Inside The Canva Juggernaut
There’s an oft-told story about Canva cofounder Melanie Perkins pitching her idea for an easy-to-use online design tool to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Tai, who was visiting her hometown Perth in western Australia for a tech conference—and to get some kite-surfing in. As she talked, she saw him typing on his phone and presumed she had lost him.
He was, in fact, messaging Google Maps cofounder Lars Rasmussen, who recalls in a video call the two-line text: “Lars, help these guys find a tech team. If you sign off on the tech team, I’ll invest in it.” Rasmussen loved Perkins’s idea for democratizing design, but over the next 18 months, none of the prospective tech leads brought forward measured up. “‘You need the best of the best of the best if you’re going to carry this out’,” Rasmussen told her. It seemed that Canva would go the way of many great ideas. Then came Cameron Adams.
The Melbourne native, well known in the intersecting worlds of coding, web design and startups, in 2012 agreed to join Perkins, a 30 Under 30 Asia alum, and her husband Cliff Obrecht. While the couple gets most of the credit for Canva’s freemium software that allows users to drag and drop their way to create and share graphics, websites, Instagram posts and more, Adams and his team of engineers have been at the technical core of the Sydney-based company. Now they’re banking on a suite of AI-powered features to power future growth.
