'm like storyboarding this thing. Then I'm doing video generation, then I'm bringing it into a non-linear editor. And if you could just do it all in one place, oh my god. Especially if you can tell Canva AI to do a bunch of that for me while I just sip on a peda, that'd be great. Okay. Let's end on the big picture. You know, many people worry that generative AI is going to shrink creative jobs, yet countless businesses credit Canva with giving them a professional voice, right? Like that they couldn't afford before. Over the next decade, do you foresee a net expansion or contraction of creative work? And if you were advising today's designers, developers, and storytellers, where would you tell them to lean in?
Cameron Adams: On the whole, I think it's a net expansion of creative work. So, we've had exactly the same question asked of us ever since Canva was launched. Like, do you think this spells the death of creativity? Uh and the answer is always, no, because what we're doing is democratizing creativity. We're bringing more creativity to more people. We now have 240 million people who previously did not think about design at all and it's now an integral part of their everyday life. Um so when you put amazingly democratizing tools in the hands of people, it creates more opportunity. We haven't seen designer jobs go off a cliff because of camera, we've actually seen it increase because it does it lets them scale their interactions with their team and their customers and their clients and lets them think on a different level. Uh they might not have to produce every business card that goes out. They can produce the framework that enables great business cards to be created by their team and then scale a heap of other content that they might have otherwise got to. And that's just the fundamental foundations that can but when you add AI into the mix, we very much see it as enabling greater conversations between team members, people being able to fulfill their ideas and get them out to other folks on their team faster so that they can jam on this new product idea or this new marketing that they want to push out. Uh it's not about constraiining people or removing things, it's about making a bigger pie that people can use to communicate, to scale their business, to get more ideas out into the world. So we're very optimistic with what AI is going to enable. It will engender some change. It will it will definitely change how designers, sound engineers, podcast interviewers, you know, everyone who's creating stuff that will change how they do things and the types of things they need to do, but we ultimately think that it's a level up for everyone and enables them to think about more new ideas, explore them even more deeply and do it to a higher quality than they could before.
Bilawal Sidhu: So the next generation listening to this, what advice would you give them? Like should they lean into the sort of classical tools? Should they learn the new tools? How deep should they go into AI? Any words or wisdom for them?
Cameron Adams: I kind of feel like they need to know the the start and the end and probably less of the middle. So the start is about fundamental understanding of what works, ideas, uh being able to think creatively and then think about how you're going to take that creative idea and then get it out at the very end. I think there's there's elements of editorship and taste that you kind of need in that early stage. Uh and then in the final output, like thinking about how you're going to express this to an audience, what feedback you take from that audience to then go back into the creation loop and then create more stuff. Whereas in the middle, that's all the kind of slightly boring stuff that you normally have to do to get something out. And and AI can be hugely helpful in like removing that or speeding that up or really scaling that part. So the the main interesting part is like the early stages of coming up with an idea and then getting it out to an audience and then interacting with them. And to me, and I think most people, those are the those are the best parts of the creative process. and the middle part is the part that you want to get rid of. So, really skill up in both of those areas. Um and I think particularly in your skills of editorship, being able to look at something and say that is good, that is bad, and know which direction you need to go in, um will become an increasingly important skill. And actually I wrote uh an entire blog post about that.
Bilawal Sidhu: Cool, we'll put the blog post in the comments below. Cameron, thank you so much for joining us.
Cameron Adams: It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.
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