Bilawal Sidhu Podcast

Canva quietly built a $32B empire — now it's redefining how the world creates with AI.In this deep dive, I interview Canva Co-founder & CPO Cameron Adams about how the company went from a web-based underdog to the OS for visual content, used by over 240M people every month. You can also watch it on YouTube, Spotify, or X/Twitter:Some topics we explore:1. Why Canva is used by over 240M people every month.2. The 3-tier Canva AI strategy: deep tech, partnerships, and marketplace.3. How they're bringing AI video and code generation to their platform. 3. How batch creation and real-time analytics enable mass personalization.5. Why Canva believes the future of design isn’t about features, but outcomes.Whether you're a founder, designer, or product nerd, this is a masterclass in scaling creativity at global scale. Hope you enjoy! Transcript formatted for reading: Bilawal Sidhu: What happens when you take professional design tools out of the hands of the 1% and give them to everyone? You get Canva, a company that's quietly amassed 240 million monthly active users, powering everything from TikToks to Fortune 500 pitch decks. Now, imagine having a graphic designer, video editor, and creative director at your fingertips, all powered by AI. So, how did Canva pull this off and where are they going next? Today, I'm sitting down with Cameron Adams, Canva's co-founder and chief product officer, to dive deep into how they're building the everything app for visual communication. What the future of human AI collaboration looks like and why AI might just create more creative jobs, not less. Let's get into it.Cameron Adams: The vision for Canva has always been about reducing this job that could take months down to minutes, and AI is letting us take it from minutes to seconds. You had tools that 1% of the world could possibly use. So we set out to create this product that enabled the other 99% of the world to access design.Bilawal Sidhu: More than 230 million people design with Canva every month. 373 designs created every single second. 240 million monthly active users. That is a flabbergasting number if you think about it. Now it's just table stakes for making a pitch deck, like, that's the tool you use.Cameron Adams: So that quickly takes one design that you're creating and multiplies it by 500 and then lets you do that in the space of minutes.Bilawal Sidhu: Do you expect it to change how people build interactive experiences?Cameron Adams: It is literally months to create some of these things that you can now generate through Canva code in minutes. Companies like Adobe very much approach it from the opposite direction. So when they try and bring something like a Canva to to life, they just don't have the same DNA.Bilawal Sidhu: Cameron, thank you so much for coming on the show.Cameron Adams: Such a pleasure to be here, Bilawal.Bilawal Sidhu: Congratulations, hot off the presses. Canva is number five on the CNBC Disruptor 50 list. Sounds like an incredible validation of the journey you've been on.Cameron Adams: That is a pretty good reflection of of where we've been and also where we're going. Still disrupting.Bilawal Sidhu: Well, speaking of the journey, let's go back to the genesis story. How did Canva go from being a niche design tool to one of the largest SaaS companies in the world, almost reframing the entire market for design and creation tools?Cameron Adams: Started out in 2012. Design for everyone was a category that did not exist. And we all realized the immense power of design to enable people to achieve their goals, but the fact that it was highly inaccessible to most of the world. You had tools that 1% of the world could possibly use, that they could afford and that they could understand and that they could actually get anything good out of. So we set out to create this product that enabled the other 99% of the world to access design. We started small. Uh we mostly focused on social media in the very early days, but in the intervening decade, we've expanded to presentations, you can create T-shirts, videos, websites, pretty much any visual content can be made on Canva. And it has truly inspired people. We've got now 240 million people that use the product every month, and they use it for an incredible variety of things. But it's really fascinating to dive into each and every design story of every person that uses Canva, because they're using Canva for impacting their own lives, whether that's putting a poster up in the window of their store or creating a pitch deck for their first business, or helping their nonprofit get more donations. Every design that's created on Canva has this amazing story behind it.Bilawal Sidhu: I love that. Yeah, and 240 million monthly active users. That is a flabbergasting number if you think about it, and it goes to show that everyone can be creative if they have the right set of tools. But I have to go back to the start and ask you, you know, one of the unique things about Canva was it's completely web-based. And I still remember back then, you know, of course there's like the Adobe incumbent tools like Photoshop, what not. Sketch was super popular, like native apps were super hot back then. Y'all went web first. Did it feel risky back then betting on emerging web standards to build a freaking design editor in the browser?Cameron Adams: I I love that you captured the exact zeitgeist of tech at the time. It didn't feel risky to us. It felt like a really interesting thing to explore because one of the things about the existing tools was the kind of barriers to access. Uh and downloading a big piece of software and learning how to use it over six months was just not something that people were going to tackle in order to get a very small job done. So giving them easy access to the tool through their web browser and letting them get up to speed in seconds, not months, um was a really critical part of helping Canva grow in the early days. We think that's the only way that you can truly grow a product and scale it. When you're talking about 240 million people, you need to have all these inroads through which they can reach the product, and the only way that we could think of doing that was through a web based product.Bilawal Sidhu: Yeah, it's funny. It's like my dad uses Canva for his Substack and like Twitter account now and it's it's kind of wild. It's like the time to first creation is just so low, like it does feel so accessible that you can create something versus, yeah, like you're saying grappling with convoluted tutorials and following stuff along just to get to something that feels like the equivalent of a hello world example.Cameron Adams: I love that your dad has a substack.Bilawal Sidhu: It's it's wild, yeah. Let's uh for a while he had more followers than me on Twitter, you know, it's just like he's got spicy hot takes on there. Um, so I am curious about the web stuff. Like did some of your work at Google give you any conviction that web was the way to go?Cameron Adams: Uh, not specifically my work at Google. So I've been working in the web for probably a decade and a half before I got to Canva. My work at Google kind of touched upon that, and I did a lot of work there prototyping what could actually be done in a web browser. I'd written a few books on JavaScript before that. I've been in the web standards scene. I think as you mentioned, like deeply in the tech, thinking about the types of technology that we needed in a browser to actually create apps and create really interactive websites. I've been pushing the boundaries of that for a while, and Canva was just kind of the next step uh beyond that. It was very much a nexus point of for for me of my experience, what was possible, the idea of Canva itself, and it all just coming together into this neat little package where we could be on the cutting edge of what browsers could do, like we were still testing out how many images you could have in a design, how to manipulate text, like how to have all these moving parts that could be rendered on what was essentially a web page at the time. You know, web apps was still something that was forming. Just on the cutting edge and at the right time to bring that into the browser and make it accessible to people. together with our product philosophies of democratizing design, it was just the perfect storm of technology innovation, bringing product to market and having the right customer base that needed this product just at the right time.Bilawal Sidhu: Now speaking of democratizing design, I'm curious how have Canva users changed over the years, right? Like when it started out, it was bloggers, marketers, small businesses, um you know, that wouldn't have traditionally, you know, had access to let's say like a like a staff designer or something. But eventually professionals and large enterprises came to the party and along with it immense growth. Uh talk me through the evolution of Canvas's user base.Cameron Adams: Canvas's user base now is just so broad. It basically encompasses the entire population. And I think that has mirrored the evolution in visual content. So 2012, Instagram was still getting off the ground, you know, it was mildly popular, Pinterest was a thing, but people were mostly consuming visual content, they weren't creating it. Uh and I think in the intervening 13 years, we've seen a lot more participation in the content ecosystem. And now everyone posts photos, everyone posts designs, everyone posts videos, people create websites. You got people spinning up businesses overnight. Like it's become a lot easier to get stuff done and to do it through the medium of visual content. Small to medium businesses started coming on because they saw Canva as a really great cost-saving tool, but also a great tool to start scaling their marketing. Um and from there we introduced presentations, which opened us up to an entirely different audience that wasn't just creating social media um gr

Just launched my 33-min documentary: "The Untold Story of Google Earth."The origin story is wilder and more impactful than most people realize. From $800/year enterprise software to a free tool that saved 4,000 lives during Hurricane Katrina, reunited lost families, and discovered entirely new ecosystems.After two decades of breakthroughs in photogrammetry, street view, and satellite imagery, Google Earth is now evolving again. Generative AI is turning this digital twin into a planetary prediction engine — a virtual crystal ball.I had the privilege of interviewing Rebecca Moore (Former Director) and Matt Hancher (Director of Engineering) to uncover the full 20-year journey. Full Transcript: Video Essay + InterviewsGoogle Earth just turned 20, but few people know the origin story.March 2003, a war begins. And for the first time in history, millions watch it unfold on a 3D globe, zooming into Baghdad on live television. Maps had never moved like this before.Rebecca Moore: It was kind of stunning. It was fantastic. And second hand, I heard later from the Keyhole team that their servers almost crashed.CNN saw revolutionary reporting, but the founders of Google saw the future of search itself. Not 10 blue links, but a living, breathing planet you could browse just like the internet. Two years later, Google put the entire world on our screens for free. Suddenly, this tech went from war rooms to living rooms. Anyone could fly from space to their streets in seconds.Rebecca Moore: I opened it up and I was like, "Oh my God, this is the answer."We thought we were building the ultimate map. Turns out we built a mirror instead. After four years inside Google's Geo team, I've watched this mirror evolve into something else entirely. We're not just mapping the world anymore, we're mapping ourselves. This is the 20-year journey of Google Earth and how this mirror is turning into a crystal ball.Chapter 1: Sci-fi Spy Tech → Gift to the WorldThe idea came from science fiction. In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the protagonist uses a software program called Earth, a perfectly detailed rendition of planet Earth. What was fiction in 1992 became Keyhole EarthViewer in 2001.Matt Hancher: The intelligence agencies of the world had had access to versions of this kind of technology for a long time. That's where the original capability, of course, for imaging the Earth from space had come from. But even those tools, they were designed for professionals, they were a little cumbersome. This was really the first time, even for them, that anyone with no special training could walk up to a computer, pick any place in the world, fly there, and see what it looks like and understand what's happening there, understand how it's been changing.Rebecca Moore: It has all the satellite imagery, you can annotate it with your own data, it has all the roads. This is going to be the magic platform for us.Keyhole was a revelation. News media and the intelligence community saw the potential immediately, but this glimpse of the future came with a hefty price tag.Rebecca Moore: When I first experimented with Keyhole, it was $800 a year. At the start as Keyhole, it was a commercial product. They were a startup, they were selling it to the government and to real estate.Bilawal Sidhu: Keyhole was bleeding money, burning through venture capital. They needed customers fast. But in Mountain View, the founders of a then four-year-old company called Google saw something bigger than breaking news and tools of war. They saw the future of search itself.Rebecca Moore: Larry and Sergey had seen, Megan Smith had seen the CNN use of Earth. And at that time, they were already aware that a significant proportion of searches that people were doing on the web related to a geographic location. And they thought we should have a geo-browser that would let you search and explore information about the world in the context of a digital representation of the physical world. And that was the original idea for the acquisition, to create a geo-browser.Bilawal Sidhu: Now with Google's resources behind them, the mission exploded in scope. This scrappy startup was about to get their first lesson in what Google scale truly meant.Rebecca Moore: Brian McClendon and John Hanke were pitching to Larry and Sergey. At that time, Keyhole only had high-resolution imagery for the US. The rest of the world they did not. So Brian asked Larry, is it possible maybe if you acquire us, we could afford to get imagery for Europe? And Larry was like, "Well, how many square kilometers are there in the whole world?" Back of the envelope. "How much are you paying per square kilometer?" Back of the envelope. "Let's just do the whole world."Bilawal Sidhu: Think bigger.Rebecca Moore: Yes, that was like, think Google scale.Bilawal Sidhu: And think bigger they did. In June 2005, Google Earth with perhaps the most extensive collection of geospatial imagery was released to the public for free, getting billions of downloads over the coming years. The first thing people did in Google Earth wasn't to go look at the pyramids or explore the Amazon, it was to zoom in and see the roof over their own head. But it didn't stop there. Earth quickly became a cultural phenomenon, both a tool and a toy. People weren't just using it to plan trips and check directions. They were hunting for mysteries, creating a crowdsourced catalog of oddities visible from space.Matt Hancher: Occasionally when the satellite is taking a photograph, there will happen to be an airplane flying below at the exact same time. Incredible rare event that's fun to spot them.Bilawal Sidhu: Some discoveries were quirky, like these rainbow-colored planes caught between satellite bands. But others changed lives forever.Matt Hancher: One of the stories that is most powerful for me about how people can use Google Earth to make discoveries is a story that was powerful enough to others that they made a whole movie about it called Lion. This is about a boy who was separated in India from his family when he was a very young child, ultimately had a new life somewhere else, had always been curious about the family he left behind. And 25 years later, he learns about Google Earth and realizes that he can use these capabilities to go back and start to piece together, oh, here are landmarks that I recognize. He had to scour the entire country trying to piece together where he had come from and ultimately was able to reconnect with his biological mother in real life.Bilawal Sidhu: Stories like Saroo showed the power of connecting personal memories to the map. But what if you could add your own data, your own stories directly on the globe for anyone to see? Earth made that possible with a simple but revolutionary tool, KML, or Keyhole Markup Language, essentially turning the globe into a canvas for anyone to paint on.Chapter 2: Katrina – First Real-World TestBilawal Sidhu: And then Hurricane Katrina happened, becoming the first real-world test of what you can do when you have a shared picture of the globe.Rebecca Moore: My first week as a Googler was when Katrina hit. And the Google Earth team was turned upside down. Eric Schmidt came down my second day and he said to the team, "Whatever your OKRs were, whatever you were planning to work on, forget that. If you can save lives in this Katrina hurricane in New Orleans, that's what you should be focused on. And I'm really proud of you." He gave the team a pep talk. Because there were so many dynamic changes going on of flooding happening and levees bursting and people stuck on roofs of stadiums and it was completely chaotic. And this aerial imagery was like a gold mine of information for the first responders. Then the team created a parallel database of imagery that was for this New Orleans imagery that was coming in every hour. They set up in New Orleans an emergency response center, and they were all using Google Earth. They would enter in Google Earth 123 Smith Street, it would fly them there, they would see the imagery that was collected an hour ago. They would have situational awareness on, okay, where could a helicopter go and pick up their grandparents? And they would then call the lat/long from Google Earth to the helicopter. The Coast Guard called us and left a message that using Google Earth, they saved the lives of more than 4,000 people.Bilawal Sidhu: For the first time, evacuees could see the state of their homes from hundreds of miles away. Rescue teams could spot down power lines and chart new paths. Vague pleas for help suddenly turned into precise coordinates for a helicopter pilot. The geo-browser built for planning vacations had suddenly become an indispensable lifeline.Rebecca Moore: Now it became clear that it was a profound tool with humanitarian applications and environmental applications that no one had realized.Bilawal Sidhu: Google Earth became a mainstay, with enterprise versions going on to power everything from the Department of Defense to NASA. Even President George Bush liked to use "the Google" to fly over his ranch.(Archival audio of George W. Bush): I'm curious, have you ever Googled anybody? Do you use Google? Uh, occasionally. And one of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. And it's very interesting to see... I forgot the name of the program, but you get the satellite and you can... like I kind of like to look at the ranch. Remind me of where I want to be sometimes.Bilawal Sidhu: Of course, it wasn't just for looking at your own ranch. World leaders began to see its powers to tell stories about entire nations.Matt Hancher: After I had come to Google, we were working on using tools like Google Earth around issues like climate change. And so we were at a UN climate change conference. This was towards the end of President Calderón's tenure as President of Mexico. We would bring these 360 wrap-around Google Earth experiences to conferences at the time. And so we were going to use that

How does Roblox use AI to power a 3D platform for hundreds of millions of users? VP of AI, Anupam Singh dives into their new Cube AI model, integrations with LLMs for complex 3D/4D world-building, and the future of vibe coding and in-experience creation on Roblox.Watch this episode on YouTube, X/Twitter, or Spotify.Topics Covered: * Roblox is the "YouTube of 3D"* The Roblox Vision: 3D Creation & Consumption at Scale* The AI Backbone: Safety, Moderation & Infrastructure at Roblox* Cube AI: Towards a Foundational Model for 3D* Using Cube AI with 3P Large Language Models (LLMs)* The Journey to 4D: Crafting Truly Interactive Worlds* The Rise of "Vibe Coding" at Roblox Scale* Empowering Players: In-Experience 3D Creation* AI's Impact on the Creator Economy* Powering Discovery: Roblox's AI Recommendation Engine* The Evolving Landscape: The Future of UGC and AAA 3D Content* Anupam's Advice for Aspiring Creators & DevelopersLinks to Roblox Releases: * Roblox Cube AI: https://corp.roblox.com/newsroom/2025/03/introducing-roblox-cube Cube AI * Cube GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Roblox/cube * Voice Classifier: https://github.com/Roblox/voice-safety-classifierGet in touch: * Join My Newsletter: https://spatialintelligence.ai * Connect with me on X/Twitter here: https://x.com/bilawalsidhu * Everywhere else here: https://bilawal.ai * Business inquiries: team@metaversity.usInterview Transcript:Bilawal Sidhu: Ever wonder how the metaverse gets built? Not just the idea, but the worlds and experiences millions dive into daily. I'm not talking hypotheticals. Roblox is a colossal platform. In late 2024 alone, 85 million people jumped into Roblox daily, spending an average of two and a half hours in user-generated worlds. Roblox isn't just a game, I call it the YouTube of 3D experiences. And the opportunity is massive. Last year, creators earned nearly a billion dollars on Roblox. But here's the catch: making 3D content is still really hard. Imagine what'll happen when you slash those barriers to entry, just like we've seen in video creation. The phone in your pocket is practically a visual effects studio. Today I got something special for y'all. We're sitting down with Anupam Singh, VP of Engineering at Roblox, the man leading the charge on AI and ML at this amazing company that is building the literal instantiation of the metaverse. Roblox recently announced their Q model, as well as their plans for building a 3D foundational model for this specific purpose of creating interactive 3D worlds. So stick around to hear why they went down this autoregressive approach to tokenize 3D, allowing them not just to predict words, but predict shapes. And how they're building towards this future where one AI model can understand geometry, textures, full body rigging, interactivity, enabling true 4D creation. We'll also dive into how they're using their own 3D models with the reasoning power of any large language model to build richer, more complex worlds faster than ever before, allowing you to literally speak 3D worlds into existence. And lastly, scale. This isn't just a toy project. This is Roblox building something for their hundreds of millions of users. So if you want to understand the future of 3D and 4D creation, you're not going to want to miss this conversation. Let's get into it.Anupam Singh: Team is very excited that I'm talking to you. They almost wanted to re-brief me on our technical work, thinking that you're talking to Bilawal, you need to be briefed. I'm like, I've been there since day one when we started this effort.Bilawal Sidhu: (Laughs)Anupam Singh: My name is Anupam Singh. I'm VP Engineering here at Roblox with responsibility for infrastructure, the AI platform, discovery, ads engineering, and many other things. Been here at Roblox for three and a half years. Uh, two-time entrepreneur before that. Uh, to summarize my career, uh, it's been about reading some great paper, uh, uh, which is super geeky at at its time, like MapReduce or Transformer, and then spending 10 years trying to make it production-worthy and getting it to billions of dollars in revenue and billions of users.Bilawal Sidhu: Yeah, don't tell the researchers that. They think it's the zero-to-one innovation, but how do you get that thing out to market at scale?Anupam Singh: We have those on our team. Uh, you know, we, we have, uh, the person who wrote the ControlNet paper as an advisor, uh, on, on the Cube team, and I always joke with him that it, it'll take 10 years for us to even understand all the implications of ControlNet, for example. Um, but for, for the researchers, it's always very obvious. The future is very clear and obvious, and then it falls to engineers like us to make it actually happen.Bilawal Sidhu: So speaking of that, Roblox is such an interesting application and ecosystem. I've been calling Roblox the YouTube for 3D experiences because it has that, like, closed loop between creation and consumption. But unlike video, 3D has historically been super challenging and very high barrier to entry. But that's changing. Tell me about what Roblox is doing to shatter these barriers.Anupam Singh: I think it goes back to almost our founding principle. Uh, uh, we have this principle called Long View, and, uh, since its founding, uh, Dave, our, Dave Baszucki, our founder, has always tried to make it easier and easier. Let's say Bilawal wants to create a 3D game today. Of course, the core coding is hard. You, the core imagination loop is yours, but then you don't know how to get traffic, you know? Um, but if you publish it on the Roblox game, the discovery system will start seeding it with some people, some, some players, and see if they're getting engagement, and then the flywheel starts happening. So the proudest thing for us is when somebody creates a game and within 30 days, they found their audience. So distribution and infrastructure, uh, are the big things. Now, the third leg of the stool is, of course, AI, that's what we're going to talk about.Bilawal Sidhu: Yeah, I mean, I love that, right? It's, uh, it's, you know, creating a 3D experience is one thing, distributing it at scale and having a huge audience of folks that can experience it from a plurality of devices, I think is equally key. Um, you know, a lot of people talked about the metaverse and kind of equate it with AR VR headsets, but I've always been a fan of the definition of like, the metaverse needs to be AR VR optional. So why not include that low-end Android device as much as like a kitted-out PC that somebody may have or a headset in the future?Anupam Singh: And the technology to enable that, right? If you have a 2 Giga phone or you have a network connection that is not strong, and you still want to play one of our games, downsampling it, upsampling it, all of that is infrastructure that we want it to be invisible both to our players and creators.Bilawal Sidhu: Cool.Anupam Singh: Yeah, I've been on calls with some of our top creators, and they sometimes are curious on what happens after they hit publish. And I want to tell them, that's where our challenge starts because some of the creators are able to get two or three million people into their events. And imagine two or three million people are pressing play at the same time. And you have to distribute this new update to 40,000 servers worldwide across data centers, match you with your friends, and get you inside the game because your patience will last not more than three seconds after you press the play button. So much to your point earlier, Bilawal, it is much more complicated than video because video is one way, whereas if you and I are playing Roblox, I have to make sure that we are synchronized and we are having a great experience irrespective of whether I am on a PC and you are on an Android device.Bilawal Sidhu: Absolutely. But let's be honest, the metaverse would be a rather empty place without interesting content. So what is Roblox doing to make it easier to populate these virtual worlds with amazing 3D content?Anupam Singh: The first one is invisible infrastructure so that people don't have to worry about where, where do the bits go. Um, second one is matching you to your audience. So it starts with matchmaking, which is the ability after you press play to put you into the right instance. But a lot of our machine learning and AI work is related to, um, uh, discovery and recommendations, whether you are in the marketplace to buy the latest avatar or whether you are on a homepage trying to figure out what next game you want to play. But one of the core values for us, and that's why I'm so proud about working at Roblox, is safety. Most of the people when they think about ML and AI, they think about recommendations, they think about monetization. But our heavy investment is in safety.Bilawal Sidhu: Is that moderation?Anupam Singh: Yeah, it could be, let's take the basic stuff. You and I are chatting on the platform. Uh, every one of the words that you type in goes through a text filter.Bilawal Sidhu: Wow.Anupam Singh: And that's, you know, uh, the last public information we've published is maybe 4 billion calls a day, more than 30,000 requests per second. And we might be the one of the few platforms on the planet where if our moderation, if our text filter goes down, we actually take our chat down. We don't do unfiltered chat just because it's too expensive or it's too hard to build. So a lot of our investment has been in safety, and then we open source it. So we've open sourced our voice safety model, uh, where literally while you and I are talking, the best demo that that our founder does with our head of safety engineering is they get on a pretend one-on-one in the town hall and he uses, um, an inappropriate word, and it gives him a warning saying, "Hey, you've just used an inappropriate word and we are, we are giving your first nudge," if you will, right? But doing it in real time where we take voice, feed it to a mac