Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)

Canva is bigger than Figma and Miro and Webflow combined. You guys are generating$2.3 billion in ARR, and you're profitable. You're also growing 60% year over year, and it's accelerating. I run everyone through the culture of Canva. One of those sections is on giving away your Lego, finding joy in the other things, and building a team, passing on your experience. Helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering. When is this coaching concept? I have never heard of this. We don't really have managers, but everyone in Canva has a coach that constantly working with you to look at your skills, but also when it might be time to move on to the next level. I'm curious just how you think about product management. I didn't want to do product management. management like they did at Google. And that's because of the different cultures. I have seen product managers at other companies who are very independent of teams, and that seems very weird to me. For us, product managers are really connected. It feels like Canvas has just been this nonstop up and to the right. All win, all success. In reality, that's never actually the case. How many failure stories do you want? We got plenty. Today, my guest is Cameron Adams. Cameron is the co founder and chief product officer at Canva.

Which is a truly incredible business and company. At the top of the episode I share a bunch of stats that'll probably surprise you about the scale that Canva has reached these days. In our conversation, we cover a ton of ground, including how Canvas stays product obsessed, their freemium strategy, lessons about building MVPs. how Cam and the product team think about AI within their product, also peek into their unique team culture, their SEO and growth strategy, and also peek into some of the stuff they just launched. This episode is for anyone building or growing a product or company, and I guarantee by the end of this conversation, you'll be as blown away with Canva as I am. With that, I bring you Cameron Adams, and if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. Cameron, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. It is so great to be here, Lenny. I'm very excited. I'm even more excited. I have at least a billion questions for you. I'm hoping I get through at least half a billion.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.