Canva Co-Founder: AI Is Useless Without This 1 Skill

If you're doing exactly the same thing as the person next to you, or the founder down the road is doing, you're not going to create that difference which attracts customers, or attracts investors, or perks anyone's ears up about what it is that you're doing.

AI gives you the options, but it doesn't give you more chances to send your message. You often only get 1 chance to send that message, and sending theright message is critical. I think as a creator, you really need to be in tune with what's going on in the world, and be able to bring theright taste.

Because taste is really about.

This is Cameron Adams, the co-founder of Canva, which he helped grow to over a quarter billion monthly users worldwide, and today he's revealing how Canva became so successful, and what every creator needs to focus on to succeed in the current AI landscape.

At the time we were launching, Lean Startup was the book that everyone was reading, and the essential takeaway from Lean Startup was just: launch as quickly as possible, and you'll learn as people either start using it or as they don't start using it.

We kind of went against that advice, but we were confident in our understanding of the field, and also through the user testing that we did, that was kind of the secret sauce to Cam's initial success. We started seeing lots and lots of organic growth coming just from word of mouth, and that sort of thing is something money can't buy.

How can creators stay relevant, and what should they actually be focusing on to be super successful in 2026 and beyond?

In a world where it's faster to create content, where it's easy to create content, the key skill of being a creator nowadays is really about.

Welcome to New Economies.

Cam, welcome to New Economies. I have been a massive fan of the Canva product ever since you guys started, like 15 years ago, and now we have you here. So thank you so much for joining us today, and can't wait to dive in.

It is so good to be here, and I always love talking to a Canva fan.

It's amazing, you know? But what's even better, Canva 2.0 just happened, and it's like this crazy event where thousands of users come together. What does Canva create, and how do you best prepare when you're about to go on stage and talk in front of thousands of people?

Because you make it look so easy.

Canva Create is seriously one of my favorite moments of the year. It's where we get a whole bunch of our community together. So this year we had about 6,000 people in Los Angeles, actually in the stadium that Taylor Swift filmed one of her concerts in, and we get them all together because we want to show them the best of Canva that is coming outright at that moment.

And we gear up lots of our product teams and pretty much everyone across Canva internally for this moment to launch some of their biggest things, to tell the best stories about how people are using Canva, and to really celebrate creativity and design of all sorts.

You asked the question, what does it feel likeright before we walk on? I feel like I've gotten pretty good at dealing with the nerves, but this time around, with 6,000 people in the theater, we actually had our countdown, and the roar from the crowd that came up as I was standing backstage was just incredible.

It gave me goosebumps and a little bit of nerves, and I remember looking at Mel, our CEO and one of our co-founders, and we were just both in awe of the community and the excitement that had been generated in that moment.

So it was amazing when we stepped out on stage and we just managed to hit our stride straight away.

It's kind of like one of those moments before you're about to go on stage, you probably get those insane goosebumps and almost like that rumbling in the tummy,right? But as soon as you hit the first, you know, few notes and the fans absolutely love you guys, you're away,right?

Yeah, it's like when you walk out, there's a little bit of nerves, but as soon as you announce that first thing and you hear the feedback from the audience, like we always hear from the front row, there's Canva superfans there, and when we talk about the new thing that's coming out, whether that's Canva AI 2.0 or Magic Layers, the gaffes that you hear and the little mutterings of like, "Oh my God, I can't believe they did that," just really give you that energy and immediately calm us down.

I don't think I've done that much. I've done like 1,000 or 2,000 people when I was like 20, 21. That is still pretty nerve-wracking. But 6,000 people? That's like half a quarter of a stadium. You guys are just like in the.

Well, 1,000 or 2,000 is still a pretty big audience, so kudos.

Didn't you guys do this in the YouTube studio in LA?

Yes. It's an amazing space there. It's part of, I can't remember whether they call it the Americans Airlines Stadium or something, but it's a massive complex. It's actually where I think a bunch of the World Cup games are being played at the moment as well.

So it's a big space to fill, but our community manages to do it.

No pressure. The Canva Founding Story, I think, is so incredible. You guys launched, you know, 15 years ago now, give or take, and every Founding Story has kind of like those humble beginnings. And when I was listening to a few of your previous episodes, when you joined Matt and Cliff, you know, the other co-founders, I don't think you really knew what you were joining for, what the meeting was about.

Like, were you joining as an advisor? Like, the first hire, second hire? How did you all come together, which then led you all to co-founding Canva?

Yeah, it was a little bit of a journey. It probably took about, oh, 4 to 6 months for us to finally like come together properly as a team. I actually got introduced to them through one of my old bosses at Google, who was actually one of the founders of Google Maps, and he had bumped into Mel and Cliff, I think at a kiteboarding event.

Kiteboarding was big back then. It was this big tech scene thing where VCs and startup founders came together, and Mel and Cliff had got into it, and they'd bumped into Lars from Google Maps, and he had gotten talking to them, and he'd been really, I think, inspired by their vision, and they were looking for someone to help them really build the product because they were two non-technical founders.

They had built through various agencies and stuff like that a yearbook tool, which started to hint at what the future of design could look like, but they wanted to take it bigger. And they had just moved to Sydney at the time.

I had been in Sydney for probably 5 or 6 years at that stage. And that very first meeting, I was impressed with the vision that they had, particularly with Mel and her background in design and her understanding of how difficult it was for people, and the notion that design could be democratized and used as a superpower for anyone around the world was really appealing to me because I've got a background as a graphic designer and a computer scientist, so I kind of merge technology and design together.

But I also had my own startup running at the time, so I was like, that sounds great, but I've got other great things going on. But over the next few months, we continued conversing, and eventually it got to the point where I'm like, these two people know what they're doing, we fit really well together, we're all passionate about this area, we can do serious things here.

So in July 2012, we finally pulled the trigger and Canva was born. We started building the product, we started fundraising, and the rest is history.

You know, when the co-founding team comes together, it's kind of that magical moment where you can like just get to the races and just like build fast. Take me back to that first year, the first 6 to 12 months.

What did that actually look like if I was to pretend I was there as your, you know, first employee?

It was exciting, but also daunting because we knew we were building something momentous, and we needed to get itright, but we also didn't have much of a team. So Cliff actually spent most of his time running the yearbook business in the first 6 months.

So they were like slowly weaning themselves off Fusion yearbooks and figuring out how they could go all in on Canva. Mel was the one who made the leap first. So she was sitting next to me. We were conversing, talking about what design should actually be like for non-designers, how to make it approachable and easy.

We did a whole bunch of mocking up and prototyping. It was really fortunate, you know, at the time, vibe coding didn't exist. I was a coder, so I could put the prototypes together. We could really feel the product quite quickly, and we spent 6 months probably narrowing down on exactly what that product was going to be.

At the same time, we were looking for a team. We were hiring engineers. We were doing fundraising. So it was all happening in parallel, but we knew pretty much the product we wanted to build after 6 months, and then spent the next 6 months going deep on that, making sure it was production ready, that it had all the features.

Critically, doing user testing to make sure that the very first experience people had with Canva was an amazing one, which then turned them into advocates and ambassadors. And when we launched, that was kind of the secret sauce to Canva's initial success, that we found this great audience who are incredibly passionate about Canva, but also about just freeing themselves to create visual content, and they would go and tell all of their Twitter followers, all of their blog readers, all of their audience about Canva, and that helped us grow in the first couple of years.

You know, especially with consumer products early, it's all about creating those fanatical users,right? But you guys waited quite a long time to actually launch the first product. We get told, you know, from ambassadors, and you know, when you're just building, especially in today's world, just like build as fast as you can, as quickly as you can, just launch.

It doesn't matter about the quality. Why was it so important for Canva to really focus on the quality and have that magical onboarding experience in the early days?

It is a real balance between getting something out and getting something out that's quality. And at the time we were launching, Lean Startup was the book that everyone was reading, and the essential takeaway from Lean Startup was just launch as quickly as possible, and you'll learn as people either start using it or as they don't start using it.

We kind of went against that advice. A lot of our investors were telling us to read that book and telling us to hurry up a bit, but we were confident in our understanding of the field, in the learnings that we had developed both through our careers, through building the yearbook business, and also through the user testing that we did.

Kind of going against the Lean Startup doesn't mean don't listen to any users. So we did a lot of user testing, getting people into the office, trying out the product, seeing what their first impressions were, what barriers and hurdles they hit along the way, and where we could make it a smoother experience for them.

So when we did eventually launch in August of 2013, we were both confident in our vision of a world where design was democratized, but also in the product that had been battle tested through that user testing. And when we did finally launch, it was polished enough and quality enough, and people could actually get content out of it that they were proud of, and that was critical to them then being ambassadors.

How many users did you guys land in the first year, and where did you actually find them?

We wanted to tackle design for everyone, and we still target that as our mission. Our mission is to empower the world to design, which pretty much means 8 billion people designing on Canva. But you can't tackle the entire world all from the beginning.

And as we started testing the product with people and seeing who got energized and excited about it, at the time it was a lot of social media managers because Twitter was still pretty new, Instagram was new, Pinterest was new.

People needed to create content, but they didn't have the tools that they needed in order to do that, and Canva was the perfect solve for them. For people who weren't used to creating visuals, who couldn't afford expensive software, who didn't have the knowledge and the expertise in order to pull a design together over many, many hours or days, Canva was the perfect solution for them.

So social media managers and bloggers were our very first excited audience, and I think we were very fortunate to have them because social media managers and bloggers like to talk a lot. They like to tweet a lot. They like to say what they're doing today, what tools they're using, how they're building their business, and Canva was a natural fit for that.

So we started seeing lots and lots of organic growth coming just from word of mouth.

Your TikTok channel actually demonstrates that. There is so much user-generated content now, and I think actually this is what potentially sets so many consumer/enterprise companies apart. You know, community, if they can build that incredible loyal audience early on, I think it really sets them apart.

Do you agree with that?

That's why we have events like Canva Create, having that community and them telling other people about the product through their own voice is incredibly important. You can't constantly be pushing out marketing messages and kind of paying for customers.

Having that community of hundreds of millions of people that are incredibly enthusiastic about the last thing they created on Canva. They might have created a t-shirt or a birthday invitation or a presentation deck that let them land an amazing client.

When they get that excited about it that they want to tell other people about it, that is the sign of a great product. And for the last 14 years, we've made sure that we've cultivated that community, put them at the forefront, and kind of made them feel like co-builders of the product themselves because when they feel invested in the product, when they see improvements based on the feedback that they're giving us, it creates a real connection between them and Canva, and that sort of thing is something money can't buy.

It's that kind of, you know, magical journey. And if you look where you started to where you are today, some of the latest stats, 250 million users, 47 billion designs created now on Canva.

It is, yeah, it's pretty incredible. I think we hoped we'd always be here, but the actual reality of it, you don't quite understand when you're first starting out. Having a quarter of a billion people designing with Canva every month is just insane, really.

And behind every design that's created, every 47 billion designs, there's a story behind each of those designs. As I said, there's like pitch decks that people have used to create their very first business, or resumes that they've used to get their very first job, or an amazing event that they've thrown because they've managed to get the word out using Canva.

And every one of those stories is a moment of impact that I love hearing. There's so many people that will walk up to you when you're wearing a Canva t-shirt and want to tell you about the last design they created, and they'll actually pull their mobile phone out of their product.

They'll show you that it's out of their pocket. They'll show you the design that they created, and their eyes just light up, and that's the true power of creativity and the thing that we've managed to tap into.

Creativity now is becoming easier, but it's also just becoming so finite,right? In the age of AI where we're living today, how are you thinking about keeping Canva relevant, but also empowering creators to actually create something extraordinary when they now have so many opportunities to create beautiful designs even better than before?

I think the notion of creativity has always changed over time, over history. When you think about creativity over the last thousand years, what it means to be creative has changed drastically. I remember when I was first starting out in design, design creativity was about manual creativity, like actually cutting things out, pasting them on, drawing things, creating, you know, photo stats that you would composite together, and the computer played a small part in that.

As the computer became more popular, you know, desktop publishing came in. We had more digital forms of creativity. As mobile phones came in, that totally changed creativity as well. And so we've seen this constantly that human creativity changes and evolves.

And we're distinctly at one of these momentsright now as AI comes in. What it means to be creative is changing, but the need to be creative is still at the forefront. And I think it's part of our role to create tools that enable people to go to that next level of creativity and to teach people the skills that they'll need to be creative in this new age.

When we think about keeping relevant as a platform, there is so much change just happening every single day,right? With new AI models coming out, new tools coming out, better founders, huge funding rounds happening. When in the Canva moment did you realize, actually, we have to focus on being a completely agentic AI-focused platform?

It happened a few years ago. We've always been quite into machine learning as a tool to be able to bring design at scale to the whole world. So we've had a machine learning team at Canva for now, I think, probably 9 years.

But the notion of how you incorporate, you know, ML and AI into your product has changed drastically over those last few years, and generative AI has been a massive shift in the last 3 or 4 years. I'd say as we started first seeing image models come out was the first real hint that we saw that creativity and creative tools were going to change.

And we were actually one of the first tools to roll out an image model at scale to the world. I think it was back in 2022, I think, when we first launched what we called image text to image back then.

It's now become magic media in Canva and now just become deeply ingrained in Canva AI 2.0. But that was like, I think, the first real leap, particularly in generative AI and in this totally different way to bring an idea from someone's head into reality.

They didn't need to bring a bunch of elements together or draw things or even work at that level where you have to think about all the different elements of an image. They could just conjure something up through a description.

Prompting has obviously become a massive, massive way of interacting with software now. And I think probably about a year after we launched our first image model, we launched our first real stab at integrating AI deeply into the full Canva workflow.

That's now migrated or evolved into Canva AI 2.0, which is a real, I think, end-to-end workflow solver. It's not just about creating one asset. It's actually about more deeply solving the job or the problem that someone comes to Canva with, which might be, "I need to get more customers," or, "I need better marketing materials for this product," or, "I need to convince some investors to invest money in me."

And like starting at that very core problem and helping them figure out, do they need a deck or a video or a podcast or 15 different types of social media content, helping them figure out all those parts of it rather than just one design is where we've moved to with AI and Canva now.

You know, it's never been easier to become a creator, but creating has definitely become harder as the age of attention changes, distribution changes. But I'm actually a big believer now it's all about taste. And when we use all of these AI models, honestly, the designs are actually okay, but it's not to our taste,right?

How should creators be thinking about creating beautiful products using AI tools, but also just making sure that taste is always at front of mind? And do you agree?

I definitely agree. For me, creativity has always been about difference. How do you bring something different into the world? If you're doing exactly the same thing as the person next to you or the founder down the road is doing, you're not going to create that difference which attracts customers or attracts investors or perks anyone's ears up about what it is that you're doing.

So bringing that difference is, to me, the key skill of being a creator nowadays. What that difference is can mean many different things. It could be meaning bringing the brand that you've created or the audience that you've created or your deep understanding of a field.

Bringing all of that together into something that you're then willing to stand behind is going to be the critical skill in the age of AI. And when you talk about taste, that is really about putting something out that sends the message you want, that talks to your audience, that represents who you are, that represents your brand promise.

To me, that's the key aspect of taste, and that's what we all need to get better at because AI is going to enable people to create more and more content, and you need to differentiate. You need to create something that's unique that is fit for the context that you're working in, and that is what taste involves.

What do you think these AI design platforms do really well at today? You know, I kind of feel if you, so if we ask users Canva,right, the product actually is pretty good, you know, considering it is relatively new.

You know, we'll ask it, we're saying before we came on, if we want to create a thumbnail, we'll ask the, if a speaker's like headphones, they're slightly out of place, we'll just ask it to change it a little bit.

We'll ask like an orange tint and color just to make it a little bit brighter. That works really well. But what do you think, what do you think these, I guess, AI design platforms do really well at today, and what is just like just still missing?

I think what they do really well at is helping you explore ideas. So you can now get an early sketch or an early concept of something and figure out whether it's heading in theright direction, which enables you to operate a bit more at scale.

Whereas previously, you might have been have to be very precious about the ideas that you greenlit at those early stages. Now you can try out 10, 20, 30 and feel which one lands. And that's where your taste comes in because when you're given 30 options, understanding which one you actually want to go ahead with becomes really critical.

And that's something that, frankly, a lot of people don't have. So teaching them the skills, giving them the confidence to be able to move forward with that option or that idea is really critical. And AI gives you the options, but it doesn't give you more channels to go to or more audience to get to or more chances to send your message.

You often only get one chance to send that message, and sending theright message is critical. And that's where we view human creativity and human judgment and taste as being the critical differentiator.

I agree. You know, being, having that attention is getting so much harder. Having that taste is going to become like the next big moat I think for a lot of these creators. There are so many of these AI tools now cropping out and, you know, launching, coming out with either very like verticalized products or they cater to the mass like Canva, which is of course like super cool to see.

But what do you think is the hardest challenge for these tools and platforms to actually getright when creators now actually have so many opportunities that they can go to?

I think it's a given now that you can prompt a bunch of tools and get something out of it. You can get an image, you can get a deck, you can get a piece of code. But really, creativity is a full workflow.

Creativity is something that changes and adapts. It's a journey. Sometimes your original idea wasn't a great one, and you need to change it based on feedback that you receive. Your team needs to work with you. You need to incorporate your brand and all the context that you have from images to documents to strategy thoughts that you might have.

It all needs to work together. It's not just about one prompt in a box producing an image. And that's something that we've focused on at Canva for years now is bringing teams and people together into a creative workflow that enables them to create unique and differentiated content.

And creating that full ecosystem is a much harder problem than having one prompt box that spits an image out of it. That's where we see a real moat for Canva. And it's frankly why we have a quarter of a billion people using Canva because they pull their teams and their colleagues, their friends, and their family into Canva to help them in that creative workflow.

And it's a critical aspect of creating the best content.

If we go inside Canva, what are some of the most popular products people use multiple times a day?

We're increasingly seeing Canva AI as being a starting point for people who want to explore those ideas. They have something that they want to visualize really quickly and then take that, iterate on it, add more things to it, shape the narrative.

So that kind of conversational starting point is becoming really popular. We also see really granular tools within Canva becoming popular. Things that people just want to get done quickly. So removing a background is one that's been a really steadfast AI feature of ours for many years now.

A more recent one is actually something called Magic Layers, where you can take any image that you've gotten from anywhere, from your local hard drive through the internet, bring it into Canva, and it becomes immediately editable. The text becomes editable.

You can move objects around. The background and the foreground are separated. You can change colors on things. All of it becomes editable. And we've seen huge take-up of that recently as well. Video is also another amazing area where AI has been able to help us out.

Bringing content together, turning it into a polished video that tells your story, your narrative with the content that you actually want to use in there. That's something you can do with Magic Video inside Canva, and we see a ton of people using that.

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Now, back to today's episode. You know, one of the things I always struggle with, there are so many opportunities on what you can create. Having a complete focus is super important, I think, when there are so many opportunities for creators.

How does Canva think about that product roadmap? Are you launching products, new features every week, every month? Because it's probably super important to stay disciplined though.

It is important to stay disciplined, butright now, velocity is also hugely important. And I think it probably speaks to the balance that we had when we were first launching Canva. You need to get something out, but you also need it to be a good experience so that people aren't turned off because someone coming to Canva and then deciding it's not the product for them is what we want to avoid at all costs because trying to win that person back is incredibly hard.

So giving people a good first impression and a good first experience with anything that we roll out is super important. But we have also focused incredibly hard on velocity in the last year or two because the tools that we now have at our beck and call to produce product have improved dramatically as well.

Our engineers are more productive than ever. Our product teams, from our designers to our product managers, can now prototype so many more ideas than they could before and really nail the experience that we want to ship. All of that means we can now ship more product.

We actually mapped out on a calendar recently all the features and launches that we'd had over the last three months, and it was incredible. It was the most amount of work we have ever put out over the last 14 years.

And all of that is incredible user value because every bug that we fix, every new feature that we launch, every loop that we close with one of our customers, that's where we get feedback from our customer and then implement that feedback in the product.

All of that is people being able to design faster, create better content, work better with their team, get more audience, find more customers, reach out to more people. All of that is real impact in the world that we can ship.

Do you have a feature which is not in Canva yet, but Canva definitely wants at some point?

Ooh, I think being able to design the interior of a room would be an incredible unlock. We've actually seen a lot of enthusiasm at the school level for 3D. We recently introduced 3D elements in Canva. So you can pull in a 3D model of a bear or a 3D model of a popsicle or a can that you might want to market, and you can rotate that in 3D.

You can move it around your design. It's the first kind of foray that we've made into the realm of the third dimension. And schools have loved it. It's really engaging for kids. It's something that they can't easily access anywhere else.

And taking that to the next level, I think, would be something awesome to have in Canva.

Super interesting. These types of tools have been, they've kind of been around for a while, but I don't think anyone's really cracked it. It's super hard. This may be something used as a one-off product, but if you have a bundle of overall, you know, products and offerings that Canva has, it probably makes it a bit easier now.

Yeah, I remember SketchUp back in the day.

That's it.

Google launched, and I still hear people talk about it today in terms of like unlocking them into doing things that they didn't think they could do before, like creating a little shed in their backyard that they had modeled out and made sure it was theright size and had theright roof for rainfall.

So I think there's something in that realm of 3D that can truly be an unlock for people. And SketchUp from like 20 years ago was the last product that I heard that tried to attempt it. So there's, I think there's definitely a rich vein in there to unlock impact.

I also think the opportunity for voice is so huge. How can creators be global from day one, translating their content into multiple languages? If a creator slips up like one question, how can Canva maybe help replace that voice with, you know, what they're meant to say?

Is voice on the agenda? Is that something you guys have been thinking about?

I think there's incredible opportunity on so many different sides of voice. There's like producing voice, like if you're editing a podcast. There's also the interaction mechanism of voice, being able to talk to your software or your device and have it be a creative partner for you.

We actually introduced that with Camera AI 2.0. You can now talk to Canva. It can take your ideas verbally and then produce a visual based off that. And I think it's going to be the way of the future for a lot of interfaces.

When you think of the number of people who maybe can't type, aren't literate, or who just don't have access to a good typing device, they're on the go, they're on their mobile phone, they need to quickly get an idea out.

There's people who maybe, as you've said, speak in different languages, aren't English first. There's environments where voice is more effective than typing or using a screen. And there's even whole continents. I'm thinking of places like Africa that are incredibly voice first, where people are using voice as their primary way that they interact with technology.

And being able to unlock that for creating visual content is so exciting.

I think you have another opportunity. I have a small request.

Okay.

Launching and running podcasts and doing live streaming, doing shows like this where the technology isn't that great, I think Canva has a shot at maybe doing something along those lines.

What are your biggest problems with producing a podcast?

There are two things. One, the transcripts are always really bad. Even though it's maybe 70, 75% accurate, you know, we want to make sure it's 100% accurate. So transcripts is number one. Second, just having an amazing experience. Like we're using this platform now,right?

And we are having a couple of issues before. It's just not a great experience. And if we're editing all of our things in Canva, the thumbnails, some of the designs, the shorts, the clippings, kind of makes sense.

It totally makes sense. Our video team are actually constantly sprinting on making, editing video, and like working up to super long-form content. Transcripts and captions is something that we actually launched at Canva Create. So you can actually get really accurate captioning of your social clips or any other videos that you chuck into Canva.

Cool.

We're constantly making easier to work with video, podcasts, the number of tracks you have and the amount of editing you have to do gets really complicated. So making that easier is also part of our mission.

But if you can also build a product like the one we're using, where you can actually record podcast episodes with the guests, it makes it so much easier.

Are you a big Riverside fan?

Pretty big, but it could be better. So if Canva does something, you know, keep us posted.

Allright. Well, if you give us your wish list at the end of this, we'll see if we can make it happen.

Oh, amazing. Souleds. You know, there are so many amazing opportunities now for creators, but I think one of the biggest things they should be focusing on is how they should be thinking on, of course, taste, but also they should be just thinking around how do they actually stay relevant over the next 12 to 24 months when there's just so many other distractions around us,right?

What's your take on how can creators stay relevant and what should they actually be focusing on to be super successful in 2026 and beyond?

I think as a creator, you really need to be in tune with what's going on in the world, what's going on in your area, and being able to bring theright taste because taste is really about understanding how an audience is going to receive something.

So if you're not aware of trends or styles or information that's flowing through the worldright now, you're going to have a problem producing theright content and understanding what you should be asking AI for. So that's a critical one.

I think another one that I'm really seeing as well is the ability to multitask because you can kick off so many things with AI. You can ask it for a thumbnail, a video edit, a strategy document, a pitch deck, and keeping all of those things spinning and kind of using the amplification that AI can give you, I think, is a real skill that some people are better at and some people aren't.

I know I've had to level up in my ability to like keep multiple things going and remember what I actually asked AI for in the first place and what it had brought back for me. And as you're skipping between tabs and between different AI tools, keeping all of that in your head becomes a really tricky task.

What do you think this actually all means for creators in the next 12 months? I feel this is going to get so much harder. Relevance is becoming harder, like we said, distribution, the taste is becoming, you know, even harder, but obviously the biggest opportunity.

What should creators just be focusing on in the next 12 months?

I think for creators, it's about responsiveness and fluidity because in a world where it's faster to create content, where it's easy to create content, being able to respond to that input, as I mentioned, that is taste. That's like what's happening in the world, what's going on, what information is happening, what events happened, what is trending, what's the style, being able to rapidly respond to that using the tools that you have at your beck and call and knowing how to quickly produce something in seconds so that you can get it out and be part of that conversation is going to be really critical.

What are you most excited about? You know, there are so many incredible tools now emerging. All of these AI labs, all of these AI models, you know, the abundance of opportunity is so great. What is Cam most excited about over the next 12 months?

What I always get most excited about is seeing people taking new tools and figuring out new ways of expression with them. So in my history, I've created a lot of creative tools for people to like push pixels around or build 3D blocks or do a collaborative design with anonymous internet artists from all over the world.

And when I put these tools out, seeing how people use them in totally different ways that they use their previous tool set is incredible. And I think we're at that moment with AI. We're starting to see the first AI native, AI first creators coming out, and it's enabling them to do incredible stuff, like come up with short-form videos entirely created by one team using particular styles, you know, the video technology that we have for now doing different camera angles, maintaining character consistency is incredible, and that just gets better and better day by day.

So like playing with these tools and figuring out how they create mediums that are different to the old tool set is where I see the most exciting creativity happening through all ages. And I'm excited to see what this wave of AI first creators are going to do with it.

We have these AI native creators, but on the other side, we also have fully AI generated creators,right? And sometimes now on social, it's so hard to actually identify. Is this content genuine? Is it AI generated? The fully AI generated content, where do you stand on that?

And do you actually think it's still going to stay relevant in the next 12 months when our tastes just, you know, go in different directions?

I think when any new medium comes in, you see this big surge in people trying it out, putting stuff out there, and maybe getting a bit tired of it. And then you kind of get this come down from the peak where people actually start to figure out what it's good for, what it's useful for, what scenarios you can use it in, and maybe what channels it's best to use it on.

So I don't think content will become all AI generated. You know, as people, we want to connect with real people. We want to have authentic content that speaks to our condition, that enables us to properly communicate as a social species.

But there undoubtedly will be situations where generated AI content is useful, where we enjoy it, where it fits into what we expect and what we want to do, whether that's entertainment purposes or information purposes or something else we haven't even thought of.

So I think it will settle down gradually. It won't be like a swing to all human created. It won't be a swing to all AI generated. It will be kind of a happy medium where we've figured out as a society how we want to use this content, how we figure out what's real and what's not real, and set up new social norms with this medium in mind.

I agree. You know, there are so many different forms of entertainment now emerging. There's the latest one called AI Microdramas. Have you seen these?

I have not. What are they?

Oh, I'll have to send them to you afterwards. So they're two to three minute mini documentaries, all fully AI generated. Normally, there's some form of like romantic element to it. They're massive in China. The trend is coming from the east to the west.

And actually, the level of the storytelling, if they're a good storyteller from the creators, they're so engaging. I just had a creator who, a friend who created an AI microdrama around Darryl from Anthropic, who falls in love with this girl from China.

This thing goes super viral, but the crazy thing is the storytelling is insane. It is a true story. I don't know how she found like the actual true story behind it. And this thing has had like five million views in a few weeks.

That type of AI microdramas, I think, is really interesting. But the fully AI generated content, that will probably fade out.

I think it sounds like slash fiction on steroids.

Exactly. It's so good.

I think I have actually heard of this coming out of China. And I think it's a great example. It's like people pushing the boundaries of what's possible with this new content creation and it finding theright niche. Like that's not going to be my news feed, but as a particular form of entertainment when I'm sitting on the bus or this particular moment in my life, like we'll figure out theright places and moments to use this.

There are so many cool opportunities, you know, founders can be building now if you weren't building outside of Canva and design. What trends are you really excited aboutright now?

I'm always a big fan of music and how AI can help artists express themselves in much the same way as we've seen with visual content, being able to explore more ideas and then aid the full creative workflow, the collaboration that you have with other artists, the bouncing around of ideas, and then ultimately getting out a fully produced music track.

If I wasn't doing Canva, that would definitely be something I'd be looking at.

AI generated music, do you think this is a good thing for the music industry?

I think it's still pretty early. Most of the stuff that I hear is pretty bland. Like it's an average of sounds and it produces something that, you know, no artist would want to get behind. But again, it's like not necessarily about doing this one-shot take of a track, like make me the next hip-hop number one.

It's about how can you start using these tools in your own creative practice to maybe noodle on an idea that you have, take something that you've hummed into your voice notes and turn that into a track, or give me like a bass track that underlines something that I've already created.

And I actually experimented with this when I first started my podcast prompted last year. I wanted to play with music AI tools and see what they were like and what I could get out of them. So I actually created the theme music for prompted.

And it was amazingly a fun experience for me as an amateur musician. I could noodle around on the piano. I could record that into my computer, get it transcribed, have AI throw some ideas around based on that piano melody that I came up with, and then ultimately help me produce the finished track.

And as someone who isn't sitting in a recording studio every day, it was great fun for me and helped me express myself and create something that was really unique and differentiated that was specific for the podcast and wasn't just pulling a stock music track out of a library.

I mean, maybe it's going to be similar to what we've seen with creators and designers. We have AI tools that empower us to do our creativity even better. Maybe this is just what's going to happen to music. And similar to kind of, I guess, what we're seeing, you know, with creators and just people out there, there is so much AI generated content out there.

If that is your type of taste, similar to what we were speaking about earlier, then there's always that form of entertainment for you. Maybe that's where we're going to go with music.

I think we'll see different channels. Like already on Spotify, you've got channels that are like six hours of thunderstorm. And that is something that you would never have released in the age of CD. Like I'm not going to buy a six-pack CD of six hours of thunderstorms, but it's something that emerges as music streaming comes about.

And I think as we see, you know, AI generated music come out, I think it will find its place. It might be in those down moments where you don't actually want, you know, vocals or a particular artist to be listening to, where it's maybe just helping you work or understanding how you're working, whether that's at a desk or doing your gym workout and then like changing the music to energize you or push you to a different level.

Like I think there's a rich vein there, but it doesn't necessarily need to replace human artists. Like we're always going to want to go see Taylor Swift or Beyoncé at a concert. We'll want to enjoy live music with other people and feel that collaborative spirit that you get out of being a live audience in front of a live band.

Those things won't go away. I think AI tools will augment what creators can do.

What's Cam's music genre? What's your taste?

My tastes are pretty eclectic. I'm a DJ. I DJ all the Canva parties. And in order to meet the needs of a very diverse Canva staff base, I need to have my finger on the pulse of pop, drum and bass, hip-hop, house, techno, everything.

So blending it together is kind of my skill, and understanding all those different genres is critical to being a good DJ nowadays.

I would love to see Cam live streaming his DJing events.

I've given it a go a couple of times. I actually did it during the pandemic when I was quarantined. There is a DJ set floating around from my backyard. So you can check that out, but unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to live streamright now.

But if Taylor Swift was to come along and say, "Let's do something together," you'd probably say yes, no?

Oh yeah, I'd definitely clear my calendar for that.

Let's make it happen. I'd love to see it. Make it happen.

Do you have connections, Ollie? Do you have a routine?

At some point, let's give it a go. Outside of music, what else are you really excited about? There are so many, you know, opportunities and trends that we can be tapping into. Anything outside of music also you're excited about?

I think in general, the ability to build a business is pretty incredibleright now. You know, starting as one person, growing out both human team and a technology-based team. I don't think we've been in a better time to be able to do that.

And you're starting to see, you know, agents have been on the scene now for a couple of years. I don't think we've seen the full promise of agents. I actually talked to someone who had run their own podcast called Shell Game, which you might have heard, and he set out to produce an entirely AI agent company.

The CEO was an AI agent, the CMO was an AI agent, the CTO was an AI agent, and he had somewhat of a mixed bag, actually trying to get that company running and for them to produce a good product, but he managed to do it.

And what you can do if you string together theright tools with theright agents is actually really promising, I think, at this stage. It's not like thereright now. It's not, you can't just switch on a company entirely created by AI, but you're starting to see it actually becoming a reality.

And there are people who are doing it kind of in niches for their company. So maybe they've created a whole sales workflow that is AI-driven and incorporates agents into it, or they've created a marketing engine that has incorporated AI agents in there and can take their ideas, a bit of their expertise, their context, and their taste, and get out to their audience in the most effective way.

And it actually being more effective, I think, is the key. Being able to do better sales, being able to do better marketing is really the goal. And we're starting to see a lot of people actually do that.

These vibe coding tools and agent tools are so insane how powerful they are, but also just the age some of these founders are building. You're seeing 18, 19-year-olds vibe coding getting to like a couple million dollars in annual revenue.

Like within the space of six months, two, three years ago, this never happened. And if this is happening now, just imagine what we can do the next, you know, two years.

I think getting started has never been easier. I am seeing a lot of management still involved though. Like when you've got all these AI agents running around, they fall over a lot. Sometimes their connections lost. You need to check their quality.

You need to check what they might be sending out into the world. So I think the dream of just kicking back on a beach in a deck chair probably isn't reality. And we're starting to see a new form of work coming in.

And again, a new skill that you need to develop in being able to manage these systems, keep your finger on the pulse of them to make sure that they're not going off the rails, and then properly architecting this whole framework, which you drop AI agents and people into.

So again, I think that's another thing for people to stay on top of over the next year or two.

How curious to know, what do you use AI tool ways and how do you use AI on a daily basis?

Of course, I use Canva a lot, and its capabilities have expanded over the last six months from not just being visual content creation, but also being able to help me work on strategy, pull together a ton of different documents into something that, you know, concretely and concisely communicates an idea to an audience.

That's been super valuable. I actually use AI assistants quite fluidly. So I'll use ChatGPT and Claude depending upon how I'm feeling that day, how I know whether they're going to execute on this particular task, whether I just want a different opinion or a different take on something.

So I'll fluidly move between those as well. Those are probably the main ones.

Any AI tools you're most excited about?

I actually quite like Lindy in my personal life. So I'm not sure whether you've tried out Lindy, but it's essentially an executive assistant that you can unleash on either your email or your Slacks or documents, whatever you want to do.

And in my personal life, it's been a real boon because I get a lot of inbound, lots of people looking to put things in front of me and managing that, triaging that, prioritizing that for me. Lindy has been really great at doing that.

You know, one of my favorite questions I love to ask on the show, if I was to join as your chief of staff for a week, what would that week look like and what do you actually do on a daily basis?

A typical week would be pretty atypical. It involves so many different things. It's slightly chaotic and you don't know necessarily what you're going to be working on day to day, but it's also a lot of jumping from high level down to low level.

So I like to get involved in product details, like is this button in theright place? What does this flow look like for a new feature? So I'll often work with design teams or product teams on that, but also think about the high-level strategy.

Where should we be moving? Here's this new idea. Does it have legs? What's the culture that we're pushing out through the companyright now? How does this part of the office feel or this part of the globe feel? So it's, yeah, it's a lot of jumping between high-level and low-level stuff.

You know, I think we can both agree what makes an amazing team is the team around us, but also those co-founders who we originated the journey with. I see so many founders go through this journey where they have co-founding relationships that last 10, 15 years, which is becoming rarer.

Sometimes they break up after 12 months, 24 months. If we could give the founders listening to the show one takeaway to build an amazing co-founding relationship, what are some of those characteristics and what are some of the lessons you have learned from Cliff and Mel that we can pass on to other founders?

I think when you're building any team, whether it's a full company team or a specific product team or even a sports team, you need to have really great self-awareness. And I found that really valuable in all the experiences that I've had over my life is becoming better at understanding what I'm great at, what I'm not so great at, what I want to invest in, what I want to grow in, and what are the skills that I can bring to any team.

And I've done that a lot over the last 25 years. And when I first met Mel and Cliff, it was just at theright moment. I'd been through a tremendous amount of growth. I'd been inside Google. I'd left to start another startup.

I'd done fundraising. I'd done product building. I'd done it all. And I knew what I was great at. I knew what I wasn't so great at. When I met Mel and Cliff, it just really clicked together that the skills that I had could fit together really well with the skills that they had.

But each of us was also a well-rounded individual. It wasn't like we were just in our fixed lane of product or operations or being CEO and visionary. Like each of us could also contribute to the other areas, but still knowing that that person was the expert and they had a lot of domain knowledge, but we still could contribute and collaborate on things.

So I think that's what's really endured for us is that we all have our locus of genius, but we can also weigh in on a ton of different things about building the company, about building the product, about finding, you know, new revenue streams.

And we work really well together in that, that we recognize that amongst each other. And I think that's why we've managed to survive 14 years now and hopefully another 14 years and beyond.

What is the greatest characteristic about Mel and Cliff that people might not know about?

That is a hard one to say because there's so many things that they bring. I would probably highlight a joint one between the two of them, which is their ability to change and recognize moments of change when something just needs to be different.

We might have been doing the same thing for five years and we might be successful at it, but spotting this thing that's coming on the horizon that is going to disrupt us or that is a new opportunity that we should charge after.

They are spectacularly good at recognizing that and then putting a hard line in the sand and saying, "Okay, this thing that we've done for five years, we're not doing it anymore. We're doing it in this new way because this is the future and it's going to lead us to a greater path.

It's going to lead us to a higher peak on the mountain." That's one thing they do really well together. Mel, I would probably highlight her ability to create a vision and then rally everyone around it. And this really speaks to the DNA of Canva as a visualization tool.

We found it amazingly useful as a tool ourselves because creating a vision, creating a tangible artifact that you can point people to and say, "This is where we want to go," is really what Canva is all about. It's what it enables for a quarter of a billion people.

And Mel is the best user of Canva and the best user of, sorry, not the best user, but the best creator of a vision that gets people excited and gets them running in the direction of a crazy big goal, something that most other people wouldn't tackle.

That's her real superpower. Cliff's superpower is being able to call it how it is. He's a very, let's say, plain speaker. He can call out bullshit when it happens. He can say when something's going wrong, but he can also help people move beyond that.

He can help them find theright solution. He can think about new ideas, new ways of approaching something, and really dive into the delivery of it. And that's what makes him a great chief operations officer.

I'm so excited for Canva, even though we're only 14, 15 years into the journey, the next even one or two years sounds incredibly exciting. Looking ahead, what is the big picture? How big is this going to go?

Well, we hope it goes into the billions. You know, quarter of a billion users is pretty great, but truly helping the whole world to design and bring their ideas to life is where we want to go with Canva.

And that's not just about producing a visual asset. It is truly about helping people figure out the big opportunities that lie ahead for them, whether they want to create a business or they want to create a social movement or they want to teach a classroom in a more engaging way.

Helping people figure out how they can do that with a tool like Canva at their side is where we really want to go. And that's why AI is so exciting for us, because it helps us deliver on that mission of empowering the world to design and on getting more great ideas out into the world and making them a reality.

So that's what really excites us and that's where the product is going.

I'm super excited. Well, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show and hopefully come back in 12 months and we can do this again on how things have gone.

No worries, Ollie. It has been a great chat.