Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and embracing AI | Cameron Adams

(instrumental music) Canva is bigger than Figma, and Miro, and Webflow combined. You guys are generating $2.3 billion in ARR, and you're profitable. You're also growing 60% year over year, and it's accelerating.

I run everyone through the culture at Canva, and one of those sections is on giving away your Lego. Finding joy in the other things, and building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing, or great product building, or great engineering.

When is this coaching concept? I have never heard of this.

We don't really have managers, but everyone at Canva has a coach. They're constantly working with you to look at your skills, but also when it might be time to move on to the next level.

(instrumental music) I'm curious just how you think about product management.

I didn't want to do product management like they did at 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.

(instrumental music) It feels like Canva's just been this non-stop, up and to the right, all win, all success. In reality, that's never actually the case.

How many failure stories do you want?

(laughs)

We've got plenty.

Today, my guest is Cameron Adams. Cameron is the co-founder and chief product officer at Canva, which is a truly incredible business and company. At the top of the episode, I share a bunch of stats that will probably surprise you about the scale that Canva has reached these days. In our conversation, we cover a ton of ground, including how Canva stays product obsessed, their freemium strategy, lessons about building MVPs, how Cam and the product team think about AI within their product, also a peek into their unique team culture, their SEO and growth strategy, and also a peek into some of the stuff they just launched. This episode is for anyone building or growing a product or company. And I guarantee, by the end of this conversation, you'll be as blown away with Canva as I am. With that, I bring you Cameron Adams. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. Cameron, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

It is so great to be here, Lenny. I'm very excited.

I'm even more excited. I have at least a billion questions for you. I'm hoping I get through at least half a billion. There's so much I want to talk to you about. But I want to start with kind of a warm and fuzzy question. Do you ever just take a, a moment to reflect on the insane success of this business that you've built? And before you answer that, I'm going to share some stats about Canva that I think are going to blow people's minds, so think about the answer. So, I was researching Canva. All of this was just, I didn't know any of this actually, and I think it'll surprise a lot of people, just the scale that Canva has reached at this point. Okay, so Canva is bigger than Figma, and Miro, and Webflow combined, both in terms of valuation and in terms of revenue. You guys are generating $2.3 billion in ARR per year, and you're profitable. You've been profitable for about seven years at this point. You're also growing 60% year over year, and it's accelerating faster than last year. I think this is all, uh, quite unheard of at this scale. Uh, do you ever just reflect back on this and like, "Okay, this is... I- I've done well."