How Canva leveraged unconventional growth levers to grow to $42B | Cameron Adams (Co-founder & CPO)

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:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/

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