Episode
How Canva leveraged unconventional growth levers to grow to $42B | Cameron Adams (Co-founder & CPO)
- Podcast
- In Depth
- Published
- Aug 20, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 3866
- Processing state
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- https://traffic.megaphone.fm/FRCH3592080876.mp3
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Summary
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: 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/ 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.…