From the beginning, we had this Venn diagram: on one side is creativity, and on the other is productivity. And you guessed it, right at the center is Canva. We really believe that people on the productivity side really want to be more creative, and that people on the creative side want to be more productive. And so we really found that’s a sweet spot – that was a huge gap in the market that we saw in the early days, and that’s where we’re continuing to invest heavily.
what about you? How does Canva use Canva?
Much broader, for literally everything. Our engineers do their engineering docs in Canva, we do all manually, I do all my product mock-ups in it. I’ve used it for decision decks and vision decks and onboarding and recruiting and hiring — to name a few, we’re using Canva pretty extensively for that.
Your peak value in 2021 was $40 billion. A year later, it was reduced to $26 billion. what happened
I think it was a complete macro shift in the market. During that time, Canva has continued to grow rapidly, both on revenue and active users. We have been profitable for seven years, so even the market [switched to caring] More about profitability, we were fortunately already on that trend. Markets are going to value different things over time, and markets are going to be frothy and then not frothy. We always care to build a strong, sustainable company with sound foundations that serve our community. So it is not a particular concern what is happening in the market.
You pledged 30 percent of Canva—yours and Obrecht’s majority equity—to do good in the world. What does this mean to you?
It seems completely absurd that we have the prosperity that we do around the world, and there are people whose basic human needs are not met. The first step we’ve taken is a partnership with GiveDirectly, where we give money directly to people who are living in extreme poverty. [Canva has so far donated a total of $30 million to people living in poverty in Malawi.] I love the empowerment that enables them to spend money on their community, their family and their basic human needs — sending their kids to school, getting a roof over their heads. We have a long way to go, but we are really excited that we have started this process.
Your goal is to reach 1 billion users. What are the plans to go there?
When we made this a goal many years ago, it seemed completely ridiculous, but over the years, it has become less ridiculous. We need one in five internet users in every country to reach one billion. It is now one in six internet users in the Philippines, and one in eight internet users in Australia. In Spain, it is one of 11. In the United States, it is one in 12. So now at 200 million, we’re one-fifth toward the billion number, and if we can continue to grow as fast as we’ve done, hopefully we’ll get there.
Any plans to do an IPO?
It’s definitely something on the horizon.
This article first appeared in the January/February 2025 edition of WIRED UK.
