From blogger to billionaire, Canva's co-founder on what failures at Google Wave taught him

Leanna Byrne (0:00)

Hello, this is Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne. Today, I'm speaking with Cameron Adams, who's the co-founder and chief product officer of Canva. Now, Cameron, Canva has more than a quarter of a billion people using it every month. It's generating billions of dollars in revenue. And you've personally gone from a web designer to one of Australia's wealthiest people. So when you hear all that, does some of that not feel real to you sometimes?

Cameron Adams (0:26)

It is great to be here, Leanna. And yes, it definitely doesn't feel real a lot of the time, particularly when someone like you reads out all those stats. It is a bit of a reminder of how far we've come.

Leanna Byrne (0:38)

Well, let's go right back. Where are you from? What was it like growing up where you're from in Australia?

Cameron Adams (0:44)

Yeah, I grew up in Melbourne, in Australia, which is down the bottom of Australia. I had, I think, a pretty normal upbringing.

My parents fostered my creativity whether they could, putting me into piano lessons and encouraging me to draw when I showed interest in that. But ultimately, I went into the fields of both graphic design and computer science. And being able to meld those two things together, design and technology, served me really well, which got me some really interesting jobs. I worked at Google, I ran my own design agency for a while, and ultimately it led into helping create Canva.

Leanna Byrne (1:23)

And so when you were younger and even back when you were at school, did you just follow your heart in terms of the subjects that you liked or did somebody in your family teach you about money and say, okay, this is what you need to do to become successful?

Cameron Adams (1:37)

My parents, particularly my mum, was really keen on me either being a doctor or a lawyer.

So I studied those dutifully in high school and wound up actually doing law in university. But I always really have my heart more set on the creative side. So in high school, I continued my drawing. I actually had a bit of a side hustle helping do designs for other students in high school. And I got a little bit of money from that, not enough to buy a house, but enough to put me through my teenage years. And that ultimately led me to starting my own freelance business throughout university. So alongside my software engineering and law studies, I volunteered on the university newspaper. I started a part-time job as a desktop publisher. That led into web design. And when I left university, I actually didn't go and get a job. I totally forgot to apply for any law jobs and just kept rolling with the clients that I currently had. So I snowballed that into a bit of a design agency and ended up working with clients like NEC, Atlassian, the Sydney Festival in Australia. And I started writing a lot about it as well. So I had my own blog that wound up getting me some book deals. And that got me enough notoriety to get me kind of a job interview at Google. And I had actually failed several job interviews at Google previously because I wasn't a good enough coder.

And they didn't have many designers at the time. So one of the very first designers at Google got me a backdoor, basically skipped all the hiring process. And I started working on a project called Google Wave, which turned out to be a really interesting project that taught me a lot about startups and technology.

Leanna Byrne (3:23)

It says a lot, doesn't it, that somebody at Google was reading your blog. The Man in Blue, I believe, was the name of it. And I mean, you were pretty well known as in the early internet world because of that blog. Isn't that right?

Cameron Adams (3:38)

Yeah, it was a really great outlet for me to explore what was going on. The internet was pretty wild at the time in terms of people were still figuring things about how to build web pages, how to build applications. We had a bit of a community that developed around web design and JavaScript and web standards. So it was really exciting to explore that. And my writing meant that I got to try out a bunch of new things which got people really interested.

Leanna Byrne (4:04)

When you got the job at Google, did it feel like you'd made it at that point?

Cameron Adams (4:09)

Definitely made my mom happy for me to have a full-time job rather than being a layabout small business owner. But for me, it was really only the start of the beginning. There was still so much to learn. I didn't really know how to build a product. I'd spent my life building magazines and websites. Building a product that millions of people use is quite a different thing. And working with a technology team that has to scale, we went from five people in one room to 60 people working across the whole floor.