Transcript for Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)

I run everyone through the Coatric Canva. One of those sections he's on giving away a Lego. Finding joy in the other things, building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great riding or great product building or great engineers.

We didn't really have managers, but everyone at camera has a coach that constantly working with you to look at your skills, but also when it might be time to move on to the next level. And here's just how you think about product management. I didn't want to do product management like they did a Google, and that's because of the different cultures. I have seen product managers at other companies who are very independent of teams, and that seems very weird to me. For us, product managers are really connected.

Well, when you say it all like that, it sounds pretty amazing. You don't, I don't think every day you're cognizant of that growth in that achievement, but there are particular moments where you get to really reflect. And for me, it's most of the time when we bring the team together. Obviously now we're in a pretty virtual world, hybrid in some best cases. But when the team all get together and we celebrate is when we finally have those moments where you get to kind of step out of yourself, look at this huge safe people and realize what you've achieved together. Probably the most recent moment we got to do that was for our 10th birthday last year. So Cam is largely sensitive in Australia. We got lots of officers around the world, but we had a big birthday celebration in Sydney right on the Harvard air in front of the water and we had thousands of people there and we just got to look back on everything we've achieved over the previous 10 years. And that was a pretty amazing moment.

I still think like I'm constantly growing, I'm constantly learning stuff. I don't feel like I've achieved a ceiling or been a massive smash hit. We're always changing how we're doing things. We're always doing things we've never done before and we feel totally like a fish out of water. Um, so yeah, I've achieved a few things personally, but I still feel like there's so much more to go.

I think there's probably a few different stories that would resonate with your audience because there's like business kind of stories of like how the actual company's tracking the product stories of stuff we launched it didn't get anywhere. There's team stories where you're dealing with people and all the different quirks that that entails. I think I'll choose a business story. There was a moment Kind of around our 100 million valuation mark where we were putting together around. We had a lot of existing investors who were really keen to invest. This is probably our third or fourth round by the stage. And it was all looking good. There was a particular investor who was really keen to lead out. We were farming that. We were doing due diligence. Got to the stage where every other investor in the round had signed on. They were like super excited. They'd wired the money into a bank accounts already. They'd signed all the long docs, but the lead investor hadn't. And about. two days before they were due to sign and get all the money into our account. They came back and said, look, this is going great, but essentially we think we can get a better deal, so we're going to cut your valuation by 50%. It was a huge surprise and totally screwed up the entire round. All the other investors were like, what the hell are you doing? My co-found is well and clear pretty much jumped on a plane that night to go to Silicon Valley, rallied around the whole bunch of other investors, found a new lead investor. took them about a week. This was like the week right before Christmas. It was incredibly stressful, incredibly tumultuous. We eventually came out of a better. We actually got better terms on the deal that we came up with. That investor has kind of fallen to the wayside now. And it was a real learning moment for us in terms of how to approach fundraising and also how to be totally independent. And that's one of the reasons why we've focused on profitability for so long now. We've been profitable spend the seven years and one of the reasons is that we never want to be put in the situation where we have to go someone have to go to someone full money to ensure the survival of business. And being profitable means that we never have to do that. We can always do it on our own terms and in our own time.

I think one key thing is that we don't know it's very rare. Like we approach a board meeting just like we do anything. We craft the experience of how we think it should be and how we think it's going to be useful. So we just like our board meetings or our product meetings or the way that we do launches, like we have shaped that in the image that we want it to be and in the way that we think it's going to be most effective. We've always been an incredibly product-led company. We've always seen first and foremost about the product. That was the whole genesis of camera itself. Having a product that we thought people would love to use and desperately needed to get out into the world. And that's the lens that we approach everything through. In terms of board meetings, I think it's been very helpful that our financials and our growth have been amazing for so many years that we don't need to focus on it. And we can just have that one slide with the graph going up and up into the right. We've also attracted investors who believe in us and who understand that us driving product and getting as much product value out to our customers is probably the most important thing we can be doing. So that's why the board meetings do focus on that because what we are launching in the product what's ahead is really determining the success of the company. Obviously financials are important and you can do a bunch of leave of pulling and thinking about margins and all that kind of stuff but product is at the end of the day the most important thing to camera and the thing that's going to help us stand out and continue to have success.

One thing really focused on is team and culture. I think. You can probably bring in the world's best person at X, Y, and Z. But if they're not beating them into a team and understanding your culture and have the same passion and vision that you do, they're not going to succeed. So it's super important that we have people along with us for the ride. And that might mean, you know, everyone can't resource them. They might be the number one person in the world for that particular thing. But they get more done than the number one person could because they've built that trust in that safety with their team. They know how to communicate their ideas. They know how to bring out the people along with them and lay out a vision in the way that we understand it at Canva. is a critical thing to building a great company. I think it's having that alignment across everyone, across your product teams, across your marketing teams, across your customer happiness. They all need to be aligned and we all need to be rowing in the same direction. We have brought in leaders and some of them have been incredibly successful. We have brought in leaders and they're the exited the company after a few months, because there wasn't that fit and they didn't manage to figure out or understand what Canva was and how to work within this big ecosystem now. We've got 4,500 employees now and it's not just a matter of you coming in and bringing all your ideas. You also need to work together with all the other leaders that we have in the team that's surrounding you.

I have this theory that type of product you're building very much influences the way that you think. This kind of stemmed out of chatters having with one of the product leaders that Spotify and they said that it's Spotify, they do an incredible amount of talking about problems like they'll have a meeting they'll talk about this new product feature and they'll just hash it out through conversation. And I kind of imagine that that was because Spotify is a very auditory product. Everyone there thinks about music, sound, podcasts, like that is their mindset. I can't go where we're all about visual communications. pitch decks, social media posts, it's video, it's t-shirts that you can make, and that's how we think about things in a very visual manner. So one of the things that's very particular about Canva is really setting visions, and I'm in visions, not just in the sense of looking forward to three years, but also visions in the very visual sense. We need to be able to see it. We need mock-ups, we need prototypes. You need to get that idea out of your head and present it to someone in a visual form that helps you talk about and communicate about it. That's one aspect of why some people, I think, don't land on their feet at camera because they aren't as serviceual thinkers and they don't end up communicating what they want to do in a visual way to the rest of people at camera. Another way is that, you know, the way that we've grown, the way that we've built product has been quite idiosyncratic over the years. And as I said, we've learnt so much just through doing and that established our own processes. So, and I think in any system, if someone comes up from the outside with preconceived notions or this idea that they're an expert and tries to bring that in, it's going to be rejected. So, you really need to work together, and I think the advice that I think you have to pay for coming to cameras is just listen for a couple of months. Like, figure out It's really working a camera and why it works before you try and change it. We're very open to change and to new ideas, but just coming in wholesale and totally changing the process just because that's what you've done somewhere else isn't going to get you the most level of stress.

Yeah, Molly wrote a great article, which I actually refer every only joins camera to be on the cultural and boarding session, which I give them. So I run everyone through the cultural camp, and what they can expect over the next few years, they work here. And one of those sections is on giving away your Lego. It's really important to us because Part of being in a startup is scaling when you're scaling from zero years to a million to a hundred million. And when you're scaling from three founders to ten employees to a hundred employees to four thousand employees, like you're scaling everything. And the product to the internal processes you have, the finance team paying people how you deal with use of feedback, everything's just constantly growing, growing, growing. And I think this is slightly different to a traditional job where you get good at the thing that you always do and you try and turn that into a process that just continually works all the time. As startup, you just have to be changing. And we want people who are flexible, you can bring your ideas, you can go to that next level. You can think about not just a million people, but 10 million people, 100 million people, a billion people using the product. and to constantly ratchet up that multiplier, you need to change yourself, which means that you probably need to give away some of the stuff that you're doing now in order to get to that next level. If you're the first email copywriter in Canva, you can get away from writing all the emails for the first year, maybe. But when you're writing emails for 100 million people in 190 different countries and 100 different languages, all the different stages of their journeys through using Canva from beginners to intermediate to experts, That just massively multiplies the complexity of the job that you have to do. And if you're trying to write every single one of those emails, you have no chance of scaling. You need to think about who you're going to bring in to help you, what systems you're going to introduce, what are the processes needed to get 100 different languages translated every time you send out an email. And that requires you to hand off that stuff. You need to maybe stop writing every single email, give that someone else, become totally doing that, because You often build up a lot of self identity and doing that and you get a lot of joy out of it. That's why you're right in the first place. Finding joy in the other things, building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering. is really what giving away your legos about. I mean, still encourage everyone to do that. To think about those moments where they need to level up in their impact, how they can bring their team along with them, how they can pass on their experience and help everyone really have a tremendous impact with the skills that they have.

Probably the deeper thing I think is giving people opportunity. So you can talk about grows and just say, please grow. That's not going to be terribly effective. But giving them the opportunity and the support to do so is super important. We have a system we call coaching at Canva where you have a coach and they're constantly working with you to look your skills, how you can improve each of those individual skills, but also what it is that you're actually doing. And when it might be time to move on to the next level, say you're just doing a product role in this particular product, and now you need to be a coach of other product managers and help them build products. Like understanding those pivot points is really important and our coaches help everyone in camera, everyone in camera has a coach that is constantly thinking about this aspect of their personal growth. And finding those opportunities where you can kind of push someone to do something that they haven't done before or to expand upon an idea that they've had and give them ownership of that idea is super important. So when people do come to us with an amazing product idea or a feature that they want to build or an entire team that they think should be spun up, we really listen to them. And if it makes sense, we go as we say, go and do that. Go and build that part of the product. Grab a couple of people and start building video at Canva. Like do that thing that you're talking about. And I think if you give it an opportunity and a little push to go beyond what they think they're comfortable with right now, that is the best way to drive growth in your team.

We don't really have managers. So, your coach is the person who thinks about you in a special distance. So, we have specialties engineering product design. You know, tens of different specialties across Canva. And your coach really helps your coach is a similar specialty lead. So if you're a product manager, they're a product manager. So they know the skills that you have to use. They know the trajectory that you could possibly grow into. They know the structures that are around Canva that you could slot into when you want to go to the next level. and your coach constantly checks in with you has sessions might help you with a strategy dog might have a one-on-one with you that is constantly thinking about those ways that you can grow and improve at camera. And then we have probably more of a collegiate managerial circle of colleagues to help you do 360 feedback, call that kind of stuff. So that's the structure we've arrived on and it's worked pretty well for us and it was driven actually by a formative coaching experience that we had as founders quite a few years ago from an external coach and we decided to bring that into camera as a whole philosophy.

There people in the company say we've got probably close to 800 or 1000 coaches now at Canva. Wow. We do have like very civic coaches who I just coaches and they can drop into any situation. They're not product managers. They're not designers, but they're relatively few. I think we've got probably five of those type of coaches, and they just work in very special situations. But what we've focused on is enabling the broader circle of coaches, so those 800 people to understand what it is to be a coach and have the skills of coaching. So we've focused a lot on teaching them the skills of coaching, how to build a growth mindset in their coaches, all the skills that you need. So yeah, it's a massive part of Canva.

So your coach feeds into that. But we also did 360 feedback from all the people that you work with. And we do that on regular cycles. As with everything in camera, the cadence of those cycles has changed over the years. But now we do that every six months.

I don't know. It's kind of one of those things that I don't want to quantify. I don't want to put it in a box and say this is product management because I've worked at a few places now. I've actually only had one real job which was a Google where I got to experience product managers the Google way. And the way that they do product management is totally different to the way that we do it at Canada. And that's partially by design because I didn't want to do product management like they did at Google. And that's because of the different cultures that they have. Like Google's a fantastic engineer-in-driven culture. And the way that they think about product management is mostly in the technical sense of like, He's a piece of technology. What can that technology do? How do we scale it? At Camel, we folks a lot on experience. And as I said before, it's a very visual experience. So we require a different product management process, but also a different product management mindset. I think we probably did that more from the ground up than a lot of other startups. This because now in Cliff, we're a lot less I think inculcated into how product management is done, other places. I had a bit of experience from Google, but was still fairly independent in my thinking. So we almost went back to first principles on how product management should be done. And to be honest, we didn't want to have the time product manager for a long, long time. It wasn't till about years, six or seven, where we actually had product managers. We decided to cave just because it was easy to explain to people. It also took us four or five years before we even had another product owner who wasn't us. Part of that was us giving up that Lego and I think we took a little too long to give up that Lego on that one. But the other part of it was us figuring out exactly what we wanted and how we built product and how to communicate that to someone else and get them to do it in a similar way and work with the teams in the way that we did. For us, product managers are really connected. They connect the team, ideas, data, a whole bunch of different things. And it's very messy. There's no exact recipe for how to do it. connecting these disparate areas and moving the team and the technology and our customers to a new place, a new vision, essentially what product managers do. And it's going to involve, compromise, it's going to involve changes in the feature scope. It's going to involve timelines of like, OK, we can't ship it in May. It's going to have to be July. Let's figure out what we can do is marketing to make that work. constant movement and connection and reorienting around constraints that have suddenly arisen in the last week. And that's what we see great product managers operating in camera.

It is always tricky working with a couple because they're on a 24-7. When you leave the office and they head home, they're still talking about product business strategy, all the things. I think they've done a really good job of evolving those ideas over nights through the conversations they have over dinner and walking, but then bringing that back to the next day and being transparent about that. And that's super important if you're working in that in that kind of dynamic. There are definitely moments where I have missed out on a memo and and stuff is kind of rapidly preceded and I think I've just gotten used to that and gotten used to catching up really quickly having a word with them on the side to like clarify what's You know, what the motivation is here, and it's constantly maintaining that alignment. And I think it happens in any partnership or team, like there's moments where there's small elements, there's more tectonic stuff that happens over months or years. And you need to realign at some stage. I think it happens with friendships that happens with my wife. It happens with our product teams. There's always these moments where you need to re-communicate things and relay the land of it. And I think we've been great as doing that as co-founders, even for the small things, and also for the more technical things.

Yeah, so when we launched or when we were building, uh, the lens startup book came out. So that was all anyone talked to us about investors. Other people building products trying to give us advice. They're like, just get something out of the door as crappy as it is just to get in front of users. Uh, I think. For us, the product is the experience and giving people a great experience is an intrinsic part of the product. It's also an intrinsic part of how we've grown. People having a good experience of being enthusiastic about it has been how we've spread the word of camera. And organic word of mouth growth was the biggest driver of cameras grows for many years. probably still is, I think people just telling someone else to jump on this amazing product. I don't think we would have had that if we just put our pretty crappy product that people didn't have joy in using. Sure, it might have got the job done, but if they weren't excited about using it the next day, then that wasn't a bar that we wanted to hit. So we did hold off on launching the product for a long time and investors Did I ask as many many times when are you launching can you just get this thing at the door? But we had done enough research. We knew the problem space. We knew what people wanted from the product. Part of that was due to the work that Mel and Cliff did on Fusion Books in kind of a very constrained area. They had looked at school yearbooks, they had built an experience for that and they had observed what worked and didn't work and how they might scale that into a bigger product. It also worked for me who had worked in a lot of creative tools and built a lot of creative tools over the previous 15 years. So I had a lot of understanding how people interact with these systems in each experience that we wanted to build. So we did hold off. And we, the product we launched launched, we obviously weren't happy with. You have to launch something that you're not completely happy with. You know all the rough edges. But you're releasing it knowing that the rough edges are going to be outweighed by the joyful experience. We still did ton of use of testing. Like it's not like we just launched this thing blind and said, Uh, we hope people like it. We did a ton of user testing. We did a ton of user research into the features that people wanted and we built that up over time. And, you know, one year to me actually seems like short time. A lot of people think it's a long time, but one year was just enough for us to scrape in with an experience that people did truly love when we launched. And, particularly the market that we went after when we launched really loved it.

The first is that even today we build for ourselves. And I think this is advice that. Probably a lot of product people wouldn't give you is that you shouldn't build for yourself, you should build for your customer. But I think we're fortunate that we are at customer. And the problems we experience, the problems that hundreds of millions, billions of people experience. I think that is maybe a fortunate part of just the problem area that we're interested in, but it has enabled us to move really quickly on the product because we can quickly know what's working in the product, whether it's feature is useful, whether it's reached that bar of a great experience. That's one aspect of it, and I think that is also about being passionate. Like, you're entering an area that you're extremely passionate about. I often hear people are like, I want to do a text start up. What is the best area I should focus on to build a product in? And to me, that is totally the wrong way to go about building a company that you're going to spend the next 10, 20 years in. It's your in an area that you are. particularly passionate about, but you see the opportunity to make a bit of money or have some external measure of success. That is a terrible way to go about being a founder because you're going to hit the rock bottom dark places. And if the passion isn't driving you through that, you are going to have incredibly hard time getting to the next step. So that's probably the first area I talk about in terms of knowing when I have product is amazing. The second one is that it really needs to spark joy and delight in people and just pure excitement. It can't just be like, oh yeah, this is a useful tool for me. It needs to light up their eyes. They need to be like, How do I sign up for this thing tomorrow? How do I get it? How do I pay for it? And they need to want to talk to other people about it because in the early days of your start-up, you don't have marketing dollars. You don't have channels which you can go to to immediately get access to a million people. You need to really foster the first people that are going to use your products and they're going to be the ones that are going to spread it and they're going to set the foundation for your growth.

2012, 2013 when we launched, and visual content was still in its infancy. Instagram had only been out a couple of years, Pinterest was on the rise. People were just getting used to creating visuals, and it was kind of hard to talk to a very select few, because it's great those visuals, you know, to forward some expensive software, know how to use that expensive software, know where to go to get fonts and photos and illustrations, know how to put that together into something that looked decent and then ship that up. It was something that only 1% of the world could do, and democratizing design and pairing the world to design is Camus's entire mission. And we saw this sweet spot at the time in social media. It wasn't what we set out to go after. We set out to democratize design to bring design to literally everyone in the world and to everything that they're doing. But through the user testing that we did through the levels of excitement that we saw from different people, social media managers really came to the fore at that time. So we knew that they really fit what we could ship right now. We didn't ship a presentation product or a t-shirt builder in our very first version. We ship the thing that could make square landscape and portrait graphics and blog post graphics. And that got a particular segment of society excited. We added on all the things afterwards because that was part of our vision and ultimately what we wanted to build. But with a team of 10 people in the space of a year, Building something that really got social media managed excited was what we could pull off. And that's something we kind of realized in the last six months of that launch year. We didn't quite know who our audience was going to be. We knew it was a tool that anyone could use. But in that last six months that user testing and refining is when we really identified that first target market and we just lent into it.

It was just incredibly emotive language like. Like a lot. She enjoyed particularly coming into the product we worked a lot on the onboarding process in the last couple of months of a launch and that was really pivotal because. Product features are kind of there. You can add text, you can add images, you can change the color of things, you can move stuff around the page. It was a simple but powerful product, but there was this thing holding people back from actually using it and understanding what camera could do for them. And we use a test of the onboarding of camera ton actually use a testing.com and just kind of launch then which really unlocked us because we didn't get to do these big formal labs or anything like that. We could just go online and get results in the space of half an hour. So that was like a pivotal unlock for our product process and that's something we still employ today and through that we tailored the onboarding process to get people excited and to understand the deeper goal with camera and the deeper impact it could let them have. It wasn't just about letting them put a pretty picture on the page. Really unlock their ideas and let them do things they couldn't do before. And we shaped the onboarding to do that. And it resonated the most with social media managers because they had this massive content need that they couldn't really service. And in the first minute of camera with the right onboarding, you just unlocked a whole realm of productivity and impact that they didn't have before. And that's why they got super excited.

For us, it was taking that first step, like tickle with camera and any, I think, creative tool. There's a real fear of the blank page. So prior to like any onboarding thought from us, we had a blank page. We had a few coach marks that said, use what you do this. Here's where you do this. And then they'd be left on this blank page and people would freak out. So what we really focused on was just taking that first step and then the next step and then the next step and before they knew they'd built a design and the way that we did that was to encourage a really simple step. So the first one was click on the search box and search for a monkey. It literally literally said that. Searching for a monkey is something you probably don't do in most tools. So it's a little surprising, which was a good kind of in-road. But it was still super easy. Like anyone can type monkey and then you type that in. It comes up with this whole sway the monkey images, which kind of look hilarious. And just dragging one of those out onto a page is another simple step. And we just got people to walk through that, keeping that interest up, keeping the bar of effort quite low. But within three or four steps, they'd built up something that they'd never been able to do before. And it surprised them. The words that we literally got out of years of testing were, I didn't know I could be a designer. And that was what we managed to do through several rounds of refinement on the onboarding process. So it's lowering the barriers to entry and also increasing the amount of delight. And I think those two things, what you should be aiming for with your onboarding.

The current one isn't similar. We have constantly gone back to it because it performs really well. We do, we do actually apply the same approach of little steps building up into to bigger accomplishments. And that's actually rolled out throughout last round of launches for the last couple of years through something we call learning play. So with every launch that we do now, we think about how to teach people about that feature and how to get them really involved in it. We have a whole series of learning plays where when we launch AI photo editing, they can try it out right then and there, they've got some great content that they can immediately operate on and it's a super simple step for them to type in a prompt and see the result of that.

Andre is an amazing guy. He's actually been in an out of camp three or four times now. Keep pulling him back. Yeah, keep pulling him back. We originally found if he came from a startup that was kind of going under here in Sydney. And he, he just, We had thought about SEO. We knew it was this thing that you could use. And I think in a couple of our pitch decks, we had SEO is a whole growth channel that we're going to execute upon in order for investors to make a ton of money. But we've heard a much new nothing about it. And it was kind of sitting away in our backlog of things to do in the first couple of years of Canva and we came across Andre and he just really crystallized what I see I was and how it would actually help us grow. So we brought him on. He rolled out his strategy and it was fantastically effective. It was also incredibly cheap and it was super easy for us to do ourselves. He set up a whole team of people who looked at people's motivations and the top jobs to be done, the camera could service. He then mapped that through the entire experience of going into Google, typing a search query, getting that search query, seeing that it was a great result, like first that getting to the top result. But then also the experience after they landed on camera. So if they searched for want to make a Halloween poster. The top Google result would be Canva. They'd click on it. They'd land on the Halloween poster landing page. It would tell them how they were going to do it. Show you how the product was going to do that. Have a button there that immediately took them into a Halloween poster template. Went through a fantastic onboarding of like customizing that poster really simply. And then they would hit Done. download the image and they had a fantastic experience and he thought through that hole into in flow from first landing on Google and typing into the search box through to that magic moment where they're like camera just helped me do something amazing and I want to do it again amazing okay so a few things I'm hearing there one is figure out the jobs to be done of potentially users

Yeah, again, it's like Product lead truly means product lead because you can't just SEO the hell out of something that is a terrible experience. So time that product experience at the end of the SEO journey is just as important as the technicalities of SEO itself and Andre really harness the whole spectrum of that to produce the end experience which ultimately ended up with an active user having a delightful experience.

There's, you know, there's a ton in the SEO realm that the Android drives that can get quite technical, but I think one of the other kind of pivotal growth moments for us was internationalization. I think as an Australian company, we're kind of fortunate in the Australia isn't a great market to focus on. We've got 25 million people here. It's OK, but it's not sizable. It's not going to make you a huge success. Whereas probably a startup that starts in the US will tend to focus on the US because it's a huge market, it's a huge monetizable market. And you can entirely create a great company that just services the US from Australia. We need to think about the world. And that meant that we very quickly got into internationalization. We started localizing and internationalizing our product. Three years after launch, which is quite early compared to a lot of other companies. And we tackled it with real bigger. We had a goal of being in five different languages within the first year of localization. And we actually hit 18 that first year. And then we set ourselves a goal of being in a hundred different languages the next year. And the internationalization team smashed that goal at the end of 2017. And it has drastically changed canvas growth trajectory because being in other languages offering a localized experience, something that people in Brazil or Indonesia or Spain or Poland can authentically feel like they're using a product that's made of them. has totally changed to our marketers how quickly we can grow and the way the products used. Internationalising into Brazilian Portuguese meant that we had to focus a ton more on the Android mobile experience, which is really different for us because we focus a lot on the desktop experience for the first four years. People also in Brazil run entire businesses from their mobile phone and the types of content they're creating to interact with their audience is totally different. So it's actually shaped that product and change that product trajectory as a result of thinking about internationalization and it is just fuel tremendous growth. Brazil, India, Indonesia, they're all in our top five markets and they grow way faster than the US does.

For me and for us, wasn't so much a great strategy or monetization strategy as much as it spoke to our core mission of empowering the world to design. We truly want to democratize design, which means we want to get designed into the hands of as many people as we can, because we think that the world is a better place when more people can create really rich visual content. So, free VM just made sense to us, because we could get the tool into billions of people's hands, and they wouldn't necessarily have to pay for it, and much of the world can't pay for products, because they just don't have access to that level of income. So, providing that equality was really important to us. but also you need to build a viable business because you can't help the world design if you can't afford to keep the lights on. So framing them just really hit this sweet spot for us between philosophy and business building. So it was always part of our plans since day one. We initially had elements sales as our business models. So when we first went to pitch camera, it was all about creating a design, anything you use in that design will cost you a dollar. So if you drag in a monkey and you wanted to export that whole design, you'd have to pay a dollar for them. Yeah, I've done that many times. Yes. It was really exciting to invest at the time. It was also really exciting to the content creators who were giving us the monkeys to put into our product. It was a totally new business model. It unlocked, I think. an area that a lot of people were unfamiliar with, which is stock photography. Most people had not paid $100, $500 from photo, and that really held them back from being visual content created. So it was a really unique innovation for us, and for the first two years at Cam with Life, that was how we derived our revenue. Group pretty well, it was still like, I don't know, 30% month or month growth in terms of revenue, but like you can do that in the early stages of the startup. It wasn't until we introduced that first subscription product that we saw really hockey stick growth in our revenue. And that was always the plan to launch a subscription product, but as with many things, it was a vision that we didn't quite have met around the bones. So we knew we wanted to put in a subscription. What exactly that subscription would look like? We didn't quite know. And through the first couple of years of Canva, we started noticing what people were asking for, what they would be more likely to pay in a subscription for. And that formed the first few features that became what was then called Canva for work, which is now called Canva Pro. And we launched our first subscription, I think about three years after we launched the first product. And we just rapidly saw the revenue from the subscription start over taking the $1 image payments. So much so that three or four years later, we made image element payments. part of the subscription. And again, that was like a second hockey stick in growth in terms of the revenue from the subscription because all you can eat images inside the camera pro subscription was just an amazing value value add to people. And I don't even know if we get any revenue from from if you're jealous about just going into this subscription.

As a technology company, you always just need to be constantly evolving and using the best technology. And when we started, that was mobile phones and cloud computing, like they were the innovations that came in that really unlock the camera. AI is the next decade, I think, of innovation. It's the next pivotal piece of technology that helps you build better products. But it also can't just be the basis for your product. You can't just be a product that's purely built on AI on being a rapper and an LLM or something like that. You still need to think about what it is that people want to do and how you build a product that actually makes that need. It isn't just about slapping a chatbot on something that already, it's just about deeply thinking about how AI can help them get to that goal even faster. And we view AI as the next way of democratizing design and empowering the world to design, helping more people design, helping more people design quicker, helping more people design quicker with better quality. And that's how we approach every aspect of including AI in the camera platform. We've had a team of machine learning engineers for probably seven years now. I think their work has become a lot more visual now and more customer-facing. way back when they were just doing recommendation engines inside our emails and our homepage and suggesting templates to you. But now they get to work with some really cool technology which Let's introduce images for people and create designs and summarize text and translate to a hundred different languages like it's really stuff that you can put directly in front of customers now and that's super exciting. Over the last couple of years we've built up more and more visual AI experts inside Canva and we approach AI inside the product. through three kind of billers. First of these is that we need to build some of our NAI tech. And we focus on building the AI tech that we have the biggest advantage in, that we have the most data that we can put into it, the most insights, the most criticality to our product and our business. So we have teams building our NRI models around design and images and that kind of stuff. Second pillar is just finding the world's best AI people to partner with. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need to internalize in your company. you don't need to create an LLM because it's a commodity thing now and there's a bunch of providers, you can do it way better and have way more resources to do it with than you do. So finding a great partner like OpenAI and we're partnering with RunwayML to do video generation, like finding the world's best and bringing them into your product with a great integration, the second pillar. And for us, the third pillar is our app ecosystem. So we're fortunate now, we've got 170 million people using the product every single month. We have quite an audience that people want access to and throughout app developer ecosystem, they can build apps which directly integrate with the camera product and give them access to those hundreds of millions of people when people are quite eager to do that now. We've seen huge uptake in that from AI developers who have included stuff in camera from music generators to virtual avatars that can present your presentation to a whole slot there. And those three pillars have, I think, allowed us to create a really coherent experience and one that still keeps the focus on what people want to do, had to help them reach their big goals in a way that doesn't just push technology in the face and a way that just is part of the experience and is a natural way of getting them to where they want to go.

Yeah, so we've got a big event in Los Angeles in a couple of months. It's our camera create, which is kind of a evolution of the season opener that we used to do. So season opener is a no longer just inside camera now. We actually invite our whole community in and we're going to have probably about 4,000 people in the theater in LA and a couple of million online. And we're really going to be pulling the covers off. Pretty much the next decade of camera. We've focused for the first decade of camera on unlocking individuals and small businesses, giving them the tools that they need to design and to express themselves and create visual content. And as Camper has grown and people have gotten used to creating this stuff, they've invited their teams in. They now collaborate with people on presentations, on camera videos, on swag t-shirts that they need to make for their event next week. And as more and more people are using Camper together, it's picking up a lot of steam. We've got 95% of the Fortune 500 using Camper. We've got huge teams of thousands of people using Camper. And this is really open to our eyes to not only the enterprise opportunity, but also just the way to redesign the way people work. And that is what the event at the end of May is about. It's really redesigning work for a whole number of different verticals from marketing to sales to HR to IT to creatives that work inside large teams, large organizations, large enterprises. It's where kind of redesign camera for this collaborative enterprise age. So we're pulling the covers off that alongside work kits which are a whole verticalized experiences for people inside marketing and sales and HR that want to use camera as well as a bunch of improvements to AI products. and an actual enterprise skew that we're launching as well. So through this growth and through getting to understand the needs of CIOs and hits the security and enterprises, we've realized that pretty much needs to be an enterprise product of camera that meets the needs of hugely scaled teams. It's been quite different for us because we have scaled from those individuals just using the product all by themselves and organically growing the team. So now looking at it from all the top-down lens and building that enterprise product is what we've been focused on for the last couple of years. So we'll be pulling the covers off that as well in LA.

They can find me online at themaninblue.com, which is my blog that's been around for 24 years now. Will there be any other question? How can listeners be useful to you? I love hearing their design stories. How design has helped unlock something for them, whether it's starting their first business or helping a nonprofit that they volunteer at. I just love bumping into someone in the street and seeing the joy of design while I'm in there. So please do that one of you, Sammy.