Canva’s $35B design biz is quietly taking over the workplace, with co-founder & COO Cliff Obrecht

**Jeff Berman** (0:01)
Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. We are gathering the leaders who are building what's next at the Masters of Scale Summit. You'll see visionaries like Waymo's Takidra Mawakana, Chabani's Hamdi Ulukaya, restaurateur David Chang, Patagonia's Ryan Gellert, promises Phaedra Ellis-Lampkins, the National Women's Soccer League's Jessica Berman. The list goes on and on. Please join us October 7th to 9th in San Francisco. The room is filling up fast, so apply now at mastersofscale.com/apply25. That's mastersofscale.com/apply25.

**Cliff Obrecht** (0:40)
The conversations I'm having here go something like this. Hey CXO, do you know much about Canva? They're like, yeah, I know a little bit. My daughter uses it, et cetera, et cetera. We're like, do you know you have 6,000 active users who have created over 500,000 designs this year alone? Then they go, what? They do what?
Is that all on brand? Who's controlling that? Does our Chief Brand Officer know about this, et cetera, et cetera? The answer is like, no, no, no, no. They're all going rogue. Then it's like, holy shit, we're going to do something about this.

**Bob Safian** (1:25)
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 Canlions 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's CEO, Melanie Perkins, how they 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.
I'm Bob Safian, I'm here with Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and chief operating officer for Canva. Cliff, great to have you here.

**Cliff Obrecht** (2:31)
Thank you, Bob. I'm excited to be here.

**Bob Safian** (2:33)
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.

**Cliff Obrecht** (2:49)
Okay, okay.

**Bob Safian** (2:50)
Is that why you're here to get better, or is it a reflection that you've figured out the marketing side of it?

**Cliff Obrecht** (2:58)
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, 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 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. When you're growing really, really fast and 95 percent of your top of funnel is organic, you don't really have to work too hard on sales and marketing.
It was only about four years ago, we were like, all right, we're 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. We've gone on a journey in the last four years. That's been an exciting one. It's really culminated at Cannes, where we have a beach here and a lot.

**Bob Safian** (4:04)
Yeah, I was there yesterday. It's really nice. Very nicely designed, as one would expect.

**Cliff Obrecht** (4:10)
Thank you.

**Bob Safian** (4:10)
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?

**Cliff Obrecht** (4:36)
Well, I think probably a lot of the tech companies, they solved a real problem. They had the same 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.

**Bob Safian** (4:57)