Cliff Obrecht on Canva, AI, and the Future of Creativity

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Hey there, it's Guy Kawasaki. I am the host of the Remarkable People podcast. You're about to listen to a special edition to our podcast. It is an interview between Bob Safian, he is the host of the Rapid Response podcast, and Cliff Olbrich. Cliff is one of the co founders of Canva. Now Canva is a company that I work for as chief evangelist. Our mantra is to democratize design. I think it's fair to say that we have pulled that off. So I want you to listen to this episode to learn the history of Canva. There are a lot of very good lessons for anybody interested in tech and design and entrepreneurship. Stories about perseverance and grit and innovation and empathy. This is a special addition to the Remarkable People podcast. Here is Bob Safian and Cliff Olbrich. Thank you for listening.

The conversations I'm having here go something like this. Hey cxo, do you know much about Canva? And they're like, yeah, I know a little bit. Like my daughter uses it, et cetera, et cetera. And we're like, do you know you have 6,000 active users who have created over $500,000 designs this year alone? And then they go, what? They do what? And is that all on brand? Who's controlling that? Does that Chief Brand Officer know about this, etc. Etc. And the answer is like, no, no, no and no. They're all going rogue. And then it's like, holy, we're going to do something about this.

That's Cliff Obrecht, co founder and chief operating officer of CAN as a fast growing design platform valued at more than $35 billion, Canva is at the heart of a cultural and business battle about AI and the democratization of creativity. Talking with Cliff at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, he explains how he treads the line between support for individual creators and what amazing new tech makes possible. We also talk about how he and his wife, who is his co founder and Canvas CEO Melanie Perkins. How they navigate their and professional lives, plus why they're giving away $100 million of their own money in Malawi. Cliff is a leader in his own mold. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Cliff Obrecht, the co founder and chief operating officer for Canva. Cliff, great to have you here.

Thank you, Bob. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, we are. We are here in, in Cannes, France, at the, at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. You know, I noticed that you once said that marketing was a weak part at Canva. One of your weakest parts.

Okay, okay.

Is that why you're here? To sort of to, to, to get better, or is it a reflection that like you, you figured out the marketing side of it?

I think it's, well, what it is, it's a byproduct of we're a product first company. And I feel that good marketing can't out compete a bad product. Before Canva, there were only professional design tools. And on the other hand you had like Microsoft, PowerPoint and Paint. So if you had an idea for something creative, you want to create an ad, if you want to create any type of beautiful presentation, any type of marketing material for print or web, you had very limited choice. With Canva, we bridged that gap and we allowed people to essentially get an idea and turn it into a design, a beautiful design. People loved our product and people told others about that product and we grew really, really fast. And when you're growing really, really fast and you're 95% of your top of funnel is organic, you don't really have to work too hard on sales and marketing. And it was only about four years ago we were like, all right, we're kind of big enough now, but we should really like double down on this marketing thing, spend a percentage of our overall revenue and also like figure out this whole sales thing. So we've go journey in the last four years. That's been an exciting one and it's really culminated at Cannes where we have a beach here. And yeah, I was there yesterday.

It was really nice. It's really. And very nicely designed, as one would expect.

Thank you.

As one would expect. It's interesting as you're saying it because you know, Silicon Valley, I know you guys weren't born out of Silicon Valley, but the tech companies there are like, even though they've made a lot of money off of marketing and advertising, they themselves haven't Always been that forward about the way they promote their own brands. You know, was that a model that you were looking at or not necessarily.

Well, I think probably a lot of the tech companies, they solved a real problem. So they had the same kind of high class problem that we had where businesses wanted to advertise on the Google platform, the meta platform, and they kind of like scaled naturally and then they started investing a lot more in marketing. So I think everyone now sees its importance.

Yeah, One of the other things I saw that you said that Canvas philosophy is sort of start niche and go wide and many successful startups have sort of tried to follow that route. You're now a lot bigger, right? These numbers, right, 230 million users, probably even bigger number than that. By now 95% of the Fortune 500, you're doing 3 billion plus in annual revenue. At this scale, is there more pressure to sort of have everything be wide, to reach a lot more people? Is it harder to start niche?

I think it actually is harder to start niche, especially when you have great companies doing so many things and the benefit of a suite or a suite of tools where you have a common interface or you have a common login, you share data, it has a lot of advantages to it. And so I think, think having scale, being able to do a lot of things, sharing data across an entire platform is very beneficial. But also companies that do one thing incredibly well, there's always going to be a space for those companies.

And when. But when you're looking at sort of new additions to make to the Canva platform, are you looking again for like niches to build off of or is it like, oh no, we gotta, that's not worth it, you know, because it doesn't reach enough people.

Well, like yesterday we acquired a marketing analytics company that essentially understands what a good ad looks like and the data behind those ads and then can help us and our customers create better ads. And I think like we're for example, moving and evolving the business from not just like creating beautiful content, but having a good understanding of beautiful content that performs and helping our customers create beautiful content that performs and helps them achieve their goals. And so we do pick off niches, but we also do pick off underlying themes that elevate our whole suite.

I mean, you're here at Cannes to elevate the Canva brand, but you also have a lot of customers in the advertising and marketing business, right?

That's right.

What is your goal when you're at an event like this?

We're in, as you mentioned, 95% of the Fortune 500. And so the conversations I'm having here go something like this, hey, cxo, do you know much about Canva? And they're like, yeah, I know a little bit. Like my daughter uses it, et cetera, et cetera. And we're like, do you know you have 6,000 active users who have created over 500,000 designs this year alone? And then they go, what? They do what? And is that all on brand? Who's controlling that? Does that Chief Brand Officer know about this? Et cetera, et cetera? And the answer is like, no, no, no and no. They're all going rogue. And then it's like, holy, we're going to do something. And so that conversation then starts turning into how we can actually be more efficient and get control over our brand and create better content that's on brand at scale.

So your entree into a lot of these big things was like, there's that phrase byot, you're bringing your own tech to work. That's basically what it was.

Absolutely, absolutely.

I mean, people say that about AI now too, that you're bringing your own AI to work. And I wanted to ask you about AI. Everybody here is talking about. Everybody everywhere is talking about it. There's this, I don't want to say conflict, but there are creatives who are like, I want to create my stuff, thank you very much. The algorithm cannot do what I do. Right. And then there are folks, Canva among them, that's like, no technology can democratize access to creativity. And some of the more pure creators might push back on that. How do you think about that issue?

I've got a couple of strong thoughts and I've got some evolved thinking on that as well. So at Canva, when we launched, a lot of designers said, canva, we hate you. You're ruining our industry. You're like letting everyone design. And then we kind of said back, why is a designer, why is that professional? That that sort of skill set defined by being able to use a set of really, really difficult tools. And so over time, it didn't take long. Within four years, designers didn't feel threatened by Canva. They saw it as actually a way to do the high value work and then essentially democratize their work throughout the rest of the organization. So they weren't stuck 80% of their time doing spell changes or like, like changing the name on a business card or creating yet another social media post. They could do the high value brand campaign stuff. We really see AI is just another step in that evolution, I mean, it's here and it's here to stay. What I really believe, though, is that the creatives that the models have been trained on really need to be compensated. And that model is still being figured out. Like, we have our creators program at Canva, where we pay out well over 100 million a year in revenue to our template creators. And that's evolving into sort of how we pay the creators that we train our models on. I think the industry at large is still figuring that out, though, and I don't think the creatives have got the full value of, of the corpus of work that these models have been trained on. But I do think creatives, they need to embrace this new technology. Like, not embracing AI as a creative is. Is like, you can see where it's going. Yes, it seems folly.

You have to. I mean, I was talking with someone from, from Google Yesterday about their VO3 tool.

Yeah, we integrated into Canva like, two days ago.

I mean, it's amazing, though, what it can do now. It does make it feel like, oh, anybody can be an auteur, which of course, is what we want, and maybe it opens the things up, but it could also, you know, have people. Have people push back against it.

Well, I think it's like with AI, there's going to be a huge proliferation of content. And I think to cut through that noise, you're going to have to create something unique and different. And I think that's what creatives bring to the table. That's what designers bring to the table, that ability to stand above the pack. If everyone can create this, then a good creative can create something elevated. And I think it's. It's going to lift the baseline. Absolutely. But I think the best creatives are going to be elevated beyond that and, and celebrated even more.

As we're talking, I'm reminded I had a conversation, this is several years back with Ben Affleck, and I was asking him, you know, listen, so many people are watching the movies that you make on their phones, do you start to think about, like, creating them differently as. Because so many people are looking on a smaller screen. And he was almost insulted at the idea, you know, that, like. No, no, no. It's got to be for the big screen. It's got to be for the big screen. But. But now I wonder whether, like, you could, you know, like, I can do some of those things that make the big screen distinctive without having to have the same sort of budgets right around it.

It's going to be incredible. And, like, we're we're about to start running competitions for student creatives. Like, what can you create as a 10 year old or a 15 year old and like create your five minute masterpiece? I think it's gonna really evolve to. I have a daughter, so how can we create her a beautiful custom story that features her doing all the things she loves? Like it's gonna, it's gonna be creative and movie quality. What's currently movie quality creative down to the individual, which is really just gonna see so much more creative. And I think it's a great thing. Cause I think also like I'm dyslexic, so I can read, but like I don't read. Like, well, I read fast but like I blur things up. So I hate being a rote learner when it comes to like reading text. I'm a very visual learner and a learner that does like wants to learn by doing. I think what AI is doing is really, it's allowing, particularly when it comes to education, bifurcating the way people learn and giving them the method that they resonate with most. So for example, you can create a document in Canva, but you can say create this as a presentation, or you can say create this as a movie or create this as a podcast. And then people can learn and people can consume the way they want to consume.

Yeah, sometimes I think too we pigeonhole people. You're either a creative or you're not. And some people are like, oh, I'm not creative. But we all are creative if we are given the tools that work for us.

Right. That's such a good comment. Because when we launched Canva, the comment we would hear time and time again is, I don't have a creative bone in my body. That's because the tools were so difficult to use. That's why we worked so hard and so long on the product, because it couldn't be daunting. It had to be simple and we had to make it a game. So our first onboarding, we had a monkey in the canvas and the first command in onboarding was put a hat on the monkey. So you had to search for a hat and put it on the monkey and then you had to like add some text. And all of a sudden you'd just done something that you never thought you'd be able to do, but you had fun doing it. And that just unlocks a whole new mental paradigm. And I think, yeah, AI is going to do that on steroids.

Yeah. But it needs that interface to be able to.

And that's why, like Canva code, for example. Like, people are scared by even these AR coding tools that make creating a website so easy, but people find the Canva interface very approachable. So, like, we launched Canva code because it's writt really hitting that sort of not the first movers, but the masses that are already using Canva, and we can take them on that journey and unlock a whole new level of sort of opportunity for them.

As Cliff talks about Canva Code, the company's generative AI platform, it illustrates how quickly AI is penetrating design and creativity. But who actually owns all this stuff that AI tools are creating? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us. Before the break, Canvas Cliff Obrecht explained how Canva has infiltrated the biggest corporations by appealing to individual users. Now we dig into who owns what AI creates, plus how Cliff and his wife, Canvas CEO and co founder Melanie Perkins, balance their business and personal lives, what they're doing with their newly earned billions, and why being blunt is ultimately good business strategy. Let's get back to it. When we were talking about AI, there's a question that I sometimes wonder about, which is, if someone uses AI to create something, who owns it? Like, you know, $20 trillion question, like, is it me? Is it the AI? Is it the person who created the source material? Do you have a philosophy about that, a position?

I think our terms and conditions say if you created in Canva and are assisted by AI, you own it, and.

That'S the way you feel like it should be for everyone.

I think we've probably followed a lot of industry best practices there. There's a lot of people that were kind of cutting down the jungle, forging forward before us, and we've kind of largely gone with industry best practices. I think that's probably the right approach.

And you're not necessarily like Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk saying there shouldn't be intellectual property protections at all.

No, I definitely believe in intellectual property protection. If you've created a character, you own the rights to that character. If you've created a piece of work, you own the rights to that work. And if people are training on that work, for example, then you should be compensated. Yeah. I very much believe in value for value.

Yeah. I will say that for those of us who are in the news business, there are certainly a lot of anxiety about how our content is being used to train models and our business is going away. And will those models be able to continue to persist when they don't have the raw material?

I Think regulation is often slow to catch up with technology. And I think you've seen like, like music, for example, it's evolving again with AI, but historically, like there was a period of time where there was Napster and like all the musicians were up in arms thinking they're getting absolutely disrupted. But that sort of figured itself out to evolve into Spotify and Apple Music and whoever else is doing this. And I don't know if net net that's actually more beneficial for musicians, but at least there's a compensation cycle that seems to fairly attribute people listening to that music, to the artists creating that music and the money from the people listening to the artists doing the creation. And that feels like we'll get to that model eventually. Like, I think it's happening in fits and starts.

You can see it's just messy right now.

It's messy right now. But in five years time I think, well, does anyone want a world with no original content being created from humans? I don't think so. Like, does anyone want a newsroom that can't survive? No. Like this ecosystem needs to exist and I think the economics will figure itself out. But it's always a rough time when you're figuring out new technology.

It's true, it's true. And it does make people anxious.

Well, I mean the candle makers, when the light bulb came about were. We're worried for a while, but. Yeah.

But then they started switching on their lights and they realized it wasn't so bad.

Yes.

And they went and did something else. You co founded Canva with your wife? With Melanie Perkins, who is now the CEO. It's not usual for a couple to be at the top of a big corporate organization like Canva. I did an article several years back with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan about how they operated the Chan Zuckerberg initiative together and how, you know, they would schedule meetings but also try to sort of schedule when they were and weren't talking about work. Like, how do you and Mel sort of balance being co workers, colleagues, Technically you work for her. Right. And also being, you know, life partners.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely something that's constantly evolving and we're figuring out. But like at the end of the day, and I don't know if I'm speaking to all the married men out there. Like you gotta know whose boss. Like there's fights you can fight and then there's things you just gotta concede on for, like the goodness of everything. And she is ultimately the boss and so on. Things like product, she Gets the final say. And you just gotta understand where those boundaries lie. We're very collaborative. Like we never, like, she never really pulls rank on me, so to speak, except for at home. When it comes to parenting, I get rank pulled on me all the time. But yeah, when we figure it out and like on weekends we've been doing this long enough now. We had talking about going niche and going wide. We had a school yearbook company. Essentially it was Canva for school yearbooks before we had Canva. So we've been on business together for probably 18 years and we've been in a relationship for 20 years. We have to say on weekends, like, come on, we're gonna take a minute off. Like you can't sprint a marathon. And there's some walks we go on where we're like, this is a no work talk. Like we just need, we need a minute to just talk about that.

Do sometimes like one of you will bring something and the other one will be like, not now.

All the time.

All the time.

They're like, yeah, it's like we don't.

Which must frustrate both of you. It does, it does, it does.

Because like you don't realize it can even be a very positive thing because like running a business, you're constantly solving problems. And so you can be on a, like we go on lots of walks, right? And we could be like, hey, there's a no work talk. But someone will bring up something that's really good. And you're like, oh, that's good, we can talk about that. Because that went really well. It always quickly devolves into like, oh, there's a problem in your area, like are you going to fix this? Or da, da. And it can blow up a good walk. So like even a good thing, we're like, let's leave that for later.

But sometimes too you're, you're just having, I mean, I know this. For me, I could be at my kids soccer game and I'm cheering and I'm into it and then sometimes something will strike me and like, do you then say like, hey, I just had this idea. Or you have to be like, oh no, no, I better not bring no.

But that's pretty useless that like if it's something burning. We're both pretty bad at holding our tongue. So. Yeah. And we often do like purely work walks as well.

I'm curious on whether it's on those walks or otherwise. One of the challenges for business leaders right now is deciding which sort of societal issues to, you know, speak out on or not. There's a lot of wariness about repercussions for things. The marketplace has become divisive about it. How much do you and Mel talk about that? How do you think about that?

I mean we're a bit insulated from crazy US politics and how sort of partisan and how everyone's just always screaming at each other all the time. And when it comes to like societal issues, our philosophies haven't changed and then they're not influenced by the latest comings and goings of politics. Like we've always had a two step plan to create one of the most valuable companies in the world and do the most good we can do. And we've pledged to give away pretty much all of our money and we already are in the process of doing that at a smaller scale through Give Directly. And I think we're just announcing 100 million over the next three years to go to communities in Malawi cash transfers. Right. And we're really big believers in giving sort of the poorest people in the world choices in what they want to do. So we're big believers in cash and education. And so just like a startup starting niche and going wide, that's kind of our approach to that.

I mean not everyone who has been as successful as you guys have are willing to embrace giving that much of it away. I mean a lot of people feel like that gives them power. You know, they can impact elections, impact other things. Do you think they're not necessarily doing what's best for the world when they do that?

I think everyone makes their own personal choices around what they think's best for the world. And I don't think like the way we view the world is maybe what's best. Like so I'm not saying I'm right, I just saying it's like what's right for us, what's right for our family and it feels good. Like I actually think giving like buying more shit does not make me feel good. Like giving away money selfishly, that makes me feel good and you know that about yourself. So I could be selfish. Like I'm acting in my own self interest because that's what I find value in and people might find value in other things and that's totally cool. I don't judge them on that. I didn't grow up with much money. I didn't grow up super poor. Mum was a teacher, dad was like a welder then worked for the government. Mel's mum was a teacher. Like we, we didn't grow up with Money. And we don't think that like money gives you more happiness. Like, I mean, those super yachts out there look pretty damn cool. But no, I'd rather just raise normal kids. And I don't want like to make my kid rich and like not appreciate things. And I'd never want to rob the right from my daughter to earn her own way in life. Like, so she needs to like buy her own house. She needs to. And sure, like you'll help out in little ways, like maybe make sure she gets a safer car, ship a little bit extra in. But like you don't rob kids of their right to feel that self worth because I don't know if you know many rich people that have been given everything, like, they're kind of like, I don't know, they're not generally the types of people I want to hang out with.

If I'm remembering this right, last fall you raised prices a lot and there was kind of a blowback and you had to walk it away.

It was kind of like so it wasn't, it was like we had grandfathered some customers at like $3. And so for most people we didn't increase prices that much. But there was like it was an oversight. Right? Like we should always respect the customer. So we never want to put Canva and our revenue and our quarters or whatever ahead of that customer relationship. Because if you do the right thing long term by a customer, they will advocate for you. Right?

But you raised prices to a certain level and there were folks who had been much more. And so for them, it was a.

Big increase for them. For a small cohort of our longest, like our oldest users who, like you can argue, loved us the most because they were grandfathered at this cheap price. It went 300% up or something like that. And then we like, we didn't really think about that cohort. We just thought about, hey, this is the new price. We're going to move everyone to the new price. Those people were obviously angry and we said, you're fair enough, we're going to keep you at that price. Thank you for supporting us.

And that was not a tough decision.

Not a tough decision at all.

You have this reputation for being very transparent, a kind of no BS style. Is that the way you always were? Do you feel like that that helps you as a leader in the organization or. And then sometimes when is it like a hindrance?

I never really had a professional job. I used to work on construction sites while I was at university and then I was a school teacher as well, following my mum's footsteps and I guess when we first started business I tried to be like more professional. And then I just realized, like, being yourself is actually like, I don't know, it works for me. I think people don't hate me and so I think it just like being transparent, you can get stuff done faster. It doesn't work with low performers. Like, working with low performers, you're not doing a very good job. Like, my expectations are here and you're down here. You need to bridge that. Or like, or this place probably isn't right for you, right? If it's not working, it's not working. And like, when it comes to managing people or even making a deal or anything, it's like, what are your goals? What are my goals? Let's find a mutual, like something that's mutually beneficial together. Because when you can find that, that's where the magic happens. And if one person's trying to push an agenda, that's. That that's not good for the other person. That's a bad deal for everyone and it always ends in disaster because, I mean, people, that's fine.

So why are you doing this today?

Doing this interview?

Yeah.

Oh, a PR team asked me to do it. I'm not big on doing podcasts and like building a personal brand actually, so I actually generally refuse to do all of this stuff. And I love your podcast. I really do. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you have done a great job and you provide really valuable information. Hopefully I said one thing that someone can take.

No, no, this is. This has been fun. So what's it. What's at stake right now? For. For and canva.

I think right now is a time where if you're not disrupting yourself, you're getting disrupted. And so we're aggressively disrupting ourselves. Like how we are all parts of the company leveraging AI, from our product to our teams, to our leadership, to our hiring. We need to be an AI company. Like, that's what we need to be in order to succeed in this new world. And to drive that change, you kind of need like, you've got peacetime leaders and wartime leaders. And this is a time where you need wartime leaders that can get shit done, come up with good ideas, build good teams, and execute very, very fast against them. It's not a time to have a six month roadmap and incrementally kind of chip away. It's time to like, it's a let's go time and you need the let's go team in order to sort of like, compete in this month.

So are you looking at the teams, the leaders that you have at Canva through a different lens then, because of this? I mean, maybe not.

I'm definitely holding them to a higher standard. Yeah, because like, in the, in the happy growth times, it was like, hey, we could just go on holiday and the numbers would keep growing. The numbers will still keep growing if we do nothing for a while, but then it will start dropping. So it's like, how do we get that next, like, hit a lick on that next stage of growth? And that's going to come from AI, it's going to come from disruption, and it's going to only come from being the very best product to solve companies and individuals. Visual communication means.

Well, thank you. Thank you again for doing it.

Thanks so much.

The phrase that sticks in my head from Cliff, if you're not disrupting yourself, then you're getting disrupted. That's arguably always been the case, the basis for Clay Christensen's seminal book, the Innovator's Dilemma. Yet in an AI world, the stakes feel higher and more urgent. As much as Canva is racing forward as a business, it's also straddling the transition that we as humans are facing, helping us all be more creative while raising questions about what actually defines creativity. Perhaps it helps that Cliff and his wife, Canvas CEO, aren't personally motivated by building generational wealth. Maybe that allows them to take a beat every now and then to examine if what's best for growing the business is necessarily best for the world. Then again, they have thousands of employees. They have investors. They're part of the global market marketplace. We'll see how those pressures manifest themselves over time. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. Rapid response is a wait. What? Original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashumaku Tonino. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lital Milad. For more, visit RapidResponseshow.