Mission-Driven Founders, Global Investing, and Canva (with Wesley Chan)

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
All right, well, hello, everyone, and what a beautiful stage we've got here and a beautiful venue, so thanks to the Web Summit team. Wesley, great to be here with you.

**Wesley Chan** (0:09)
It's exciting to be here.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:11)
Well, my first question, because I know the topic today is technically something about being a global VC in a remote world, so let's start there and then kind of see where the conversation goes.
You've been a global VC for quite a while now, and I'm thinking specifically of Canva, which is a name a lot of folks will know. Can you tell the story of how you came to be an early investor there?

**Wesley Chan** (0:33)
Yeah, Canva's an amazing company.
Mel and Cliff are two of the most sort of thoughtful and wise founders I've ever had the opportunity to work with, but it was completely non-obvious when I, along with my team at Felicis, led the Series A.
And it's one of those things where, when we led the Series A and we showed up at their office, there was an introduction from the CEO of Culture Amp, who I had joined the board of in Melbourne. And he said, you got to meet these two founders, Cliff and Mel, they're amazing. They're starting this design company that no one really knows about right now, but you should see them. So I got this introduction from Didier at Culture Amp, and we had a board meeting in Melbourne, and I was on my way back to Sydney, because you can't connect directly to San Francisco from Melbourne. And I set up a time with Cliff and Mel, and they're like, come by the office, we've got this fun little place, come see us. And so I had this half hour of coffee booked with them at their office and route to the airport. I literally brought my bags with me and wheeled it into the office. And you know, Cliff and Mel come down. I don't think either of them were wearing shoes at this point. And they had all these engineers running around also without shoes. I'm like, I'm at a strange, barefoot place. Like they just had come back from the beach.
And they went on to describe Canva to me. It was the absolutely most incredible thing. Mel said, I'm gonna change the world of design. There's a hundred different tools that you need when you wanna go make business cards, PowerPoint decks. Like you have to learn Photoshop. You have to learn this printing tool. You have to learn Microsoft Office. And she said, I'm gonna combine them all in the one tool.
And they had not turned on monetization yet. There was some money they were making selling graphics and fonts. But they said, this is gonna be the biggest thing on the planet. And I remember just listening to their vision and could not stop being mesmerized by some of the things they told me.
And so my half hour meeting turned into three hours with them and I missed my flight back to San Francisco. That was the probably most interesting thing. I was like, oh crap, I'm gonna miss the flight. And they're like, oh, come stay with us and learn more. And so they invited me back the next day and then the following day. And I spent three days with them in Sydney, understanding product.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:38)
Three straight days in diligence with the company.

**Wesley Chan** (2:40)
No, it wasn't diligence. That's the thing. I wasn't planning on investing.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:43)
Investigating the investment opportunity.

**Wesley Chan** (2:44)
I just like to hang out with them because they were thoughtful, smart and their engineers and their product designers were some of the most interesting people on the planet. And a lot of them had come from Google in Australia, had helped build a lot of the Maps products in Australia and they just was hungry. They were just super hungry for information. So that was just very, very interesting. And I had spent 10 years of my life building product at Google, 15 years there. And it was one of these amazing things where we got to share knowledge with each other about how they saw the world, how I saw the world and I helped them figure out how to do hiring for product managers and engineers. And at the end, they said like, we'd love to find a way to work with you some more. And I was like, well, I don't know. It's hard for me to bring back a company with no revenue leading a Series A.
And the difficult thing about the deal was they made it very easy to say no, right? It was a romantically involved team.