SaaStr 2025 Ai Stage

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It. You.

Sa. Sam. Sa. It.

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Partners. John gleason.

We're waiting.

Please welcome to the stage cco canva, rob giglio.

Hey, John.

Hey, how you doing, Ralph?

A lot of that's a long walk from over there, let me tell you.

I know the smoke I got. I got a little lost on the way. All right, folks.

Too. This is a good desk setup.

I know. You ready to get grilled?

I'm ready. Let's go.

Game on.

Hope they're ready.

All right, folks. Hey, everybody. My name's John Gleason. I'm the founder and managing partner at Success Venture Partners. The significance of that fund is that the LPs are some of the best CCOs in the world. 130 CCOs. So if there's one thing I love talking to and talking about and talking with its great CCOs. So let me introduce you all to my friend, Rob Ji Lee Ho. There we go. Did we get that right?

Nailed it there.

There we go. All right, so Rob is the Chief Customer Officer at Canva, where he oversees not only customer success, but Canva's entire sales and go to market functions. Rob brings over 20 years of interest, industry experience, leading and executing global marketing and sales initiatives. Before Canva, Rob was at HubSpot, where he was also the Chief Customer Officer. Before that, he was the Chief Marketing Officer at Docusign. And prior to that, he spent 10 years at Adobe, where he's leading their Go to Market teams for their digital media business and was responsible for $7 billion worth of revenue. He's truly one of the most accomplished and sharpest leaders I know in Go to Market. Everybody, let's welcome Rob. Here we go.

You're a pretty good hype man, John. That's good. Thank you.

Hyping you up.

Yeah, that's really good. You're gassing me right up.

Game on. All right, so, Rob, I gotta ask, because you've got a pretty big title, Chief Customer Officer, but when we were prepping, it's more than just the customer side of things. It's in the entire Go to market motion. So tell me a little bit more, just like, about the title. What's your remit? What does it look like?

Yeah, I think it's an evolution that's going on in our industry, which is there are groups of people who care the most about a customer, and you organize those teams into a single organization. Some places call it Go to Market, some people call it the customer. Org, and some people describe the leader of that group as the Chief Customer Officer, really, for no other reason other than to give a title that attaches to the most important entity in any business's radar, which is the customer. And I think just by title it forces you back to focus on the customer. So it's a big, big to do about a title that just really is focusing you on customers, which is like.

It'S so obvious, right? Like ultimately all of us exist. We, you know, we were building our companies to serve customers and somewhere in the mix we forgot about that Capital C thing. The customer.

Right, yeah, yeah. And I think we always used to sort of have these like very commercial sounding titles to do the same thing. And it just disconnected the work from who you're serving. And so that's why Canva did it. That's why HubSpot does it that way. And that's why many companies have changed their titling to a Chief Customer officer or oftentimes it's like purely customer success. But in Canva, it's customer success and its sales and its operations and things focused on the customer.

I love it. I love it. All right, so you've held the top go to market position though, at Adobe, at DocuSign, at HubSpot, now Canva. You know, I often tell people, you know, when you're building a career, think of your career maybe as like if you're a venture capitalist, right. And unlike me, I get to make a whole bunch of mistakes. I only need one to work out. You're quite the picker. You, you pick, you know, four amazing companies. So just like talk me through that like picking process. Like, how did you know you've left one amazing company off to another amazing company? How'd that process come to be? You know, how did you know that this was the next one?

Yeah. So how did I know canva was the right place to go?

Yeah, yeah.

So I do a lot of mentoring to folks that are younger in their careers. And one of the things I describe is as you're managing your career, you are actually managing a portfolio of opportunities. You have a portfolio of options and you're going to place a bet. And the way you place a bet on a career should be very similar to the way you'd place a bet on making an investment. Do you believe in the product is a number one? Do you believe in the leadership team and the culture? That's number two. Unlike placing a bet where you're removed from what happens with the outcomes, the third one is, can you make a difference? Is this a company where your unique set of stuff, skills are needed and you're actually adding some kind of incremental value as opposed to just taking up a job in a role that anybody could do. And so I've tried to avoid jobs where like anybody could just do it because it would be hard to really create a difference. And I've tried to find places where maybe my unique experiences or things that I've learned along the way can be helpful to the company. So Canva was really pretty straightforward. A massive customer scale with a product that people loved. A leadership team that had an amazing culture, one that I really aligned with, one that was definitely customer first. Like, we talk about giving value first and getting value second. We talk about our two step mission, which is we want to do as much good as we can in the world as possible, but the only way to do a lot of good is to get a lot of value. So. So we want to be big so we can do a lot of good. And so I just. That aligned really well with me. And when I got, I actually got a text from one of the founders who I had met years before and it was like the afternoon before Thanksgiving here in the us Australia obviously doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving. And he's like, hey, can we talk tomorrow? And I was like, well, it's Thanksgiving, but maybe my family would be okay with that. Maybe early morning, he's like, oh, sorry mate, early morning is middle of the night for us. So late afternoon on Thanksgiving, we chatted and the rest was history. At the time, Canva was like maybe 170 million monthly active users. And depending on what slide you're looking at, you'll see that we're at 230 million monthly active users now. So the company has come a long way in a very short period of time. Yeah, I'm getting a wow from the audience. That's a quarter of a billion people using the product every month. Yeah, don't clap for me. It's an amazing product. So back to the idea that it's a great product. And I think the cool thing is a lot of companies think about vanity stats. You know, you could throw a chart like this up and you could think about it as a vanity stat. But we at Canva try really hard to make sure that when we say monthly active use, it's actually completing a design. So it's not just opening something and starting, it's opening something and finishing feeling like they've completed it. It's been shared with someone, it's been downloaded, it's been saved, it's been copied, something has happened with that design, it's been published, and then that qualifies as monthly active use. So these are not vanity stats as much as they're north Stars for us to stay focused.

Man, I love that. It's like really thinking through almost like the desired outcome sometimes. Like, yeah, the first click, we measured it there. But it's actually like people are getting like that desired outcome when they sign up for Canva.

Yeah, that's the idea.

That's the idea. Okay. The numbers though, like, oh my God, those are insane numbers. Everybody, I think admires Canva for the product LED motion that you've all built. You know, if there was a poster, you know, best PLG LED company, Canva would be probably front and center. But you came in to build a different part of the business in a lot of ways. Like you got brought in to build the enterprise part of the business. So tell me about that. Right? Sometimes it's a big hurdle when you have a PLG motion and then you start to go into the enterprise. What did it look like day one? What were some of the cool things, the green flags, let's call them, and what were some of the red flags?

Yeah, so I think the first things first is, and most of you probably know this if you've been knocking around in the SaaS world for a while. We all know it's a lot easier to go from PLG to SLG than to go from SLG to plg. That is a very hard motion to back channel. I worked on that side of the business back when I was at Adobe and I can tell you it's really hard to go from like a mindset of enterprise only down into a touchless plgmotion. It's way easier to go PLG upmarket. And the reason I say that is in a PLG motion, when you have a well instrumented product and a decent amount of customer love and product engagement, you're getting signals every day. And so green flags for us were we had a lot of data, we had a lot of good product usage data. We weren't using it necessarily in the ways that looked like you could get a, a sales LED motion going. But we knew what we needed to do to get there. It was literally all about the data and its use. So that was one of the biggest green flags. I think the other big green flag was we were building an enterprise product. So we had an intentionality to building something that was really right for enterprises as opposed to just having this self serve product. And thinking we could charge more and jam it into an enterprise. That was not our mindset at all. We wanted to give value first and get value second. Red flags. We hadn't done it before. We had a culture that thought touchless. We had a culture that really leaned heavily on organic network driven adoption. And so we had to think about like, what is organic network led adoption inside of an enterprise? And although I think Canva does a great job at PLG and we've done a good job transitioning early phases of to slg, there are a million and one great examples in the world that do it really, really well and arguably in many vectors better than Canva does. And we try to spend a lot of time watching what others do and we try to search and reapply. I mean, that's like the highest form of flattery.

Yeah, of course. And you know, like, Canva's got a really special culture. So I imagine like, you know, introducing this new part of, of the business wasn't something that the founders took lightly. So what was the journey they went on? Were they fully fleshed out with where they thought PLG could take them? Was it the next frontier of scale? What was their process when they came to you and they're like, yo, Rob, we got a job for you here.

Well, it started with the company's mission is to empower the world to design. So if you're going to empower the world to design, you have to be where the world is designing. And largely that's inside of businesses, that's inside of companies, organizations, higher ed places where applications, in particular SaaS applications, are largely controlled by some sort of administrative process. So think cio, cto, admin. And so to get into those kind of environments, we had to think differently. And so it's, it started first with the founders saying that's a place we want to help people design and create and communicate. And then the next step was let's figure out how to go do that. The thing that was really, I think as anybody who's a founder in here or an early stage company, the thing that really mattered a lot was like, don't have two different cultures. Don't build an enterprise culture over here with all the sort of downsides of what we think of as enterprise culture culture. Like there's a lot of like, you know, sort of like deal making, finger pistoling kind of vibe that we did not want to have. That's not our culture. We were, you know, we were really interested in like trying to take complex things and make them easy. And we were interested in helping businesses express themselves and communicate and scale. And we felt like we could do that with an enterprise motion if we did it in the context of. Of Canva's culture.

Right, right. So, like, what did it all look like? Like, was there actually. Was there any AES there when you got there, or did you have to, like, start that from the ground up? There were a couple.

There weren't a lot. There was a couple, and they were frustrated because they knew what they wanted to do. And yet, you know, the product wasn't there, the motion wasn't there. We weren't really, like, putting the right signals in place. And one of the expressions that I think maybe is showing up on a slide is data drives signals, and then signals drive actions. And so the data was living passively. We weren't grabbing it and sending signals to AES. And those signals didn't have a set of steps or actions that live behind them. And so now, as an example, we gather together network effect inside of a business. We look at, like, multiple use and collaboration inside of an organization. And then we send a certain amount of touchless signals. Email in product, maybe abm, we might do retargeting. And then eventually that sequence is ready for some sort of outbound motion. But it's not a totally cold outbound motion. We're going outbound into an enterprise that's already using Canva. And so we think data drives these signals. These signals make us prepared to create actions, and then we have to have the right actions and the next slide. I love, because the process of how you do that matters as much as the skill. And so we started talking about, well, what would be the sales process we would follow? And one of the first things that everybody thinks about is like, will this be a challenger sale, or will we use med pick, or will we use Winning by Design Spice? And I think those questions matter and the answers to this question matter. And for the record, we did pick Winning by Design. We are using spiced. We have a little bit of a Canva flair on it. And that process and methodology matters a lot. But actually, what matters underneath that is the skill of our team, our customer success team, being great communicators and having a playbook that's tied to those signals we're getting. And the AES and our BDRs working in collaboration to have the right level of skill to carry good conversations. And the one thing that we all miss, everybody knows this, is are we super clear on the problem we're solving? For our customers. And we anchor ourselves on that, like, daily. And so, yeah, process matters a lot. But if you don't have the skill to have a good customer conversation that feels genuine, that actually is empathetic around the problems they're trying to solve, like, game over, you'll have a hard time. You really will have a hard time growing your. Your sales momentum.

Yeah. And I think, like, that through line to the customer is, like, so key. I was telling you backstage, the co working space where. Where I work out of sometimes Guy Kawasaki. The Guy Kawasaki, who's your chief product evangelist, he also works out of there. And I said, guy, like, what? What should I be asking Rob? And he's like, well, you know, I'm not entirely sure, but listen to this podcast with Melanie. And they go deep on just the culture of Canva. And the thing that really struck me was just this incredible customer centricity that you've woven into, whether it's like a student sitting in some remote place anywhere in the world, right through to a chief designer at ideo, maybe that customer is front and center. And I thought that was really a special customer thought.

Well, I mean, it really, like, ultimately, the headline is it always comes down to customer value. The way we think about customer value is we follow a customer journey framework. I think, like most of us, this is not any big, like, ooh, new thing. Most of us do this. But I think the difference between those that talk about it and those that do it well are the ones who do it well actually start to embed the tracing and tracking of a customer journey from the very first point of awareness all the way through some expression of loyalty. And you can follow the through line of this single customer experience. You're not looking at it as like, what was my traffic last week? You're actually looking at it at the customer. What stages and steps are the customer following to get themselves to some level of loyalty? And are we helping them or are they doing it on their own? And ultimately, if all we think about that matters for Canva is taking someone who's aware and interested in the product and leading them through to solving the problems that they're trying to accomplish that they're trying to knock down, which might be scaling design, it might be telling a story, it might be doing something as simple as managing a social media account. If we can draw them through that experience.

Experience.

And they're happy with the outcomes, well, then we've won. That's one customer that's moved through the customer journey effectively. And then now the question is, can we do that at scale and can we do it without throwing a whole bunch of bodies at it? And so can we instrument it with some digital experiences and some great trained rep experience? If we can do that, we're off to the races.

Right. So, okay, so as you built that, you know, upmarket enterprise motion, there was a lot of culture there that you wanted to keep, but no doubt there was like, things that you wanted to change in process. So what were like some of the tweaks that you made and what were some of the things that you kept?

Yeah, well, I mean, the nice thing is on the, on the enterprise side, there wasn't much that we had to not do. One thing I would say that we had to not do was organizationally, many of you might work in organizations where you have a customer success team that's like the high touch customer success team. And then oftentimes what happens is there's a marketing organization or a product organization that is doing customer touches to your online PLG customers. And what that creates is a huge separation between teams that are essentially trying to solve the same problem, which is, how do I help an individual customer accomplish the task that they're trying to accomplish? And am I paying attention to some of the same signals? And so maybe one of the things that we like knocked down was we just decided there's a pool of people and they are in businesses and they are individuals and they are in teams, but they live inside of this common population. And that population are our users, they're our customers. And we shouldn't care whether or not they're paying us a lot of money or a little bit of money or no money at all. We should actually be thoughtful about are we helping them solve their problems and are we moving them through a journey with the use of our product? And if we do that really effectively, we're going to get value later. They're going to tell people about us, they're going to move up a version and maybe move to a paid version. They're going to invite somebody else in their team to use the product, and ultimately maybe they become a larger paying customer. And so we worry a lot less about how much money we're making from a customer. We worry a lot more about how much value are they getting out of the product. Now our first intent, because we want to be scaled, is can we do that digitally? Can we do it in product? Can we do it through email? Can we do it with some other outreach methodology? Can we do it with AI? If we can we do right? If we can't, we try to batch them up, we try to pull them into groups of customers that have like problems and we can use the something like a webinar or we can use a group email or we can use a group zoom session and we can invite them to connect with a customer success rep with enough scale and enough customers that it's like financially viable because that's what your CFO is going to care about. Like what is the per touch cost? And we don't worry about the per touch cost if you're thinking about scale every time.

Yeah, it's interesting you say that because I actually had a very similar conversation with John Hurstein who's the CCO at Box. Similar problem in that, you know, you could have the end user using canva to help their kid with their homework and that person actually happens to be, you know, the chief customer officer at big company XYZ and is pulling you up market into that organization. And so the blanket statement is just like treat all your customers like gold and really good things happen 100%.

And I think a lot of us don't pause and actually unpack the economics of our business models such that we do think about what is the real cost of letting a customer wallow versus what is the real cost of providing some level of support and would be willing to invest in building an infrastructure that provides the kind of scaled support and success experiences that customers really need. So that's how we think about it. The one last thought that I'll throw out with you is we all do an amazing job of customer acquisition. Like this is an industry. SaaS in particular, we kick ass at orchestrated customer acquisition. Our lead funnels are dialed. We understand all of our funnels. We know the difference between top of funnel and lower funnel. We're great at it. That level of orchestra orchestration does not need to live in the pre sale environment. That orchestration actually is better served in the post sale environment. Like we should be better in the post sale orchestration of customer experiences than we are in the front side. Because most of us, if we're in a SaaS business, we have an install base and there's no way that the new customer acquisition in any given quarter is going to dwarf the current install base. All the values in the install base. So I just, I evangelize that with our team. I evangelize it with people that I talk to. I think it's an overlooked discipline. Be orchestrated post sale better than you are pre sale.

And I love it because yeah, we always talk about like, okay, what's the second order revenue if we give them a great experience and what we forget about is like, what's the second order, like loss that happens if we don't give them a great experience. And I think that is really hard to account account for and we kind of just bury that deep somewhere. I don't think about it, but man, it can really come back to bite you.

Yep.

All right, so we talked about a little bit about your process. This whole conversation was meant to be about AI. There's so many things I wanted to talk to you about.

Everybody's already talking about AI, but what about every other session? We don't need that here.

But okay, so like, tell me some of the cool things that you're doing in your organization right now because you've got an AI centric platform that no doubt you're doing a ton of amazing work.

Well, we think about AI in like two forms. There's the AI that's in Canva, that's available for customers to use. That gets a pretty significant portion of our attention, as you can imagine, because we're trying to put experiences in the hands of our end users that allow them to scale imagery, ads, creation. I think we recently shared that we've had like 16 billion instances of AI usage, which I think ranks amongst the top AI use cases with some of the tippy top performers in the AI space. So I think we're pretty good on the consumer side.

Yeah.

On the back end side, if we advance one slide, you'll get the headline. So just like the way we try to make complex things simple, we are focusing for our own team to find complex workflows and complex experiences for our reps. And we're trying to stitch AI next to those to make them easier. And I think that's largely what everybody's trying to do. That's not unique to us. We have a mindset that's like, there are probably great tools in the world. We should start with those tools and implement them in our own workflow flows as opposed to try to build them ourselves right now. And we're willing to try almost anything if it's a reasonable investment. And we're kind of finding our way. We're building rep to CS processes that are heavily underpinned with AI. We are using AI to like, understand. So we're talking about these signals. You get data to give you signals, signals guide actions. That framework is literally our AI philosophy. Great data underpins the models that we're putting in place and the experiences we're stitching on top. And so I think we're okay at it. I think we have a long way to go, which is nice. When you're a private company, you can say statements like that. When you're a public company, if you say we have a long way to go, you're like, hammered. But I'd say that Canva is a long way to go. We're going to focus first on getting it right for our customers, and then we're going to get it right for. For our own team. And we're gonna be thinking about ways to scale to make better experiences for our customers and make it easier for all of our reps to perform their tasks.

You know, I love that, though, because it's almost that same humility that has made you such an amazing company from day one. It's like solve a small problem for a niche group, right? I think an initial goal was people in academic situations and do that really well and go from there and start small and make it big. And it's pretty amazing journey you've been on. I admire it a lot. So, dude, thank you so much and.

Thanks everybody for listening. Hopefully you got something out of that.

Yeah.

Thank you. All right, have a great day. Sa. It.

Please welcome to the stage cmo asana shannon duffy. Happy Tuesday. Gotta come get my clicker. All right, so let's talk about AI marketing and demand gen. So as I was putting this presentation together, I was reflecting on my career and marketing and how many things that I've seen change. But one thing has remained constant. If you're in marketing, you have been trying pretty much your entire career for the holy grail, and that is how to drive hyper personalization at scale. Now, as marketers, we have been talking about this for years, if not decades, and there's a lot of technologies will say that we can do this and we can do some of it, but when I think about AI and I think about the power that it gives us as marketers, being able to finally drive this personalization at massive scale is something we're going to be able to do. Now, I want to be clear, we can't necessarily do it just yet, but by implementing marketing into our teams, into our programs, we're going to get that much closer. Now, the thing about AI is it's driving productivity, it's driving all these great gains. But how many times have you gotten something a little weird from AI and you're probably like, I would like to know what that weird thing is behind you, Shannon. Well, don't worry, I will tell you. So I'm a huge Britney Spears fan and so every month when I do my all hands call, I have like a little Easter egg of Britney Spears in there somewhere. Again, I think I'm very funny. And about six months ago I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to have a picture of Britney Spears, I'm going to use AI and Britney Spears is going to thank the marketing team. So off I go to one of the LLMs and this is what I got right. And I love this. I think it tells a really good story that AI is getting us there. But there's still some wonky things that we need to work out. And we're seeing this in the way our marketers and our marketing teams are thinking about AI and what it means. Now, at Asana, we are very passionate about work. Work. Asana is all about making work easier, making work effortless. And we study the way people work. We study the way knowledge workers interact with tasks and tools and projects. And we've been studying the way marketers think about AI. And here's what we've seen. We've seen that 38% of marketers are skeptical about using AI. They're skeptical because they don't want to build a janky product Britney Spears and send it off to their boss. Right? That could be really scary. And we're seeing that 19% of marketers worry that people at work will trust them less and 27% are worried.