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?If you don’t like it, get a job at a bank’: Canva boss
The design software giant’s all-singing, all-dancing debut event in Los Angeles came with a host of new features – and rumblings of a cost to its tired staff.
In a luxury suite overlooking the 70,240-seat football stadium that is home to the Los Angeles Rams, some not-so-quiet lobbying is happening. A crew from the New York Stock Exchange, replete with a telegenic presenter, are interviewing the luminaries of Canva.
The kite-surfing, cowboy hat-wearing investor Bill Tai, who was crucial to its seed capital raising, is there. So is Blackbird Ventures co-founder Rick Baker, the adult supervision who backed the company repeatedly, making his fund’s reputation and fortune.
But the story of Canva’s founding has been told many times before. What’s new is that the NYSE wants to tell it, and to woo Canva from its rival, the Nasdaq, for a listing widely expected to happen in the next two years.
Canva loves confetti, one executive notes, after the presentation by co-founders Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins and Cameron Adams.
This spot, high above gambolling school children thrilled to be throwing a football on the same ground as their National Football League heroes, is no accident. It’s one of the few areas of quiet at Canva’s Create conference, held this week for the first time in the United States on the grounds surrounding the SoFi Stadium in Hollywood Park. It’s an event for a company that has arrived, and arrived at a time when markets are starved of public offerings.
At about 3500 attendees, the company’s keynote presentation at the 6000-seat YouTube Theatre isn’t packed out, but that doesn’t dent the company’s energy.
Chris Little, from Canva’s IT help desk in Austin, Texas, bounds on stage in a double denim-style outfit to hype up the crowd, with mixed success as a single stairway in or out holds up proceedings. He’s followed by the company’s “global head of experiential”, Jimmy Knowles, who has masterminded the event, in a pink velour suit and designer Timberland-esque shoes that resell for about $800 a pair. Then it’s on to the real show.
There are slick videos, presentations from Canva’s co-founders, Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, and a host of senior executives. Clients give glowing testimonials. Shreya Kushari, chief client officer at OMD Group, a global media agency, says the company’s new templates and bulk creation features make her team’s work “infinitely easier than it needs to be”.
Two singers stage a rap battle over the company’s enterprise tools while breakdancers perform.
Beneath the increasingly big tech razzmatazz and Canva’s impressive charitable giving (where a list of good deeds from 6.2 million trees planted, to 650,000 non-profits given free software, is leavened by Obrecht joking there are 100 more to go), that’s the crux of the whole event.
Big business play
Canva is unveiling a redesign for its core apps, and feature after feature to make its tools useful to big businesses. One to update company documents with new graphics en masse gets a big cheer, pointing to the audience’s priorities.
It’s a way of challenging Adobe (with a $US216 billion [$328 billion] market cap versus Canva’s $US25.6 billion valuation), which might be known for high-end creative tools but does huge business from more pedestrian marketing uses, and a host of smaller companies.
Canva has a beachhead in many companies through individual users with their own accounts, and it is hoping these people will convert their firms to a bundle of Canva tools rather than opting for dedicated bits of software from multiple firms.
“The world of work has officially been redesigned,” says Perkins, with an impish grandiosity. If Canva is to make a successful run for the NYSE, or any other exchange, this plan has to work.
Canva dancers staged a rap battle about the company’s enterprise products. Nick Bonyhady
Posts on Blind, an anonymous corporate social site, show the effort behind Create and the features unveiled there has taken a toll. A poll of 216 Canva staff about its consequences for their mental health, seen by AFR Weekend, shows 34 per cent say the event has had no impact on them, 13 per cent report a small impact, and 30 per cent say they are are busier than usual.
But 23 per cent ticked “a lot (dead, mentally quitting)“. Whether they saw that as a genuine mental health question or just a test of busyness is unclear, but Obrecht, the genial hype man on stage, is dismissive of workload concerns in an interview.
“I think people like to deliver incredible things,” he tells AFR Weekend. “And if you’ve worked at any tech company of significance over the years – Apple, Google, Spotify – what company has not had a sprint in the lead-up to a big product launch?”
While the demands ebb and flow, periods of intense work are “start-up life”, Obrecht says.
“That’s what people are subscribing to. And that’s why the rewards are disproportionate to, say, working at a bank, or a nine-to-five [job] working for government.
“So I unapologetically say people do work incredibly hard in the lead-up to an event like this. But that is part of what we do, that’s part of the fun of that. And if you’re not onto that ride, then there’s lots of banks you can work nine-to-five for.”
Given how far Canva has come, the banks would be happy to have them.
The reporter travelled to Los Angeles as a guest of Canva.
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