Canva's Co-Founder on Joyful Products, Giving Away Your Lego, and Growing to $2.3 Billion

Lenny opens by listing the scale: Canva generates $2.3 billion in ARR, has been profitable for about seven years, and is growing 60% year over year and accelerating. Adams says he rarely reflects on it day to day, but moments like the 10th birthday celebration on Sydney harbor, with thousands of staff, bring it home. He insists he still feels like he is learning and often like a fish out of water.

Asked for a hard moment, Adams recounts a funding round near a $100 million valuation. The lead investor, after other investors had signed and wired money, came back two days before closing demanding a 50% valuation cut. Co-founders Mel and Cliff flew to Silicon Valley that night, found a new lead in about a week just before Christmas, and ended with better terms.

The episode left a lasting lesson about independence. Adams says it is one reason Canva has prioritized profitability for seven years: the company never wants to depend on someone for money to survive, and can act on its own terms and timeline.

Lenny had heard that Canva's board decks include one financial slide and otherwise cover product updates and the roadmap. Adams says they didn't know that was unusual: they shape board meetings the way they shape launches, with the product as the lens, and have attracted investors who understand that delivering product value is the most important thing.

Canva's leaders are mostly homegrown, and Adams explains why: someone who is the best in the world at a function but doesn't fit the culture will not succeed. People who have built trust with their team often get more done than the top specialist would. Some outside leaders have succeeded; others left after a few months because they did not figure out how Canva works across its 4,500 employees.

He has a theory that a product's type shapes how a team thinks. A Spotify product leader told him that Spotify talks problems through in conversation, which he links to an auditory product, whereas Canva, built around visual communication, needs mockups and prototypes. Newcomers who are not visual thinkers, or who arrive trying to replace Canva's idiosyncratic processes, struggle. His advice is to listen for a couple of months before changing anything.

Adams runs every new hire through a culture session that references Molly Graham's "giving away your Lego" idea. In a startup everything scales, from users to process to headcount, so people must hand off work they enjoy. His example is the first email copywriter, who cannot personally write emails for 100 million people across 190 countries and 100 languages, and must find joy in building a team and passing on experience.

To make this real, Canva gives people opportunity and support rather than telling them to grow. Everyone has a coach from the same specialty, such as a product manager coaching product managers, who discusses skills, growth paths and when it is time to move up. Canva has few traditional managers; a circle of colleagues handles 360 feedback every six months, and the system came from the founders' own experience with an external coach.

Adams says there are close to 800 to 1,000 coaches, mostly employees, plus about five dedicated coaches who can drop into special situations. Canva invests in teaching coaching skills and a growth mindset. He also says leaders listen when someone pitches a feature or team, and may tell them to go build it, as with starting video at Canva.

Adams says he has had only one real job before Canva, at Google, and deliberately did not copy its engineering-driven view of product management. Canva focuses on visual experience, so it needed a different process and mindset. They avoided the title product manager for a long time and finally gave in because it was easier to explain, and it took four or five years before anyone other than the founders owned a product.

He admits part of the delay was failing to give away their own Lego quickly enough, and part was figuring out how to communicate their way of building to someone else. In his view, product managers are connectives who join teams, ideas and data and move technology and customers toward a new vision. The job involves compromise, shifting scope and timelines, and constant reorientation around new constraints.

On working with co-founders Mel and Cliff, who are a couple, Adams says they carry conversations into evenings and he sometimes misses a memo. He copes by catching up quickly, clarifying motivations, and keeping alignment, which he says every partnership needs.

When Canva was being built, the Lean Startup was in fashion and investors repeatedly urged the team to ship something rough. Adams says experience is an intrinsic part of Canva's product and growth: delight drives word of mouth, which was the biggest growth driver for years. The team held off on launching, though they did not skip user research and testing.

They could do this partly because they knew the problem space. Mel and Cliff had learned from Fusion Books, a school yearbook product, and Adams had built creative tools for 15 years. He says they still launched with rough edges, knowing delight would outweigh them, and a year felt short to him.

His advice to founders has two parts. Pick a problem you are passionate about, since a founder who chases a market for external success will struggle in dark moments, and ideally build for yourself, as Canva's founders are their own customers. Then make the product spark enough excitement that people want to sign up the next day and tell others, because early startups have no marketing budget.

Canva launched around 2012 to 2013, when only a small share of people could produce visuals. The founders' mission was to democratize design for everyone, but user testing showed social media managers were the most excited, so the first version focused on social graphics. The target market was only identified in the last six months of that year, and other formats came later.

Adams describes the excitement of social media managers as emotive language and sheer joy, powered by onboarding the team refined in the last months before launch. UserTesting.com had just launched, so they could get results in half an hour instead of running formal labs. The onboarding aimed at the fear of the blank page by breaking the first design into tiny steps.

The first instruction literally told people to search for a monkey, then drag one onto the page. It was unexpected but easy, and within three or four steps users had built something new. Testers said they had not known they could be a designer. The same small-steps approach now lives on in "learn and play" experiences attached to each launch, such as trying AI photo editing right away.

On SEO, Adams says investors had seen it in early pitch decks but the team knew nothing about it until Andre joined. Andre mapped users' motivations and top jobs to be done, then designed the whole path from a Google query like a Halloween poster to a Canva landing page, template and fast customization. Adams stresses that product-led means you cannot SEO a terrible experience.

Another pivotal move was internationalization. As an Australian company with only 25 million people at home, Canva had to think globally and began localizing three years after launch, aiming for five languages in a year and hitting eight, then 100 languages by the end of 2017. Brazilian Portuguese pushed the team to take Android mobile seriously, and Brazil, India and Indonesia are in the top five markets, growing faster than the US.

Adams says freemium was never just a growth or monetization tactic: it reflected a mission to put design into as many hands as possible, including people who cannot pay. It also had to support a viable business. Canva's first model charged a dollar per element used in a design, which excited investors and content creators and made stock imagery accessible.

For two years that was the main revenue, growing about 30% month on month, but the real hockey stick came with the first subscription product, launched about three years after the first release. Its features, informed by what users asked for, became Canva for Work, now Canva Pro. A few years later images were folded into the subscription, which created a second jump.

On AI, Adams says Canva cannot be a wrapper around an LLM or a chatbot bolted onto an existing product. AI is the next decade of innovation after mobile and cloud, and Canva sees it as another way to help more people design faster and better. Its ML engineers, who began with recommendation engines, now work on customer-facing visual features.

Canva's AI approach rests on three pillars. First, build its own models where it has the most data and strategic importance. Second, partner with the best, such as OpenAI for language and RunwayML for video, rather than build commodity technology. Third, open an app ecosystem to its 170 million monthly users, which has attracted AI developers building music generators and virtual avatars.

Adams previews Canva Create, a community event in Los Angeles with about 4,000 people in the theater and a couple of million online. He says the first decade focused on individuals and small businesses, but their teams have joined, collaborating on presentations, videos and swag, and 95% of the Fortune 500 now use Canva.

The event will present a redesign of work across marketing, sales, HR, IT and creative teams, with vertical "work kits", AI product improvements and a dedicated enterprise SKU. Adams says learning about CIOs and heads of security convinced the company it needs a new enterprise product, and that building top-down is a change after growing organically from individuals. He signs off pointing to his blog, themaninblue.com, and says he loves hearing people's design stories.