Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably | Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)

June 2, 2024

AI Summary

5 min read

Canva co-founder and CPO Cameron Adams discusses the company's operating principles amid its scale of $2.3 billion ARR, seven years of profitability, and accelerating 60% year-over-year growth. He covers culture centered on coaching over management, product-led decision-making, growth levers like SEO and freemium, and AI integration, drawing from experiences like a near-failed fundraising round that reinforced independence.

Culture and Team Structure

Canva replaces managers with coaches—around 800-1,000 internal experts in specialties like product or engineering—who guide skill growth, identify level-up opportunities, and support handoffs. This ties to "giving away your Legos," a core onboarding principle where employees relinquish owned tasks to scale impact, such as evolving from writing emails to building teams for multilingual campaigns. Leaders are mostly homegrown for cultural fit, emphasizing visual communication via prototypes over verbal debate; external hires often fail if they push preconceived processes without first listening.

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What you'll learn

1 *(00:02:30) **Canva's Scale and Founder Reflection***
2 *(00:05:17) **Fundraising Failure and Profitability Lesson***
3 *(00:12:02) **Homegrown Leaders and Visual Culture***
4 *(00:16:31) **Giving Away Legos and Coaching System***
5 *(00:24:29) **Product Management at Canva***
6 *(00:30:59) **MVP Philosophy, Onboarding, and Initial Launch***
7 *(00:44:26) **Growth Engines: SEO and Internationalization***

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Cameron Adams is the co-founder and chief product officer of Canva. Canva is one of the world’s most valuable private software companies, used by 95% of Fortune 500 companies. Since its launch in 2013, Canva has grown to over 150 million monthly users in more than 190 countries, generating $2.3 billion in annual revenue. Prior to Canva, Cameron ran a design consultancy, worked at Google on Google Wave, and founded the email startup Fluent. He is also an author of five web design books and a regular speaker at global conferences. In our conversation, we discuss:

• Why they spent a year building their minimum viable product (MVP) before launch

• Why Canva has no managers, and their unique approach to coaching and performance reviews

• Why they encourage employees to “give away their Legos”

• Insights into Canva’s SEO growth strategy

• Their three-pillar framework for integrating AI into their product

• Stories from the early days

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