How Canva leveraged unconventional growth levers to grow to $42B | Cameron Adams (Co-founder & CPO)
Description
Cameron Adams is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, the design platform valued at $42B as of July 2025, used by over 230 million people every month.
Before starting Canva, Cameron was a designer and engineer at Google and co-founded Fluent, an email startup. In this episode, Cameron walks through Canva’s earliest days — from the remarkably fast courtship with co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, to the counterintuitive product decisions that helped Canva instantly resonate with users who thought they would never design anything.
In this episode, we cover:
- How Canva turned social media managers into early evangelists
- Balancing a huge vision with scrappy execution
- Hard lessons from their near-silent launch day
- The two growth levers that changed everything
- And much more…
References:
- Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/home
- Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/
- Campaign Monitor: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/
- Canva: https://www.canva.com/
- Cliff Obrecht: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cliff-obrecht-79ba9920/
- Dave Greiner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegreiner/
- Lars Rasmussen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larserasmussen/
- Melanie Perkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieperkins/
- Mike Cannon-Brookes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcannonbrookes/
- New York Stock Exchange: https://www.nyse.com/
- Pinterest: https://pinterest.com/
- Scott Farquhar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottfarquhar/
Where to find Cameron:
Where to find Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
Where to find First Round Capital:
- Website: https://firstround.com/
- First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
- X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
- This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
Timestamps:
(01:24 ) The birth of Canva
(04:32 ) Meeting Canva’s co-founders
(11:22 ) Building the first iteration of Canva
(15:26 ) The discovery that changed prototyping
(20:48 ) Why onboarding was the unlock for retention
(27:36 ) The anticlimactic launch day
(32:43 ) How word-of-mouth spurred early retention
(36:33 ) Targeting different user personas
(41:02 ) Building a community on social media
(43:38 ) Two impactful growth levers
(47:14 ) Why Canva should have gone mobile sooner
(48:12 ) What underpins Canva’s dominance today
(53:37 ) Rebuilding for enterprise
(58:38 ) Lessons from Canva’s tough times
United States
