Canva’s founders living the dream
AUSTRALIAN start-up darling Canva is continuing to grow and hire despite its valuation being slashed by investors by as much as 40 per cent.
Co-founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams are adding headcount and looking at acquisitions amid what has become a bloodbath for the local technology industry.
Launching a new suite of workplace products this week at a flashy event at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion, Canva’s co-founders – who recently dropped out of the global billionaire rankings – say they want to make the most of the current market volatility, including hiring staff from other start-ups or buying up their companies.
“We’re a profitable company, we have $US700m ($1.04bn) in the bank,” Mr
Obrecht said. “There’s not a day that goes by without multiple companies for sale landing in my inbox, so while there’s a lot of pressure on other folks, it provides some level of opportunity for us. Our team is growing, we’re continuing to hire, we haven’t had any type of hiring pause.
“We’re really leaning in to this. One of the biggest regrets (Salesforce chief executive) Marc Benioff had was not leaning really early into the 2009 downturn, and there are a bunch of different examples like that where companies who have chosen to lean into the downturns have come out the other side much stronger, and we’re in a fortunate position to be able to do that. Our underlying business foundations are hugely profitable.”
CEO Ms Perkins said that while other start-ups had laid off staff, Canva had received more than 200,000 applications
to join the company in the past 12 months. It now has more than 3000 staff – up 50 per cent in the past year – and more than 85 million people now use its online design platform globally, across both its free and paid tiers.
Once worth more than Telstra and Qantas, Canva has had its valuation slashed by some investors, with USbased T Rowe Price cutting its valuation by 44 per cent since the end of 2021, downgrading its worth to $32.1bn, while Australian venture capital funds Blackbird, AirTree and Square Peg Capital each recently slashed valuation by 36 per cent. Mr Obrecht and Ms Perkins fell out of Bloomberg’s Top 500 billionaire list as a result.
One investor who has not trimmed Canva’s valuation is former top Google executive Wesley Chan, one of the company’s earliest backers and a long-time board member.
“I don’t care. The thing I care about is what Canva is worth in 10 years,” Mr Chan said in an interview. “This is a recession-proof business.
“Valuations are not things you can control. What you can control is whether you have a durable business, whether you’re profitable, and whether you have a long trajectory of cash.
“This reset will be good for them; the market used to prioritise growth at all costs. Canva is not raising more money so I don’t care what they’re worth right now.”
AirTree Ventures wrote down its investment in Canva by 36 per cent in August, but AirTree partner Craig Blair described the company as a “once-in-a-lifetime business”.
“They have the world’s best metrics across growth, customer engagement, the loyalty of their community and the fundamentals of their business,” he said. “They are profitable, and they are absolutely in control of their own destiny and can double down and strengthen what they’re doing.”
The company on Wednesday used its Canva Create conference in Sydney to unveil a suite of workplace products, including a Google Docs competitor – Canva Docs – along with new features for websites, team collaboration and data visualisation.
Chief product officer Mr Adams said the products were in response to demand from large teams who wanted to use Canva products.
Ms Perkins said despite its new focus on enterprise tools and having been around more than a decade, Canva was “definitely still a start-up. The definition of a start-up I think is when your dreams are bigger than the size of your company. And our dreams are way bigger than the size of our company.”