Lesson 1: Any big mission can be broken down into smaller steps 

If you’re aiming to build a global business, then you need to be addressing a huge problem, something that chimes with people around the world. 

Melanie shared the background to the early days of Canva, and how they identified the initial problem. “We saw an enormous opportunity to transform the world of design. While teaching design classes at university, I saw how difficult and unnecessarily complex these tools were to learn. Back then, design wasn’t collaborative and design programs had been built for an era of desktop computers.” 

So they started small. Melanie and Cliff’s first company, Fusion Books, addressed a small piece of the enormous visual communication pie. The pair focused first on school yearbook design, something that had no existing solution and they believed could benefit from a more collaborative, intuitive approach.  Having nailed this, they quickly realised that there was no equivalent for design in general. 

This gave birth to their straightforward but highly ambitious mission—’To empower the world to design.’

Melanie shared how they made this huge mission manageable. “It’s really about breaking it down into smaller steps, like rungs on a ladder. In a very literal sense, our mission means empowering everyone, on any continent, in any language, on every device, to design everything, with every ingredient they need.”

For example, language: they started with English, then Spanish, then 5 languages, then 20 languages, then languages not using Latin script, then right to left languages like Hebrew and Arabic. Start small, build your foundation, and work your way up from there. Today, Canva is available in more than 100 different languages, while the company’s new Magic Translate feature can instantly translate your designs from one language to another. 

“Being aligned on the big things has made small decisions much easier. It’s given us each a strong idea of where we are going—we often ask ourselves what would wild success look like in a decade, what does terrible failure look like? That has been a helpful way to plan for the future and to ensure we’re always rowing in the right direction,” Melanie added. 

Lesson 3: Don’t chase “shiny things” in tech

In tech, it’s very easy to become distracted by hype and excitement.

Cameron recalled one of the ‘shiny’ traps the team fell into the early days. “We built a Christmas Card template to drum up excitement and engagement around the festive season. The initial numbers looked okay—around 30,000 cards had been sent. When we looked into it, 25k of these had come from the same user. We realised this ‘shiny thing’ might not have been the growth channel we thought it would be.”

Tech is currently experiencing mass excitement around AI, particularly generative AI. So is this a shiny thing? Well, to answer this, you really need to think about whether it is important for your customer, and for the problem you are trying to solve. If it doesn’t contribute to your core mission, ignore it. 

“We’re trying to help people express their ideas, communicate visually, and do all this easily, conveniently, and quickly. AI is a huge asset to this, ​​shortening the time between an idea popping into your head, to being able to get that thing out into the world,” Cameron said. 

This thinking informed the acquisitions they made—always considering whether they’d improve the experience and tools at the fingertips of Canva customers. This includes Flourish, who Canva acquired in 2022, which brought engaging data storytelling to their users, and Kaleido, a design AI platform known for the creation of a one-click background removal tool.

Lesson 5: Being outsiders can actually help

Australia-based, female CEO, married couple, background in education—the Canva team is very atypical when it comes to founding teams. In many ways, this made a lot of things harder for them in the early days, particularly around attracting attention from VCs. But for other reasons, they’ve really embraced being outsiders. 

Being based in Australia kept them away from the Silicon Valley bubble, and the expectations that heaped on many founders to build ‘growth at all costs’ startups. “We had the best of both worlds: able to go visit Silicon Valley to raise, while also building in an environment that fostered sustainable growth,” Melanie said. Cliff added—”Being one of the few big tech companies in Australia allowed us to be a big fish in a small pond, which helped us attract brilliant talent that we might have struggled to get in the early days.” 

In general, the team has embraced doing things their own way, different from your typical big tech company. This might cause some friction with certain hires from other companies, who might have a rigid way of doing things. “That’s why we always look for people with a degree of flexibility to ensure they can blend the Canva way with their own experience,” Cliff said.