Cameron Adams is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, the design platform valued at $42B as of August 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/](http://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