Cameron Adams: How Canva Builds Products: Lessons Learned, What Works? What Flopped? | E1179

Speed is definitely important. Like, you can't take five years to launch a product. It also needs to reach a certain level where people get excited about it. You don't just wanna launch something that people feel like it just gets the job done, but they're not that crazy excited about it. Launching something at Canva that people will spread, they will tell others about, has been the biggest growth driver for us.

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Cam, I am so excited for this. I was just chatting to Cliff beforehand, and I was like, "Where do I take this conversation?" He's like... I'm not gonna do the accent 'cause you just ridiculed me for it.

(laughs)

I was actually gonna do it before, but he said, "You've gotta ask him, how did he come to meet me and Mel?" And he said there was a little bit of confusion on your end about-

(laughs)

... why you were there as an advisor or actually a hire. Talk to me about that.

Well, firstly, don't ask Cliff about content.

(laughs)

But secondly, um, I got intro'd to Mel and Cliff through my old boss at Google, Lars Rasmussen. So, he was one of the founders of Google Maps, and I worked with him on a project called Google Wave, and we did that for, like, four and a half years. I left Google to do this other startup with a couple of other, um, engineers from Google, and we were going very happily doing that. We were in the process of fundraising and Lars said, "Go talk to these people about some tech that they need." And I went and talked to them, they'd just moved to Sydney over from Perth at the time, and they had a school yearbook business. So, they were running this thing in Adobe Flash, it helped schools make their yearbooks, and they kinda wanted to take it to the next level, but they weren't gonna do that with Flash. So, I knew a bit about JavaScript and HTML, so I went to chat to them about that. Walked into their office, Mel was sitting at their conference table, trying to look very professional 'cause they had, like, five staff at the time, and I walked in and she's like, "Oh, are you here for the PHP developer role?" And I'm like, "No, I'm here to tell you, like, how to actually run the tech side of your business." So, we sat down, we chatted a bit about the latest tech at the time, what browsers were capable of, and particularly in the scheme of creating design, so how can you do visual design inside a browser, which was quite tricky at the time.

Mm-hmm.

Um, we explored it a bit. We went for coffee afterwards. Mel told me about her bigger vision beyond yearbooks, and it was democratizing design. It was bringing design to people who hadn't been able to access it before, which was really intriguing to me because my background is a graphic designer and also computer scientist, so merging design with democratizing technology was perfect for me. But me and my co-founders in my other startup, called Fluent, were, like, very happy, we were gonna take over the world, and we were just about to land $5 million in funding. Little did we know that we weren't just about to land $5 million in funding, but that's beside the point. So, I kind of put it in the back of my mind, of what Mel and Cliff were doing, and went off to do what I wanted to do. And a few months later, after our, um, startup had kind of created a little bit, um, that idea of democratizing design really came back to me. So, my wife, uh, her- she- we were looking at possibly moving to San Francisco 'cause there wasn't much happening in Australia at the time. My wife wasn't that keen to move to San Francisco, neither was I, so she said, "Why don't you go hit up Mel and Cliff again and see how they're going with trying to democratize design?" Uh, so I did, and they hadn't got funding or anything so far, they hadn't, uh, found a tech co-founder that could help them build the product, so we decided to join forces, and that was 2012.