Canva’s Cameron Adams’ advice for Kiwi founders

Australian unicorn Canva launched a little over a decade ago and now has more than 125 million monthly users in 190-plus countries. The company’s co-founder and CPO, Cameron Adams, was a speaker at last week’s Sunrise Aotearoa, where he lifted the hood on the company’s phenomenal growth. And he also took the time to sit down with Caffeine to share some insights and advice for Kiwi founders. Here’s what he told us:

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1. Have an expansive vision, then figure out the steps

One of the greatest skills you can have as a founder is having this immense vision that is almost infinite in how it can expand. But then being able to connect that down into the steps you need to take today to make that happen. And those tiny little steps that add up over thousands of days, and many, many, many hours turn out to build that vision. A lot of us as entrepreneurs have this incredibly expansive vision, but then figuring out how to get that first foothold is one of the challenges that you have in the early days.

So for us, our mission is to empower the world to design. So pretty much every person on earth should be able to use Canva, and that has guided us for the last 11 years and will guide us for decades to come. Scoping that down in the early days was like, well, we could create a design tool for every person to do everything, but that's not physically possible with the resources we have. So we needed a niche that wasn't too small, but which would allow us to start building the foundations of the product. 

There's a tricky balance there in that you need to build for that niche but you need to build in a way that it can easily expand. Thinking about possible startups in the New Zealand space, you don't want to build for the New Zealand market and then find yourself constrained in a later stage.. So it’s always having that global audience in mind. 

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2. Bring the passion

Bring your passion with you to work every day and pass that on to your employees. That's why they're there…because they believe in something you’re doing. 

It's about constantly telling stories and aligning people. You tell stories about all sorts of different things – about the culture, about the hard times, about the path to success that you found. You also tell stories about the product: what we're building, who we're building for. You talk about your mission and where we're heading in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years. You're just constantly telling those stories and passing them on. 

Particularly when you're at a fast-growing company, you're adding employees like crazy…So you constantly need to retell those stories, update them. Keep [your teams] inspired about the vision and also keep reworking that vision, making sure that where you are now isn't just filling the fishbowl, but that you're constantly pushing the boundaries of where you can go.

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3. Stay flexible

It’s incredibly important in the early days to stay flexible, but it's equally as important once you've grown and gotten past the ten-year mark.

There's a tendency to become more rigid as you get bigger. But we've found it incredibly important to stay nimble and flexible and to be able to identify new opportunities; to be able to change the structure of the company; to map to where we want to go; for individuals to be able to move between teams and change their focus and grow and learn new skills. 

And when new technology like AI comes along for us to be able to capitalise on that, and incorporate it into our product and really shift world-leading stuff, even at the size we are, in the style that you would as a startup. So we really hold on to that ethos of having small teams who are striving for crazy big goals. Just trying to hit it out of the park, no matter what stage.

‍As told to Caitlin Sykes