Jay: Ladies and gents, we’re sitting here at the RISE Conference, and we have the fortunate opportunity to interview Cameron Adams. Cameron is the chief product officer and co-founder of Canva, an online design and publishing tool which makes graphic design simple for everyone. Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown to over 10 million users across 190 countries with more than 400 million designs created. Cameron, welcome.

Cameron: It’s a pleasure to be here, Jay.

Jay: Yeah. I’m glad we got a chance to do this, and I always enjoy doing interviews in person because 90% of mine are actually done over the internet. So when it’s in person, I just feel like it’s a lot more personable.

Cameron: Yeah. You get to connect a lot better.

Jay: That’s right. We’re excited to have you up here. Maybe for my audience, you can just quickly give a little bit of background and maybe from the entrepreneur side because a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs and startup founders listen in. Maybe a little bit of your background, how you decided to become an entrepreneur, or were you an entrepreneur from the get-go, and then how that led you down this path to creating Canva.

Cameron: Sure. Canva started six years ago. It took us about a year to build the product before we finally launched it. But prior to that, I had a fairly long history dabbling around in business, but I’ve always been more on the creative side. So straight out of university, I studied law and science, and I didn’t really go to do any of those things. I’d been doing graphic design during university and picked that up as a full-time job after I left. And that was right around the time when the internet was becoming popular, particular down in Australia. We were late starters compared to the rest of the world.

I started up my own web design agency and worked there for a while and eventually ended up at Google working on a product there called Google Wave, which was quite a ground-breaking technological project, but ultimately it wasn’t a success at Google.

After taking a lot of learnings from that, I decided to go back and do my own thing. I left Google, did another startup with two other Google engineers, learned a helluva lot in that. We did a lot of pitching, went to Silicon Valley, talked to investors there. Ultimately, we didn’t come out with any money, but fortunately, my old boss at Google introduced me to a woman called Melanie Perkins who had been running a school yearbook business at the time. They were over in Perth in Australia and built up a fantastic business letting schools build their own yearbooks using this Flash app. And Lars, my boss from Google, told me to go talk to them about technology and what was possible in the browser.

So I went and chatted to them, and that’s when she told me her broader vision for what design could be, and that turned into Canva. We joined forces, and the three of us — Mel, Cliff, and I — founded the company, got the product up, built a small team, and launched it with eight people in 2013.

Jay: Wow.  and what a journey it’s been since then. It sounds like you were kind of entrepreneurial from the get-go. You kind of had this… You’re more risk tolerate and able to make these sort of moves. The reason I bring this up is because a lot of my listeners are based in Asia or in Hong Kong, China, or Korea or Japan where going out and being entrepreneurial is less encouraged, even from the family level. So your parents, they don’t necessarily want you to do that. I know my parents wanted me to be a doctor. Disappointed them. But I’m always curious to hear successful entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial journey and what actually brought them into that lifestyle and that business. Thanks for sharing that.

Was it a pain point of Mel’s that was directly the reason why she wanted to start this company or envision this company? Or was it a combined brainstorming that happened?

Cameron: It was definitely the genesis was from her pain points. She was teaching design at university, and she was teaching amateurs who had never touched a design program before and never really thought about what design is and how to do it. And she was finding it incredibly frustrating. So she thought there must be a better way for people to be able to communicate their ideas and communicate their vision without having to spend two years learning Photoshop and understanding the fundamentals of design. And that was kind of the very seed of the idea. And the yearbook business was the first step in that. She kind of identified a market that she wanted to tackle. And they ran that for about four or five years and learned a helluva lot. Went out and talked to schools, talked to teachers, talked to students, understood what their frustrations were, what could help them, and built up a great deal of knowledge over that time. Then when they met up with me, they were just starting to formulate that broader vision of “What if we could design anything? What if we could help anyone in the world design what they need, to communicate what they want?” And that’s where Canva came into its own.

Jay: I’m curious — the name Canva. Is there a significance to that name?

Cameron: It’s gone through a few iterations. One of the early names was Canvas Shift, which I always think is a terrible name, and fortunately, we moved beyond that one. We gravitated towards the word canvas, with an S. And one day… It was really hard to find a domain name with the word “canvas” in it because they were all taken. And we asked one of our engineers — he helped to be French — and we were like “What’s the word canvas in French?”

And he was like “It was ‘can-vah.'” Unbeknownst to us, it’s spelled exactly the same as “canvas.” They don’t pronounce the S, though. So Mel registered the Canva domain with no S, and that’s where the name came from.

Jay: That’s fantastic. For our audience’s sake, if you could just very simply, maybe the user experience, exactly what Canva does, the functionality and why it’s basically such a successful company now. But really, it’s because of the offering to the end user. Right?

Cameron: Yeah. Our tagline now is “Design anything. Publish anywhere.” And the idea behind that is that we want to offer the full experience of designing something in a really simple package. When we first entered the market, there were quite a few things out there, but they were very fragmented. So to find an image, you had to go to a stock photo library. To find a layout, you had to go to a stock layout library. To get fonts for your design, you had to download those separately. And then you had to pull all that stuff into an application like Photoshop and understand how to use it and know all the rules about layout and hierarchy and topography. To do all that is an incredibly complex process. So we wanted to distill that down into one app that you could use that did it all and did it in such a simple way that anyone could approach it and get great results. Because we wanted to take design from this very privileged, professional thing that 1% of the world could do and allow the other 99% of the world to access it as well.

Jay: Yeah. I’m sure the designers aren’t too happy about that. But it is…

Cameron: We’ve actually had a really great reception from designers because we’ve seen that as people interact with design and start creating their own things, the demand for it and their understanding of it gets better and better. So designers who have embraced Canva find it really liberating because they get to work with their clients in a different way and collaborate with them. And often, the clients will do stuff that designers don’t like doing or that they never would have approached a designer to do anyway. So most of the graphic designers who have embraced Canva have found it a really valuable tool.

Jay: I personally actually use Canva at least one a week, because I actually use it for my podcast for the covers. I actually discovered it a couple years ago. And now I’ve outsourced that work to a virtual assistant or that sort of thing, but I can tell you — and I actually haven’t used it in maybe a year or so, but I know that, literally, to sign up and get an account started, it takes seconds even. It is still the freemium model where you can do the free and then you pay for certain photos and certain advanced features? Is that still have it is?

Cameron: Yeah. Very much. It’s part of our ethos that we want people to have access to this tool, no matter if they can afford it or not. So we have a very strong free offering that you can use to design stuff. We have a lots of free elements, free photos that you can use in your designs. But if you want to take your design to the next level, you can access premium elements that you can pay for, and they only cost $1, which is extremely affordable for most people in the world. And we also have a more business-slanted subscription offering that you can sign up for when you want to take Canva to the next level, really focus on your business and your brand and work together better with a team as well.

Jay: I think it’s absolutely so fascinating, and it’s really, really helpful for someone that’s not with a design background. At one point when I was younger, I actually did know how to use Photoshop, but then I didn’t use it for a couple of years, and then you basically have to re-learn it. You have to go back up this learning curve and the tools and the menus… So that was actually when I just googled other options. That’s where I found Canva. The great part about it is now when I use it, I’ll use it, and you guy have these amazing templates. I literally just used it for my son’s first birthday party. My wife was like “Find an invite template, and I want a super power theme.” And I literally looked, and within a minute I found exactly that. So it was brilliant, life-saving. I feel like the technology is really good, and it just keeps improving.

So what are some of the features that you’re currently working on and that you’re looking to improve to an already very, very sophisticated platform?

Cameron: I think as we build out different parts of the product, we just keep discovering more and more areas where we can apply our philosophy of design. We originally started with bloggers and social media and really focused on their needs. It spread out to consumers, and now you can get a great superhero birthday invitation. And it’s also gone in a professional direction as well. One of those more interesting directions is into presentations, which we’ve really doubled down on. We’ll be building out a lot more of that this year. We recently had an acquisition of a company called Zeetings which is really aligned with our philosophy on presentations and the notion that PowerPoint has been around for a while and is a very particular way of presenting things. And times have changed in the way that people want to communicate and present ideas. It’s different now.

So Zeetings is very bullish on presentations being a two-way dialog rather than just one person standing up on stage and forcing their idea at everyone. So they built a bunch of technology to help presentations be more dynamic, capture real-time data and analytics, and foster that conversation between the people that you’re talking to.

Jay: That’s fantastic. I had a career on Wall Street about 15 years ago when I first started my career, and I remember basically one part of my entire job would be just to tinker around on PowerPoint and prepare for a presentation. It would take hours and hours and hours. So I’m definitely looking forward to that sort of solution when that becomes available.

You recently, or earlier this year, had quite a significant funding round. And correct me if I’m wrong, but that has basically put you into unicorn status as the only unicorn from Australia. So congratulations.

Cameron: Thank you very much.

Jay: That’s huge, huge news. For full transparency, I actually am indirectly an investor into your company because I’m a 500 Startups Fund II, L.P. I was really excited when I found out that they were actually investing — and this was several years ago — because I’d used the app myself, and I was like this is a great, great investment. So congratulations, for sure. You guys are charging straight ahead.

Just looking forward, 2018, ’19, and beyond, what are some of the milestones, benchmarks that you guys as a company are focusing on? And if there’s any data points that you would like to share with the audience to look at for.

Cameron: As the company has grown, we’re now in our sixth year, coming up to our seventh year now. And as the company has grown, we found ourselves more in a position to be able to live towards our values and really express the values of the company through the work that we’re doing and the impact that we have on the world. So we’re really focusing on Canva being a force for good and how we can influence that both through the individual actions we take at our company and through the scale that we have in our product.

Quite recently we had an initiative at work where we encouraged all our employees to find a way to contribute to the company, and we got together, and 50 of us got together on a Saturday, came into the office, and actually cooked a thousand meals for homeless people in our community. That working from the grassroots like that is really important to us because that then affects how people are empowered in other parts of the company.

So we have, again, a not-for-profit program that we promote through Canva, and we have 20,000 not-for-profits now using that. And they get the Canva subscription package for free which allows them to work with their teams, find volunteers, increase their donations, and really spread their positive impact all across the world. So we wanted to be doing more of those things, and that’s really important to the future of the company and also the passion of the people that join us as well. We’re up to about 300 people now in the company, and we’ve found that our mission and our drive really attracts those people to Canva, and we want the people that come and work there to have the same passion and drive to improve the world and bring about change through design. So it’s really important that we communicate that out.

Jay: It sounds like Canva is an awesome place to work. What challenges have you experienced as the organization grows? Being one of the first employees to now managing 300 people and trying to basically retain that culture and the right place with the right message and the right values, how have you been able to cope with that? Tell us a little bit about your experience as you’ve seen amazing growth.

Cameron: Scale and growth have been pretty challenging. You go through definite phases as the number of people in the company increases. Roughly, every time you double, stuff just starts breaking. You have to think about different ways to tackle the same challenges. Over the past four years, we’ve really zeroed down on the values that we want to live by and that we want to run the company by, and they’ve been incredible important in guiding the decisions that we make it helping people who come into Canva to understand how they should be making decisions and what they should be prioritizing.

So we originally started with 12 values that no one could remember, and we’ve now zeroed those down into six that really matter to us and that we’re constantly communicating, particularly the new people who come to Canva. Anyone who is new to Canva goes through a very well thought out onboarding process where we pair them up with someone on their team who looks after them. They have lots of sessions telling both about the little technical details of Canva as well as the broader philosophies and the values and how we make decisions —giving people that knowledge and then setting them free. It really empowers them.

We set up our team structure such that each team has the resources to operate almost like a mini startup, and they can make their own decisions, set their own crazy big goals, and get stuff done without having to go through too many layers of decision-making. And that’s been really important to moving fast and also keeping our people passionate about what they’re doing and feeling like they’re in control of the stuff that they’re actually contributing to Canva.

Jay: Right. Speaking of growth and funding, where you sit, I’m sure you get asked this question all the time. What are the future plans? I’m sure you’ve had acquisition offers. I’m sure you’ve been tossing around the idea of potentially going public, that sort of thing. What are your thoughts? And how do you feel about that whole thing?

Cameron: The impact that we’re seeing Canva have on the world has really made us understand that we want to continue doing that. We always love… We can spout off many metrics about millions of users and 20 designs created a second. But when you drill down into the stories behind those, it really makes you understand why we do what we do, and we want to keep doing that. We’d love to keep Canva independent and being a real force for good in the world. So that’s where we’re headed. We want to keep Canva driving forward, make sure all our teams are kicking crazy, big goals and keep expanding the number of areas that we’re helping people out in.

Jay: Fantastic. As we look to wrap, just a couple more questions for you. Thanks again for your time. It’s been a pleasure sitting down with you in person. It’s amazing. I always ask this to successful entrepreneurs because I think my audience gets a lot out of it. Having gone through the struggle and the climb of building a very successful business, this is not an easy question to answer, but if there’s one or two pieces of advice that you could give to people, maybe that are sitting there six years, eight years ago where you were, to get from point A to where you are now, what would that piece of advice be?

Cameron: I think in the early days, I find there are stories of people who have set out by themselves and created amazing companies, but having been through it and had the support of partners and understood the interplay between all three of us and our skillset, I think you really have to know what you’re good at as an individual and also what you’re not so good at, and you need to find the supporting partners that fill in those gap and the partners whose gaps you fill in as well. So finding that founding team and making sure that you fit together perfectly as a jigsaw is incredibly important.

And also really understanding the pain point that you’re trying to solve. Often people will pitch you a lot of ideas that sounds like great technology, quite inventive or creative, don’t necessarily solve something that someone out in the world is actually feeling pain on. And that was one of the key things that we did early on. We solved a problem that people were really feeling and gave them a solution that really changed their world. You need to do that in order to have a product that’s going to be successful.

Jay: That’s absolutely great advice on both parts. Obviously, I think a lot of us struggle because we’re sort of taught growing to, if you’re not good at something, to just keep trying and trying and trying, even though maybe you just will never be very good at that. And so identifying what you’re strengths and what you’re weaknesses are and then finding the right people to partner with — very, very crucial.

So lastly, you’re here for RISE. I don’t know if you’re doing more promotion here. If there’s anything you want to tell our audience about or, if not, then where is the best place to find you, follow you, maybe learn more about Canva, open up an account, and start using the tool?

Cameron: Definitely hit up Canva.com and sign up. It’s all free to use. If you want to find me, you can find me on Twitter @themaninblue. That’s pretty much the only place you can find me.

Jay: The man in blue. I like that handle.

Cameron: I also have a website called TheManInBlue.com, which has been around for almost 20 years now. I’ve been writing for a long time on there and put down my thoughts about design and creativity and starting a business. So if anyone wants to read about that, they can visit that too.

Jay: Fantastic. Cameron, thank you so much for your time. It’s been such a pleasure, and we’re really excited to hear about your company and the growth. It’s going to be on all of our radars because I’m sure we’ll be hearing many more positive news flashes regarding Canva. So thanks again for your time.

Cameron: Thanks so much for having me.