Cliff Obrecht: 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. 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 our 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 shit, we’ve got to do something about this.

Bob Safian: That’s Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and chief operating officer of Canva. 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 Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, navigate their personal 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.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and chief operating officer for Canva. Cliff, great to have you here.

OBRECHT: Thank you, Bob. I’m excited to be here.

How organic growth shapes marketing strategy

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

OBRECHT: Okay. Okay.

SAFIAN: Is that why you’re here, to get better? Or is it a reflection that you’ve figured out the marketing side of it?

OBRECHT: I think it’s, well, 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 Microsoft PowerPoint and Paint. So if you had an idea for something creative, if 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 choices. 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 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 double down on this marketing thing, spend a percentage of our overall revenue, and also figure out this whole sales thing.” So we’ve gone on a 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 we’re learning a lot.

SAFIAN: Yeah, I was there yesterday. It’s really nice, and very nicely designed, as one would expect.

OBRECHT: Thank you. Thank you.

SAFIAN: As one would expect. It’s interesting, as you’re saying it, because Silicon Valley, I know you guys weren’t born out of Silicon Valley, but the tech companies there, 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. Was that a model that you were looking at, or not necessarily?

OBRECHT: 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 scaled naturally, and then they started investing a lot more in marketing. So I think everyone now sees its importance.

Balancing niche features with platform scale

SAFIAN: Yeah. One of the other things I saw that you said, that Canva’s philosophy is to start niche and go wide. And many successful startups have tried to follow that route. You’re now a lot bigger, I have these numbers, right, 230 million users. It’s probably an even bigger number than that by now.

OBRECHT: It is, it is.

SAFIAN: 95% of the Fortune 500. You’re doing $3 billion plus in annual revenue. At this scale, is there more pressure to have everything be wide, to reach a lot more people? Is it harder to start niche?

OBRECHT: 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 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.

SAFIAN: But when you’re looking at new additions to make to the Canva platform, are you looking again for niches to build off of? Or is it like, “Oh, no, we got to… That’s not worth it because it doesn’t reach enough people”?

OBRECHT: Well, 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 we’re, for example, moving and evolving the business from not just 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 pick off underlying themes that elevate our whole suite.

SAFIAN: 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?

OBRECHT: That’s right.

SAFIAN: What is your goal when you’re at an event like this?

OBRECHT: 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. 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 our 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’ve got to do something about this. 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.

SAFIAN: So your entree into a lot of these big things was like, there’s that phrase BYOT, you bring your own tech to work. That’s basically what it was.

OBRECHT: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

The evolving relationship between AI and creativity

SAFIAN: Yeah. 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 it. 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.” 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?

OBRECHT: 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 are ruining our industry. You are like letting everyone design.” And then we kind of said back, “Why is a designer, why is that professional, that 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 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 as 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. 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 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 that creatives have got the full value of the corpus of work that these models have been trained on. But I do think creatives, they need to embrace this new technology. Not embracing AI as a creative is, you can see where it’s going. It seems folly.

SAFIAN: Yeah. You have to. I mean, I was talking with someone from Google yesterday about their Veo 3 tool. Have you-

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

SAFIAN: I mean, it’s amazing, though, what it can do.

OBRECHT: Incredible. Incredible.

Making creativity accessible for everyone

SAFIAN: Now, it does make it feel like, oh, anybody can be an auteur, which of course is what we want, and maybe it opens things up, but it could also have people push back against it.

OBRECHT: 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 going to lift the baseline, absolutely. But I think the best creatives are going to be elevated beyond that and celebrated even more.

SAFIAN: Yeah. As we’re talking, I’m reminded, I had a conversation, this is several years back, with Ben Affleck. And I was asking him, “Listen, so many people are watching the movies that you make on their phones. Do you start to think about creating them differently, because so many people are looking at them on a smaller screen?” And he was almost insulted at the idea that, no, no, no. It’s got to be for the big screen. It’s got to be for the big screen. But now I wonder whether you could.  AI can do some of those things that make the big screen distinctive, without having to have the same budgets around it.

OBRECHT: It’s going to be incredible. And we’re about to start running competitions for student creatives. What can you create as a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old, and create your five-minute masterpiece? I think it’s going to 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? It’s going to be creative, and what’s currently movie-quality creative, down to the individual, which is really just going to see so much more creative, and I think it’s a great thing.

Also, I’m dyslexic, so I can read, but I don’t read well. I read fast, but I blur things up. So I hate being a rote learner when it comes to reading text. I’m a very visual learner, and a learner that 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.

SAFIAN: 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?

OBRECHT: 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 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.

SAFIAN: Yeah. But it needs that interface to be able to – 

OBRECHT: Yeah.  And that’s why Canva Code, for example, 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 we launched Canva Code because it’s really hitting that, 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 opportunity for them.

Understanding ownership and copyright in the age of AI

SAFIAN: 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.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Canva’s 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, Canva 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 a good business strategy. Let’s get back to it.

When we’re talking about AI, there’s a question that I sometimes wonder about, which is, if someone uses AI to create something, who owns it? I get confused, right?

OBRECHT: That’s the $20 trillion question.

SAFIAN: 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?

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

SAFIAN: And that’s the way you feel like it should be for everyone?

OBRECHT: 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.

SAFIAN: Yeah. And you’re not necessarily like Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk saying there shouldn’t be intellectual property protections at all?

OBRECHT: 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 – 

SAFIAN: Be compensated.

OBRECHT: Yeah. I very much believe in value for value.

Navigating rapid technological change and industry disruption

SAFIAN: Yeah. I will say that, for those of us who are in the news business, there is 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?

OBRECHT: Well, I think regulation is often slow to catch up with technology. And I think you’ve seen, like music, for example, it’s evolving again with AI, but historically, there was a period of time where there was Napster, and 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. I think it’s happening in fits and starts. You can see it.

SAFIAN: It’s just messy right now.

OBRECHT: 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. Does anyone want a newsroom that can’t survive? No. 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 technologies.

SAFIAN: It’s true, it’s true. And it does make people anxious.

OBRECHT: Well, I mean the candle makers, when the light bulb came about, were worried for a while, but, yeah.

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

OBRECHT: Yeah. Yeah.

SAFIAN: And they went and did something else.

Maintaining a healthy work-life partnership as co-founders

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 they would schedule meetings but also try to schedule when they were and weren’t talking about work. How do you and Mel balance being coworkers and colleagues?  I mean, technically you work for her, right?

OBRECHT: Yeah. She’s my boss.

SAFIAN: And also being life partners.

OBRECHT: Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely something that’s constantly evolving and we’re figuring out, but at the end of the day, and I don’t know if I’m speaking to all the married men out there, you got to know who’s boss. There’s fights you can fight, and then there’s things you’ve just got to concede on for the goodness of everything. And she is ultimately the boss. And so on things like product, she gets the final say, and you just got to understand where those boundaries lie. We’re very collaborative. 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, and we figure it out.

And on weekends, we’ve been doing this long enough now.  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 in business together for probably 18 years, and we’ve been in a relationship for 20 years. We have to say on weekends, “Come on, we’re going to take a minute off.” You can’t sprint a marathon. And there’s some walks we go on where we’re like, “This is a no-work talk, we need a minute to just talk about-“

SAFIAN: And do you sometimes, one of you will bring something up and the other one will be like, “Not now”?

OBRECHT: All the time. All the time.

SAFIAN: “It’s not the time.”

OBRECHT: Yeah. It’s like, we don’t have a –

SAFIAN: Which must frustrate both of you in those situations, right?

OBRECHT: It does. It does, it does. And because you don’t realize, it can even be a very positive thing. Because running a business, you’re constantly solving problems. And so you can be on a, like, we go on lots of walks, and we could go, “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, are you going to fix this? And it can blow up a good walk. So even a good thing, we’re like, let’s leave that for later.

SAFIAN: But sometimes, too, you’re just having, I mean, I know this for me, I could be at my kid’s soccer game and I’m cheering and I’m into it, and then sometimes something will strike me. And do you then say like, “Hey, I just had this idea,” or you have to be like, oh, no, no, I better not bring this up now.

OBRECHT: No, if it’s something burning, we’re both pretty bad at holding our tongue.

SAFIAN: Uh-huh.

OBRECHT: So, yeah. And we often do purely work walks as well.

Personal ethics and philanthropy at the heart of success

SAFIAN: I’m curious on, whether it’s on those walks or otherwise, one of the challenges for business leaders right now is deciding which societal issues to 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?

OBRECHT: I mean, we’re a bit insulated from crazy US politics and how partisan and how everyone’s just always screaming at each other all the time. And when it comes to societal issues, our philosophies haven’t changed, and they’re not influenced by the latest comings and goings of politics. 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 GiveDirectly. And I think we’re just announcing $100 million over the next three years to go to communities in Malawi and cash transfers. And we’re really big believers in giving 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.

SAFIAN: 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. 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?

OBRECHT: I think everyone makes their own personal choices around what they think is best for the world. And I don’t think the way we view the world is maybe what’s best. So I’m not saying I’m right, I’m just saying, it’s like, what’s right for us, what’s right for our family? And it feels good. I actually think buying more shit does not make me feel good. Giving away money, selfishly, that makes me feel good.

SAFIAN: And you know that about yourself.

OBRECHT: Yeah. Absolutely. So I could be selfish. 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. Mom was a teacher. Dad was, like, a welder, then worked for the government. Mel’s mom was a teacher. We didn’t grow up with money, and we don’t think that money gives you more happiness. 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 to make my kid rich and not appreciate things. And I’d never want to rob the right from my daughter to earn her own way in life. So she needs to buy her own house. She needs to, and sure, you’ll help out in little ways, like maybe make sure she gets a safer car, chip a little bit extra in. But you don’t want to 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. They’re kind of, I don’t know. They’re not generally the types of people I want to hang out with.

SAFIAN: If I’m remembering this right, last fall, you raised prices a lot, and there was kind of a blowback, and you have to walk it away?

OBRECHT: That was, that was kind of bullshit. So it wasn’t, it was like, we had grandfathered some customers at $3. And so for most people, we didn’t increase prices that much, but there was like, it was an oversight, right? 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.

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

OBRECHT: For them, for a small cohort of our longest, our oldest users, who you can argue loved us the most because, they were grandfathered at this cheap price, it went 300% up or something like that.

SAFIAN: I see.

OBRECHT: And then 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.”

SAFIAN: And that was not a tough decision?

OBRECHT: No, not a tough decision at all.

Leadership, transparency, and building resilient teams

SAFIAN: 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 helps you as a leader in the organization, and then sometimes, when is it like a hindrance?

OBRECHT: 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 mom’s footsteps. And I guess when we first started business, I tried to be more professional. And then I just realized, being yourself is actually, I don’t know. It works for me. I think people don’t hate me. And so I think just being transparent, you can get stuff done faster. It doesn’t work with low performers. Working with low performers, you’re not doing a very good job, my expectations are here and you’re down here, you need to bridge that or this place probably isn’t right for you, right? If it’s not working, it’s not working.

And 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 not good for the other person, that’s a bad deal for everyone. And it always ends in disaster because, I mean, people are smart.

SAFIAN: So why are you doing this today?

OBRECHT: Doing this interview?

SAFIAN: Yeah.

OBRECHT: Oh, my PR team asked me to do it. I’m not big on doing podcasts, and building a personal brand, actually. So I actually generally refuse to do all this stuff. And I love your podcast. I really do.

SAFIAN: Well – 

OBRECHT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you have done a great job, and you have provided really valuable information to people. Hopefully I said one thing that someone can take – 

SAFIAN: No, no, this has been fun. So what’s at stake right now for you and Canva?

“If you’re not disrupting yourself, you’re getting disrupted”

OBRECHT: 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. That’s what we need to be in order to succeed in this new world. And to drive that change, 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 road map and incrementally kind of chip away. It’s time to, it’s a “let’s go” time. And you need the “let’s go team” in order to compete in this market.

SAFIAN: 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 today –

OBRECHT: I’m definitely holding them to a higher standard, because 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’ll start dropping. So it’s like, how do we get that next 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 needs.

SAFIAN: Well, thank you again for doing this.

OBRECHT: It’s a pleasure. Thanks so much.

SAFIAN: The phrase that sticks in my head from Cliff: “If you’re not to 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, Canva’s 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 marketplace. We’ll see how those pressures manifest themselves over time. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.