It was eventually killed, though, wasn't it?

Yeah, I was working with some of the founders of Google Maps.

Uh, and they had- Sold Google Maps to Google a few years prior.

They'd worked through that a bit.

They'd scaled the product all around the world.

Uh, but they always had this bigger idea at the back of their brains that they wanted to do, which was Google Wave, which for most of the world who haven't used it, um, it was a communications product that was quite groundbreaking.

At the time, you didn't have real-time communication, you didn't have seamless docs and spreadsheets and, uh, chat all woven into the same product.

[laughs]

Um, I'm curious, you know, Canva has built a really powerful global community around its product, and that's something that pretty much every company wants, right? Um, how do you actually hang on to that and make it stick? Um, and what's the most valuable piece of feedback that you might have received from a user?

user?We had our biggest event of the year just yesterday called Canva Create, uh, which is where we invite our community in to see the latest big launches that we're, that we're putting out.

We launched Canva AI 2.0 yesterday, which people were incredibly excited about, and I said it on stage, the energy that we feel at Canva Create is just incredible because we do literally have an amazing community consisting of chief marketing officers to teachers to nonprofit champions, people from Brazil to Los Angeles, here, all around the world, they come together for this.

Um, and when we get to turn up to these events, it's an amazing lifeline into our community to, like, talk to them and hear from them, hear their excitement, hear about new features that they want us to build, and it's truly one of the best parts of Canva.

And we've constantly focused on building that community.

So even before we launched the product, we were talking to bloggers, we were talking to social media managers about the problems they had and the problems that we could solve with Canva itself.

We tested the product with them before it even launched to make sure it was the right product for them, and we've done that for the last 13 years.

So much to unpack here, but talk us through kind of what this entails on a high level and the thinking around it.

It was in Nashville as well that Parton fought to be taken seriously as a songwriter.

Dolly started in an era when women, particularly in music, were just given songs, like, "Just sing this," you know, "You're the pretty girl." And that's how her career actually started, and she really pushed to be a songwriter.

She was a songwriter from the start, wanted her own songs on the records, and that came to a head in ...

So 1974, she'd had country hits in America with, uh, Jolene and I Will Always Love You.

Incredible that, you know, those two songs were written almost back to back, but that's Dolly.

So Elvis Presley comes to her in 1974, or his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and wanted to record I Will Always Love You.

Elvis wanted to record that song.

As her star rose, she stayed out of the political fray, and perhaps that was part of her universal appeal.

When in a can the moment did you realize, actually, we have to focus on being a completely agentic AI-focused platform?

Happened a few years ago.

We've always been quite into machine learning as a tool to be able to bring design at scale to the whole world.

So we've had a machine learning team at Canva for now, I think probably nine years.

But the notion of how you incorporate ML and AI into your product has changed drastically over those last few years.

And generative AI has been a massive shift in the last three or four years.

I'd say as we started first seeing image models come out was the first real hint that we saw that creativity and creative tools were going to change.

What is the greatest characteristic about Madden Cliff that people might not know about?

And, and when you think about the, the playbook of how you're... you've had to refocus the company and the product, do you look at, you know, some of the companies in Silicon Valley and say, "Oh, we're gonna do it that way," or, "We're not gonna do it that way"? I mean, you, you guys are far from Silicon Valley in, in Sydney.

We've made, I think, a couple of really pivotal, um, changes to the way that we work with our teams to enable that.

Firstly, it is use whatever tool you need.

So we're not mandating Claude, or ChatGPT, or Gemini, or whatever tool you wanna use in your part of the company.

You can figure it out.

You've got spend to try out our tools, to figure out your workflow, your process, and tackle the problems that you have.

Giving people that freedom is really important because they need to feel comfortable experimenting, and if you force a tool on them, they're just gonna do that very begrudgingly, um, and they're not gonna enter into this very experimental mindset that we need them to.

How do you know when you're amplifying creativity versus kind of automating it away? I mean, that's some of the anxiety that, that comes around with using AI tools.

And, and when you think about the, the playbook of how you're... you've had to refocus the company and the product, do you look at, you know, some of the companies in Silicon Valley and say, "Oh, we're gonna do it that way," or, "We're not gonna do it that way"? I mean, you, you guys are far from Silicon Valley in, in Sydney.

We've made, I think, a couple of really pivotal, um, changes to the way that we work with our teams to enable that.

Firstly, it is use whatever tool you need.

So we're not mandating Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever tool you wanna use in your part of the company.

You can figure it out.

You've got spend to try out our tools, to figure out your workflow, your process, and tackle the problems that you have.

Giving people that freedom is really important because they need to feel comfortable experimenting, and if you force a tool on them, they're just gonna do that very begrudgingly.

How do you know when you're amplifying creativity versus kind of automating it away? I mean, that's some of the anxiety that, that comes around with using AI tools.

You've had to refocus the company and the product, do you look at, you know, some of the companies in Silicon Valley and say, "Oh, we're gonna do it that way," or, "We're not gonna do it that way"? I mean, you, you guys are far from Silicon Valley in, in Sydney.

We've made, I think, a couple of really pivotal, um, changes to the way that we work with our teams to enable that.

Firstly, it is use whatever tool you need.

So we're not mandating Claude, or ChatGPT, or Gemini, or whatever tool you wanna use in your part of the company.

You can figure it out.

You've got spend to try out our tools, to figure out your workflow, your process, and tackle the problems that you have.

Giving people that freedom is really important because they need to feel comfortable experimenting, and if you force a tool on them, they're just gonna do that very begrudgingly.

How do you know when you're amplifying creativity versus kind of automating it away? I mean, that's some of the anxiety that, that comes around with using AI tools.

He sat down with Cameron Adams, Canva co-founder and chief product officer, about the launch.

It's definitely an advantage and we think deeply about the data that we use and how we go about training our models.

We're all about transparency.

So every interaction you have with AI can be controlled in Canva.

We give you all the switches and levers you need to say this data can be used, this data can't be used.

And in terms of copyright, we actually offer indemnity for that for our enterprise users.

So as they're using Canva, they get the benefit of what we call Canva Shield, which means that any content that they generate through any of our AI systems, we indemnify them for any copyright that might arise from that.

Is Canva flexible to kind of update its stack on the run? If a model becomes available that can improve the operating system, you would be able and nimble to integrate it into what you're doing.