00:00Cliff, extraordinary level of uptake. Were you expecting that?
00:05To be honest, and thanks for having me first and foremost, we've been absolutely blown away by the level of uptake.
00:12It probably really speaks to the creative community screaming out for choice and us delivering on it.
00:17But yeah, we've been absolutely blown away with the pickup so far.
00:21Affinity is about professional design in many ways, but how are you seeing being adopted more broadly?
00:27And who is it that really wants to lean into this type of sophistication?
00:32So Canva is a design tool, and when we launched Canva, there were only professional design tools.
00:38So we launched Canva to enable the 90% to 99% of the world who couldn't design to be able to design and express their creativity.
00:46And what we did with the acquisition of Affinity, we acquired that company and we just launched it 100% for free.
00:52And that really gives creative freedom and the ability to create and design to the other 1% to 10% of the organization.
00:59So now we have both professional designers and everyone else able to design for free and with ease and not let the tools or cost get in the way of people achieving their goals through visual communication.
01:11Now, I'm looking at some analysis that was put out.
01:15One analyst is calling it from a visual suite to a comprehensive creative operating system.
01:20They say that it launches Canva into beyond the tool for simple graphics and to challenge Adobe's longstanding market dominance.
01:27Is that what you're doing?
01:28You're challenging Adobe here?
01:29I think we really just think about how do we help organizations achieve their visual communication goals.
01:37How do we – people don't wake up in the morning wanting to create a social media graphic or wanting to create a presentation.
01:43They wake up wanting to achieve a goal, whether that's a small business trying to raise money, whether that's a large organization trying to win more customers or deploy great marketing content to grow their business and revenue.
01:53We're really in the business of helping businesses achieve their goals and that's quite a complex process in a large organization to create on-brand content at scale and we really have connected all of that complexity through the creative operating system and help businesses deliver on that promise.
02:11The promise is being borne out with the statistics and the money that rolls in, $3.5 billion in terms of annual revenue, users $260 million, you've been profitable for eight years.
02:19All of this seems to hint that you're on the path to becoming a public company.
02:23Is that right, Cliff?
02:25Yeah, it's probably imminent in the next couple of years, that's for sure.
02:30Imminent.
02:30And what, therefore, do you need to streamline before that?
02:34How much are you thinking about your talent?
02:35I know you've done a raise where you're able to offer liquidity to those that have been working with you, but how are you able to get the right talent in the door and retain them at this moment?
02:46I mean, Canva is one of the fastest growing companies in the world right now.
02:49And so that helps.
02:50It's a great product solving real problems for customers and delivering lots and lots of value.
02:55So people are excited to work at a company that really are helping, like that company that is helping their customers achieve their goals and is delivering on that success and is growing fast.
03:07And we've hired an incredible leadership team over the last, well, since the start of Canva.
03:11And a lot of our leaders have been with us for eight plus years.
03:15But we have also brought in a really great C-suite of folks like our CFO Kelly, who came from Zoom, and a bunch of others to really sort of like pad out that leadership muscle in the lead up to an IPO and beyond.
03:26You are really augmented by AI in many ways.
03:30But some would say that OpenAI is a key competitor of yours.
03:33How do you see that with Sora?
03:34How do you see innovation as your lifeblood?
03:38OpenAI are an absolutely fantastic partner of ours.
03:41And you can even start a design within ChatGPT now.
03:44So if you're creating a presentation outline, you can simply say, can I please have that as a Canva design?
03:50And it will give you that Canva design straight into ChatGPT.
03:54And then you can click through to Canva for the final mile of editing, collaboration, deployment, and then understanding how that content actually performs in the wild.
04:02So we have an absolutely fantastic partnership with OpenAI.
04:05And we really build the tools around the models like Sora.
04:09So in order to create a video, there's a lot more than just prompt to short clip.
04:13You need to create character consistency, audio.
04:16There's so much more.
04:17So we really create that end-to-end workflow that enables video creation, design creation.
04:22And now we're the first company in the world that's launched a layered design model.
04:26That really generates a Canva design that you can edit straight away rather than having to, every time you make a change, redesign or recreate that image or piece of content.
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