Canva's Cliff Obrecht: How We Turned Our Yearbook Company to $40B Business | 20VC #971

Where do we get money from? Silicon Valley's got heaps of money. Let's go to Silicon Valley.

(instrumental music) Cliff, I am so excited for this episode. I know you've listened to this show before, so this is gonna be one of the most special shows. Thank you so much for joining me, first.

No, thank you. Long time listener, first time caller. I feel privileged.

Not at all, my friend. We have quite a schedule in place. So I want to start with a little bit on you, that we see this incredible brand today that is Canva that you and Mel have built. Take me back to the beginning though. What was that founding aha moment for you with the very first day of Canva?

Oh, it probably goes back earlier than Canva. So Mel was teaching design at university and realized that it kind of sucked. It was really complex, it took about six months to learn the professional graphic design tools at the time. Whilst at the same time, people were using, I think it was MySpace at the time, Facebook. They were collaborating, they were sharing content. And, and she gets all the credit. She was like, "In the future, creation is gonna be totally different. It's gonna be online, it's gonna be collaborative, and it's gonna be easy." Um, but we're based in Perth, Western Australia, um, which is, I think the most isolated city in the world. And there's no such thing as venture capital there, and we had no idea. We didn't know what a startup was. We were like, "We should create a small business around this." Um, and I was studying school teaching at the time, uh, and so I was like, "Well, why don't we do school yearbooks?" And, and so we sort of took the idea. It was like, the i- the idea from Canva, Mel had this like 15 years ago. But we said, "W- we can't create this big global thing. Like, why don't we solve a real problem people had?" And I'm like, "I've seen school yearbook coordinators really struggle to create a yearbook." And so we did that and we created a, a company called Fusion Books, which, uh, became Australia's largest school yearbook company. So for a while there, we were sort of kings and queens of the Australian yearbook market, which is a, a small kingdom to be (laughs) , um, overseeing. Um, and then it was about four or five years into that business, we realized, hey, people are using our yearbook software for all kinds of different things. They're creating newsletters, they're creating posters. The world needs this. Maybe we can scale this idea and, uh, take it to the masses and really solve visual communication. And as the web and the world were becoming increasingly visual places, the world needed this tool to be able to allow people to express their creativity and turn it into a design.