From the beginning we had this Venn diagram: on one side is creativity and on the other side is productivity. And you might imagine that right in the center is Canva. We really believe that people on the productivity side actually want to be more creative and that people on the creative side want to be more productive. And so we found that this was really the sweet spot: this was a huge gap in the market that we’ve seen since the early days, and it’s where we continue to invest very heavily.
And you? How does Canva use Canva?
Extremely extensively, literally for everything. Our engineers create their technical documents in Canva, we do everything manually, I create all my product templates in it. I’ve used it for decision decks and vision decks, onboarding, hiring and recruiting – tell me something, we’re using Canva very extensively.
Your peak valuation was $40 billion in 2021. A year later, this was reduced to $26 billion. What happened?
I think it was purely the macro change in the market. During this time, Canva continued to grow rapidly, both in terms of revenue and active users. We’ve also been profitable for seven years, so even though the market (has moved on to worry) more about profitability, fortunately we were already on that trend. Markets will value different things over time and will be frothy first and then not frothy. We always care about building a strong, lasting company with a good foundation to serve our community. So it’s not a particular problem what’s going on out there in the market.
You’ve committed 30% of Canva, the majority of your and Obrecht’s equity, to doing good in the world. What does it mean for you?
It seems completely absurd that we enjoy the prosperity we get all over the world, and there are people who still cannot meet their basic human needs. The first step we took is to partner with GiveDirectly, where we donate money directly to people living in extreme poverty. (Canva has so far donated a total of $30 million to people living in poverty in Malawi). I love the power it gives them to spend money on their community, on their family, on their basic human needs: sending their kids to school, having a roof over their heads. We have an extremely long way to go, but we are really excited to have started this process.
Your goal is to reach 1 billion users. What’s the plan to get there?
When we set this as a goal several years ago, it seemed completely ridiculous, but as the years go by it’s becoming less ridiculous. We need about one in five Internet users in every country to reach one billion. There is now one in six Internet users in the Philippines, while in Australia it is one in eight. In Spain, it’s one in 11. In the United States, it’s one in 12. So, with 200 million now, we’re a fifth of the way to one billion, and if we can continue to grow as rapidly as we have so far, we hope to get there .
Any plans for the IPO?
It’s definitely something on the horizon.
This article first appeared in the January/February 2025 edition of WIRED UK.
