Canva’s CEO on what happens when AI does the design

Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan and for the ones you don't. For those early morning news sessions or when you're on the go and leave your charger at home or even the times you need the best processing speed to just get the job done. Dell built tech that adapts to you. Built with a long-lasting battery so you're not scrambling for an outlet and with built-in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule not in the middle of it. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.co.uk forward slash Dell PCs. Built for you. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for every moment with long-lasting battery life and built in intelligence you can stay focused on what matters most. Dell technologies built for you. Why do all my clients want to kill you? What do they have against you? What did you do to all of them? I mean I can't comment on those other companies but I guess when you do something that's going pretty well you've got a quarter of a billion people using Canva I think maybe they want a piece of that. Is Canva tech's most underrated company? Nine years of profitability, hundreds of millions of normie users outside tech that are so hard to get and now a big pivot from design platform to AI platform. Today on Access we have co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins to discuss everything they just announced today at their big event here in LA. But first Alex and I discuss our waning interest in Open Claw, my new addiction to the AI assisted poke which was made by last week's guest, and the big reputational crisis facing the AI industry. Welcome to Access. My name is Ellis Hamburger and I'm here with my lovely co-host Alex Heath. We've got Melanie from Canva on the pod today with some actual news which isn't always the story of our show. We're trying to get the real talk and the real takes not just the embargoes but we have a bit of both today. But first Alex will you be attending ClawCon in Los Angeles tonight? We need to make LA tech happen. Hell no. I was going to, I think it's going to be a madhouse. I'm too old for this shit man. Really? A madhouse? Part of me really wants to go especially when it was first announced. So these ClawCon pop-ups have been happening all over the world really for the last couple of months and I thought you'd live for the Claw. Ain't no laws when we're using Claws. We've talked a lot about the Clawfather, Peter Steinberger and Open Claw. I have been very interested in it but my view of it has actually changed in the last I would say couple of weeks and I would say our episode with the CEO of Pocke Marvin last week actually played a role in me souring on going to this event as well. I just feel like Claw is a thing that we're going to look back on and go wow wasn't that a really cool nerdy time like when people used to jailbreak their iPhones but then nerdy two weeks. Yeah and then Apple started adding stuff to the OS and opening up over time and I think the analogy here is services like Pocke which again we featured on the show last week basically simplifying what Open Claw is for people like me who don't have time to chain together a bunch of stuff with a Mac mini. Okay so maybe we can cut in all the times you've talked about Open Claw and me being unimpressed for this exact reason from previous episodes of the show because it just felt kind of so inevitable and also weirdly surprising that it didn't already exist in some way and we're already starting to see people just just natural language it and have the agents hook up MCPs on their own and have it all just work in the server with no Mac mini but um yeah I've been pretty poke-pilled as well since last week. I mean it's honestly been pretty mind-blowing having a tool that's just built for this I think I mean it is it is shockingly ahead of the game and was a few months ago I think my first exposure to some of the agentic natural language programming every morning do this look at this add to this my first exposure to that was actually with no Notion custom agents but seeing with Pocke that can handle Notion MCP pretty darn well if not if not in some ways as well as Notion AI at this moment it's like now I can do things like hey Pocke when you see client invoices hit on my mercury account um shout out to mercury who I'm also a new customer of I just use whatever's on the show I guess now is this the third guest company that you've shouted out in our intro so far we've got Ivan from Notion a mod from Mercury we have good companies we do have good companies and so I say when you see the bill hit my account on mercury market is paid in my Notion database and just like little experiments like that and I think one of the things Marvin said that was a good prompt was just think of it like an EA like what would you ask an EA to do and so that's one of those things you know that I would have asked me to do the other thing I would have asked an EA to do is update all my goddamn services with my new mercury credit card instead of my chase one and Pocke said it could do that and then messed it up and could whoa you're going full full mercury like with the credit card and everything yeah I mean dude my overhead with meaning is like insanely low it's it's like it's like a thousand dollars a month but what about those chase points I mean come on I mean my personal spending is going going crazy on chase okay shout out to my business spending very low okay all right and when Pocke doesn't do so well I say hey Pocke draft a bug report email to the team and send it which is also very satisfying because I've been a bug reporter for my entire life Snapchat browser company etc and I spend a lot of time reporting bugs and now I can just fire it off have Pocke do it for me so I try not to do this but sometimes when we have people on the show I haven't had time to really dig into the products that they build Pocke was one of those things where it just looked cool and I figured it was going to be a thing people were talking about and I think correctly so I think I saw Pocke in the news quite a bit last week at least in our little bubble but I hadn't quite tried it so it's good to hear from you that you think it's legit I've also been getting like the daily summaries from it and it's decent it like forgot that I am back on the west coast after a trip to the east coast last week so it's not quite as smart as I would like still a little rough around the edges but you're right I mean the form factor and the I don't know if taste is the right word but just the approach that it has with the way it communicates and where it decides to prompt you a little more or go the extra mile seems to be quite good I honestly didn't know the tone could be as much of a lever as it is in Pocke people talk about having a nicer tone yeah right but people talk about Claude having a nicer tone but Pocke isn't just a nice tone that actually in some ways is the closest thing to it is probably the friend aipendent it's a little sarcastic a little pushy fourth show definitely briefs mentioned you've made now yeah and it and it makes fun of me sometimes which I actually genuinely appreciate but it also just knows when to be quiet and work so I was like talking about some potential dinner spots I was looking at for some trip and I said which one looked best to me and it said hmm that surprises me not very Rick Rubin of tech of you I'm like Jesus you're pulling quotes from my website and and roasting me for that so wow yeah you weren't looking in Malibu for a restaurant no that would make you rick rick and it does feel like it knows me better than the others it feels like they have some good prompts in place to remember your taste and and things like that so it's given me very good recommendations and it really does feel like a friend as opposed to your AI assistant who's going to write you a five paragraph essay every time okay so we're we're long poke short open claw I mean different audiences right it's like it's like iOS and Android Android people want to tweak their home screen with interesting widgets that don't work well that's great another thing that I wanted to talk about with you Alice is that the social network sequel is apparently going to be good I regret to inform you so there was a teaser shown at CinemaCon this week I saw friend of the show Matt Bellany said that it might be the thing that actually breaks the internet referring to Jeremy Strong's Mark Zuckerberg in this movie gave it five stars which is high price stunning casting couldn't be better yeah man kindleroy is going full zuck and I'm here for it I think uh you know I think zuck's can't wait to see the haircut oh yeah cut out the haircut's not out so I think everyone had to have their phones put away to see this I see okay but I assume a teaser will drop the movie comes out October 9th I'm sure it's going to have awards buzz I'm all for this and you know I think zuck shout out to our now our fifth access guests in this intro should embrace this you know he famously back in the day for the social network the first one rented a theater for Facebook employees to go watch it and really leaned into the the ridiculousness of it and look it's not going to be a favorable movie it's about Francis Hogan who I've met interviewed and the Facebook files which I covered extensively that were all the internal documents that came out about all the you know uh what's the right word uh rough things that Facebook was doing and the way it was hashtag as I reported as I reported as uh you know shout out really to Jeff Horowitz the Wall Street Journal reporter who famously wore a headband on national television as he was breaking this story looking like he was in a dojo I know Jeff was just a vibe man just in the arena yeah he's just in the arena and now he's being played by the Bears Jeremy Allen White and Francis Hogan is being played by Mikey Madison which will be I think a very great cast and yeah I think zuck even though this is gonna you know paint him as a savage monopolistic capitalist who doesn't care about children I think you should lean into this I think you should rent a theater again I think you should play into the memes uh because it's going to be you know obviously a hard one and I think if you just ignore it you kind of give it more life I mean what choice do you what choice do you really have is I think an executive these days but to laugh at the joke as well yeah um I'm just I mean Aaron Sorkin's obviously you know go to love a lot of his early stuff I haven't liked some of the movies he's done in recent years um there was one set in a courtroom that I can't even remember I think I fell asleep a few couple of years ago he hasn't had a ton of great stuff so I'm hoping this is actually a return to form and I didn't actually look to see if like if Trent Reznor was doing the soundtrack again that would be dope but yeah we'll have to go see this all see we'll have a little access uh premiere I cannot wait for any number of reasons social network is one of my top 10 movies ever and it really is hard to overstate how influential it has been on the tech industry you know probably even more so than her and and many others because it incorporated music that has set the tone of coding for 15 years since then uh so many of the archetypal narratives that executives take part in or have to combat it really has just been so influential and really just a stunning movie and so I'm I'm hopeful that Aaron Sorkin is not washed and can make this happen again yeah and we're going to keep the tech meets Hollywood theme going next week on the show we've got Jonathan Glatzter who is the showrunner of the audacity a new show on AMC that is the spiritual successor to Silicon Valley the former HBO show I think I talked about it briefly on the last episode but really excited to have him on he'll be our first non-tech founder type on the show so we're branching out can I get like a pre-read pre-watch I've got the screeners I'll send them to you is that is that legal did you just cause yourself a problem if my poke was working it would have already sent them to you but we'll make sure to address that so I had pokes send a calendar invite to someone and I asked the person if they successfully received it and they said yeah but I think poke misspelled the name of my company and I was like ha ha ha yeah no that was my fault see that's also what I'm terrified with agentic ai is it just really messing something up or compromising a deal or oh it asked me for permission don't worry about yeah but you're not going to look at everything you know you're giving your life over to this thing well the only other thing I wanted to talk about before we get into our convo with Melanie was I think a confluence of two things that multi-mundays yeah gosh for those who didn't see it's important to laugh I guess but this is pretty serious there were two attacks on Sam Altman's home one of them threw a Molotov cocktail over the gate and then another was like a drive by you know firing rounds into the side of the of the property thankfully no one was hurt and Sam posted a blog about it over the weekend that I'm sure a lot of listeners of the show have already seen to me this is obviously a horrible thing and attacks on tech executives have been happening I remember I covered in 2018 there was a horrific shooting at YouTube's headquarters and it was about something to do with demonetizing a video or banning someone and the person got mad and this stuff happens right but I think what's happening with AI and I wrote about this in sources this week is a real reputational crisis that I think the industry has not come to terms with and is not focusing on enough so on Monday Stanford they do this big AI index every year it's kind of the bible of where AI is at and they release it once a year and they had a bunch of interesting data this year about how horribly AI is being received by the general public and how the gap between how people feel about AI who work in it and are building it is really diverging from everyone else and then you see these attacks on Altman's house and it's like yeah these are the consequences of what's happening which is a lot of people hate AI and they hate what it represents they hate the mass unemployment narrative that companies have been putting out and it feels like it's reaching a boiling point I wasn't sure if you got to look into all of this but my takeaway is that I think the industry should stop finger pointing and focusing so much on the rat race of what everyone else is doing around you know you specifically I'm talking about open and an anthropic and they should think more about this because this seems like the biggest problem of all yeah I think first thing I want to say is violence is never the answer to some companies doing some things you don't like no um I will also say I wonder if in some ways AI is kind of becoming the symbol for the wealth and equality and lack of agency and mobility that so many people are feeling and while it's always been on the left or on the right to talk about you know how we describe the rich or the elite the AI leaders seem to be something that both sides can agree on are accelerating the demise of a specific group the middle class or otherwise that was already really really really struggling and telling them to go start their own agentic small business tomorrow while they're struggling to make ends meet and can't afford groceries is not really gonna work and so yeah it seems like it definitely demands a different tack and I will say I was also scrolling some feeds and half the time I favorite something on X I now get a notification later that it was actually fake from community notes and I will say I think regulation does happen fastest when everybody is dog-fooding this bullshit you know and so I mean certainly it's in the news all day every day and could be the future of many companies livelihoods and and so you know populations at stake so I would expect there to be a very strong reaction over the coming years I hope so I hope so I mean so this guy that attacked with the with the Molotov cocktail he's a 20 year old from Texas he then went to open AI HQ smashed the glass doors with a chair and told security he was there to burn it down and kill anyone inside and he had this anti AI manifesto where he had a specific note to Altman saying you know if for some reason I don't succeed in killing you I guess then you should take this as a sign to quote redeem yourself and then the memo was talking about you know AI replacing us mass causing mass extinction and then you know Altman puts out his post and he says you know that he sympathizes with this anti-tech sentiment that is clearly so pervasive but then he said I believe technological progress can make the future unbelievably good for your family and mine and that you know that may be true like I believe that mostly I think I think you probably do too we talk about AI all the time we're nerds about it we love to try it it's helping us with our businesses but most Americans don't think this Sam and this is the problem so this Stanford report said that 38% of Americans view AI positively and that's the lowest ever recorded and in China it's 84% so there's also this huge divergence happening with just the rest of the world and then the trust in the US government to regulate is like 31% so people seem to just be incredibly pessimistic about AI yeah it seems like a little bit of a catch 22 for whichever administration is in power today or tomorrow they don't want to cap the American growth and hegemony over tech but it also in some ways is just kind of like a repeat of some of the stuff Bill Clinton gets criticized for accelerating globalization which took so many jobs abroad and sure it did lower a lot of the costs of goods here but for many people they don't think it was worth it and for many people their salary or their wages haven't realistically relatively gone up in you know 20 to 30 years I always say I think it's the only chart that matters you know you talk to people building AI and a lot of them privately believe that there's going to be more jobs in the future but they all also acknowledge that there's going to be this period where a lot of people lose jobs really quickly and I think that's the tricky part is communicating this vision on the other side of you know technology tends to enable new kinds of jobs I mean like we would not be doing a podcast 50 years ago the idea that this could be a business was ridiculous then so it will unlock a lot of new things but that transitional period is going to be really messy and no one in the industry seems to know how to talk about that and again I just keep coming back to the industry is so focused on itself and competition and recruiting and virtue signaling to everyone in the bubble that they aren't paying attention to the fact that people are rioting about this stuff has Gary you'll written the only bad news essay I guess the citrini as you say but that was not a frontier lab almond has a lot of stuff about you know needing universal basic income because of such mass unemployment that's going to come right he has that world coin startup that he's involved with I mean they all they all talk about this stuff I just I think there's a recalibration that needs to happen and I'm not really sure what it's going to look like but I mean I think the attacks on Elton and really show the stakes here and I just hope that the industry wakes up I mean you kind of probably get if I had to guess you get lulled into a sense of this is just the way it is when you're an open AI employee and you're leaving the office and you see a sign reminding you to hide your badge as you walk out which is something I noticed when I was walking out of open AI a few weeks ago I remember even going a couple years ago and this was well before all this mass unemployment rhetoric and I was asking like why is this an unmarked building like why is like there's no way of knowing that this is the headquarters and people were telling me at the time that they were already getting crazies showing up talking about AGI and trying to find AGI and you know this is just the stakes of this technology feel so high now that I just hope that people don't get used to going into their unmarked office every day and ignoring it you know well on a lighter note today we have Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins to talk about some upcoming news they're dropping. Excited for this one it's been in the works for a while we've wanted to have Melanie on the show she's obviously a super impressive founder and Canva is a very important company we recorded this last week right before their big event in LA which is happening the day this episode drops and they've got a lot of big AI news which we get into so thanks again to Melanie. Let's roll it. Maria you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharapova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty Tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power and being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. For the last 10 years everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man and as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat. I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first. America first. Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building. But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Vox. The idea of post-Trump or not exactly Trump-focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel so reactive. I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far it doesn't among people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But for the first time you see on a major issue, open opposition from the start of this war. I'm Astaed Herndon and welcome to America, actually. Hi, Melanie. How are you? Great to see you. I'm well. How are you doing? Good to see you. Are you in the throes of create rehearsals or what's going on? Yeah, it's all happening. Create rehearsal, keynote prep, like the products coming. It's all happening right now, but it's exciting. Ellis has done some keynote prep in his time. Yeah, I'm curious. What does that look like these days? I feel like some folks, including Apple, are just like, we're just going to do this all in post and just record it and then make everybody sit in an audience and just play the video. But there seem to be a lot of different approaches on where is the leverage with the keynote these days. I don't know. What's your take? Oh, that is totally, that would be a very relaxed approach, wouldn't it? We have an audience of 5,000 people all in our community. It's a big event. We have a whole day of workshops and training and it's a very live experience. I think the keynote goes live like an hour or something after it's recorded. So it's minimal post. I got to see Jensen do his keynote at GTC a few weeks ago and he doesn't have a script. He just freewheels it for like almost three hours. Are you very scripted? How regimented are we talking? The masculine urge to freewheel your two hour keynote. I have to say we're a little more prep than that. But we also have a lot more, let's say creative flair you might see coming out next Thursday. There's a lot of elements and creative industries coming together, which we're excited to bring to life. So there's a little more than just freestyling it for two hours. How many cooks are in the kitchen approximately at this moment? I feel like keynotes are just so high pressure because they're live and I feel like everybody wants to have their two cents, which can get a little crazy at times. It starts off pretty small, but then as we come up to the day, we've now got hundreds of people working because there's going to be hundreds of people on stage. I don't know exactly the number on stage. So there are a lot of people prepping all sorts of things to bring to life on the day. So there's hundreds of people involved actually at this point. Melanie, how big is Canva these days? How many users do you guys have? I don't know if you disclose revenue, I know you're private, but give us a sense of the scale because creative is such a big thing. I mean, thousands of people. We've got more than a quarter billion people using Canva each month, and we reached four billion in annualized revenue in December. How do you think about the growth? Has it always been the last few years pretty steady, or have you had an inflection moment recently? It's been pretty steady for the last decade. We've been in the lush for 12 years now, and it's been growing rapidly actually since day one, which has been pretty epic and continuous in study. But I think because so many people have been using Canva, one of our favorite charts is the cohort chart. You can see people that joined in 2013, there's more people using Canva and paying for it today. And there were back in 2013, there's more people from that cohort upgrade to our paid products and use it more over your time. And then the same for every year since. I think that's why it has been very continuous over the last decade. I'm curious, how would you describe the growth? Is it moving into new teams within companies, or is it just more companies using the baseline stuff that's been there and been popular, or how are you thinking about that? It's all of the above. It's new people that have never used Canva before. It's people using Canva for more of their workflow. They might come in to create a presentation, or they stay for all of our docs and whiteboarding and all the other things that you can create in Canva. So having that interoperable visual suite at the heart of it means you can learn one product and then you can take that to every other product, like websites, and so forth. And we've got 100 million teachers and students using the platform around the world. We've rolled out into 21 countries, and then thousands upon thousands of districts, small businesses, individuals. It's really the full gamut. It's quite fun when you look at a chart, breakdown of the different departments of a company using Canva. It actually mirrors their company. So if there's more salesfolk at their company, there's more salesfolk using Canva. If there's more engineers at the company, there's more engineers using Canva. So it really is a very broad split. Ellis has a question that he needs to ask you about his clients. Ellis, I just want to make sure you ask this. Thanks for teaming me up, Alex. Why do all my clients want to kill you? I work with tech startups, and I feel like we've got the deck ones. We've got the video ones. We've got the dock ones. We've got the design ones, obviously. What do they have against you? What did you do to all of them? There's such a vengeful spirit. Is it really vengeful or just like, people want what Melanie's got? I mean, I can't comment on those other companies, but I guess when you do something that's going pretty well, you've got a quarter of a billion people using Canva, I think maybe they want a piece of that. You just made two acquisitions, right? We did, yes. Yeah. So maybe you could buy some of these that Ellis is talking about. Well, I think part of the question is just about the classic bundling, unbundling idea. Every company starts small, gets big, adds more features, becomes a suite, wants to be for everybody, and then the startups come and peel out the individual use cases, make them simple again. Where do you feel like you stand in that trajectory right now? I think if you look at the first decade of Canva and the genesis of the company, was that there was a very fragmented industry. To just create a piece of design, you have to go to all these different products, go in different templates, sign stuff, photography, and illustrations, and layouts, and a different piece of software for everything you want to design. Our whole thing was taking all of that fragmentation and bring it into one simple couple and making it accessible to the world. I think what's really interesting is actually, if we look at the parallels of creation today, actually that fragmentation is occurring now with all the different AI tools, all the different things that have your memory and your context. The modern process of creation, we're really excited to again, we bring it all into one simple platform and making it accessible to the world, which is exactly what we've been doing with Canva AI 2.0. We're very excited about everything being in one place once again. Melanie, you're from Perth, right? That's correct. It's one of the most remote cities on earth, if not the, right? Mm-hmm. You're correct. I would love to know how people feel about AI in Perth right now. I don't know if you still live there, you spend a lot of time there, but Perth and Australia in general, I mean, we talk about it, you know, this shows very, we talk to people in the SF bubble all the time, and obviously, Ellis and I are pretty AI-pilled, we're using stuff constantly. I'm curious in Australia, I mean, we don't have many Australian founders on the show, and I would just be curious to hear what it's like down under. Very question. So I live in Sydney now, and I think that everyone has their own experiences with AI and with different products. And I guess some people find it, they're using a certain tool, one of the issues that a lot of people have is they have to prompt and repront and go over and over again to try to get the output that they want. I think there's a lot of problems that we're trying to solve with the existing tools with Canva AI 2.0. So for example, that prompting, reprompting thing, now with Canva AI, you can just prompt it once, and then you can create the design that's in a fully editable layered format, and then you can just go in and edit any aspect of it, and you can have the normal tools that you know and love in Canva. And so I think that everyone has their own experiences. I can't speak for all of Australia here right now. But you know, in the states where it's always like, oh, like, you know, non-technical people are pretty negative on AI, they fear about job loss, they don't see it as like an uplifting thing, and then in other parts of the world, it's a little different. I was just curious if it happens here. Alex thinks everybody has heard of open claw when no one has. That is fair. I think, you know, for everything with like all technologies, like, is it help, people aren't, except from perhaps Silicon Valley, waking up and thinking about AI every single day, they're waking up and like, they have a job to do, a teacher has a classroom to teach, and so, you know, a small business has a small business to run, and so forth. Like, everyone has their own job to do. And so, where we really, the way we really think about it, Canva, is like, how do we empower people to achieve the goal that they have in the real world with technology? And AI is just another tool in our toolkit to help people achieve their goals. It was why we're so excited to launch LearnGrid, which is specifically for teachers around the world. So it has curriculum aligned content materials. So if you're in year five, you're teaching maths in a certain district or in a certain country, you'll then have curriculum aligned content thing, how to get created really easily. And then if you're a small business, then you have to come into Canada AI and just like, get research done on something, get a debt created, and have things happen on brand and to be able to collaborate with your team. I think sometimes it can feel a little scarier when it's like, away from you and you kind of hearing about these things, you know, and the messaging and the media. But then when you actually can use it and actually helps you to achieve your goal and you help your, helps you and your team to be more efficient and to be able to get your work done. I think that's when it becomes a lot more approachable. Our goal is always to make complex things simple. And so we're really excited about bringing the power of AI to help people achieve their goals in the world. I think that sometimes it can sound like, there's this thing that's going to happen to us. But actually, what we're really working very hard at is ensuring that that thing is actually just another tool to empower you to achieve your goals. So it's a very strong focus for us actually. Yeah, I have a lot of respect for anybody who's building for everyday folks, call them normies or otherwise, because I do feel like that's a lot harder realistically to do. What do you think? I mean, you talked about making the complex simple, but do you have any like internal principles for that bar or what it means to design something that you feel like everybody from the teacher to the professional could use? Because I feel like that's quite a hard skill. This is one of the other reasons I appreciate Apple's forward moves with iOS and otherwise. They've been able to stay up to speed on a lot of this stuff while. I don't know about Liquid Glass and the new phone app in particular, but yeah, I mean, it's a tough line, isn't it, to try and like bring new tech to everybody? How do you think about that? It's what we've been doing really for a decade. So we've always tried to give people the latest and greatest technology, but in a really accessible way that helps them to achieve their goals. We launched AI back in 2019 with Background Room Reaver, and people of course loved it because they didn't have to do this manual task, but you'd like have a photo and you want the background room. Classic banger feature. Yeah, you just disappeared. But even if you rewind even further back to Canvas Chef, which was actually Canvas name before we launched Canva, and that was all about being able to, like, you would have a search box. And the idea was you just search for whatever you want from a lab report to a brochure or whatever, and it would be able to create it on the fly. And then you'd jump into the Canvas Chef editor and be able to like move things around and drag and drop and collaborate exactly as you are today. It was just like my prototype before we actually built Canva. And I think it's kind of interesting that like now if you look at Canvas Chef and you look at Canva AI 2.0, the UI is actually remarkably similar that you've just got a search box you can jump in, but then you would go into the editor and you can collaborate and do all of the standard things that you want. So I think, like, well, AI is obviously very new and certainly a generative AI and all the things that are now is able to happen with the dental orchestration and so forth. I think to the standard person, they're just trying to get their goal done. And so if we can help facilitate that, it's pretty powerful. Are you telling teachers about agents? So are we just letting that be a word that just kind of doesn't need to exist in their mind space? You know? They don't need to know about it. We are going to talk about a gentile orchestration, but we also don't expect them to specifically care. I think that like, you know, we've got hundreds of people working behind the scenes to make this a gentile orchestration really awesome. But from a user's perspective, they just like say the thing that they want, they get it in a layered format that works the way they know and love from Canva. And then they can just use it how they would normally use Canva. Are you going to have an actual orchestra at Create, though? Yes. So we have one of our team members said it is like an orchestra. And so for the internal team celebration, we put together like a team orchestra. It was hilarious. But we are actually getting a professional orchestra, which I am yet to see that are going to be coming on stage next Thursday. Oh, so. And they're dressed as agents like from the Matrix or how are we? I think we're giving standard standard orchestral blacks, I believe. But there will be a little glitter visit. There's going to be a lot going on. This is a big moment for you guys. I mean, looking at what your team sent over, there's a lot here and how you're changing the interface. And it really is consistent with I think a lot of the themes else and I've been covering on the show for the last six or so months, you know, we've had Dillon Field from Figma and we've had a lot of these kind of platform tool companies talking about how they're adapting to AI and a line that struck me from your all's release that the team sent was we're moving from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools. What does that actually mean? That is a really great question. So from a user standpoint, there's a lot of things that just stay exactly the same as Canva. Our mission is to empower the world to design. If you come into Canva and you hate AI, you actually can just completely use Canva exactly the way you always use it. But I guess behind the scenes, Canva AI is a new tab that you can access on the homepage or inside the editor while you're actually designing. And that is where all of the power of that identical orchestration comes to life. So you can type it, whatever it is that you want in, and then you can get your job done. And so previously in Canva, you had all these different really great AI tools, but they're all quite fragmented. So you'd get the tool at your hand when you needed that tool, you have to know where to find it. And so with Canva AI 2.0, it brings that all together into the one space. And so you can just type it in and it will go and find you the tool rather than you having to go in it. Oh my god, this is incredible. It's pretty cool. I literally had this problem where I'm not like a power user. I have Canva installed and I needed to get something updated with my logo for my newsletter to send to someone. I needed to do it fast. And I was like, how fast can I do this? What tool do I need to use? I used Google. It was like, you should try Canva. And then I opened it and I look at all the menus and I'm like, shit, this is going to take me like a while to figure out. And it was, Melanie, it was so basic. I don't even know what it was. It was like conferred. It was like increasing the size of something. I feel so dumb about it. But it's one of the main AI use cases is being able to click all the buttons in the menus for you that you didn't even know existed. And that applies to like literally every product. And it's pretty wild. Like now with dictation, you can just like literally speak into your phone. Like I've been designing presentations, like when I get an idea at midnight, it's like literally on my phone and I can just dictate what I want. And then it will just like create it for me. And then I can do it already the editing because of the way it now works inside the editor. I thought, Oh, actually, I didn't mean that. I wanted this other thing or I want to rearrange it or try out this idea. And so all of a sudden you can have all of the design happening just by dictation on your mobile phone, which is pretty wild. Well, so let me ask you, I know, you know, with the mission about empowering everybody to design, then you have some new use cases here. One of the ones that y'all mentioned was building a custom pitch deck for a customer based on every email you've ever exchanged with them. Sounds great. But it also sounds like, is that not the work that that person was already, you know, is that not their job? And like, where's the design left in that in that type of world? Or are you thinking of design as potentially something bigger than that, like coming up with the framework for the decks, and then that gets adapted, you know, customized? Like, what is that job that that person's doing anymore? I think that's what's kind of exciting in this new era. Every like in our company, every role is changing what it actually means. And in fact, if you look at the role of a designer over the years, that's changed. Like if you go back to the in each of the different ages, the role of a designer has been completely different depending on the tools are available. I think that what we're going to see is a lot more brand system designers coming to bear as a really important role. So things that might have been a graphic designer before, just like creating a one off graphic, is all of a sudden creating the brand system for the entire company to operate from. And it means that the sales team that often gets neglected by the brand designers, all of a sudden can have this system where the brand designers are working on the templates, that then the rest of the organization are able to utilize. And then all of a sudden every single customer can have a personalized pitch deck with all of the up to date information that can feel a lot more personal to that person or to that customer. And so I think, you know, we look at a lot of the jobs that are disappearing, but with AI and in fact, with every technological revolution, a lot of new jobs come to bear. And so things like a brand system designer, I think are exactly in that category, where it's there's so much of a brand that is instilled in the template and in the way it's actually laid out and the information is like a much more procuration job as well. Is what you're describing how Canva is changing internally too? Like, are you are you creating new kinds of roles? Very much. So pretty much like every role today is different from the way it was three years ago. If we look at the way our engineers work, it's completely different. If we look at what our product designers do, they're creating prototypes. If we look at what our PMs do and the way they do their research is completely different. It's all the same like underlying principles of the same like building great products for customers, that doesn't change. The way we actually get our work done, or the way we create brand templates across the organization, like all of these things are certainly changing. And you know, we've invested very heavily in upskilling our team upskilling our systems to help everyone come on this very important journey that we're all going on together. I can definitely vouch for the fact that all designers just want to design brand systems or design systems. I think that's definitely true. But I know like one big question with this kind of like the whole debate, if you've heard it about friction versus friction lists and what you might gain or lose, where do you feel like the design creativity is going to live? I mean, is it that clear of the wall between the exploration stage and the scale stage? For me, design is always about like taking an idea and turning that into reality. And there's so many stages of design sometimes I can think because I just have an idea that I like actually going through the prototyping phase actually helps bring that to life and adds more color. And then I refine like sometimes 100 times after after that point in time. And sometimes for me, I have an idea but actually writing it out in like prose is really helpful. And sometimes so I think at its essence, we're always taking an idea from chaos all the way to clarity. And there's lots of different tools and mechanisms that help to bring that to life. And so I think that the role of design is actually more important now than ever before when we launched Canva at the start, people were like, what are designers going to do? Canva is going to take away all design work. And actually, if we look at the last decade, there's way more design is creating way more visual content than ever before. And I think that next leap is also going to be true that brand designers are going to be creating, there's going to be a lot more brand design is required because they're going to be creating the templates. Actually, the brand intelligence that we're launching right now, it really leans heavily on the template side because the template actually imbues so much design principles and brand brand knowledge in a template itself. So we're really excited about the way that will come to life as well. And the new roles that will be created because of this. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand marketing tools that get your products out there integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale ups online, in person and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. At EDF, we don't just encourage you to use less electricity, we actually reward you for it. That's why when you use less during peak times on weekdays, we give you free electricity on Sundays. How you use it is up to you. EDF, change is in our power. You've got all these connectors that you're plugging into Canva now where it's sucking in context from Google, Slack, CRMs, et cetera. The through line of create this year seems like Canva is becoming this hub. I'm curious about that philosophy because just to bring up like Figma again, he started basically making Figma like an MCP node where all of a sudden Claude can talk to Figma. Do you want that? Do you want the big assistance, AI assistance to be at a higher abstraction level of the interface into Canva and vice versa? Because right now, it seems like you're wanting everyone to bring stuff into Canva, not necessarily have Canva open up. Is that fair in my understanding of the philosophy? It actually works both ways. We already collaborate really closely with OpenAI and Anthropic. Canva is one of the top apps on both platforms. But then equally on the other side of the fence, having Canva be the platform that is bringing all the information in. So when you're creating that pitch deck, it can bring in the latest calendar invite in your Gmail context. So it's both. I was curious if it's going to be both because this seems more like pulling in. And I know you had the open the chat app and all that, but I wasn't sure if this was a shift. Yeah, no, very much so bi-directional. Are you able to break down what people are asking for when they're doing it through chat, GPT or Claude? I wonder just like how much design work is actually the stuff that gets marketed like generating logos and stuff like that. Or if that's just kind of the flashy piece, and most of it is scaling, executing, automating. Yeah. So one of the things that was pretty cool, the more content that is being created on these third parties like on Claude and chat, GPT, actually the more content that then gets brought into Canva is actually so much so that we launched something called magic layers recently, because so many people are creating images in all sorts of places on the web and then actually get really frustrated because they want to be able to actually edit the text or edit whatever format it might be. We've had eight million users of that in the first four weeks since that product launched. So I think that in Canva, you can design presentations and I think we've had 100 million people creating a presentation each month now. So it's a very large plethora. I think being able to take an idea and turn that into a design, we kind of cover that full gamut. What's your view of the SaaS Pocalypse Convo right now? Being someone who is very AI native and you're working with the assistants in the chatbots, but you're also doing your in-house AI, you probably are pretty glad if I had to guess if you're not a public company right now because it's rough out there. But curious, yeah, how you're viewing all that. What you think people are maybe getting wrong, where they're getting right? I know, we've been doing this for a while now. Canva's been around for 12 years and the kind of things like go yo-yo, like one stage they'll be like, growth at all costs and then the next stage is like profitability. We've been fortunate, we've been profitable for nine years, so we've kind of avoided that yo-yo, but at one stage people like, spend all your money in the bank account and you'll be fortunate to have a very sufficient bank balance. So it kind of means that we don't need to worry too much about what's happening in the macroeconomic environment and we just really focus on what we control, which is delivering a great product to our community. I think being out of Silicon Valley does create a little bit less noise for us and we just really focus on delivering a great product to our community and I think that they're going to love hopefully what we're bringing out. Well, being profitable certainly helps. That's definitely not in vogue in Silicon Valley. And sometimes it is like, I think after COVID it became cool, but we're like, we've been profitable for like five years now, now it's nine years, so we kind of just, we really focus on just building a good company. I know there are a lot of rumors of the one-person billionaire company. Are you seeing the team size actually change as a result for camera users as more people are able to do stuff on their own? For us, like having, we've got very, very large ambitions, we always say we're one percent of the way there and so actually our team's like way more productive and can do way more things, but that we say one percent because we just keep growing our dreams for what we'd like to be able to do with the company and so it just means that we're able to do more things and like serve our customers better. One of my favorite things is we get one million requests from our community each year of things that they'd love to see in the product and we're actually watching, it's 41 at our event and so just being able to serve our customers better to be able to help them achieve their goals. We've been really investing heavily in our team, upskilling everyone, we have something called AI Discovery Week, we have specialty training, so each specialty is going through the transition of learning the new skills for this new era. We really see it as that we can do so much more. Let's coin it right now, long tail feature development. I feel like you're going to be able to just come up with ideas and as long as you can get sign off, I mean it doesn't even have to live somewhere in the app. If someone can ask for it, it could still work, you know? And obviously that's still resources, but I do think that is going to be fun. Well, she gives the sign off, Ellis, so that's easier for her. Yeah, I mean to the point about 1%, I mean it's in the press release up high. It says the ambition is simple to be the place where all of your work gets done. I mean that's putting you in competition with everyone. I mean, how do you think about that? I mean, is your goal really to have Canada become like everything that Microsoft and Google and Notion and all these companies are doing? You want all of that activity to be possible inside Canva? The way we think about it is just what is best for a user and having to go and navigate lots of different systems and lots of different tools is kind of annoying. And so having that all in one place kind of makes sense, but then that doesn't mean we don't go and have access to lots of different tools and places that you might be doing your work elsewhere, but being able to have that all at your fingertips or at the end of your query and just having all that context. For a long time, our goal has been just to bring productivity and creativity together in a way that hadn't been done before. And so that's where we saw as a huge gap in the market and we're certainly doubling down on. Seems like it's got to be a stressful time to be a founder right now. How big does the suite go? What do we try and eat? What do we let leave? I don't know. She seems pretty zen, Ellis. You don't seem too stressed, especially a week before Create, but are you? Yeah, to that question, are you at all about any of this? I mean, open AI, as you may have read on sources.news, is kind of going through a bit of simplification, retraction of some of these bigger ideas back towards simplicity. It's tough to know when to stop when you can kind of create everything. There's a lot of things that have changed. What we can do technologically has changed radically for the better as far as actually being able to bring our mission to life. But our mission is actually very stable. Our mission to empower the world to design, we break down into what we call our mission pillars, empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device. And then every year, we pick off what is the next most important strategic goal under each of those mission pillars to bring to life. And so we started off with social media, graphics and marketing materials, and then there was presentations, docs, whiteboards, websites, KENVACode and so forth. And so it's kind of like there's some things that change radically. And then there are other things that are like actually quite the same. And because we've been pursuing the same mission and the same strategy for such a long time now, it does take a little bit of the pressure off because you kind of know that like how these things will play out. It's tough though, isn't it? I mean, you guys have a scheduler inside the product now, right? For scheduling meetings for yourself? Oh, it's like cool. Yeah. It's actually crazy. I can schedule with 15 different apps right now. I don't know which one to choose. I mean, is the idea that it's just whatever one's in front of you? Yeah. So what's really cool is like, so for the other day, I was like, I had, we just got connectors to work and I was able to like, I was like, tell me about my week coming up and create me a docker. You remember about it till we planned for the week. And I was able to go into my calendar, like look at my schedule, actually tell me how to optimize my time. And I found out like, I was like, it said that I had a massage coming up. It said I had a hectic week and I was like, I didn't think I had booked a massage. And I was like, is there a problem? And then I looked at my calendar, I was like, they're actually my partner had booked me one. And so it's kind of fun just being able to have like the document that you typically have to go and like have, go and create with like all these disparate tools to like be able to be created on the spot. Or even like research, usually if you're in research, you have to go and scour lots of different places. And all of a sudden, the research can actually just get handed to you in a document that you can just like share and collaborate on. It's kind of cool. I mean, you might be able to tell I kind of love being able to take technology and like utilize it to help achieve goals. And like the amount of new technology that we now have inside our product and have built is pretty extraordinary. Like the way these things will come together in completely unexpected ways. A lot of what you just described, I'm using Claude for right now. And I'm curious, since you've been using, you know, the AI 2.0 stuff, are you using the other big assistance less? Do you think this eats into their time? If Canva users embrace all this stuff? I think we're just at the such the early stages of all of this, like the number of people that are currently using AI tools or even using your is like quite small compared to the number of people on the internet, for example, I think there's going to be a lot that transpires over the years to come. That's a very diplomatic answer. I mean, because I think, you know, it's tempting, right, to like add some of this stuff to the product, just philosophically, I mean, shout out to a couple clients, Cosmos and Mabin, you know, which are two very different types of inspiration, like one for kind of like more lifestyle art photography design, one for user interfaces. And, you know, that's kind of what they want to be is the research workspace where you can assemble stuff using powerful tools, better libraries, this or that. And then, yes, there is certainly a value to not have to copy and paste to be able to have it within your workspace. I don't know if the the the jury, the jury's still out on kind of how people are going to use each of these, but it's interesting. There's just so much overlap right now, I feel like. And indeed, I mean, you have a huge edge just being the place where a lot of people already are. And you have the edge of trying to bring it to them seemingly successfully in a simpler way, you know, so there's that as well, just kind of the first mover advantage or even the distribution, if you will. Yeah, I think we're so early in the innings of like, what is the new software stack for companies? What's the new software stack for, you know, people at home? What's the new software stack for a teacher? I think, you know, it's so early for all of this that I think there's going to be space for a lot of companies over the years to come. And companies that serve the community really well, you know, Canva AI, like is obviously the goal is like everything in one place to like help streamline fragmented workflows, which we think is hopefully a pretty compelling proposition to our community. I saw that you all trained your own model for this. I'm curious what that process would like was like. Had you done a foundational model before? Like, what was that like? A huge effort over many years. We have a team of researchers of over 100 people now, they've been working really heavily on this goal. We had this interoperable format between all the different types of products in Canva, which was a huge investment for the last decade. The same format for a presentation as a website, as a video, as a document. So we knew that if we could crack that, it was going to be a huge unlock for what we could do with AI inside our product. And so it was really exciting to crack that. And then in October last year, we had this really exciting breakthrough as to how we could actually bring that to life in our product with authentic editing. And so that was a pretty significant and exciting unlock, which is where we've been. Do you have a good name? You know, these frontier models, they need names. You got a good name for your model? The Canva design model. We haven't put like a scare. Well, this gets to your idea of like simplicity and the user shouldn't know, right? I'm being kind of facetious, but like it, I'm just curious too for these, for, you know, these big consumer companies that invest in their own models, you know, it's the AI race is always contextualized by the labs and the models that people can name. And it's like, well, there's a lot happening with these other big scale companies. And it's not all of them are doing models, but some of them increasingly are. Well, you could do what all the LA parents are doing and name their child like Picasso or Matisse. Could always just do that. I mean, I think it brings back to your LA point around like simplicity. Like customers don't really care what's underneath the hood. They come in with a job to do out of the real world, teach a classroom, you know, market their business, whatever it might be. And you know, I think that's what's exciting is we're able to abstract a lot of the complexity. Like Canva uses our own models in where we need to have expertise around design. And then we partner with a lot of other great companies and we're able to bring that technology in. But from the customer standpoint, they don't need to know like the hundred different things that are happening behind the scenes to help deliver their goal. They just need to see the thing at the end looks great and helps retrieve that original goal they set. So we try very intentionally to abstract a lot of the complexity behind the scenes. I know any model has its tendencies and tastes. Do you feel like you've identified any? Because I mean, there's got to be something right in the world of design. There are just so many opinions on what good design is. What's the what's the bent of the model that you've trained? So with their heart, it's really fun. Does it like liquid glass? One of my favorite things, I don't know if this particularly answers your question, but it is my new favorite thing. We've got this thing. It's in the onboarding for Canva AI and you can create what's called an about me page and it's the first book in your memory library. And what it does, it takes all of your designs, you have to click on buttons, they like create my about me book. And then it creates all of your designs and documents and it actually creates a page that explains your preferences for things. And it's so fun. Because it like, I didn't actually believe until I saw it with my very own eyes, how much knowledge about you as a person is instilled in all of your designs and documents. It was really interesting. So I guess, and then that actually becomes the memory that then piles all of your other designs. So what's your aesthetic? It actually got into my aesthetic, but it also got into my, it kind of felt like a fun, weird personality profile. Cause it like, it understood like that I have a two step plan, build one of the worlds most valuable companies and do the most good we can do. And like, it understood like the way I think behind things. So I guess the idea is that it doesn't have a stand preference that it really is your preference. It's like, you've got your brand system in there and then you've got your memory documents says Mel. I personally think vapor wave is pretty passe, but if that's your thing, all right. Well, actually, I'm going to have to say you're about main job here is I'm curious. Mel, you have a keynote rehearsal to get back to and I have to catch a flight, but I did want to know, maybe we can end it here. You do this big event every year, you get thousands of people. It's a spectacle. You're going to have an agent orchestra, etc. I'm sure there's going to be other, you know, special surprises. What do you do right after all this? Do you immediately go on a vacation? Do you, you know, do not disturb and you disappear? What's your post create flow? It's a great question. I immediately after, I'm actually an introvert and I really just like a dark room. Well, thank you for being on with us. Just like low stimulation because it's like, it's always, it's so fun. And there's like, we've got 5,000 people there and like, lots of, you know, a lot of really high energy. And so there's like, a very, very relaxed, very chill at home. Maybe a massage. Exactly. What's happening in the cave? Are you reading, gaming, catching up on reality TV? So meditating, it sounds like. Yeah, I have actually, I've got into meditating, I've got into singing bowls recently, which has been a very, maybe that's why I've seen them. I've seen bowls. Great. If you haven't had ever tried one of them before. We'll have to give that a try. Well, Mel, we really appreciate your time, especially this week. Congrats and good luck on the keynote. Thank you so much. Brick leg. That's it for this week's show. Thanks to Melanie for coming on. It was a great time. If you like the show, don't forget to like and subscribe everywhere you get podcasts. We are access.show online and you can find us in video at access pod on YouTube. If you really liked this episode, we would just love a five star review or even a share with a friend. It really helps us grow. Indeed. You can find my newsletter at sources.news. And you can find me at hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.company for all your startup storytelling needs. Access is part of the Vox Media podcast network and this show is produced by Hooked Creators. Bye.