Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
Canva is bigger than Figma and Miro and Webflow combined. You guys are generating $2.3 billion in ARR, and you're profitable. Girls are growing 60% year over year, and it's accelerating.

**Cameron Adams** (0:12)
I run everyone through the culture of Canva. One of those sections is on giving away your Lego, finding joy in the other things, building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing, or great product building, or great engineering.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:24)
When is this coaching concept? I have never heard of this.

**Cameron Adams** (0:27)
We don't really have managers, but everyone at Canva has a coach that's constantly working with you to look at your skills, but also when it might be time to move on to the next level.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:36)
I'm curious just how you think about product management.

**Cameron Adams** (0:38)
I didn't want to do product management like they did at Google, and that's because of the different cultures. I have seen product managers at other companies who are very independent of teams, and that seems very weird to me. For us, product managers are really connected.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:50)
It feels like Canva has just been this nonstop, up and to the right, all win, all success. In reality, that's never actually the case.

**Cameron Adams** (0:56)
How many value stories do you want? We got plenty.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:03)
Today, my guest is Cameron Adams. Cameron is the co-founder and chief product officer at Canva, which is a truly incredible business and company. At the top of the episode, I share a bunch of stats that will probably surprise you about the scale that Canva has reached these days. In our conversation, we cover a ton of ground, including how Canva stays product obsessed, their freemium strategy, lessons about building MVPs, how Cam and the product team think about AI within their product, also a peek into their unique team culture, their SEO and growth strategy, and also a peek into some of the stuff they just launched. This episode is for anyone building or growing a product or company, and I guarantee by the end of this conversation, you'll be as blown away with Canva as I am. With that, I bring you Cameron Adams, and if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously.
Cameron, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Cameron Adams** (2:04)
It is so great to be here, Lenny, I'm very excited.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:06)
I'm even more excited. I have at least a billion questions for you. I'm hoping I get through at least half a billion. There's so much I wanna talk to you about, but I wanna start with kind of a warm and fuzzy question. Do you ever just take a moment to reflect on the insane success of this business that you've built? And before you answer that, I'm gonna share some stats about Canva that I think are gonna blow people's minds. So think about the answer.
So I was researching Canva. All of this was just, I didn't know any of this actually. And I think it'll surprise a lot of people just the scale that Canva has reached at this point.
Okay, so Canva is bigger than Figma and Miro and Webflow combined, both in terms of valuation and in terms of revenue.
You guys are generating $2.3 billion in ARR per year, and you're profitable. You've been profitable for about seven years at this point.
You're also growing 60% year over year, and it's accelerating faster than last year. I think this is all quite unheard of at this scale. Do you ever just reflect back on this and like, okay, this is, I've done well.

**Cameron Adams** (3:10)
Well, when you say it all like that, that sounds pretty amazing, I don't think every day, you're cognizant of that growth and that achievement, but there are particular moments where you get to really reflect. And for me, it's most of the time when we bring the team together.
Obviously now we're in a pretty virtual world, hybrid in some best cases, but when the team all get together and we celebrate is when we finally have those moments where you get to kind of step out of yourself, look at this huge sea of people and realize what you've achieved together. Probably the most recent moment we got to do that was for our 10th birthday last year. So Canva is largely centered in Australia. We've got lots of offices around the world, but we had a big birthday celebration in Sydney right on the harbor there in front of the water. And we had thousands of people there and we just got to look back on everything we've achieved over the previous 10 years. And that was a pretty amazing moment.