Cameron Adams is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, the design platform valued at $42B as of July 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:
Where to find Cameron:
Where to find Brett:
Where to find First Round Capital:
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
