Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company

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

Oh, it probably goes back earlier than Canva. Mel was teaching design at university and realized that it 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, were sharing content, 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.

We’re based in Perth, Western Australia, which is, I think, the most isolated city in the world, and there’s no such thing as venture capital there. We had no idea. We didn’t know what a startup was. We’re like, we should create a small business around this. And I was studying school teaching at the time, and so I was like, well, why don’t we do school yearbooks? And so we took the idea. It was the idea from Canva. Mel had this fifteen years ago, but we said, we we can’t create this big global thing.

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. We did that, and we created a company called Fusion Books, which became Australia’s largest school yearbook company. For a while there, we were kings and queens of the Australian yearbook market, which is a small kingdom to be overseeing. 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 take it to the masses and really solve visual communication. 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.

The thing with me is I just don’t think too much, and I don’t think through how hard things are gonna be. And that naivety probably plays well because I’m just like, oh, yeah. That sounds like a good idea. Let’s go for it. What do we need to do? Let’s unpack this problem we need to solve. Okay. We need some money. Where do we get money from? Silicon Valley’s got heaps of money. Let’s go to Silicon Valley. And then we went to Silicon Valley. We spent over a year there back and forth still trying to run our other business, and we got rejected over a 100 times by VCs before we finally convinced some people to invest in us, and that was a journey.

I literally

So that was our ticket into Silicon Valley, and it was really fortuitous. Bill Tye is a venture capitalist in the Bay Area. You should have him on the show. He’s an awesome guy. But mad keen kitesurfer, and Perth, being the most isolated city in the world, is amazing for kitesurfing. So I think he just made an excuse to have a junket in Perth where he could kitesurf, and he called in a tech event, and we had our Fusion Books company at the time. So we sort of rocked up and went in this pitch competition for Fusion Books.

We lost. He rejected us as the winners in that competition. But we got to know him over time, and then we got invited over to a conference in Maui, and that was at the time, it was quite funny. So we were super super green. I was listening to Tony Robbins at the time, and one of his philosophies is you are who you hang out with. With. We couldn’t afford to go to Maui, but I’m like, fuck it. This is a huge opportunity. We’re going all in with all our money from our Fusion Books bank account.

We’re going over there, and we stayed in we got to stay in this house with some really cool people. I think they must have had someone pull out. That’s why we got invited. And that’s how we made bunch of connections. And we’re talking before the show started about just grinding it out. We just ground it out, and there was one point in the journey where we’d been rejected by everyone in Silicon Valley. When you’re pitching, everyone that’s pitching, especially for early stage rounds, they have this spreadsheet, and it’s all the leads they have and where they’re at.

This spreadsheet slowly started turning red, just rejection, rejection, rejection. Mel and I got to the bottom of that list, and we’d been rejected by everyone, and we’re like, wow. We’ve spent six months and nearly all our money sleeping on people’s couches, not succeeding. What do we do? So we sort of had a day of misery where we’re kind of a bit upset and then pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and went back at it. I told

Well, firstly, persistence pays off. You need to have some semblance of a good idea, but persistence really pays off. And then what I was saying to you before the show was it’s really a marathon, not a sprint. The amount of times we’ve been rejected from candidates, and it’s broken my heart because you you know what it’s like. You spend so much time investing, taking these people out, and you know how good they’re gonna be and what impact they’re gonna have on the business, and getting rejected by those people really hurts.

But I’ve been in the game long enough now where if you leave a nice taste in those people’s mouths and you always be the good human and be the honest, honorable person and speak truths, people come back, and they remember you. And when they are ready for that career change or when an opportunity does arise, they often come back. And I really think about business as a really long game, and one of my biggest philosophies is just be honest. And if you say something, stick to your word.

There’s nothing I can’t stand in business more than people that go against their word. If I say something and make a commitment to something, then my word is my bond. I don’t need a term sheet. I don’t need a legal document. And I think that integrity over time, hopefully pays off as people start to recognize that you’re a straight shooter.

Oh, that’s a really deep question. It’s changed a lot over time. So I used to, for the longest of times, have this philosophy of work hard, play hard, grind it out, everyone else has just been weak. Why wouldn’t you go out for 20 beers after work and then rock back into work at 7AM and just grind it out again and just get through it? As you get older, you realize that’s not quite sustainable, so you need to start looking after all the things that really matter, like actually getting sleep and having just had a kid.

I’ve never appreciated sleep so much in my life. Exercise and all the good things. They really do matter as through your twenties, you can get away with pretty much anything I feel, but as you get into your mid thirties, I’m turning 37 in a couple of weeks, you need to start looking after yourself a bit better and then constantly learning when it actually comes to the career side. The best performers I know are just constantly learning, and they feel they don’t know everything, and they’re constantly on a journey striving to increase their knowledge.

How would you describe your leadership style today? You mentioned it

I think it was very much used to be lead by example. Work hard and accomplish things, and hopefully people would follow. I think now it’s just like honesty, and how it’s changed is I used to just have high expectations of people and used to will to me when people weren’t good. And I to think a lot of things like, this is just common sense. Why don’t you get this? As I’ve grown, you realize really frank and transparent feedback and coaching is really important. Sometimes people just don’t know and just being really transparent around, hey, you did this way.

Have you thought about doing it this way? Really helps people. And also understanding personality types, where I’m pretty just straight up with things. And some people are more sensitive, so you need to adapt the way you communicate to the people receiving that communication.

Melanie, I completely so Mel is my wife and the CEO of Canva, so my boss, and definitely the worthy boss. But we have totally opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to trust. So I trust by default, and you can lose that trust. Mel, it takes a lot of time to build her trust. But once you build it, it’s wow. It’s there, and it’s there for a long time. So that’s how I think about it. I fly by the seat of my pants a little bit, wear my heart on my sleeve, and and quick to love, that’s my style.

Yeah. I actually think I heard this from someone on your show a long time ago, and it really resonated with me. Distance traveled is if if you grew up in a privileged family, went to an Ivy League school, and you end up as an investment banker, that’s great. I’m sure you worked really hard. I was a school teacher before I couldn’t use computers before we started our first I hated computers, to be honest, before we started our first business. But I used to be a school teacher and I taught at one of the most underprivileged schools in Western Australia.

A lot of the students there were refugees from Africa, Middle East, and parts of Asia. These people, ex child soldiers, they’d been through the most horrific things. They started life with a really big disadvantage. They had everything stacked against them. They had often spent years in a refugee camp. Then they traveled to a new country. They couldn’t speak our language. To see these kids evolve, educate themselves, learn a new language. Sometimes just getting a job is like the distance traveled from being a child soldier to getting a job.

One guy I met on the street years after, he said, oh, I’m a roof tiler. And he was so proud of that, and I was so proud of him because coming from being a child soldier to actually having a full time job being a roof tiler, probably being paid really well, that’s distance traveled. I really look out for that in the hiring process. And so if you have come from a obscure background, like nontraditional tech or whatever, and have taught yourself the tools, I find those people once they figure out the game, because this all is just one big game.

Once they figure out how to play the game, they are some of the best people we have. What do you mean when you say it’s a game? Most things are just a game, really. We’re fortunate. Live We in Australia. We have a social safety net. If you have no job, you can go on the dole and get enough money to live and eat and have a roof over your head, which is a great system, by the way, that many other countries should follow that can. With business, we’ve just always treated it like a game, and it’s a serious game.

Like, I’m very competitive. So when I play a game, I’ll play to win. I’ll absolutely play to win. But at the end of the day, the business doesn’t define me. I would be just as happy if I was a fisherman. That would be my dream job. It’s going out fishing every day. I was in construction industry before I I started teaching. I think I’d be happy out on-site digging holes every day. Often, I long to dig a hole and not have to think about things and manage people.

Sometimes with some

So short answer, yes. Absolutely. And still have a very much to this day when we meet sort of fancy people. One thing you realize though, you say and so I used to have it tremendously. Sometimes it’s crushing. And that’s why, like, I I would often go to some of these social events, have a couple of drinks because you’d need that social lubrication just to be able to function. Because these people, you’re dealing with people that have created billion dollar businesses or venture capitalists, and they all seem so intelligent, you don’t think you’re that smart.

And super, super intimidating, but what I found is as you get to know these people over time, and this probably sounds conceited, they’re not that much smarter than you. Sure. They’ve got experience in the thing, and they sound really smart because they’re talking about the thing they’ve spent ten years doing. If you’ve spent ten years doing something, you should sound smart talking about that thing. And so it’s hugely intimidating going into a new world, a new industry. I think you gotta start backing yourself. And this really hurt us in hiring actually throughout the early years of Canva because we used to have all these, I call them fancy people with the fancy titles coming from fancy companies interviewing at Canva.

I’m like, oh, shit. I’m not worthy to to be interviewing you. You are so good. You are like a a senior VP this or that at one of the fan companies. I’m not worthy. I’m lucky to be interviewing you. And I guess that came across, and we made a bunch of really poor hiring decisions because we just assumed that these people were smarter than us. And then, like, during the company, like, a year, and we’re like, fucking hell. Like, you’re not really smart at all. Like, these ideas you’re coming up with that we’ve been listening to are stupid, and they’re taking us on a massively wrong direction.

We’ve come full circle there and realized that, actually, we’re not bad at some of the stuff we do. Mel, I think she’s the best product person in the world, and her product vision is just impeccable. She’s seeing around corners ten years into the future that no one else is. We’ve really learned to trust each other and trust our judgments a lot more, which has been a huge kind of u-turn from where we were before.

I love hiring internally. We love building talent. My EA is now our head of people. Zach, our CMO, joined Canva as content writer, a contract content writer. He was seen at the time. He’s been with the company about ten years now. He’s now our CMO. Wouldn’t change him for any of the best CMOs in the world. He’s absolutely phenomenal. Same with Jenny, our head of people. World class. Absolutely world class. And these people didn’t come from fancy tech companies. But that being said, there are great companies that have built great people, and we definitely complement homegrown talent with really amazing people we bring into the business.

It’s the yin and the yang. It’s the art and the science. It’s all about the vibe.

So firstly, I think people’s strengths are whatever comes natural to them. We didn’t grow up with no money, but we didn’t grow up with a lot of cash and stuff when we were kids, and we had a great little family upbringing. Mum was a teacher as well. Dad was a boilermaker welder who got into work safety stuff, worked for government doing inspecting building sites. And so do you have Kmart over in The UK? Like, Big W and Kmart? This is like supermarkets. Right? No. They’re kinda like Walmart, I guess.

Yes. We

So think of it like a Walmart. We’d go into Walmart with my mom, and she would haggle at the equivalent of Walmart. I’m like, mom, I was so embarrassed. But she’s, like, kinda haggle for everything, was always trying to get a good deal, was always trying to find the best value in things. I But was also, like, honest and open when she did it. So I learned a lot from her just about I guess it was the art of getting a good deal. She’s Italian, and so I think Italians are good at the haggle.

And I think I just grew up in that environment. As with that sort of skill transferred into business, I had a few just really simple revelations, and then this applies to acquiring a company, growing someone through your business and helping with their career, or hiring someone. You essentially just need to align the company you’re acquiring or the person’s goals with your goals. And I just find being really transparent. Here are our goals. What are your goals? If we can get our goals to align, magic can happen, and one plus one can equal 10.

It’s a really simple philosophy being super transparent like any acquisition we make. A lot of people don’t believe it up upfront, and I say talk to all the other companies we’ve acquired because you’ll find out what I say is actually true. I’m just gonna be super transparent with you from day dot, and if you speak to corp dev people, and we’ve spoken to a lot of them from lots of the big companies, there’s a lot of bullshit there. That’s not what you’ll get from me. I’m gonna be super transparent.

This is why we love your company. This is why I think it’s great for us to partner. And this is the value we see, and these things aren’t valuable to us, and this is how we value it from a dollar perspective or an equity perspective or whatever the deal terms are gonna be. And let’s just talk about that. And I do that very early, and I say I’d rather a fast no than a long no, but better is a fast yes. Man, I’m naive. What’s the normal bullshit in

They’ll reach out and say, oh, I just wanna chat, learn about your business or whatever. You’re like, okay. You’re the corp dev person. I don’t know exactly where this goes. And then, oh, let’s talk about a partnership. Okay. What kind of partnership? And they can’t articulate an actual partnership. And after three or four meetings, they’ll go, well, would you consider an acquisition? You could have said that in the first thirty seconds of us chatting, and I could have told you no. We’re not looking to be bought.

I like to get to know the human behind the business, and that’s probably the most important thing because the business speaks for itself. You can look at SimilarWebb, and you can look at their traffic. You can look at their metrics. You can outside in how a company is going. You can then understand how their culture is outside in as well. You look at their attrition through LinkedIn, who’s jumping jobs, etcetera. There’s a lot of knowledge you can kind of assess just from sort of outside in analysis.

And then it’s really around what are the motivations of the founder, what are they like as people. I mean, it was hard through COVID because you couldn’t go out and spend some time with them and really get the cut of their jib, But we find we have a real philosophical alignment with the founders we’ve acquired their companies of, and we’ve acquired some amazing founders. Maybe we’ve just been really lucky, I think, but we’ve had a lot of luck in that regard. Have you ever made a bad

most important thing for me is trust. You can garner any knowledge and skills you like through commercial means. I’ve actually having listened to your podcast for a long time, heard a lot of really smart people and just reached out to them and say, hey. Can you be an adviser to the company, or can I pick your brain on this thing? You can get a lot of great advice around certain domains from just reaching out to people, and, obviously, as you’ll get more leverage with your company, that becomes easier and easier.

Even in the earliest days, we used to pay people with generous equity grants, and we still do to this day to get them on as an adviser. Canva, to give you an example, three years ago, we were like a big bodybuilder that had not done a single leg day in their life. So we had a huge upper body, and that was our user acquisition, that was our product, and that was our organic growth. But our two weak little legs were marketing and sales. Me and Zach were like, hey.

Let’s figure this out together. Who are the best people? Who does marketing better than anyone else? Let’s go speak to as many of them that will speak to us. We started by building our own knowledge, and then we hired a few people, and we made a few bad hires, and we made a few great hires, and we just figured it out. And then now we’re doing that with sales, and I would actually think we’re pretty damn good at marketing now, traditional marketing, and sales is definitely on the right trajectory.

But these things take time and a lot of learning. Are you asking about investors? Yeah. Trust is the most important thing. And once again, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. This is cliche, but you really see investors’ colors in the tough times. Good times, everything’s easy, but it’s in the tough times where people’s true colors come out. And the age old do some reference checks with companies that haven’t done well for that firm, etcetera, etcetera, all actually makes a lot of sense.

Oh, I’ve had a few. I’d tell you the toughest time I’ve had recently was putting up this Christmas tree that I bought. It got the better of me. I’m terrible for not reading instructions, and I did it all wrong just like IKEA furniture. And it took me about four hours to put up this Christmas tree. It was 11PM, and I I nearly gave up, but I didn’t. The next biggest challenge in our business journey was we had our first version of Fusion Books, the school yearbook company, built in Australia by contractors, and that was becoming very expensive.

We couldn’t afford it anymore. So we outsourced it through oDesk, which is now Upwork at the time, to a team in India. And and so we had about 400 schools on the platform at the time. And the whole concept of, I guess, Canva for yearbooks is the teachers and students create their yearbook together using this WYSIWYG software. It’s all amazing. And then they hit publish and that exports a PDF document that gets printed. The WYSIWYG part worked, but it couldn’t export a PDF.

We had to recreate over a 100,000 pages with Photoshop and InDesign where we had to hire a team of designers on Upwork to essentially eyeball these pages and redesign them in Photoshop and InDesign, and then we had to convert those into a PDF and publish them. So that was probably one of the hardest things we’ve ever done. The other hardest thing we ever done were about five years into Canva, and we realized when you’re a startup, right, you have to make tradeoffs. And often when building technology, that trade off is a speed for tech debt.

And we’d accrued a lot of tech debt, particularly in our front end code. And it got to the point where it was untenable. We couldn’t scale our team. Our user base was scaling massively, and we were like, I think we need to rewrite this whole thing. And we obviously analyzed pulling it up to bits and recreating it component by component, but that wasn’t gonna work. We had to down tools and ship no features for a full two years. It was supposed to be one year, but it took two years in the middle of Canva’s growth journey, call it from year four to six.

We’re at year 10 now. And that was a death march for a company that’s so used to shipping product and shipping value to customers. That was a really dark time. How did that impact your growth trajectory? For the first year, we had all the tailwinds. It was a great product, but we had people copying us. We have had so many copycats over the years. Mel doesn’t ever look at competition. She’s like, fuck the competition. We’ve got this ten year vision. They’re copying where we were. I’m like, yeah.

That’s nice. People are copying us, and they’re hey. It looks pretty good. So I’m probably a bit on the other side, but I’ve learned more to be like Mel. And seeing these copycats just ruthlessly copy you, and then one of the copycats, they introduced video, and that was a core part of what we were gonna launch. It was like, fuck. They’ve launched video. They’re gonna beat us and blah blah blah. But ultimately, we just stayed the course. And while it was tough, we got through it.

And now our product velocity, of this new free platform, is faster than anyone else. And once again, we’re off to the

First to market is important, but user acquisition is just as important. You can have a great product, but if you haven’t cracked the user acquisition channels, you’ve got nothing because customers need to be able to find your product and use your product and love your product. And we grew Canva through a couple of different ways. Primarily, our product was our biggest marketing channel, so we built Canva over the course of a year before we launched anything. At the time, the lean startup was really in vogue.

So our investors were all going, what are you doing? Launch. Iterate, do all the lean startup stuff, hack your way to success. And Mel was like, absolutely not. We are gonna launch the most delightful product to our users and offer it for free, which is the freemium model, and our users are gonna be our biggest marketing channel. And that’s what we did despite all that pressure from investors, and we picked a really good target audience when we’re starting as well. We’re like, who has the biggest need for visual content creation?

Social media marketers. Because social media is a visual content beast, and you need to keep feeding the beast. So we approached social media marketers, and one of the people I called outreach to was Guy Kawasaki, and he responded. We were nothing at the time. He was my first avagast on the show. First avagast hearing that. Yeah. Eight years ago. Yeah. He’s an absolute legend, and good on him for giving a chance to underdogs that have no leverage. Most people, you need enough leverage to for them to pay any attention, but Guy Kawasaki responded to my tweet, and he responded to whatever you sent him, and so, yeah, kudos to Guy.

Let’s have a homage to Guy moment.

Oh, there were so many reasons why VC said no. Two nontechnical founders from Perth. We got every reason under the sun. But we have a philosophy around that. It’s start niche and go wide. You don’t wanna boil the ocean. You wanna solve a problem for someone that has that problem. Solve that problem really well. And then once you’ve solved it for them, what are the adjacent industries, people, professions that have that same problem? And let’s go pick those off. And that’s what we’ve done with Canva.

And the other sort of user acquisition channel we cracked in the early days was SEO as well. We’re a content company, and we figured out a way how to propagate that content onto the Internet so people searching it can find it and then drive people to the product like that. When

You’re right. It’s a huge risk, actually. It is an absolute huge risk because if you don’t have the right technical foundation of your business, then it’s like a house of cards. We were incredibly lucky to bring on a third cofounder, Cam, and he was at Google. He wasn’t quite technical, but we palmed him off as the technical cofounder because he could write JavaScript, and he did write JavaScript. He built a lot of the first front ends in Canva.

We had a couple of early commitments, but getting him on board really tipped the needle in regards to investors and also allowed us to get on our CTO who is also another amazing human, Dave Fanden who’s still with the company and absolutely phenomenal and really built the technical foundations that are still there today and

Greatest good for the greatest number. I always think to the product, I don’t know, give away all our secret sauce here, but as a funnel, is it is, like, super obvious. People sometimes love to pitch ideas and features. My first question is how many people are gonna see this feature? You can’t build a feature nestled so deep in your UX that it’s only gonna be seen by some 10% of your user base. I think there are a lot of things as funnels and around product development.

What is gonna have the greatest good for the greatest number? And then the other product philosophy is a lot of the time, and this is like Mel’s strengths, I’ve learned this from her. People don’t know what they don’t know. That’s the whole Henry Ford. If you ask them people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. You need to be looking at the future and understanding trends. We’re thinking twenty years into the future, not just two years into the future. And if you think how industries coalesce over time and what that’s gonna mean to your business, it allows you to be really strategic and make long term bets as well as short term.

How that applies now is really relevant in AI. So Canva was created because before Canva, the design ecosystem was incredibly fragmented. You had to go to a stock photo site to get your stock photos. You had to go to Vistaprint to print your stuff. You had to use three different softwares to create your design, and you had to communicate over a whole different communication layer like email, etcetera, etcetera. So we brought all of this industry together in one simple page to create Canva, and it was the aggregation of that disjointed industry that really enabled us to help the everyday person to achieve their goals and their visual communication goals.

The same is occurring in AI at the moment. There’s all these cool tools, but it’s really how those tools show up in a workflow where people get their job to be done that really adds the most value. And that’s why we’re investing so heavily into AI as really the copilot to help people achieve their goals because people don’t open their computer at the start of the day or wake up in the morning thinking, I wanna use AI. They wake up in the morning thinking, I have these certain jobs to be done, and we see it as our job as a company to help them achieve those jobs to be done.

Can I ask

who needs good

We hate good enough. Good enough is not good enough. We aspire and are world class across our key product areas, and we’ve built the entirety of Canva on the one unified platform. That comes with a bunch of benefits. When you use a video creation tool, a whiteboarding tool, a presentation tool, a social media graphic tool, whatever, you don’t wanna learn a whole new interface. You don’t wanna upload all your stuff to a whole new content library. You want the interoperability of designs. We’ve built all of Canva off this one ecosystem and one graphics engine, so every doc type is built off the same interface and it’s very interoperable and easily understood.

That also allows you to actually convert a presentation with one click into a video. It allows you to convert a doc into a presentation. It allows us to do all these crazy things that you can’t do with these point and shoot tools, particularly going into this economic downturn. People are looking to aggregate their visual communication tools just from a pure simplicity and job to be done perspective, but also a cost cutting perspective. You shouldn’t have to pay $20 for this tool and $20 for this tool and $30 for this tool when you can get Canva for essentially $14 a month.

And we only charge you based on active users. How do you add the most value to customers? Our pricing even is aligned to customer value. So we don’t try and sell an organization a thousand seats. We only charge you based on the number of active seats in a particular quarter. Value is aligned with value, And we really believe over the long term, that really builds trust and allows good things. Cliff, I wanna

I’ve always felt rich. My favorite wine is what we call in Australia a goon bag. It’s like boxed wine. It costs $10 a box. And I know it’s my favorite wine because the last blind wine testing thing we did, it had everything from a $500 bottle to this boxed wine. The blind wine tasting test was my favorite. So I’ve always felt like I’ve had abundance. We’ve always had enough money to travel. Mel and I used to be carnies. We used to do airbrush tattoos at carnivals.

We used to work our ass off and make enough money to go to India or Thailand for three months at a time or Africa. Especially when you travel those countries, you realize how lucky you are and like, we’ve always felt lucky and rich. As the company’s grown, we’re all in on Canva. So it’s not like we’ve cashed out tons and tons of money and all that kind of stuff. We’re very long on Canva.

I actively don’t angel invest. I do do some just because it’s, a great person. I don’t do anything to make money. I back ideas that I think the world needs to see. In regards to the money stuff, it started to become really uncomfortable for us when Canva started really growing in valuation. The papers started writing about us as billionaires, and we were like, that feels horrible. We don’t really wanna be billionaires. We have more than enough with what we have.

So Mel and I, we own 31% of Canva, and we put 30%, so, like, 99% of what we own into a charity that we can’t spend on our own stuff because it’s selfish in a way because we get the most joy, I guess, or our most fulfillment from helping others rather than sort of buying a PJ or that fancy car or or thing like that. Yeah. That’s kind of why

Yeah. We very much aligned it with the Canva Foundation. And so the team now that runs the Canva Foundation, we just pull that capital. We draw down some capital every year where we pick projects we believe in. A really great one we’ve been focusing on for the last couple of years is in conjunction with GiveDirectly that essentially gives cash to the world’s poorest people and aims to lift them out of poverty, and our first sort of big pilot was in Malawi. And it’s a journey, though.

It’s like building a business. Ten years ago, we knew jack shit about building a business. Now we know jack shit about philanthropy. We know we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have this pool of capital that isn’t ours. We’re custodians of that capital, and now it’s on us to figure out how to deploy it through projects and investments to have the biggest positive impact we can on the world. And that sounds really wanky, but I’m

How much money do you need? We had a kid recently, and the last thing I want her to do is grow up rich. There’s so much joy. Like, you’re self made, Harry. You built this business by grinding it out from the early days. I remember you saying one time your first podcast. It must have been with Guy Kawasaki. You got your mom to take the phone off the hook and Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I am a fan. See? But, like, how is the joy in actually, like, building something for yourself that you’ve earned? Imagine getting everything handed to you on a silver platter. I would not take that right away from my daughter to not earn her own self worth.

It’d mess you up. I’d be messed up. I would have gone off the rails. I imagine growing up knowing you’re super rich and you can do anything. You see some of these kids that grow up rich and entitled, and that’s not what I want for future generations. How much money is enough? I think you need enough to have a nice house, travel, do all the things. But to be honest, we I always say a 100,000,000. That’s a lot. I don’t think you need that much. I really don’t think you need that much.

You can do some cool stuff with a 100,000,000 number. I own your private jet, Harry. That’ll be fun. I’ve never flown on a private jet before, but I’m very keen to be invited on someone else’s. I’m such a tight ass. I told you my mom used to haggle at the Australian version of Walmart. I still fly economy unless I can get a points upgrade. You want $10 for a five hour trip? I’ll tough out that $10, and I’ll spend that $10 on something I never do spend it on something else, but I just don’t value, I guess, comfort that I never thought about this, but, yeah, I’m a tight ass.

I’m not a tight ass with others. I’m just a tight ass with some decisions. One the things that I

We invest in experiences. I’ve recently got a personal trainer as well because we work a lot, and you often put off exercise. So having someone you’re accountable to actually helps with that. But, no, we really invest in experiences. Some of the the coolest things we’ve done in recent years is we rode motorbikes across Bhutan, went what do you call it? Zip lining in Laos, rode motorbikes again, dirt bikes on the China Vietnam border. We used to have experiential holidays, and that means a lot to us, and that’s where we get the most of our joy.

Tell

I don’t know. If there is a secret to a successful marriage, please tell me. Like anything, it’s always a work in progress. Melanie and have only been married two years, but we were dating sixteen years before that. So we’ve been together for eighteen years. So we’ve really grown up together, and she’s really my best friend more than anything else. And I think that’s important, but, shit, we get in heated debates. It’s not all roses and teacups. There’s lots of challenging moments.

We endeavor to. We have this thing where we’re like, no work talk. And then we’re not talking about work. Can’t be bothered talking about work tonight. And so we often try and do that on weekends and stuff. Inevitably, it creeps in. Now we used to do it a lot, talk about work a lot, but now, like, we try not to. And we do. And often, it’s fun, but sometimes you just need to not talk about work if you’re on a date night or if you’re doing something fun.

You need that division. And like we said a few times, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And as you’ve been doing it for a long enough period of time, you actually need those recharge moments where it’s not about work. I’m gonna get you in trouble

Oh, I think if either of us were dating anyone else, we would both be dumped because we’re both kind of neglectful partners at times. So many times in the style, someone’s making dinner for the other person, and it’s like, I can’t come up for dinner. I’m flat out on this thing. I need to get it shipped. But we understand each other’s. You go, girl. You’re doing this for the team. And so if we’re with anyone else, it’d be terrible. So that’s, I guess, a pro where we can really work really hard and not get in trouble for it.

I know other people that have demanding businesses whose partners aren’t in the business struggle with that because it’s just a dichotomy of who’s more busy. The biggest con, yeah, we both work a lot. I don’t know. It’s all fun. It’s all in the mix. Final one

I always really valued my independence, liked to cut my own course. I think you need to give that space to kids to find their own path and cut their own course. What you can instill on them is a set of values. Be honest. Be a good human. Be kind. Work hard. And if you leave them with those values or those guiding principles or guardrails, you would hope they can then make good decisions for themselves. What’s the hardest thing about being a father? Oh, no sleep. This decision is super young.

So it’s just getting better now. The first five months were very trying in regards to not getting much sleep, and I guess I underestimated

No. Mel was breastfeeding. She has to get up and breastfeed. I don’t have boobies. We tag team it. Right? We both work incredibly hard, so we tag team it. She had a lot more of the load in the early days by nature’s default, but it’s starting to even off a bit more. That’s a great

We kinda tried that, but it didn’t really work. We ended up getting a lady in for a few hours for about a week, and she really just whipped us into gear. Turns out it’s all about routine, and Melanie and are not very good at following structure and strict routines. And apparently, kids need that, and it actually works. So anyone out there that’s got a kid that doesn’t sleep, yeah, do the whole routine thing. I

a quick fight.

Perfect.

Oh, I’ve read a lot of business books over the years, but now when I’m going to bed at night, I want some trash, and I read Jack Reacher. Oh, wow. I had in my head that you were gonna say Sapiens or something. I was like, oh, no. I do like that book. I know. The business book I’m really enjoying now is Working Backwards. It’s about Amazon. But for me, business books are like flavor of the month. I like Daily Sturt by Ryan Holiday.

We’ve just got a lot to figure out. I think the world has enough good intentions and capital to solve the world’s problem. I think what we need to solve and not just us, but the gap we need to bridge is connecting those good intentions and that capital with the problems, and I feel it’s a very inefficient system. So figuring out a way to connect the world’s goodwill to the problems and solve those problems. Would you ever do another startup? Oh, I don’t think so. It’s hard.

Tell me. Although, we’re gluttonous of punishment. Like, we we’ll probably do we’ll run projects, philanthropic projects that are built like a startup based on technology. What have you recently changed your mind on, my friend? How hard having a kid is? I used tell Mel when she was pregnant, which she used to hate. Having a baby’s gotta be easy. People have been doing it since the dawn of time. There wouldn’t be so many humans on this planet if it wasn’t easy, and that didn’t go down well.

And and now I know why it didn’t go down well.

Perseverance, kindness, being curious, and a sense of adventure. Like, a real sense of adventure. I want my daughter to have a real sense of adventure.

be

Oh, think probably Bob Iger. I love Bob Iger. What have you learned from Bob? Bob has a very values first approach to business. It really resonates. What’s best for the customer? What’s best for the employees? What are we actually trying to do here? So he often relates things to Disney, and they’re in the business of telling beautiful stories that engage people. And I think this is one thing that people get really distracted by. They focus on the art of running a company rather than the art of creating value, and that’s why people and a lot of founders lose sight of why their business exists.

Often in tech, it’s like you create a product that solves a problem, and people, especially as their business grow, they get caught up with internal politics, hiring the next big hire, blah blah blah. But what do your customers see? All your customers sees at the end of the day is your digital product, and if that product is not delightful and amazing, your business is gonna go to shit. That’s a common misconception that people have and focus too much on their company and not enough on their actual product and the value that they’re creating for their customers.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you

Canva? I’m glad I don’t know how hard it all is because that would be a challenge, you know, all the hurdles we would have had to jump over. If you knew, then it would be sort of harder to start. Well, I guess a lot of the people management stuff, I’ve really evolved how to get the best out of people. That whole thing I was talking about before, aligning goals and just being transparent. They’re probably some of the things I wish I sort of could have brought into my toolkit earlier.

Penultimate one, my friend. What would you most like to change about the world of startups? The thing I would like to change is changing, and it was this concept of everything used to have to be in the Bay Area. You had to be Stanford grad, all that bullshit. The amount of investors that rejected us because they said, I like to ride my bike to my start ups. I’m like, fuck off. That is changing, though. I think COVID really accelerated that change, and now investors are having a more global approach and seeing that unorthodox people in unorthodox places can and often do solve big problems because they have unique perspectives different to those perspectives that are grown in the Bay Area.

Man, I love that.

We’re just gonna keep on keeping on, man. We love this journey, and we love where we’re going. We really believe as the web and the world become increasingly visual places, Canva is in prime position to really help through that transition and help people achieve their visual communication goals. And that goes in a variety of different paths, but we’re just excited to follow those paths down to their end. Cliff,

always a pleasure.