Canva's CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software

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Decoder. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Melanie Perkins, founder and CEO of Canva, the popular design tool. I always enjoy talking with Melanie.

She was last on the show a couple years ago, just as the AI revolution was coming to the world of art and design. At the time, Canva had escaped a lot of the criticism leveled at competitors adding AI tools. Something Melanie attributed both to how much Canva users love the product and also the fact that the company is making huge inroads into the business world. Canva is a tool that empowers non designers to make design, and that group of people was just trying to get work done.

They didn't seem nearly as threatened by AI as creative professionals using other creative software. Canva users may have even felt empowered. Well, now it's two years later, and it's safe to say that AI is all over modern design software, and a lot more people have had a lot more feelings about AI in general. But Melanie and Canva are pushing even more aggressively into integrating AI. The company just announced a big new update that allows people to simply tell Canva what to make and have it go through various data sources like Slack and email to build presentations, documents and other design materials.

Those projects arrive as regular old Canva files, which you can edit at will. You'll hear Melanie come back to that idea several times. That having the output of the Canva AI system, the regular old Canva files, is a big deal so that users can refine that work and make it what they actually need. The idea here, to borrow the company's tagline, is that Canva is quote moving from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools.

I'll let you all sit with that for a minute. Obviously, I dug into all of these ideas with Melanie and how she's thinking about Canva's relationship to the AI model providers. The cost of the token required to automate an app like Canva in this way, and the kinds of pricing that might lead to for users. These new AI tools are still in beta, so there's a lot to be worked out. But you'll hear Melanie say she's confident that Canva's growth in enterprise will continue to accelerate as more and more companies look for tools that automate tasks like making presentations.

But of course, that's the same idea as a lot of other big AI players aiming for corporate dollars. And so Melanie and I talked a lot about whether Canva is the right platform to bring everything all together. Unsurprisingly, she thinks it is, not least because she runs Canva using Canva. I also asked Melanie for an updated vibe check on AI and design. Melanie is herself a designer. But poll after poll shows that people really do not like AI right now.

And the fears around job displacement and being overrun by slop all come to a head in a piece of creative software that maybe doesn't require creatives anymore. Melanie had a lot of thoughts here as well, and I did my best to get her to talk about Adobe, which is also adding AI tools and raising prices. A deadly combination for the biggest player in the space. You tell me if I got it right. There's a lot in this one.

Like I said, I always enjoy talking to Melanie. Okay, Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, here we go. Melanie Perkins, you're the founder and CEO of Canva. Welcome back to Decoder. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

I am very excited to talk to you again. It's been a couple years. You were last on the show in 2024. We talked about AI and design and the feelings people have about AI and design. And I was looking at that interview again just to prepare for this one. And a lot of the themes are all the same, and then the facts surrounding those themes have changed so dramatically in the past two years. And on top of that, you have big news that I really want to dig into.

So let's just start at the start. The last time you were on the show, I said, What is Canva? and you said, Canva is an online design platform. And your news this week is that I believe the company is changing its own conception of itself. Tell us about that change and and what led into it.

So there are some things that are changing, and there are many things that remain the same. So our mission is still to empower the world to design, and we're going to be doing that very much over the years to come. We but the te uh. Something that we've always believed is that we should take the latest and greatest technology, we should build the latest and greatest technology and put that into our community's hands and enable them to achieve their goals.

And what is the latest and greatest technology has certainly changed over the last few years. And so obviously AI is at the center of of that change, but obviously the latest and greatest technology today is AI. And so we're really exciting, excited to be doubling down into that space.

All right, but I'm looking at a press release that says we're moving from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools. That seems like more than bringing the latest and greatest technology, right? It seems like a rethinking of what Canva's product is. Unpack that a little bit for me.

Okay, so let's get into it. So when we launched Canva for the very first time, we really one of the huge innovations that we had was moving from pixels, where everything was very granular and required deep expertise to be able to move anything around. To be able to design anything. To objects where you could lay out a design, you could just have ideas for different co um objects. You could search our stock photography library, our illustration library.

You could drag it onto the page, you could start with a template or start from scratch, you could collaborate and design. And now what we're really excited about is with AI, we're moving into the concept layer. So you can just take an idea, you can write it in and then something can get created for you. But very importantly, you can still move into the canvas object editor and lay things out, collaborate, edit away. And so we're really excited about bringing it to this 3rd tier of concept editing, um, which we think will be extraordinarily exciting.

So it's our biggest launch ever, and it becoming the system where work happens end to end. But still very importantly, with design at its core. I was going deep the other day into the definition of design, and to design is to mark an idea, and really to mark an idea, um, is at the essence of design. So we're really excited about bringing new tools and capabilities to be able to do exactly that.

Sorry, I have to ask you, I I'm looking at the presentation about all of this. It was obviously made in Canva, I know you told me last time that you you the whole company works in Canva. Did you automate the creation of your own deck announcing the AI tools, or did you make it all by hand?

So what's really cool about this new product release? It can be one shot generation and that is awesome, but the really exciting thing is it's actually also iterative, so it can lay out pages. So, for example, you can take huge passages of text and then you can just lay lay that out, um, with Canva AI. So you can actually be your companion, your creative partner, as you're going through the process. So we didn't do it to just one shot generation for the entire deck, I have to say.

But what we were able to do is like to use it for all the fine grain edits, the laying out of boxes, um, and that sort of thing. So it's it really, it helped with the deck, um, but I think that's the exciting thing is that I think one shot generation is sort of like AI 1.0. And being able to do iterative agentic orchestration is really, um, 2.0. So we're really excited about that.

And then turning it into the press release doc, and it's really great at helping to create like that first first draft for us. And then we can use that to iterat, iterate, to collaborate. Because I think we, you know, we both certainly know, and everyone knows that, you know, that one shot generation might be a helpful starting point, but that really is the draft to then be able to iterate and refine from there.

Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm curious about this, you know, I'm just looking at pictures of the interface. It looks like a chat bot, it can. You can ask it all kinds of questions, as you as you showed off. Make me a content plan, do a bunch of stuff for me. Out on these platforms, you can connect directly to the platforms and have it publish for you. That feels like in S, in particular, the cutting edge of marketing, right?

Is automating the creation of assets and the publishing to platforms and collecting the data and iterating through that. But the interface is still a chat bot, and it feels like maybe that's gonna be the interface for everything forever. Did you, did you experiment with other kinds of interfaces, or is it just the open-ended text box? Is the end? All be all of AI?

So I think that's where, you know, I was going through those three tiers of pixels, objects and concepts. I think that's what's really exciting to me is that we're in most chatbots out there. You're kind of like in a in a chat, in a chat, and you kind of go backwards and forwards asking for the same thing and it will regenerate the entire thing over and over again. That's kind of annoying. But with Canva AI, you've got the ability to have the conversational editing, which is extraordinarily powerful and brings completely new capabilities.

But then you have the normal Canva that you know and love, where you can just drag and drop, you can collaborate, you can do all your iterative editing. You can go and change a word here and update that and not having to prompt to do that. So it actually helps to make complex things simple by bringing it all together into one spot. So rather than having to, so, um, if you'll see in the interface, this Canva AI, it's like a brand new tab inside the editor.

And so you can go there, you can dictate into your phone, you can, um, do it on the fly, get that first pass and then it will lay it out just in the normal Canva that you know and love. And then you can just edit that as as you would typically do after a lot of experimentation. That was where we landed that. It's just it's so powerful to be able to dictate, you know, for everyone's different accessibility needs, even accessibility needs on a day-to-day basis.

Like sometimes now I can just be in, like talking to my phone, ask it to generate something, and you can just do that on the fly. But then that creates a normal Canva design that you can collaborate, you can edit, you can use our 100 million plus stock photos and illustrations and drag and drop and design that. So, you know, the really, the the huge opportunity is this end to end workflow of being able to take an idea and turn that into a finished, usable work in one seamless platform.

Um, yeah,

Yeah, can I ask just a question about the relationship to the FR of the AI to the tools in Canva? And I'm gonna basically just do personal tech support with you. So I used Canva, I used Canva this week. Uh, my daughter's having a detective themed birthday party and so we took photos of all our friends. We're gonna make wanted posters. And so I'm like, awesome. I, I was like, I'm gonna talk to Melanie and I better use Canva to do this, right?

It it seemed very natural, so I could ask you very weedsy tech support questions and it just in the version of Canva that I was using. It was clear that the AI tools operated in some places and not others, right? It didn't it? They weren't seeing the whole Canva tool palette. And very simply, as background remover, which I believe is like one of your most popular tools, it's everyone's most popular tool. I could do it in some parts of Canva, not the other.

I couldn't look at my sort of like finished layout and say, actually, can you just go ahead and remove the background? From this photo? I had to get to where I needed to be and then ask the question, is the new Canva AI? Can it address the whole set of tools? Is it using Canva as a whole, or is it still narrowly sliced?

you, you hit the nail on the head with what we were doing with Canva 2.0, Canva AI 2.0. So it actually goes across the entirety of Canva, um, and it means so you were using Canva AI 1.0. I'm very excited to get your hands on Canva AI 2.0. We'll have to get you into the million, though, I guess by the time this podcast out, we may we. Maybe we'll have to make a special exception because it'll help you with exactly that.

And so, um, you can say, for your example, for your wanted posters, um, create me the wanted poster. And you can upload the photos. And it can actually orchestrate all of the different tools, um, in Canva, to be able to create that on the fly without you having to go to the different spots. But you can still go and like edit the different particular parts, the element editing if you want, but it actually is able to orchestrate it and then create a layered file in canvas standard format.

I I think I understand how the user will see it. I think architecturally, I'm very curious how you build the product that way because it it doesn't seem like there's like some industry standard way of saying. Now you can use this software. Like, ha, about half of the attempts I see are we're just gonna take screenshots of everything and very slowly click around. And there's an infinite number of variations on that approach. There's the MCP approach, which everyone was really high on and seems to have arrived at whatever point it's going to arrive at.

And now maybe half the industry is back at, Well, we should just do APIs. What approach did you land on?

So I think the reason we've been able to make so much progress in this space. Firstly, was the the decade of investment in this interoperable format. So being able to have this design format that spans presentations and whiteboards and docs and videos, um, the full gamut has been a really powerful part of why th. When we launched the foundational model, the design foundational model, it actually is able to create across all of these different formats. And is that layered file, um, which means that you can operate at a full design level, you can operate on a page level, you can operate, um, on a like a photo level or text, um.

And so the huge investment in that space is why we've been able to bring this to life, um, with Canva AI 2.0 and it. There's an extraordinary amount of complexity behind the scenes. Uh, you know, we've got. We've had hundreds of people working on this project for some years to get to this point in time. But I think that the the really important part is, you know, one of our engineers, um, described it as an orchestra.

Because there's so many tools and systems under the hood that need to talk together, um, to be able to bring that thing to life. So when you say I wanna create a wanted poster for my daughter's birthday party, it will then be able to go and use background remover. It will be able to go and use all of the different tools to be able to assemble that. But from a user standpoint, they just get to say what they want, and then we go and do the hard work to achieve that goal.

I'm just curious, what, what bet you made there? Cause that it feels like the industry has not coalesced on a strategy. So is it actually clicking around Canva, or is it? Is there some other way of the AI addressing the tools?

I won't go into technical detail there because I think that we have. We have had a f a, a few breakthroughs that made this all possible. Um,

I I understand. That's why I'm asking. The other thing I'm very curious about you have good is

questions, I will give you that

that's, that's, that's why everybody comes back. It's s. It's surprising, that's, but it turns out, uh, it's a. It's a fun game to play to see if I can get through the media training. Melanie The other question I have is who the model providers that you have doing this are right. Cause we are hearing every single day that token use rates for agentic software are through the roof. We're watching Anthropic have to modify its pricing there.

There's all kinds of stuff happening in that world. And you're launching an agentic AI product that just from the interface alone makes you want to use it a lot, right?

I'm happy to hear that.

Like it, it, but it, it's not like, and you know, Anthropic literally has in Claude. There's like a usage meter and you it, it will tell you like you're done now or pay us more money. Are you gonna have like a token usage meter in Canva in the same way?

Yeah, so we bit you ask so many questions in that in that very short space of time. I was

Well, there there's more, there's more to come, don't don't worry,

I. We have been investing in the areas that we really need to. So becoming domain experts in design has been a really critical part of our research strategy. But then partnering with incredible companies that, you know, spending billions of dollars to build the best in their own areas. Um, and then bringing that technology onto Canva is also a key part of of the way we're approaching this, being experts in design. Because that's where we really need to specialize, because it isn't great, um, great technology in that space.

And then we've got a hundred person research team working very specifically on these problems themselves. On the AI credit front, we have different tiering available for each of the different packages. So in free, you get a certain number of um, you get limited credits, and then in pro, we get much more generous, and then in um, our business package, you get far more generous, and then enterprise more more so. Um, but actually, for the 1st million users, we're giving everyone an AI pass, which we're really excited about, so it's a hundred um monthly pass.

We're gonna be giving everyone um in that 1st million. So they can just go completely wild and test out all of these new products. Um, so we're really excited about to see how that is used and see where it takes them.

don't worry, we're gonna. We're. I wanna come back to pricing, cause I I have a lot of questions about it. But at first, I just kind of wanna understand the the the product a little bit more. Um, the last time you were on the show, you were making the inroads to enterprise, right? You would sort of relaunch for enterprise. And we talked a lot about how. What you needed to for enterprise was not necessarily product focused, but just workflow focused.

You needed user authentication systems and management systems and dashboards and all that stuff, and you had built it out and that seems to be going really well. I think the numbers I have here are you're at 4 billion in annualized revenue, 500 million of which is enterprise. So in two years, you've grown. Is that the part of the business that's growing the most?

The whole company is growing very rapidly, but yes, enterprise has been growing extremely rapidly. We grew by 100 over last year, 95 of Fortune 500 companies and getting really deep footprints with thousands of people at companies now, which is extraordinary to see. We think that this with Canva AI 2.0, it will radically change. That it will be a huge step change again and becoming the system at the center of work really bring things together.

I think, you know, a lot of people can relate right now. It feels like there's a lot of fragmented systems, things that are kind of in lots of different places. Being able to have that all on one platform, having that with all of the work and all of the designs and presentations and documents, um, all in one place. And with connectors, being able to go even further and pull in context and information from your Gmail or your Slack, um, we think is going to be a huge step change for the way work gets done

So that's the part I'm really interested in. The idea that a company is just a collection of disparate databases that are not well organized or managed, and that there's truth in those databases. If only we could read them all at the same time, that's a big part of, like, the AI thesis in general, like you hear it all over the place. I, you know, I work with a bunch of cranky reporters. I, I don't think they put all their ideas in the databases, but like, I get it right.

There's. There's a sense that there's a lot of opportunity in the disparate data sources in a company. And you can bring them together in a platform and then take action on it and achieve some results. Is Canva the the right tool to do that work, right? You're, you're kind of like, right up against Claude, or you're right up against, I don't know, like Oracle, whatever, like whatever big enterprise business process automation vendor is going to say, AI will connect all your databases.

And then there's Canva. And I'm, I'm wondering if you want the whole, the whole opportunity, or just the design opportunity.

well to me. Design, as we've just talked about before, is like bringing creativity and productivity together and being able to do that. That in a way that we think is is pretty extraordinarily powerful. I mean, I had my own experience of this, of having the other day, which I was like, actually blew my mind. I was like I had to answer a whole bunch of questions and I was like they were going into like all sorts of different questions.

Over the last decade. And then I was able to just type it into Canva AI 2.0 each of the questions and it was able to, like, construct answers based on all of my designs and all of my documents from the last decade. And it kind of blew my mind that, like, I was like, this is the only place that actually has this information about me. Um, and so being able to have that full visual suite, from docs to sheets, um, you know, whiteboards, presentations, all of that context.

And then, I guess the other thing is that when you think about it, most things kind of end up in a design format of s of some description at the end of the process. And so being able to have all of that context right there, um, beside the AI tools, we think is pretty, pretty powerful.

Yeah, I think the the I'm. The thing I'm curious about is where the primary interface for that lives. And you're obviously making the case that it should be Canva. It cle- it clearly is for the CEO of Canva inside of Canva. But I could bring the CEO of Slack on here and they would happily tell you that that is Slack. Or I don't know. Microsoft will tell you that they're gonna force feed Copilot to you wherever you are using a Microsoft product, and that's where that should be.

There's a lot of ideas about this, and one of the things that makes that messy in my mind is all of these products can now talk to each other in very specific ways. So Canva itself is a plugin for the other chatbots, and it it seems like the usage of that plugin is very high. How do you think about who owns the interface? In a world where the core tool set might be usable somewhere else entirely?

That also has access to all that data and all that, uh, information that the company might have generated.

The the key focus for us is always like, how do we empower our community the most? how do we help them to achieve their goals? So we're already embedded in organizations and businesses all around the world. And you know, when they're creating a design today in Canva, it's like quite a manual process. You have to go to all these different fragmented tools, collect all the information. And so being able to have that just inside the design tools, we think will make a great deal of sense.

Because it means that you're not. It's just like cutting down manual and busy work, which is kind of always a thing that we're doing for our customers. Like when we launched, you know, some years ago, like 2019, we launched background remover, and the whole point of that was you click the background remove button and then the background was removed. Um, and it like that reduced a lot of manual work. And then again, like with this release, it's kind of the same sort of thing.

It's like there's a lot of manual work to go and collect all the information, collect all of the context, all in different places. And so having that just there, where you're designing, we think makes a lot of sense. Where you've already got like huge repositories of your images across your company, where you've already got all your brand templates, where you're already doing the collaboration, we think that makes a lot of sense. But really, we just wanna be putting the tools that help to reduce busy work in the hands of our community, um, and helping them to achieve their goals with less clicks.

A few weeks ago, we had the CEO of Okta on the show, Todd McKinnon, and he was like, the next. The future of Okta is managing agent permissions because this is a security nightmare. And I will sell kill switches to every enterprise that has agents running rampant over its networks and databases. And so I I hear what you're saying. It's like, okay, Slack is gonna have a bunch of agents that can go talk to, uh, uh, Canva's database of images.

Canva will have a bunch of agents that can go talk to Slack's database of conversations. Something else is gonna happen over here. Does that seem like a workable picture of a company of the future, where all of these tools are sort of accessing one another independently? Or do you think it will naturally land on just one?

I think there will be, I I think the cool thing is for consumers. There's going to be choice about how they want to have their work stack set up. I think it's a really exciting time in technology because there's just so many new possibilities for way the way work gets done to reduce fragmentation. You know, we've got a quarter of a billion people using Canva today, so we think there's a huge opportunity to make AI simple and accessible, just like we did with design.

Um, but very importantly, helping to empower people to achieve their goals and, um, to communicate their ideas. So we think that we think we're, we're. We're pretty excited about what we're gonna be able to bring out into the world.

Yeah, how does it work for you? What, what? What's the dynamic inside of Canva? Like? You're obviously on the bleeding edge of this technology, and you obviously have your own tool. How does it work for you?

In in what sense? Sorry,

Do do all of your tools have AI access to all the other tools, or do you work only in Canva and let Canva AI go talk to all the other tools? What's your setup?

oh yeah, since getting connectors, um, like, so obviously Canva's always had all my designs and my presentations and my documents. But being able to get connectors and being able to pull in for information has been pretty astonishing. So, for example, being able to say, hey, like, create me a plan for my next week and how I can optimize my time. And it being able to go and read my calendar and then create me a document about my upcoming week.

It was like, there's a lot going on and it told me I had a massage booked and I was really surprised about that. Cause I didn't actually know until I read that in my Canva doc. And then I was like, Oh, I think there's like a bug here. And then I realized that my partner has booked. I was like, what

The bug is it's booking self care for you whenever it wants.

and so I? I think it's really cool because there's a lot of things that would be like very, very manual, like going and doing a calendar audit, um, and that all of a sudden can actually happen inside the one thing. And it can actually create the presentation, or it can create the document. And then you can have people collaborating on that. People talk about AI slop, and I think that AI slop is often it's like one shot generation, you kind of just take that and you put it somewhere else.

I think that what Canva has a really, it's really exciting about with Canva is that that is really just the draft. That's the starting point. And then you can use it to iterate, you can use that, you know, through manual editing, or you can use that through, um, being able to iteratively edit through Canva AI inside the editor itself. And like to refine it, to really be able to clearly articulate your idea. So we we're pretty excited about the possibilities that it unlocks.

We have to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. I'm talking with Canva CEO Melanie Perkins and I had to know Has Canva's big AI push changed how she makes decisions? Uh, I feel like it's time for the decoder questions, cause you've talked about how much you use Canva, uh, internally. The last time I asked you how you make decisions, you said you had a process called decision decks, where you literally made Canva documents with all the pros and cons and you mocked up the products.

Is that still the process?

Uh, that is still the process. Prototyping has become a very key part of it, so often now there's like a workable prototype, um, before anything gets launched. I think the really fun thing about, I think I don't know if I talked to you about the complex decision making framework.

No, this is new, this is.

Um, okay, well, the this for anyone that needs to make complex decisions. I find this extremely helpful. It's like splitting it out into like, what are the goals, then what are the options, what are the pros and cons for each of the options? But it's really fun because, like, now we have a template inside Canva, which is the complex decision making framework doc. And you can literally just dictate, um, using dictation through Canva AI, and it will actually go and fill out this template.

So there's a lot of really exciting ways of like, how you can take your ideas and like the thoughts in your head. And then have that distilled in a way that other people can see and understand, which I guess is the essence of design. Like, if you think about design in the sense of a previously, you know, design can sometimes be thought of as like making things look pretty. But really, design is about expressing ideas and being able to communicate that effectively, and being able to turn something from an idea into reality.

And so we think all these new tools really help to facilitate that. I use Canva code all the time, I used to do a lot of mockups, so now I create use Canva code to create, um, prototypes all the time. For every idea that I have, which is pretty powerful because it it takes the idea far further than it could before.

The last time I asked you about structure, I asked the other decoder question is how the companies are structured. Last time you were about four, 500 people, and you described your structure as a very centralized product team and then lots and lots of local teams. And the metaphor you used was a cupcake, and you said we work on the cupcake and we make the cupcake bigger, and all the local teams work on the icing. Is that still the metaphor?

No, yeah, that's a fair metaphor. That one, that one's been around for we, we, uh, the the cupcake and the icing is actually so applicable in so many different ways. Um, these small empowered teams is really at the essence of how we get things done. Uh, we're very much a goal oriented structure. So, for example, with Canva AI 2.0, we really brought everyone together across the company to achieve that goal and bring Canva AI 2.0 out into the world.

Uh, we do like show and tells every week, so everyone can share and get deep context on what's happening. Um, I think that, like goals, has really been at the essence of how we've achieved anything over the last decade is like being able to rally around goals and have different team formations in order to achieve that.

How many people does Canva now?

Oh, latest stat about five, zero.

Okay, so you, you've been growing, uh, I'm really curious about, you know, just in that context, decisions and structure. How you made the decision to say, okay, we're gonna do Canva 2.0 and we're gonna lean heavily into AI, the way that we're gonna lean into AI, right? You? That's a lot of people. It's a big decision. I imagine that there was a decision making slide or a deck, and then this feels like it sort of inherently is a top down decision.

Like we're all doing this, like Melanie says, we're all doing this, we're all doing this. Walk me through that decision and walk me through any structure changes you had to make in order to accomplish it.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm gonna take us back to 2011 and to a deck that we had, which was called Canvas Chef before Canva was even called Canva. And uh, when you, uh, the 1st slide, when you go into it, it's like, Um, what do you wanna chef up today? Or how? And then you could type into a search box and you can. The idea was you could type whatever you wanted, and then you'd pop into the editor and you could collaborate and you could, um, have the editing tools.

It's if you, if we sh share it with you after this, um, you'll see. It's like, bizarrely similar to what we're launching today. So I guess this has been the dream for a really long time. But the technical ability to do this has been, um, um, has been hard, I'd say. In 2017, we had this document, we called it getting smart, and we're like, in the future, future, future. There's going to be search driven design, rather than going to the buffet and getting something, it'll be able to happen on the fly.

Um, like a chef cooking something up from the the raw ingredients. And now it feels like we can actually do that. Back in October, we, like, we'd been in researching into this space for some years. The foundational model that was a huge step, the design foundational model, that was a huge key piece. But then in October, there was a significant breakthrough in the company that meant that we could actually do it. So as soon as we saw that, we were all like, Oh my goodness, this is really exciting and groundbreaking for what Canva can unlock.

And so that was when we really started to go all in. And, um, realize that that that technology needed to be pushed as far as it could go, which is what we're launching today.

Did you, did you send out an email? Did you send out like a Canva doc being like, we're doing this now, decision made? How did that work?

That is a great question. Um, how do we? So there was a team working on it already, and then we really bolstered up that team. So then we were like, okay, we need to get every single person that can possibly help bring this to life onto the project. And we started the weekly show and tells, um, and we s, you know, turned it into a more of a centralized AI team. With then hundreds of people, it went from a smaller team to then, you know, many hundreds of people, um, to to bring it to life, everyone working on the different parts, um, that needed to, to become part of this orchestra.

But yeah,

Yeah, I'm curious, what, like that part, that structure part, seems really interesting to me, right? We have a software tool, a, you know, standard sort of deterministic software tool with a select box and a text area, all that stuff, and we're gonna build an AI that can use that tool. Now we've got to take all the engineers we had and point them at that problem. Did you have to rethink your product team, or did you just make it bigger, the team that was working on that part?

um, I think it a little bit of both. Like we, once the team had this big breakthrough, then and we and we all saw it in action, we were like, my goodness, this is the coolest thing ever. And then we had to figure out, like, who could actually help from across the company? And I think that's the goal oriented structure I was meaning before is that I was mentioning before is that when there's a goal, then you need to figure out like, who are the people that can help bring this to life?

And then everyone, that's what. Then we were doing the weekly show and tell, so everyone can get a really clear understanding of, like, where everything is at, all the pieces that needed to be orchestrated to come together. Um, I think Canva already being interoperable meant that there was a lot of these things that had already been built, um, and that then could just be c come together in a an exciting way. You know, we, we do something called um, the Canva jigsaw.

We've been doing different variations of the Canva jigsaw since the earliest days. Which is like, it's often a goal and then all the pieces that need to be worked on independently to be able to bring that to life. Um, and that was exactly what we had at the center of this project again.

You're fundamentally a software CEO, I think that's a fair description, I think you make software. The nature of software development itself seems to be going under some kind of existential crisis. One of our designers here at the Virgin Box Media described all software development now as calibrating yourself to a database. And just like talking and seeing what happens, and maybe that'll turn your brain to mush. Are you using as much Claude code or Codex to make Canva as it?

It seems like every other company is racing to do

Yeah, so I use Canva code really extensively from the perspective of like,

wait, when you say Canva code, that's your own coding product, you're not using Claude code. because Or

it's so cool. So what you can do like now, like, rather, I used to just create mockups all the time, like anytime I had an idea, I'd like create a mockup, and now anytime I have an idea, I can use Canva code. But with this latest release, you can actually go in and edit the text, so you can actually code something, you can edit the text, you can drag and drop, you can move things around. Um, yeah, we've been really investing heavily on the AI front and upskilling our team, so

so can you make Canva with Canva code?

yeah, we do make Canva with Canva code, not deployed. We have many, many incredible engineers that actually make it sound to go out to, um, hundreds of millions of people, um, but we we use it for prototyping all the time.

Yeah, the I mean, I think that's the. The question I'm asking is more about those folks and how you think about the costs associated with those folks. Like, the nature of software engineering is changing in some big, meaningful way due to the in particular, the coding tools that are available. Are you rethinking how that works inside of Canva as you ship new versions of Canva? Cause every other software CEO I talk to is their their minds are exploding.

They don't quite know how it's gonna go, but they know it's definitely gonna change forever.

I think, you know, one of the things that we've invested really heavily in is continuously upskilling our team in systems. So we've we've taken a very intentional approach to give all of our our team access to all of the latest and greatest tools. So we actually have, like, not selected a winner, we have just like given them everything. And it's been very intentional because we want everyone to be playing with the latest and greatest and to be upskilling all the time.

We need to be upskilling each one of our s, every one of our systems, we need to be upskilling. Um, because, like, the way we build product is completely different today, the way we do QA is completely different today, the way we, you know, do actually every system and process inside the company has had to have, like an AI native transformation. And so there's, you know, in every specialty inside the company, has had to have an AI native transformation.

What a designer does today, what an engineer does today, across every single part of the company. So it's been a huge area of investment on the tooling, on giving our team time on the specialties. Um, we've had this focus, um, on AI everywhere, and then AI impact, and now AI native, because we really want to be rethinking everything, um, in this AI era.

There's some sort of rebalancing of power between product managers, designers and engineers, because AI lets them all do each other's jobs. Where have you landed on that inside of Canva?

I think, you know, we're all here to build the best experience we can. And, you know, I think having really solid expertise is it's never been the best way to build product. In fact, great, um, PMs often think about the design perspective, great engineers often think about things from a design perspective. So really, it's about the team that are like there to like, just create the best thing possible. And, you know, having people in their separate siloed, isolated lanes and saying, like, that's my territory, uh, was never a great way to build product.

And so I think that with AI, it's really leaning further into that. Is like everyone thinking about, like, what is the best product experience that we can build? And everyone will bring different skills to the fore. So a designer will obviously have a certain expertise, a a PM will have a certain expertise, a an engineer will have certain expertise. But we've always thought of it as a bit of a team sport where the best idea should be winning, um, and everyone should be collaborating to create the best outcome that they possibly can for our community.

So I I understand the the sort of positive case for AI, why you made the decision, I understand the the product promise of just tell this box what to make and it will make you a 1st draft and you can go on from there based on the data you have. There's a pretty significant downside to AI, particularly as it relates to brand, right? There's polling here in the United States, at least that basically is just bad vibes around AI.

Like the last NBC News poll that we are constantly citing is AI is polling under ice in terms of favorability, and just above the war in Iran. That's not a great place for AI to be as a concept that as favorables aren't favorables, uh, people are voting against data centers in their communities. AI is widely associated with job loss, and maybe now you're gonna cause some enterprise job loss because social media teams don't need to be as big as they needed to be anymore.

There's a lot of layoffs are being blamed on AI across the board. You're leaning into AI with Canva, right? They're like, you're, you're rebranding, the whole product is having AI in it. How do you think about that downside risk that people don't like it? The more they're exposed to it, the more they're saying, Wait, stop, I don't want this around me.

I think it's kind of like any tool, it will be whatever you want it to be. And so if you want it to help empower people, if you want it to help deliver better experiences for your customers, if you want it to uplift students and to give them great quality education materials, it can do that. And I think that's

Wait, can it do that? I'm actually not so certain about the student thing,

We launched something called Learn Grid, and Learn Grid enables, um, across many countries, to be able to have the curriculum aligned, um, content created. And that can be worksheets, that can be immediate feedback, and it's free. So we're really excited about being able to put these tools in teachers and students hands around the world. We've got 100 million teachers and students using Canva today, but the access to great tools is like, very divergent, depending on, you know, the wealth of a school, for example.

And so we're really excited about being able to bring that accessibility to students around the world. Um,

right? But I think my my question there is it, it's more of this the slop question, right? Like people are experiencing the tools that exist today, and maybe mostly they're experiencing the free version of ChatGPT or whatever AI overview Google puts in front of them. Running on the cheapest possible model, at the biggest possible scale, and they are, they're having these experiences. And I, I know that, you know, the industry likes to say most people have never used AI, and certainly no one's paying for it.

But like a billion people have used ChatGPT, and then the polling is the polling. I'm I'm just sort of wondering, how are you thinking about communicating? This is an AI product, because it to me feels like that comes with all kinds of baggage. And I'm watching OpenAI buy TVPN, cause they think they have a marketing problem, right? I'm I'm watching all the venture capitalists be like, the media is lying about AI and it's gonna change everything for the better.

And then you're like racing into being like, Canva's AI now, and I I. I think you know that a bunch of designers are gonna be very unhappy about this, right? There's some people who are gonna just say this is bad, they're ruining the product. And I'm just wondering how you are thinking about navigating that balance.

I think, you know, there's going to be a plethora of opinions on any, on any topic. What we always do is just like, put what our community want and need at at the center of it. So we've had a lot of people asking, you know, even yourself quite specifically, you're like, I've got this goal, why can't Canva AI just know everything about it and be able to help me with that 1st draft? And so that helping people to achieve their goals is always going to be at the center of what we do.

And that's exactly what drives these sorts of decisions. Is like being able to, like, take out a lot of the manual work, from being able to, you know, create, lay things out. So really believe that AI should accelerate your vision and creativity, not override it. And I think that's really important, that, like, AI is just like another tool in our toolkit, and it will help achieve our goals. Um, if we choose to use it, and so we've been really intentional about the product design.

Like Canva AI is a new tab, so if you just come in and you love templates, you can use that. If you come in and you just love the elements and just like creating things from scratch, that's totally fine, that's totally cool. If you wanna be able to express an idea, just like by through dictation or through typing, you can do that too. So I think it's really important that, like, we understand that every c, every one of our community members is like, at different stages and different scales of, um, comfort with AI.

And so we wanna be, um, we wanna be making sure that we're helping to facilitate that. So I think there's this is like the full spectrum. And it's really important that, you know, Canva isn't turning into a chatbot by any stretch of the imagination. Um, but if you do wanna be able to just chat to something and have it help you out, you can do that too. So, you know, really enabling all of that. I think, you know, I can't speak for other companies out there in the world, but I, you know, Canva has benefited greatly from an incredible community.

We've got, you know, quarter billion people that use Canva each month. Um, there's a lot of love for our product, and I think that that love really comes from being able to have Canva be the thing that helps people to express their ideas and turn that into reality. And we take that extremely seriously. So with all of these product developments, we are continuing to keep that at our core. And empowerment is like, you know, such a critical principle for us.

Um, that is is very much through everything that you'll hopefully be seeing and touching very soon.

We've got to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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As US. Americans voted in the midterm elections, a lot was uncertain, but one thing was clear. This year, many of the attention grabbing candidates identified or were identified as populists. Gina Inohosa, a Democrat who ran a surprisingly competitive race for governor in Texas.

Populism is about economic power.

Sam Forsteg, who ran for Congress as a Dem in Montana,

I'm running as a populist because populism is what the the Democrat party is supposed to be about, it's what democracy is supposed to be about.

Josh Turek, a Democrat up for a congressional seat in Ohio.

We want to once again have a common sense, pro populist that is fighting for the people.

And Senate hopeful Dan Osborne, who ran as an independent in Nebraska and didn't use the word populist, but

My life sucks, too. Costs are too high.

the last ten years in the US. have been defined by Trump style populism. This year, candidates from across the political spectrum embraced the populist mantle. On today's explain from Vox, What has ten years of populism gotten us? and are we ever going back? Today's Explain drops every weekday.

You know, the the,

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Welcome back. I'm talking with Canva CEO Melanie Perkins about how weird it is to do automated marketing with AI right now. Let me ask you about the the competition, cause you're describing goals in, you know, when I, when I talk to executives and I describe goals and what people really want. W. You often realize you're talking about business software, right? And y, your enterprise is growing for you, and this very much feels like an enterprise offering to me.

Like you're gonna connect to all these other systems and you're gonna get some work done and you're gonna do work. That's what this feels like to me. And I know Canva has a big consumer base and a lot of people have fun with it, but this feels like a work product. Is AI fundamentally enterprise software? To me, like, I don't think that people yearn for automation in their like personal lives. Like, I think you wanna get rid of busy work at work so you can do something more important.

And a lot of work is inherently repetitive, and aI just makes a lot of sense in this zone. Do you think AI is fundamentally enterprise software?

I think you're, you're right, like Canva AI will totally be the system at the center of how work gets done. Um, but that doesn't mean that if you're creating those wanted posters for your daughter's party, you can't be like, pull the invite list from the party coming up. Um, and just like wanting that to kind of connect together,

This implies that I have a a good access to the database of the eight year old girls coming to my house next weekend. But well, but all right,

but yeah, it it often will be a about work, and you know, work means many different things to many different people. So work can mean, um, a teacher in a classroom, work can mean at a large company, work can mean a small business. Trying to just get their marketing, um, collateral created, you know, I think, you know, we've gone from broadcast communication, um, where everything is like one to many. To being able to have, like a hairdresser, being able to send out a a campaign on someone's birthday to say, here's a special voucher for your birthday, you know, that particular thing that you like, you know, being able to have that much more personal communication, um, I think is a

is another aspect.

it does feel to me like the cutting edge of, in particular, social media marketing is automation in this way. And I probably watch more TikToks and Instagram reels of social media managers explaining how they have built incredible dashboards using AI tools, automated entire workflows, built content pipelines. You can see it, there's something very important happening there. Presumably Canva will participate in that and they will build those tools inside of Canva. Right next to that is Meta itself, and TikTok itself, and YouTube itself, who are all working on tools exactly like this.

Uh, Mark Zuckerberg in 2025, I'm just gonna read you this quote, he said this to Ben Thompson. In general, we're gonna get to a point where if you're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account. You don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting, you don't need any measurement. You tell us the results you want and we will give them to you. You accept to be able to read the results that we spit out.

That's a redefinition of advertising. That is, they're describing to some extent your product, right? They're, you tell it what you want to achieve, and AI is gonna make a bunch of creative and schedule it across their platform. I I know TikTok is working on this, I know YouTube is working on this. They all see this thing that they can sell to their biggest clients, their advertisers. How do you think about competing with the platform's own native capabilities that look a lot like what Canva is trying to make for marketers in particular?

It's actually funny. It sounds like, you know, back in 2012, we had this pitch and we called it. We had the design engine, and we said, like, all these other platforms are gonna like, um, have tools, and they did, like, for the, like, lots of companies have lots of different tools for, like, a specific platform. But it's kind of annoying because as a company, you probably want to be advertising in lots of different places.

You probably want to be having your pitch decks and your docs and all the different things. And you don't want to have that fragmented across lots of different tools and systems. And so, you know, Canva is kind of everything in one place rather than having to go and have your knowledge in lots of different places. So that's, I guess, one of the key things that we've been leaning into for the last decade is that Canva can be that thing that is, um, at the center of your, of your work.

So the back and forth there is these platforms either have bad analytics or are not very generous in sharing their analytics or make you pay extra to access their analytics. Uh, Meta obviously has its own models, Google obviously has its own models. They might say, look, if you want to run this creative, you gotta make it in our tools, right? If you want to use this stuff, we will throttle you if you come to us with creative made elsewhere.

You we're gonna push you towards our tools. So you use our models and we get, we get two bites at the apple on on token pricing. I I've heard this from a bunch of a i c e os that database access in general is gonna become a new pricing vector, right? We're gonna charge tolls. You want to connect to our system, you got it, you're gonna pay. The customer will have to pay some higher access fee.

Have you seen any glimmers of this yet, or is it too early to say?

I'd say a is too early, but b I think that hopefully the customer wins out of all of this. Like, hopefully, the customer

It's very optimistic.

is able, hopefully the customer is able to achieve their goals and, you know, use the tools that they wanna use. And, um, I guess at the end of the day, all of this is hopefully about, you know, why I've been so infatuated with design is like, design is imagining the future and then, um, willing it into existence. And design really radically helps that process. And so, you know, I guess, you know, you mentioned optimism. I think that's why I love design so much is because you kind of you do have to imagine the future that you want, and then you can work to bring it into reality.

Yeah, I, I just I. The reality is Mark Zuckerberg exists and he's very, very, very competitive, right? Like, the the there's also that piece of it. And

But I think they also You know, uh, like Mo. I think I, from our experience, they love to have creative because creative is what blocker

did you say they love money? from I heard you. Uh, well, I mean, look, it it it is like, um, I know a lot of social media people who take it From the as an article same angle, let of faith.

me let me give a little like, some clarity on that. They like to be out like they're not gonna stop advertisement like their their company is built on advertising. It's they're gonna wanna take creative from wherever, um, to have it on their platform. In fact, you know, the lack of companies being able to create great advertising materials has been a huge blocker for people being able to advertise on their platform. And so I don't think they're gonna be sad about creating it in Canva.

Okay, I'm curious how this one this one plays out, because the the other thing that I see Meta doing is investing heavily in A I, like themselves. And they are every week, he, you know, Zuckerberg spent another $200 1 trillion hiring three A I researchers. We're gonna build in the best model. And like, who knows how that will pay off? The same way who knows how any of this will pay off. But one way it could pay off is for him to say, if you want to buy advertising on our platform, you're gonna generate it with our A I models.

And because we own the model, we can charge you less than Melanie, who has to go buy tokens from someone else and pay their margin and pay her margin. And you can just see how that would. Like, I know a lot of, uh, social media managers who are fully convinced that they need to make their videos in Instagram's edits app. Because Instagram will promote it more heavily, even if they're not actually making the videos, even if they're just feeding it through to get whatever little metadata that it says edits.

And like, maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but the the perception of Meta as a platform, the perception of YouTube as a platform, is that they will self-preference in this way. So if they're also the model providers, and they can have lower pricing and the perception of self-preferencing, how how do you expect to come up against that?

Let's check back in in a few years.

Okay, I kind of thought that's what you would say, but I it's just I see it coming, right? Especially for Meta, which has to find some way to make money with the model that they're building. And as of yet, I, I don't, I don't know what it is, except for maybe they're doing reels targeting on G P Us.

Yeah, I I can't speak for them and their business model, but I can certainly say, you know, from a customer's perspective, being able to create all of the content that you want in one place, having little friction between that, being able to deploy it to lots of places. It's the it's, you know, what we've been specializing in, I'd say, for the last decade, and, you know, certainly being able to take that to other platforms, um, has been great for our customers, but then also great for the other platforms, because then they're able to have all these people that can do their marketing on those platforms.

the last time we talked to your model provider was OpenAI, I believe. Is that still the primary partner?

We partner with, um, OpenAI and Anthropic, and then, of course, our own internal models. We we love to collaborate with everyone.

Yeah, do you, uh, are there models interchangeable? Or do you use them for specific tasks inside of Canva AI?

We always take the best model at the, uh, for the best task, um, continuously. So that's, you know, it's been great to have so so many great partners in the space, you know, from Google to Anthropic and OpenAI.

My sense of the situation is that every token costs the big companies money, that they're they're all subsidizing token use. At some point, that's gonna turn, right? They're gonna, they're gonna wanna make a penny of profit on every token. What does that do to your pricing when that happens?

So investing in our own models has been a really core part of our strategy, and we were able to bring the cost down, the latency down. Um, so that's been a, and and the price is being driven down radically. Like, if you look at the price of an of L L M queries, you know, it's grown down fifty times in the last three years. So it's pretty exciting from that standpoint of having so many big companies racing to, um, provide the cheapest models.

Yeah, uh, when you say your own models, are you actually, are you like, in the fight for G P U s? Are you training them on someone else's cloud? How's that working?

Yeah, it's been a really important area of investment, which is why we, you know, got our own research team of a hundred people that are, um, investing in the areas that we need to. So, for example, you know, I was mentioning the design side, and like, Magic Layers was from our, um, own research org. It's, yeah, been really exciting to to invest in the areas that other companies aren't. We don't need to go and compete in areas that there are billions of dollars of investment already happening, but in the areas that we know we can give great advantage to our customers, we certainly do that.

So Magic Layers was, you now take any image from wherever you might generate it into Canva, and then it will actually split it out into layers so you can just edit it like a Canva template.

Does that does magic layers happen on your models, or is that are you going out to?

that's that's certainly our models.

That's really cool. When you were, when you've made the decisions to invest in your own models versus going out to other providers, is there a cost performance ratio? Like, how do you make that decision? Because investing in your own models is expensive.

Uh, it is expensive, but like, for example, Magic Layers has had 8 million uses in the four weeks since launching. Um, and it just it really hit a pain point that people had, which was that, you know, you generate something and you have to go and re-prompt the L L M over and over again, um, to be able to do it. So being able to, like, just go in and make that tiny little text tweak, or, you know, to be able to collaborate or whatever it might be, um, has been really important.

So, I guess, you know, every time we're choosing a model, it's like, what is the best in the world? What, you know, we wanna have price brackets for each of the different, um, different areas of our company. So, you know, we've got different models. You can choose your premium, uh, models, or you can choose the standard models. So we are, you know, domain experts in design and visual A I, and so that's been really the focus of our research and development.

Uh, I wanna you, you said you don't wanna talk about your competitors, but I wanna wrap up by talking about your biggest competitor. We we spent some time on it the last time you were on.

I'm actually curious, I don't even know who you're gonna name. Who's our biggest competitor?

I think it's Adobe. I I I think it's Adobe. I think in the world of creative software for professionals, it's obviously Adobe, and maybe Canva's more consumer than that. Who do you think your biggest competitor is?

I shouldn't have opened that question up, should I? I should have let you just go. You walked right into I know, I know. I like, you know, we when we set out years ago, we were like, there's this huge gap in the market. Um, there wasn't tools that enabled easy design, that was rapid and and enabled creative freedom. And I think that that's exactly, you know, with Canva, a I 2.0, bring creativity and productivity together, having being this place where you can get all of your work done in in one place.

They're really, I I don't really think of it as competitors. They're are our community of a quarter billion people that we need to satisfy and help them achieve their goals. We really focus on running our own race and filling the gap in the market. I guess No, but you have that's kind

to answer, who's your biggest competitor?

who's our biggest competitor? It You can't is, I think

say no one. You can't be 4 billion dollar company with no competitors. That's not a choice.

um, I don't think that they're, I think, like, the way we think about it, it would be it would be actually a a bad business decision to be like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go and create this product that another company has created. That wouldn't make any sense. We literally go in and we say, like, where is the gap in the market? Where are users

I I like currently having what you're doing, I

friction?

appreciate it and it's very good. But it has to be someone. Who do you want to take market share from from, and who might take market share from you?

Um, I don't know that I have a great answer for you. Um, I think there's a lot of fragmented tools right now, and having that in one place, I think is gonna be the gap in the market that we fill.

Were you born this way? You're like, such a pro. This is, it's very good. I'm, it's, it's incredible. I I I've never, I'm, I'm impressed. My the reason I'm asking about Adobe specifically,

Who's, who do you, who you can name, who do you think? I'll I'll let you say, whoever you think.

I do, I do think it's Adobe. Um, and I th- there's specifically, you know, when you when I think about the Canva community, it's a lot of people who need to make something as consumers or as a one-off at their company, and they kind of graduate to the full suite, right? And you, I think we we've talked about that journey for a lot of folks. And, you know, when I was young, getting my first legal Photoshop license was a a marker.

And like, I think that is still a marker for a lot of people. I think Premiere is a marker for a lot of creators, right? Being able to afford that software. And I I think Adobe is a different kind of company. And maybe you you don't think they're a competitor, but they occupy the same space for a lot of creatives in a lot of ways. And they their products line up right with yours, right? You can prompt Photoshop in exactly the way that you were talking about prompting Canva, and Adobe will tell you that its P D F business is.

That is the best business database that has ever existed in the history of the world, and they're gonna line it all up. Like, I know what they're gonna do. One of the things that I think is the most interesting when I when I line up these two companies is, in general, people love Canva. And I I think that is, on balance, is true. I'm very curious to see how that goes once you put A I in front of everybody.

Like, I'm saying, I think that there's some risk there. And in general, people are really mad at Adobe all the time, right? That is just the nature of those two companies, the way they're situated right now. So I gotta ask you, Jonathan Ryan is leaving Adobe. He announced he's going. We don't know who the new C E O is gonna be. Who do you think the next C E O of Adobe should be?

I definitely can't comment on that.

Yay, cool. Should it be, should That's definitely it be you?

for them. No, definitely not. Uh, maybe you can, but then we, were

No, nobody wants me to be in charge of P D Fs in in the world, like, you don't want that at all. Um, but I'm asking, like, if you you're looking at this, there's a leadership change coming. Do you see that as an opportunity? Do you see that as you're, I will say, your competitor, retrenching? But I'm just, I'm. I'm curious how you are perceiving that change over there.

honestly, like, we really have been pretty busy just focusing on our quarter billion users to try to make sure that we're building great products It's very in their hands. good, And I, I just genuinely haven't given that, like, any consideration.

really, like, you, no one sent I, you a text like, he's leaving.

I, I was aware of it, but it's like, it's not where my mind is focused. Uh, here, I'll I'll give you the way I think about the world. Is like, uh, I always think of. It's like internal locus of control and external locus of control. Things that you can control that actually, like, have an impact, and then things that are, like, completely outside your control. I really focus on the things that are like within our control.

And like, that's delivering a great product to our customers. That is like helping to close, um, our community's wishes, um, and then the things that are outside of our control. I literally just don't focus my time and energy on, cause there's there's quite a bit inside the internal locus of control.

One of the reasons that I think, uh, designers are always mad at Adobe is, you know, the the their pricing goes up, they change the plans, they charge for more features, go away. You're at a scale with Canva now, where you have what I would call like the Microsoft Word problem, where, like, the toolbar has to have every button in it. Because you're so big that even if it's like 1% of users use the button, it's like millions of people use the button.

And you can't have millions of people mad at you cause you remove the button. Like, I, uh, that it feels like Canva's at this scale, which is why A I is in a tab, right? You can't, you can't change it too much. How do you think about making sure your Canva customers, who all use the product every day, seem to be very happy with you, stay happy with you? Even as you roll out these products that might fundamentally threaten their jobs or how they work?

I think, you know, all of those considerations you said is is absolutely, very much on top on, um, very much something we focus greatly on. So, for example, um, when we launched Canva A I, what we're really excited about is there's like so much breadth and depth in Canvas product now that, like, a casual user might not be aware of all of the different things and capabilities that Canva can do. You know, many users are very deeply aware of every single button in Canva, um, but Canva A I really brings that all together.

So you can just say whatever it is that you want, and you might not know the specific tools that you need to be able to use to bring that to life, but it can do it for you. So we're really excited about how that will be able to, you know, make complex things simple, even from the perspective of, like, being able to create your first design in Canva. We also do an extraordinary amount of user testing, and we do that with existing Canva community members, with new users, um, and that really helps to refine the products before we're getting them out the door and into our community's hands.

And then we get more than one million wishes a year from our community, um, and so we're actually, we have just granted forty of them at the at Canva Create. And so all of these things that we're doing, um, are very much in partnership with our community. And I think, you know, that's a really key part for us is that we, like, want to be building Canva in partnership with our community, getting their feedback, helping to learn from what they want, what they need to do to achieve their goals.

And that's very much at the at the center of how we think about it.

All right, I need to ask you one very important question right at the end. Do you promise to keep Affinity free?

yes, absolutely. We've made that a absolutely key

Just checking. commitment in I feel like every

the business.

time I talk to you, uh, someone's like, make sure you ask her if Affinity is gonna stay free.

I can, I can very much say AFFINITY is going to be staying free. It's it's a critical thing. Um, you know, we knew that that was a really critical part of why Affinity was created in the first place is being able to make it more accessible. And then a key part of Canva has always been having our free product. We've got hundreds of millions of people using our free product. You know, Affinity itself has had more than 5 million downloads, um, since, uh, we announced it.

So yeah, it's a it's a really key part. Affinity is is free and will be,

That's great. Uh, Canva 2.0 is basically in beta, right? You announced it, but it's in a small beta. yeah, research When, when do you think it preview. when does it go big?

At Canva Create, we gave one million people access to Canva A I 2.0. And so we're really excited to be watching how everyone is using it and how it's helping them to achieve their goals.

Great. Uh, well, I look forward to getting secret access to it so I can make even more silly posters for birthday parties. Mel, it's always so much fun talking to you. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

Thank you so much for having me and thanks for your great questions.

I'd like to thank Melanie Perkins for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Just let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all. Drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at theverge dot com. We really do read all the emails, or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod.

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