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:

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