Transcript

[Harry] Cliff, I am so excited for this episode. I know you've listened to the show before, so this is going to be one of the most special shows. Thank you so much for joining me first.

[Cilff] No, thank you. Long time listener. First time caller. I feel privileged.

[Harry] Not at all, my friend. We have quite a schedule in place. I want to start with a little bit on you, though. We see this incredible brand today that is Canva that you and Mel have built. Take me back to the beginning, though. What was that founding aha moment for you with the very first day of Canva?

[Cilff] Oh, it probably goes back earlier than Canva. Mel was teaching design at university and realized that it sucked. It was really complex. It took about six months to learn the professional graphic design tools at the time. Whilst at the same time, people were using, I think it was Myspace at the time, Facebook. They were collaborating, they were sharing content, and she gets all the credit. She was like, in the future, creation is going to be totally different. It's going to be online, it's going to be collaborative, and it's going to be easy. We're based in Perth, Western Australia, which is, I think, the most isolated city in the world. And there's no such thing as venture capital there. We had no idea. We didn't know what a startup was. We were like, we should create a small business around this. And I was studying school teaching at the time. And so I was like, well, why don't we do school yearbooks? And so we took the idea. It was the idea from Canva. Mel had this 15 years ago, but we said, we can't create this big global thing. Why don't we solve a real problem people had? And I'm like, I've seen school yearbook coordinators really struggled to create a yearbook. We did that, and we created a company called Fusion Books, which became Australia's largest school yearbook company. For a while there, we were kings and queens of the Australian yearbook market, which is a small kingdom to be overseeing. And then it was about four or five years into that business, we realized, hey, people are using our yearbook software for all kinds of different things. They're creating newsletters, they're creating posters. The world needs this. Maybe we can scale this idea and take it to the masses and really solve visual communication. As the web and the world were becoming increasingly visual places, the world needed this tool to be able to allow people to express their creativity and turn it into a design.

[Harry] It's a big jump to make. Were you nervous making the jump from yearbooks, even though very successful, yearbooks to actually like a full kind of collaboration software suite eventually?

[Cilff] The thing with me is I just don't think too much and I don't think through how hard things are going to be. And that naivety probably plays well because I'm just like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Let's go for it. What do we need to do? Let's unpack this problem we need to solve. OK, we need some money. Where do we get money from? Silicon Valley's got heaps of money. Let's go to Silicon Valley. And then we went to Silicon Valley. We spent over a year there, back and forth, still trying to run our other business. And we got rejected over 100 times by VCs before we finally convinced some people to invest in us. And that was the journey.

[Harry] I literally just got a message before this show like 10 minutes ago from Doug Pepper saying, ask him about kitesurfing in Maui and Bill Tai and the rest of us putting in money in the very early days. Kitesurfing, Maui fundraising?

[Cilff] So that was our ticket into Silicon Valley, and it was really fortuitous. Bill Tai is a venture capitalist in the Bay Area. You should have him on the show. He's an awesome guy. But Mad King kitesurfer and Perth being the most isolated city in the world is amazing for kitesurfing. So I think he just made an excuse to have a junket in Perth where he could kitesurf and he called it a tech event. And we had our Fusion Books company at the time. So we sort of rocked up and went in this pitch competition for Fusion Books. We lost. He rejected us as the winners in that competition. But we got to know him over time. And then we got invited over to a conference in Maui. And that was at the time it was quite funny. So we were super, super green. I was listening to Tony Robbins at the time, and one of his philosophies is you are who you hang out with. We couldn't afford to go to Maui. But I'm like, fuck it. This is a huge opportunity. We're going all in with all our money from our Fusion Books bank account. We're going over there. And we stayed in and got to stay in this house with some really cool people. I think they must have had someone pull out. That's why we got invited. And that's how we made a bunch of connections. And we were talking before the show started about just grinding it out. We just ground it out. And there was one point in the journey where we'd been rejected by everyone in Silicon Valley. When you're pitching, everyone that's pitching, especially for early stage rounds, they have this spreadsheet. And it's all the leads they have and where they're at. This spreadsheet slowly started turning red. Just rejection, rejection, rejection. And Mel and I got to the bottom of that list. And we'd been rejected by everyone. And we're like, wow, we've spent six months and nearly all our money sleeping on people's couches, not succeeding. What do we do? So we sort of had a day of misery. We were kind of a bit upset and then pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and went back at it.

[Harry] I told you before this, the recording that I just got rejected by someone and you said something to me. What would you say to me again if I asked you? And what do you say to founders out there who see the reds on the sheet and they're pretty demoralized?

[Cilff] Well, firstly, persistence pays off. You need to have some semblance of a good idea, but persistence really pays off. And then what I was saying to you before the show was it's really a marathon, not a sprint. The amount of times we've been rejected from candidates and it's broken my heart because you know what it's like. You spend so much time investing, taking these people out and you know how good they're going to be and what impact they're going to have on the business and getting rejected by those people really hurts. But I've been in the game long enough now where if you leave a nice taste in those people's mouths and you always be the good human and be the honest, honorable person and speak truths, people come back and they remember you. And when they are ready for that career change or when an opportunity does arise, they often come back. And I really think about business as a really long game. And one of my biggest philosophies is just be honest. And if you say something, stick to your word. There's nothing I can't stand in business more than people that go against their word. If I say something and make a commitment to something, then my word is my bond. I don't need a term sheet. I don't need a legal document. And I think that integrity over time hopefully pays off as people start to recognize that you're a straight shooter.

[Harry] Cliff, you said the word marathon there. I've obviously known you before this show. There's one thing that we have in common. We are both peak performance athletes.

[Cilff] If anyone's watching this, they'll see. And I have not.

[Harry] The joys of podcasts is that no one actually gets to see us. Actually, now we have TikTok with us.

[Cilff] Actually pretty ripped then.

[Harry] But my question to you is, when we think about high performance, when I apply that to business and your 15 years running businesses, what does high performance in business mean to you?

[Cilff] Oh, that's a really deep question. It's changed a lot over time. So I used to, for the longest of times, have this philosophy of work hard, play hard, grind it out. Everyone else has just been weak. Why wouldn't you go out for 20 beers after work and then rock back into work at 7 a.m. and just grind it out again and just get through it? As you get older, you realize that's not quite sustainable. So you need to start looking after all the things that really matter, like actually getting sleep and having just had a kid. I've never appreciated sleep so much in my life. And then exercise and all the good things. They really do matter. Through your 20s, you can get away with pretty much anything, I feel. But as you get into your mid 30s, I'm turning 37 in a couple of weeks. You need to start looking after yourself a bit better. And then constantly learning when it actually comes to the career side. The best performers I know are just constantly learning and they feel they don't know everything and they're constantly on a journey striving to increase their knowledge.

[Harry] How would you describe your leadership style today? You mentioned it changing over time there. How would you describe it today?

[Cilff] I think it was very much used to be lead by example, work hard and accomplish things and hopefully people would follow. I think now it's just like honesty. And how it's changed is I used to just have high expectations of people and used to bewilder me when people weren't good. And I used to think a lot of things like, this is just common sense. Why don't you get this? As I've grown, you realize really frank and transparent feedback and coaching is really important. Sometimes people just don't know. And just being really transparent around, hey, you did this way. Have you thought about doing it this way? Really helps people. And also understanding personality types. I'm pretty just straight up with things and some people are more sensitive. So you need to adapt the way you communicate to the people receiving that communication.

[Harry] You said there about expectations and kind of other people's performance. I'm intrigued. Trust is an interesting thing. A lot of people start kind of binary. They either have lots or they have none. How do you think about your starting point for trust?

[Cilff] Mel and I are completely, so Mel is my wife and the CEO of Canva, so my boss and definitely the worthy boss. But we have totally opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to trust. So I trust by default and you can lose that trust. Mel, it takes a lot of time to build her trust. But once you build it, it's wow, it's there and it's there for a long time. So that's how I think about it. I fly by the seat of my pants a little bit, wear my heart on my sleeve and quick to love. That's my style.

[Harry] I think when I was speaking about quick to love and the trust that we imbue within people, when I spoke to many of your investors, they said that I had to talk about talent with you. You said to me before about distance traveled when it comes to talent. What did you mean, Cliff, when you said distance traveled? Can you unpack that for me?

[Cilff] Yeah, I actually think I heard this from someone on your show a long time ago and it really resonated with me. Distance traveled is if you grew up in a privileged family, went to an Ivy League school and you end up as an investment banker, that's great. I'm sure you worked really hard. I was a schoolteacher before. I couldn't use computers before we started our first. I hated computers, to be honest, before we started our first business. But I used to be a schoolteacher and I taught at one of the most underprivileged schools in Western Australia. A lot of the students there were refugees from Africa, Middle East and parts of Asia. These people, ex-child soldiers, they'd been through the most horrific things. They started life with a really big disadvantage. They had everything stacked against them. They had often spent years in a refugee camp. Then they traveled to a new country, they couldn't speak our language. To see these kids evolve, educate themselves, learn a new language. Sometimes just getting a job is like the distance traveled from being a child soldier to getting a job. One guy I met on the street years after, he said, I'm a roof tiler. And he was so proud of that and I was so proud of him because coming from being a child soldier to actually having a full time job, being a roof tiler, probably being paid really well, that's distance traveled. I really look out for that in the hiring process. And so if you have come from an obscure background, like non-traditional tech or whatever, and have taught yourself the tools, I find those people once they figure out the game, because this all is just one big game. Once they figure out how to play the game, they are some of the best people we have.

[Harry] What do you mean when you say it's a game?

[Cilff] Most things are just a game, really. We're fortunate, we live in Australia, we have a social safety net. If you have no job, you can go on the dough and get enough money to live and eat and have a roof over your head, which is a great system, by the way, that many other countries should follow that can. With business, we've just always treated it like a game and it's a serious game. Like, I'm very competitive. So when I play a game, I play to win, I absolutely play to win. But at the end of the day, the business doesn't define me. I would be just as happy if I was a fisherman. That would be my train job, going out fishing every day. I was in the construction industry before I started teaching. I think I'd be happy out on site, digging holes every day. Often I long to dig a hole and not have to think about things and manage people.

[Harry] Sometimes with some of the companies in 2022, I want to dig a hole and get the fuck in it. Or push them in it, either one. I want to ask, man, this is personal, but fuck it, we can do. I was not trained for this in any way. And respectfully, you didn't go to Stanford and the usual Silicon Valley graduation mechanism. You're a teacher. Were you insecure moving into this world? And did you have imposter syndrome? And do you have imposter syndrome about not being trained in the classic mold?

[Cilff] So short answer, yes, absolutely. And still have a very much to this day when we meet sort of fancy people. One thing you realise though, and so I used to have it tremendously, sometimes it's crushing. And that's why I would often go to some of these social events, have a couple of drinks, because you'd need that social lubrication to be able to function. Because these people, you're dealing with people that have created billion dollar businesses or venture capitalists, and they all seem so intelligent, you don't think you're that smart. And super, super intimidating. But what I've found is as you get to know these people over time, and this probably sounds conceited, they're not that much smarter than you. Sure, they've got experience in a thing and they sound really smart because they're talking about the thing they've spent 10 years doing. If you've spent 10 years doing something, you should sound smart talking about that thing. And so, it's hugely intimidating going into a new world, a new industry. I think you've got to start backing yourself. And this really hurt us in hiring actually throughout the early years of Canva because we used to have all these, I call them fancy people, with the fancy titles coming from fancy companies interviewing at Canva. I'm like, oh shit, I'm not worthy to be interviewing you, you are so good. You are like a senior VP this or that at one of the FANG companies. I'm not worthy, I'm lucky to be interviewing you. And I guess that came across and we made a bunch of really poor hiring decisions because we just assumed these people were smarter than us. And then like, they're in the company like a year and we're like, fucking hell. Like, you're not really smart at all. Like, these ideas you're coming up with that we've been listening to are stupid. And they're taking us on a massively wrong direction. We've come full circle there and realized that actually we're not bad at some of the stuff we do. Mel, I think she's the best product person in the world and her product vision is just impeccable. She's seeing around corners 10 years into the future that no one else is. We've really learned to trust each other and trust our judgments a lot more, which has been a huge kind of U-turn from where we were before.

[Harry] How do you think about hiring internally versus bringing someone in?

[Cilff] I love hiring internally. We love building talent. My EA is now our head of people. Zach, our CMO, joined Canva as content writer, a contract content writer he was in at the time. He's been with the company about 10 years now, he's now a CMO. Wouldn't change him for any of the best CMOs in the world, he's absolutely phenomenal. Same with Jenny, our head of people. World class, absolutely world class. And these people didn't come from fancy tech companies. But that being said, there are great companies that have built great people and we definitely complement homegrown talent with really amazing people we bring into the business. It's the yin and the yang, it's the art and the science, it's all about the vibe.

[Harry] I spoke to Zach before this episode and Zach told me about your strengths and weaknesses. And he said when it comes to strengths, one of your biggest strengths is your deal making ability. I wanted to touch on this because it's a specific strength. What do you think is good deal making and what makes you so good at it, do you think?

[Cilff] So firstly, I think people's strengths are whatever comes natural to them. We didn't grow up with no money, but we didn't grow up with a lot of cash and stuff. When we were kids, we had a great little family upbringing. Mum was a teacher as well. Dad was a boiler maker welder who got into work safety stuff. Worked for the government doing, inspecting building sites. And so, do you have Kmart over in the UK, like big W and Kmart?

[Harry] This is like supermarkets, right? No, they're kind of like Walmart, I guess. Yes, we do, but they're not called Kmart.

[Cilff] So think of it like a Walmart. We'd go into Walmart with my mum and she would haggle at the equivalent of Walmart. I'm like, mum, I was so embarrassed. But she's like kind of haggle for everything, was always trying to get a good deal, was always trying to find the best value in things. But was also like honest and open when she did it. So I learnt a lot from her just about, I guess it was the art of getting a good deal. She's Italian and so I think Italians are good at the haggle. And I think I just grew up in that environment. As with that sort of skill transferred into business, I had a few just really simple revelations. And this applies to acquiring a company, growing someone through your business and helping with their career or hiring someone. You essentially just need to align the company you're acquiring or the person's goals with your goals. And I just find being really transparent. Here are our goals. What are your goals? If we can get our goals to align, magic can happen and one plus one can equal ten. It's a really simple philosophy being super transparent like any acquisition we make. A lot of people don't believe it upfront. And I say talk to all the other companies we've acquired because you'll find that what I say is actually true. I'm just going to be super transparent with you from day dot. And if you speak to corp dev people, and we've spoken to a lot of them from lots of the big companies, there's a lot of bullshit there. That's not what you'll get from me. I'm going to be super transparent. This is why we love your company. This is why I think it's great for us to partner. And this is the value we see and these things aren't valuable to us. And this is how we value it from a dollar perspective or an equity perspective or whatever the deal terms are going to be. And let's just talk about that. And I do that very early. And I say I'd rather a fast no than a long no. But better is a fast yes.

[Harry] Man, I'm naive. What's the normal bullshit in acquisitions corp dev? What's the normal bullshit?

[Cilff] They'll reach out and say, Oh, I just want to chat, learn about your business or whatever. You're like, okay, you're the corp dev person. I don't know exactly where this goes. And they're, Oh, let's talk about a partnership. Okay, what kind of partnership? And they can't articulate an actual partnership. And after three or four meetings, they'll go, Well, would you consider an acquisition? You could have said that in the first 30 seconds of us chatting. And I could have told you, no, we're not looking to be bought. That's the bullshit.

[Harry] Can I ask, in terms of integration, integration is really hard. And you said about aligning goals there. People sometimes say goals that may not be true to get acquisitions done. How do you ensure that the goals they say are the truth? And you're a very trusting guy, but you also have to be savvy enough to know when someone wants to get a deal done and say what you want to hear.

[Cilff] I like to get to know the human behind the business. And that's probably the most important thing, because the business speaks for itself. You can look at similar web and you can look at their traffic, you can look at their metrics, you can outside in how a company is going. You can then understand how their culture is outside in as well. You look at their attrition through LinkedIn, who's jumping jobs, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of knowledge you can kind of assess just from sort of outside in analysis. And then it's really around what are the motivations of the founder? What do they like as people? I mean, it was hard through COVID because you couldn't go out and spend some time with them and really get the cut of their jib. But we find we have a real philosophical alignment with the founders we've acquired their companies of and we've acquired some amazing founders. Maybe we've just been really lucky, I think, but we've had a lot of luck in that regard.

[Harry] Have you ever made a bad acquisition? And if so, why was it a bad acquisition?

[Cilff] Not really.

[Harry] You said there about kind of the importance of the human. I think one thing that I heard a lot from your investor base was exactly that. When you think about investor relations, what have been some of your biggest lessons as you reflect on the investors that you have on your cap table now?

[Cilff] The most important thing for me is trust. You can garner any knowledge and skills you like through commercial means. I've actually, having listened to your podcast for a long time, heard a lot of really smart people and just reached out to them and say, hey, can you be an advisor to the company or can I pick your brain on this thing? You can get a lot of great advice around certain domains from just reaching out to people. And obviously, as you'll get more leverage with your company, that becomes easier and easier. Even in the earliest days, we used to pay people with generous equity grants and we still do to this day to get them on as an advisor. Canva, to give you an example, three years ago, we were like a big bodybuilder that had not done a single leg day in their life. So we had a huge upper body and that was our user acquisition, that was our product and that was our organic growth. But our two weak little legs were marketing and sales. Me and Zach were like, hey, let's figure this out together. Who are the best people? Who does marketing better than anyone else? Let's go speak to as many of them that will speak to us. We started by building our own knowledge and then we hired a few people and we made a few bad hires and we made a few great hires and we just figured it out and then now we're doing that with sales. And I would actually think we're pretty damn good at marketing now, traditional marketing and sales is definitely on the right trajectory. But these things take time and a lot of learning. You're asking about investors. Yeah, trust is the most important thing. And once again, it's a marathon, not a sprint. This is cliche, but you really see investors colors in the tough times. Good times, everything's easy, but it's in the tough times where people's true colors come out. And the age-old do some reference checks with companies that haven't done well for that firm, et cetera, et cetera, all actually make a lot of sense.

[Harry] Cliff, I look at Canva's journey and it doesn't look like there have been tough times. And I know there's always tough times in a business, but it kind of looks up and to the right. What was the toughest time that comes to mind?

[Cilff] Oh, I've had a few. I'll tell you, the toughest time I've had recently was putting up this Christmas tree that I bought. It got the better of me. I'm terrible for not reading instructions and I did it all wrong, just like IKEA furniture. And it took me about four hours to put up this Christmas tree. It was 11 p.m. and I nearly gave up, but I didn't. The next biggest challenge in our business journey was we had our first version of Fusion Books, the school yearbook company, built in Australia by contractors. And that was becoming very expensive. We couldn't afford it anymore. So we outsourced it through oDesk, which is now Upwork at the time, to a team in India. And so we had about 400 schools on the platform at the time. And the whole concept of, I guess, Canva for yearbooks is the teachers and students create their yearbook together using this WYSIWYG software. It's all amazing. And then they hit publish and that exports a PDF document that gets printed. The WYSIWYG part worked, but it couldn't export a PDF. We had to recreate over a hundred thousand pages with Photoshop and InDesign, where we had to hire a team of designers on Upwork to essentially eyeball these pages and redesign them in Photoshop and InDesign. And then we had to convert those into a PDF and publish them. So that was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done. The other hardest thing we ever done, we're about five years into Canva. And we realized when you're a startup, right, you have to make trade-offs. And often when building technology, that trade-off is a speed for tech debt. And we'd accrued a lot of tech debt, particularly in our front-end code. And it got to the point where it was untenable. We couldn't scale our team. Our user base was scaling massively. And we were like, I think we need to rewrite this whole thing. And we obviously analyzed pulling it up to bits and recreating it component by component. But that wasn't going to work. We had to down tools and ship no features for a full two years. It was supposed to be one year, but it took two years. In the middle of Canva's growth journey, call it from year four to six, about year 10 now. And that was a death march for a company that's so used to shipping product and shipping value to customers. That was a really dark time.

[Harry] How did that impact your growth trajectory?

[Cilff] For the first year, we had all the tailwinds. It was a great product, but we had people copying us. We have had so many copycats over the years. Mel doesn't ever look at competition. She's like, fuck the competition. We've got this 10-year vision. They're copying where we were. I'm like, yeah, that's nice. People are copying us and it looks pretty good. So I'm probably a bit on the other side, but I've learned more to be like Mel. And seeing these copycats just ruthlessly copy you. And then one of the copycats, they introduced video. And that was a core part of what we were going to launch. It was like, fuck, they've launched video. They're going to beat us and blah, blah, blah. But ultimately we just stayed the course. And while it was tough, we got through it. And now our product velocity, because of this new free platform, is faster than anyone else. And once again, we're off to the races.

[Harry] Cliff, how important is First to Market? And how do you advise founders on how to think about competition?

[Cilff] First to Market's important, but user acquisition is just as important. You can have a great product, but if you haven't cracked the user acquisition channels, you've got nothing because customers need to be able to find your product and use your product and love your product. And we grew Canva through a couple of different ways. Primarily our product was our biggest marketing channel. So we built Canva over the course of a year before we launched anything. At the time, the lean startup was really in vogue. So our investors were all going, what are you doing? Launch, iterate, do all the lean startup stuff, hack your way to success. And Mel was like, absolutely not. We are going to launch the most delightful product to our users and offer it for free, which is the freemium model. And our users are going to be our biggest marketing channel. And that's what we did, despite all that pressure from investors. And we picked a really good target audience when we were starting as well. We're like, who has the biggest need for visual content creation? Social media marketers. Because social media is our visual content beast and you need to keep feeding the beast. So we approached social media marketers. And one of the people I called outreach to was Guy Kawasaki. And he responded. We were nothing at the time.

[Harry] He was my first ever guest on the show. First ever guest.

[Cilff] Oh, I remember hearing that, yeah. Eight years ago, yeah. He's an absolute legend and good on him for giving a chance to underdogs that have no leverage. Most people, you need enough leverage for them to pay any attention. But Guy Kawasaki responded to my tweet and he responded to whatever you sent him. And so, yeah, kudos to Guy. Let's have a homage to Guy moment.

[Harry] I can ask, when you think back, I heard you there say you focus on social media marketers. As a VC, straight away, I just think a load of VCs would say, ha, small town.

[Cilff] Yeah.

[Harry] When you look back, were there commonalities in why VCs said no?

[Cilff] Oh, there were so many reasons why VCs said no. Two non-technical founders from Perth. We got every reason under the sun. But we have a philosophy around that. It's start niche and go wide. You don't want to boil the ocean. You want to solve a problem for someone that has that problem. Solve that problem really well. And then once you've solved it for them, what are the adjacent industries, people, professions that have that same problem? And let's go pick those off. And that's what we've done with Canva. And the other sort of user acquisition channel we cracked in the early days was SEO as well. We're a content company and we figured out a way how to propagate that content onto the internet so people searching it can find it and then drive people to the product like that.

[Harry] When I think over those reasons, the two technical founders, honestly, Cliff is one where I might slip up on. I do like to see a technical founder. I like to see someone like deeply rooted in engineering and products. And I know Mal's obviously a product visionary, but it's not technical in that way. Why am I wrong and why does it work?

[Cilff] You're right. It's a huge risk, actually. It is an absolute huge risk because if you don't have the right technical foundation of your business, then it's like a house of cards. We were incredibly lucky to bring on a third co-founder, Cam, and he was at Google. He wasn't quite technical, but we palmed him off as the technical co-founder because he could write JavaScript and he did write JavaScript. He built a lot of the first front ends in Canva. We had a couple of early commitments, but getting him on board really tipped the needle in regards to investors and also allowed us to get on our CTO, who is also another amazing human, Dave Handon, who's still with the company and absolutely phenomenal and really built the technical foundations that are still there today and we can build off.

[Harry] You mentioned prioritization earlier when you said about kind of the technical debt versus performance and new features. When you think about what you have ahead of you today, there are many different angles that you could go down, but also quite a challenge. How do you think about product prioritization today when you look at the different avenues that you have in front of you?

[Cilff] Two ways, the greatest good for the greatest number. I always think to the product, I don't want to give away all our secret sauce here, but as a funnel, this is like super obvious. People sometimes love to pitch ideas and features. My first question is how many people are going to see this feature? You can't build a feature nestled so deep in your UX that it's only going to be seen by some 10% of your user base. I think there are a lot of things as funnels and around product development, what is going to have the greatest good for the greatest number? And then the other product philosophy is a lot of the time, and this is like Mel's strengths and I've learned this from her, people don't know what they don't know. It's the whole Henry Ford, if you ask them people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. You need to be looking at the future and understanding trends. We're thinking 20 years into the future, not just two years into the future. And if you think how industries coalesce over time and what that's going to mean to your business, it allows you to be really strategic and make long-term bets as well as short-term. How that applies now is really relevant in AI. So Canva was created because before Canva, the design ecosystem was incredibly fragmented. You had to go to a stock photo site to get your stock photos. You had to go to VistaPrint to print your stuff. You had to use three different softwares to create your design and you had to communicate over a whole different communication layer like email, et cetera, et cetera. So we brought all of this industry together in one simple page to create Canva. And it was the aggregation of that disjointed industry that really enabled us to help the everyday person to achieve their goals and their visual communication goals. The same is occurring in AI at the moment. There's all these cool tools, but it's really how those tools show up in a workflow where people get their job to be done that really adds the most value. And that's why we're investing so heavily into AI as really the co-pilot to help people achieve their goals because people don't open their computer at the start of the day or wake up in the morning thinking, I want to use AI. They wake up in the morning thinking I have these certain jobs to be done and we see it as our job as a company to help them achieve those jobs to be done.

[Harry] Can I ask you, when I hear about the different products and tools, the thing that I think of is bundling versus unbundling and respectfully, and you're going to probably kill me for this, when you unbundle, you get increased product quality in a lot of cases, the hyper specialized, yeah, where it's very detailed functionality and you often can't have that in more bundled products. How do you think about that trade-off and are you trying to take people away from the vertically specialized tools or is it not that it's for the general populace who needs good enough?

[Cilff]We hate good enough. Good enough is not good enough. We aspire and are world-class across our key product areas and we've built the entirety of Canva on the one unified platform and that comes with a bunch of benefits. When you use a video creation tool, a whiteboarding tool, a presentation tool, a social media graphic tool, whatever, you don't want to learn a whole new interface. You don't want to upload all your stuff to a whole new content library. You want the interoperability of designs. We've built all of Canva off this one ecosystem and one graphics engine so every doc type is built off the same interface and it's very interoperable and easily understood. That also allows you to actually convert a presentation with one click into a video. It allows you to convert a doc into a presentation. It allows us to do all these crazy things that you can't do with these point and shoot tools particularly going into this economic downturn. People are looking to aggregate their visual communication tools just from a pure simplicity and jobs to be done perspective but also a cost cutting perspective. You shouldn't have to pay $20 for this tool and $20 for this tool and $30 for this tool when you can get Canva for essentially $14 a month and we only charge you based on active users. How do you add the most value to customers? Our pricing even is aligned to customer value so we don't try and sell an organization a thousand seats. We only charge you based on the number of active seats in a particular quarter. Value is aligned with value and we really believe over the long term that really builds trust and allows good things.

[Harry] Cliff, I want to take a little bit of a different turn actually away from the business. With the incredible success of the business, one's financial profile changes. When you think about your relationship to Money today, you've had many people answer this question on the show before but it's one that I grapple with. How would you describe your relationship to money and how has it changed over time?

[Cilff] I've always felt rich. My favorite wine is what we call in Australia a goon bag. It's like boxed wine. It costs $10 a box and I know it's my favorite wine because the last blind wine testing thing we did, it had everything from that $500 bottle to this boxed wine. The blind wine tasting test was my favorite and so I've always felt like I've had abundance. We've always had enough money to travel, Mel and I used to be carnies, we used to do airbrush tattoos at carnivals, we used to work our ass off and make enough money to go to India or Thailand for three months at a time or Africa, especially when you travel those countries. You realize how lucky you are and like we've always felt lucky and rich. As the company's grown, we're all in on Canva so it's not like we've cashed out tons and tons of money and all that kind of stuff. We're very long on Canva.

[Harry] What do you think of founders who are actively angel investing? You see a lot today with funds. I have very strong views on those with funds who take external money. What do you think about founders who are actively angel investing with or without funds?

[Cilff]I actively don't angel invest. I do do some just because it's like a great person. I don't do anything to make money. I back ideas that I think the world needs to see. In regards to the money stuff, it started to become really uncomfortable for us when Canva started really growing in valuation. The papers started writing about us as billionaires and we were like that feels horrible. We don't really want to be billionaires. We have more than enough with what we have. So Mel and I, we own 31% of Canva and we put 30% so like 99% of what we own into a charity that we can't spend on our own stuff because it's selfish in a way because we get the most joy I guess or our most fulfillment from helping others rather than sort of buying a PJ or that fancy car or thing like that. Yeah that's kind of why.

[Harry] How do you manage the 99%? Do you have someone who manages that philanthropic activity?

[Cilff]Yeah we very much aligned it with the Canva Foundation and so the team now that runs the Canva Foundation, we just pull that capital. We draw down some capital every year where we pick projects we believe in. A really great one we've been focusing on for the last couple of years is in conjunction with GiveDirectly that essentially gives cash to the world's poorest people and aims to lift them out of poverty and our first sort of big pile up was in Malawi and it's a journey though. It's like building a business. Ten years ago we knew jack shit about building a business. Now we know jack shit about philanthropy. We know we've been incredibly fortunate to have this pool of capital that isn't ours. We're custodians of that capital and now it's on us to figure out how to deploy it through projects and investments to have the biggest positive impact we can on the world. And that sounds really wanky.

[Harry] But I'm a VC. I just don't get it. It's very strange to me and what I mean by strange to me, not the giving to charity obviously I think that's fantastic. You're not custodians and it's not not yours. It's not like inheriting money.

[Cilff] How much money do you need? We had a kid recently and the last thing I want her to do is grow up rich. There's so much joy like yourself mate Harry. You built this business by grinding it out from the early days. I remember you saying one time your first podcast. It must have been with Guy Kawasaki. You got your mum to take the phone off the hook.

[Harry] Yeah exactly.

[Cilff] I am a fan see. But how is the joy in actually like building something for yourself that you've earned? Imagine getting everything handed to you on a silver platter. I would not take that right away from my daughter to not earn her own self-worth.

[Harry] I have a genuine question for you that I think about a lot. Would I work as hard as I do if I had 200 million from my family in the background? And I would like to think I would.

[Cilff] Probably be a drug addict. Nope. Mess you up. I'd be messed up. I would have gone off the rails. I imagine growing up knowing you're super rich and you can do anything. You see some of these kids that grow up rich and entitled. That's not what I want for future generations.

[Harry] How much money is enough?

[Cilff] I think you need enough to have a nice house, travel, do all the things. But to be honest we...

[Harry] I would say 100 million.

[Cilff]That's a lot. I don't think you need that much. I really don't think you need that much. You can do some cool stuff with 100 million. Your private jet Harry. That'll be fun. I've never flown on a private jet before but I'm very keen to be invited on someone else's. I'm such a tight ass. I told you my mum used to haggle at the Australian version of Walmart. I still fly economy unless I can get a points upgrade. You want 10 grand for a five-hour trip? I'll tough out that 10 grand and I'll spend that 10 grand on something else. I never do spend it on something else but I just don't value, I guess, comfort that much. I've never thought about this but yeah I'm a tight ass. I'm not a tight ass with others. I'm just a tight ass with some decisions.

[Harry] One thing that I did learn though actually and the friend taught me very wisely is that some things are better to pay for now you can afford it because it makes you better. An example of that is I spend on a personal trainer because it makes me fitter and healthier and I could never afford to before now I can and it makes me better as a business person. Are there any things where you invest there that do actually make you better?

[Cilff] We invest in experiences. I've recently got a personal trainer as well because we work a lot and you often put off exercise so having someone you're accountable to actually helps with that but no we really invest in experiences. Some of the the coolest things we've done in recent years is we rode motorbikes across Bhutan, went, what do you call it, ziplining in Laos, rode motorbikes again, dirt bikes on the China Vietnam border. We used to have experiential holidays so that means a lot to us and that's where we get the most of our joy.

[Harry] Tell me my friend you've mentioned Mel many times. I'm just fascinated you have the most incredible relationship and it's also a very rare one because most people I interview aren't also co-founders with that other half. What's the secret to a successful marriage do you think?

[Cilff]I don't know if there is a secret to a successful marriage please tell me. Like anything it's always a work in progress. Mel and I've only been married two years but we were dating 16 years before that so we've been together for 18 years so we've really grown up together and she's really my best friend more than anything else and I think that's important but shit we can get in heated debates it's not all roses and teacups there's lots of challenging moments.

[Harry] Do you have like Chinese walls of separation and when you go to family Sunday lunch and it's fuck we lost that fucking big enterprise deal Cliff damn are you like nah ah ah not on Sunday do you have the Chinese walls of separation?

[Cilff] We endeavor to we have this thing where we're like no work talk and then we're not talking about work can't be talking about work tonight and so we often try and do that on weekends and stuff inevitably it creeps in but we used to do it a lot talk about work a lot but now we try not to and we do and often it's fun but sometimes you just need to not talk about work if you're on a date night or if you're doing something fun you need that division and like we've said a few times it's a marathon not a sprint and as you've been doing it for a long enough period of time you actually need those recharge moments where it's not about work.

[Harry] I'm gonna get you in trouble here what's the biggest pro and the biggest con of co-founding a company with your other half?

[Cilff] Oh I think if either of us were dating anyone else we would both be dumped because we're both kind of neglectful partners at times so many times in the style someone's making dinner for the other person and it's like I can't come up for dinner I'm flat out on this thing I need to get it shipped but we understand each other's you go girl you're doing this for the team and so if we're with anyone else it'd be terrible so that's I guess a pro where we can really work really hard and not get in trouble for it I know other people that have demanding businesses whose partners aren't in the business struggle with that because it's just a dichotomy of who's more busy the biggest con yeah we both work a lot I don't know it's all fun it's all in the mix.

[Harry] Final one before we do a quick five but I do want to touch on it you mentioned the newborn what does great fatherhood mean to you and how do you think about being the best father you can be?

[Cilff] I always really valued my independence like to cut my own course I think you need to give that space to kids to find their own path and cut their own course what you can instil on them is a set of values be honest be a good human be kind work hard and if you leave them with those values or those guiding principles or guardrails you would hope they can then make good decisions for themselves.

[Harry] What's the hardest thing about being a father?

[Cilff] Oh no sleep this is super young so it's just getting better now the first five months were very trying in regards to not getting much sleep and I guess I underestimated.

[Harry] How can you split that between Mel is it alternating nights who gets up in the middle of the night?

[Cilff] No Mel breastfeeding she has to get up and breastfeed I don't have boobies we tag team it right we both work incredibly hard so we tag team it she had a lot more of the load in the early days by nature's default but it's starting to even off a bit more.

[Harry] That's a great example I would invest in a night nanny for your sleep and for your sanity invest in a night nanny.

[Cilff] We kind of tried that but didn't really work we ended up getting a lady in for a few hours for about a week and she really just whipped us into gear turns out it's all about routine and Mel and I are not very good at following structure and strict routines and apparently kids need that and it actually works so anyone out there that's got a kid that doesn't sleep yeah do the whole routine thing.

[Harry] I want to move into a quick fire, I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts does that sound okay?

[Cilff] Perfect.

[Harry] What's your favorite book and why?

[Cilff] I've read a lot of business books over the years but now when I'm going to bed at night I want some trash and I read Jack Reacher.

[Harry] Oh wow that had in my head that you were going to say sapiens or something I was like oh no.

[Cilff] I do like that but the business book I'm really enjoying now is Working Backwards it's about Amazon but for me business books are like flavor of the month.

[Harry] I like Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and I like it because I don't read more than the page and it's a page per day literally you go brush your teeth read a page while you're doing your business and uh the reason I'm not

[Cilff] I don't want to borrow that book after you.

[Harry] I'll try if you want I'll send I'll give you a signed copy of my...

[Cilff] Not your toilet copy please.

[Harry] Tell me my friend what do you most want to achieve from your philanthropic endeavors?

[Cilff] We've just got a lot to figure out I think the world has enough good intentions and capital to solve the world's problem I think what we need to solve and not just us but the gap we need to bridge is connecting those good intentions and that capital with the problems and I feel it's a very inefficient system so figuring out a way to connect the world's goodwill to the problems and solve those problems.

[Harry] Would you ever do another startup?

[Cilff] I don't think so it's hard. Although we're gluttons for punishment like we we'll probably do we'll run projects philanthropic projects that are built like a startup based on technology.

[Harry] What have you recently changed your mind on my friend?

[Cilff] How hard having a kid is I used to tell Mel when she was pregnant which she used to hate having a baby's got to be easy people have been doing it since the dawn of time there wouldn't be so many humans on this planet if it wasn't easy and that didn't go down well and and now or not why it didn't go down well.

[Harry] Oh man that's a risky place to go. What three traits would you most like your child to adopt?

[Cilff]Perseverance, kindness, being curious and a sense of adventure like a real sense of adventure I want my daughter to have a real sense of adventure.

[Harry] If you could add anyone to your board who would you add dream at doesn't have to be real.

[Cilff] Oh I think probably Bob Iger I love Bob Iger.

[Harry] What have you learned from Bob?

[Cilff] Bob has a very values first approach to business it really resonates what's best for the customer what's best for the employees what are we actually trying to do here so he often relates things to Disney and they're in the business of telling beautiful stories that engage people and I think this is one thing that people get really distracted by they focus on the art of running a company rather than the art of creating value and that's why people and a lot of founders lose sight of why their business exists often in tech it's like you create a product that solves a problem and people as especially as their business grow they get caught up with internal politics hiring the next big hire blah blah blah what do your customers see all your customer sees at the end of the day is your digital product and if that product is not delightful and amazing your business is going to go to shit that's a common misconception that people have and focus too much on their company and not enough on their actual product and the value that they're creating for their customers.

[Harry] What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started Canva?

[Cilff] I'm glad I don't know how hard it all is because that would be a challenge and all the hurdles we would have had to jump over if you knew then it would be sort of harder to start well I guess a lot of the people management stuff I've really evolved how to get the best out of people that whole thing I was talking about before aligning goals and just being transparent they're probably some of the things I wish I sort of could have brought into my toolkit earlier.

[Harry] Penultimate one my friend what would you most like to change about the world of startups?

[Cilff] The thing I would like to change is changing and it was this concept of everything used to have to be in the bay area you had to be a Stanford grad all that bullshit the amount of investors that rejected us because they said I like to ride my bike to the most startups I'm like fuck off that is changing though I think Covid really accelerated that change and now investors are having a more global approach and seeing that unorthodox people in unorthodox places can and often do solve big problems because they have unique perspectives different to those perspectives that are grown in the bay area.

[Harry] I love that I've heard it so many times I'm like wow you must be a very good cyclist I live in Mumbai. Final one for you my friend what do the next five years look like for you and for Canva if we sit down in 2027 where will we be then?

[Cilff] We're just going to keep on going on man we love this journey and we love where we're going we really believe as the web and the world become increasingly visual places Canva is in prime position to really help through that transition and help people achieve their visual communication goals and that goes in a variety of different paths but we're just excited to follow those paths down to their end.

[Harry] Cliff I've loved doing this thank you so much for joining me thank you so much for opening the kimono on so many different topics that were not on schedule you've been a star and I loved it my friend.

[Cilff] Legend take it Harry it's always a pleasure.

[Harry] Cliff is just such a wonderful awesome leader such humility such authenticity if you want to see more from us you can find us on YouTube by searching for 20VC I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.