YouSaid · the spoken record

Cliff Obrecht

lines on the record: 66
first: 2023-01-27
most recent: 2023-01-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Appreciate your support and my worb. What a show we have for you on Monday with two incredible guests Hunter and Satya at Homebrew.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Koda, you'll never need to ask Where are the latest project updates Anyone know where the performance stats are? This is what really slows.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's tougher to focus on getting things done. Let alone getting them done together And that's why I realized that I had to have coda and why”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about the way your team works today. If all the work is spread across different documents, spreadsheets, and a stack of workflow tools like they are in all of my teams,”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But before we leave you today, the single most important element of any team is their ability to work together in the best and most efficient way. Encoder is the doc where teams can work on entire projects from start to finish with everything they need all in one place.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just going to keep on keeping on, man. We love this journey and we love where we're going. We really believe as the web and the world become increasingly visual places. Canva is in prime position to really help through that transition and help people achieve their visual communication goals. And that goes in a variety of different paths, but we're just excited to follow those paths down to their end.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing I would like to change is changing, and it was this concept of everything used to have to be in the Bay Area. You had to be a Stanford grad, all that bullshit. The amount of investors that rejected us because they said, I like to ride my bike to the startups. I'm like, fuck off. That is changing, though. I think COVID really accelerated that change. And now investors are having a more global approach and seeing that unorthodox people in unorthodox places can and often do solve big problems because they have unique perspectives different to those perspectives that are grown in the Bay Area.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Glad I don't know how hard it all is because that would be a challenge, and all the hurdles would have had to jump over. If you knew, then it would be sort of harder to start. Well, I guess a lot of the people management stuff have really evolved how to get the best out of people. That whole thing I was talking about before, aligning goals and just being transparent, they're probably some of the things I wish I sort of could have brought into my toolkit earlier.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bubaz are very values first approach to business, it really resonates. What's best for the customer? What's best for the employees? What are we actually trying to do here? So he often relates things to Disney. And they're in the business of telling beautiful stories that engage people. And I think this is one thing that people get really distracted by. They focus on the art of running a company rather than the art of creating value. And that's why people and a lot of founders lose sight of why their business exists. Often in tech it's like you create a product that solves a problem and people, especially as their business grow, they get caught up with internal politics hiring the next big hire, blah, blah, blah. But what are your customers see? All your customers”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perseverance, kindness, being curious, understand your adventure, like a real sense of adventure. I want my daughters to have a real sense of adventure.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How hard having a kid is I used to tell Mel when she was pregnant when she used to hate. Having a baby's got to be easy. People have been doing it since the dawn of time. There wouldn't be so many humans on this planet if it wasn't easy. And that didn't go down well. And now why it didn't go down well.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. It's hard Although my glands were punishment, like we'll probably run projects, philanthropic projects that build like a starter based on technology”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've just got a lot to figure out. I think the world has enough good intentions and capital to solve the world's problem. I think what we need to solve and not just us, but the gap we need to bridge is connecting those good intentions and that capital with the problems. And I feel it's a very inefficient system. So figuring out a way to connect the world's goodwill to the problems and solve those problems.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do like that book. I know the business book I'm really enjoying now is Working Backwards. It's about Amazon. But for me, business books are like Flavor of the Month.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've read a lot of business books over the years, but now when I'm going to bed at night, I want some trash and I read Jack Reacher. Oh, wow.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of tried that, but didn't really work. We ended up getting a lady in for a few hours for about a week, and she really just whipped us into gear. Turns out it's all about routine. And Mel and I are not very good at following structure and strict routines. And apparently kids need that. And it actually works. So anyone out there that's got a kid that doesn't sleep, yeah, do the whole routine thing.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm all breastfeeding. She has to get off and breastfeed. I don't have boobies. We tag team it, right? We both work incredibly hard. So we tag team it. She had a lot more of the load in the early days via nature's default, but it's stunning to even off a bit more.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, no sleep. She's super young. So it's just getting better now. The first five months were very trying in regards to not getting much sleep. And I guess I underestimated.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always really valued my independence, liked to cut my own course. I think you need to give that space to kids to find their own path and cut their own course, what you can instill on them is a set of values. Be honest, be a good human, be kind, work hard. And if you leave them with those values or those guiding principles or guardrails, you would hope they can then make good decisions for themselves.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think if either of us were dating anyone else, we would both be dumped because we're both kind of neglectful partners at times. So many times in the style someone's making dinner for the other person and it's like, I can't come up for dinner. I'm flat out on this thing. I need to get it shipped. But we understand each other's. You go, girl. You're doing this for the team. And so if we're with anyone else, it'd be terrible. So that's, I guess, a pro where we can really work really hard and not getting in trouble for it. I know other people that have demanding businesses whose partners aren't in the business struggle with that because it's just a dichotomy of who's more busy. The biggest con yeah, we both work a lot. I don't know. It's all fun. It's all in the mix.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We endeavor to. We have this thing where like no work talk. And then we're not talking about work. Can't be not talking about work tonight. And so we often try and do that on weekends and stuff. Inevitably creeps in. But we used to do it a lot, talk about work a lot. But now we try not to. And we do. And often it's fun, but sometimes you just need to not talk about work. If you're on a date night or if you're doing something fun, you need that division. And like we've said a few times, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And as you've been doing it for a long enough period of time, you actually need those recharge moments where it's not about work.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if there is a secret to a successful marriage, please tell me. Like anything, it's always a work in progress. Mel and I have only been married two years, but we were dating sixteen years before that. So we've been together for 18 years. So we've really grown up together. And she's really my best friend more than anything else. And I think that's important. But shit, we can get in heated debates. It's not all roses and teacups. There's lots of challenging moments.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We invest in experiences. I've recently got a personal trainer as well because we work a lot and you often put off exercise. So having someone you're accountable to actually helps with that. But no, we really invest in experiences. Some of the coolest things we've done in recent years is we rode motorbikes across Bhutan. What do you call it? Ziplining in Laos, rode motorbikes again, dirt bikes on the China Vietnam border. We used to have experiential holidays and that means a lot to us and that's where we get the most of our joy”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think you need that much. I really don't think you need that much. You can do some cool stuff with 100 million number. On your private jet, Harry, that'll be fun. I've never flown on a private jet before, but I'm very keen to be in.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mess you up. I'd be messed up. I would have gone off the rails. I imagine growing up knowing you were super rich and you can do anything. You see some of these kids that grow up rich and entitled, that's not what I want for future generations.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a fan, see? But how is the joy in actually building something for yourself that you've earned? Imagine getting everything handed to you on a silver platter. I would not take that right away from my daughter to not earn her own self-worth.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much money do you need? We had a kid recently, and the last thing I want her to do is grow up rich. There's so much joy. Like you're self made, Harry, you build this business by grinding it out from the early days. I remember you saying one time your first podcast, it must have been a guy Kawasaki, you got your mum to take the phone off the hook and...”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we very much aligned it with the Canberra Foundation. And so the team now that runs the Canberra Foundation, we just pull that capital, we draw down some capital every year where we pick projects we believe in, a really great one. We've been focusing on for the last couple of years is in conjunction with Give Directly that essentially gives cash to the world's poorest people and aims to lift them out of poverty and our first sort of big pilot was in Malawi. And it's a journey though. It's like building a business. Ten years ago, we knew jack shit about building a business. Now we know jack about philanthropy. We know we've been incredibly fortunate to have this pool of capital that isn't ours where custodians of that capital and now it's on us to figure out how to deploy it through projects and investments to have the biggest positive impact we can on the world. And that sounds really wanky, but”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actively don't Angel Invest. I do do some just because it's like a great person. I don't do anything to make money. I back ideas that I think the world needs to see. In regards to the money stuff, it started to become really uncomfortable for us when Canva started really growing in valuation. The papers started writing about us as billionaires. And we were like, that feels horrible. We don't really want to be billionaires. We have more than enough with what we have. So Mel and I, we own 31% of Canva and we put 30%. So like 99% of what we own into a charity that we can't spend on our own stuff because it's selfish in a way because we get the most joy I guess or our most fulfillment from helping others rather than sort of buying a PJ or that fancy car or anything like that. Yeah, that's not a”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always felt rich. My favorite wine is what we call an Australia a goon bag is like boxed wine. It costs $10 a box. And I know it's my favorite wine because the last blind wine testing thing we did, it had everything from a $500 bottle to this boxed wine. The blind wine tasting test was my favorite. And so I've always felt like I've had abundance. We've always had enough money to travel. Mel and I used to be carnies. We used to do airbrushed tattoos at carnivals. We used to work our ass off and make enough money to go to India or Thailand for three months at a time or Africa, especially when you travel those countries. You realize how lucky you are and like we've always felt lucky and rich as the company's grown, we're all in on Canva, so it's not like we've cashed out tons and tons of money and all that kind of stuff. We're very long on Canva.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just from a pure simplicity and jobs to be done perspective, but also a cost cutting perspective. You shouldn't have to pay $20 for this tool and $20 for this tool and $30 for this tool when you can get Canva for essentially $14 a month. And we only charge you based on active users. How do you add the most value to customers? Our pricing even is a large customer value. So we don't try and sell an organization a thousand seats. We only charge you based on the number of active seats in a particular quarter. Value is aligned with value. And we really believe over the long term, that really builds trust and allows good things.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We hate good enough. Good enough is not good enough. We aspire and are world class across our key product areas. And we've built the entirety of Canva on the one unified platform. Then that comes with a bunch of benefits. When you use a video creation tool, a whiteboarding tool, a presentation tool, a social media graphic tool, whatever, you don't want to learn a whole new interface. You don't want to upload all your stuff to a whole new content library. You want the interoperability of designs. We've built all of Canva off this one ecosystem and one graphics engine so every dock type is built off the same interface and it's very interoperable and easily understood. That also allows you to actually convert a presentation with one click into a video. It allows you to convert a doc into a presentation. It allows us to do all these crazy things that you can't do with these point and shoot tools, particularly going into this economic downturn. People are looking to aggregate their visual communication tools.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two ways, greatest good for the greatest number. I always think to the product. I'm going to give away all our secret sauce here, but as a funnel is this is like super obvious. People sometimes love to pitch ideas and features. My first question is, how many people are going to see this feature? You can't build a feature nestled so deep in your UX that it's only going to be seen by sub 10% of your user base. I think there are a lot of things as funnels and around product development. What is going to have the greatest good for the greatest number? And then the other product philosophy is a lot of the time, and this is that Melth strengths and I've learned this from her. People don't know what they don't know. That's the whole Henry Ford, if you ask them people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. You need to be looking at the future and understanding trends. We're thinking 20 years into the future, not just two years into the future.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right, it's a huge risk, actually. It is an absolute huge risk because if you don't have the right technical foundation of your business, then it's like a house of cards. We were incredibly lucky to bring on a third co-founder Cam, and he was at Google. He wasn't quite technical, but we palmed him off as the technical co-founder because he could write JavaScript and he did write JavaScript. He built a lot of the first front ends in Canva. We had a couple of early commitments, but getting him on board really tipped the needle in regards to investors and also allowed us to get on our CTO who is also another amazing human Dave Ferndon who's still with the company and absolutely phenomenal and really built the technical foundations that are still there today and we can build off.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were so many reasons why VC said no to non technical founders from Perth. We got every reason under the sun. But we have a philosophy around that. It's start niche and go wide. You don't want to boil the ocean. You want to solve a problem for someone that has that problem, solve that problem really well. And then once you've solved it for them, what are the adjacent industries, people, professions that have that same problem? And let's go pick those off. And that's what we've done with Canva. And the other sort of user acquisition channel we cracked in the early days was SEO as well. We're a content company and we figured out a way how to propagate that content onto the internet so people searching it can find it and then drive people to the product like that.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's an absolute legend and good on him for giving a chance to underdogs that have no leverage. Most people you need enough leverage for them to pay any attention, but Geikawasaki responded to my tweet and he responded to whatever you sent him and say, yeah, kudos the guy, let's have a homage to guy moment.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is visual content based, and you need to keep feeding the beast. So we approach social media marketers. And one of the people I called outreach to was Guy Kawasaki. And he responded, we were nothing at the time.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, market's important, but user acquisition is just as important. You can have a great product, but if you haven't cracked the user acquisition channels, you've got nothing because customers need to be able to find your product and use your product and love your product. And we grew Canva through a couple of different ways, primarily our product was our biggest marketing channel. So we built Canva over the course of a year before we launched anything. At the time, the Lean Startup was really in vogue. So our investors were all going, what are you doing? Launch, iterate, do all the lean startup stuff, hack your way to success. Emel was like, absolutely not. We are going to launch the most delightful product to our users and offer it for free, which is the Freemium model. And our users are going to be our biggest marketing channel. And that's what we did, despite all that pressure from investors. And we picked a really good target audience when we're starting as well. We're like, who has the biggest need for visual content creation? Social media marketers, because social media...”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the first year, we had all the tailwinds. It was a great product, but we had people copying us. We have had so many copycats over the years. Mel doesn't ever look at competition. She's like, fuck the competition. We've got this 10-year vision. They're copying where we were. I'm like, yeah, that's nice. People are copying us and it looks pretty good. So I'm probably a bit on the other side, but I've learned more to be like Mel. And seeing these copycats just ruthlessly copy you. And then one of the copycats, they introduced video. And that was a core part of what we were going to launch. It was like, fuck, they've launched video. They're going to beat us and blah, blah, blah. But ultimately we just stayed the course. And while it was tough, we got through it. And now our product velocity because of this new free platform is faster than anyone else. And once again, we're off to the races.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was a death march for a company that's so used to shipping product and shipping value to customers. That was a really dark time.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pages with Photoshop and InDesign, where we had to hire a team of designers on Upwork to essentially eyeball these pages and redesign them in Photoshop and InDesign, and then we had to convert those into a PDF and publish them. So that was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done. The other hardest thing we ever done were about five years into Canva and we realized when you're a startup, right, you have to make trade-offs. And often when building technology, that trade-off is a speed for tech debt. And we'd accrued a lot of tech debt, particularly in our front-end code. And it got to the point where it was untenable, we couldn't scale our team. Our user base was scaling massively. And we were like, I think we need to rewrite this whole thing. And we obviously analyzed pulling it up to bits and recreating it component by component, but that wasn't going to work. We had to down tools and ship no features for a full two years. It was supposed to be one year, but it took two years in the middle of Canvas growth journey caller from year four to six about year.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I've had a few. I'll tell you, the toughest time I've had recently was putting up this Christmas tree that I bought. It got the bedroom of me. I'm terrible for not reading instructions and I did it all wrong, just like Ikea furniture. And it took me about four hours to put down this Christmas tree. It was 11 p.m. And I nearly gave up, but I didn't. The next biggest challenge in our business journey was we had our first version of Fusion Books, the school yearbook company, built in Australia by contractors, and that was becoming very expensive. We couldn't afford it anymore. So we outsourced it through Odesk, which is now upwork at the time to a team in India. And so we had about 400 schools on the platform at the time. And the whole concept of, I guess, Canva for yearbooks is the teachers and students create their yearbook together using this WYSIWYG software. It's all amazing. And then they hit publish and that exports a PDF document that gets printed. The WYSIWIC part worked, but it couldn't export a PDF. We had to recreate over 100,000”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them that will speak to us. We started by building our own knowledge and then we hired a few people and we made a few bad hires and we made a few great highs and we just figured it out and then now we're doing that with sales and I would actually think we're pretty damn good at marketing now traditional marketing and sales is definitely on the right trajectory but these things take time and a lot of learning you're asking”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most important thing for me is trust. You can garner any knowledge and skills you like through commercial means. I've actually, having listened to your podcast for a long time, heard a lot of really smart people and just reached out to them and say, hey, can you be an advisor to the company or can I pick your brain on this thing? You can get a lot of great advice around certain domains from just reaching out to people. And obviously as you'll get more leverage with your company, that becomes easier and easier. Even in the earliest days, we used to pay people with generous equity grants and we still do to this day to get them on as an advisor. Canva, to give you an example, three years ago we were like a big bodybuilder that had not done a single leg day in their life. So we had a huge upper body and that was our user acquisition that was our product and that was our organic growth. But our two weak little legs were marketing and sales. Me and Zach were like, hey, let's figure this out together. Who are the best people? Who does marketing better than anyone else? Let's go speak to as many of”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to get to know the human behind the business, and that's probably the most important thing because the business speaks for itself. You can look at similar web and you can look at their traffic, you can look at their metrics, you can outside in how a company is going, you can then understand how their culture is outside in as well. You look at their attrition through LinkedIn, who's jumping jobs, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of knowledge you can kind of assess just from sort of outside in analysis. And then it's really around what are the motivations of the founder? What do they like as people? I mean, it was hard through COVID because you couldn't go out and spend some time with them and really get the cut of their jib. But we find we have a real philosophical alignment with the founders who have acquired their companies of and we've acquired some amazing founders. Maybe we've just been really lucky, I think, but we've had a lot of luck in that regard.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reach out and say, Oh, just want to chat, learn about your business, or whatever. Okay, you're the corp dev person, I know exactly where this goes. And they're like, oh, let's talk about a partnership. Okay, what kind of partnership? And they can't articulate an actual partnership. And after three or four meetings, they'll go, well, would you consider an acquisition? You could have said that in the first 30 seconds of us chatting. And I could have told you, no, we're not looking to be bought. That's the bullshit.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people don't believe it up front, and I say, talk to all the other companies we've acquired because you'll find that what I say is actually true. I'm just going to be super transparent with you from Day Dot. And if you speak to Corp Dev people, and we've spoken to a lot of them from lots of the big companies, there's a lot of bullshit there. That's not what you'll get from me. I'm going to be super transparent. This is why we love your company. This is why I think it's great for us to partner. And this is the value we see. And these things aren't valuable to us. And this is how we value it from a dollar perspective or an equity perspective or whatever the deal terms are going to be. And let's just talk about that. And I do that very early. And I say I'd rather a fast no than a long no, but better is a fast yes.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So think of it like a Walmart. We'd go into Walmart with my mum and she would haggle at the equivalent of Walmart. And I'm like, mom, I was so embarrassed. But she's kind of haggle for everything, was always trying to get a good deal, was always trying to find the best value in things. But I was also like honest and open when she did it. So I learned a lot from her just about, like, I guess it was the art of getting a good deal. She's Italian. And so I think Italians aren't good at the haggle. And I think I just grew up in that environment. As with that sort of skill transferred into business, I had a few just really simple revelations and this applies to acquiring a company, growing someone through your business and helping with their career or hiring someone. You essentially just need to align the company you're acquiring or the person's goals with your goals. And I just find being really transparent. Here are our goals. What are your goals? If we can get our goals to align, magic can happen and one plus one can equal 10. It's a really simple philosophy being super transparent like any acquisition we made.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, firstly, I think people's strengths are whatever comes natural to them. We didn't grow up with no money, but we didn't grow up with a lot of cash and stuff when we were kids that we had a great little family upbringing. Mum was a teacher as well, dad was a boilermaker welder who got into work safety stuff, worked for the government doing inspecting building sites. And so do you have Kmart over in the UK, like Big W and Kmart?”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love hiring internally. We love building talent. My EA is now our head of people. Zach, our CMO, joined Canva as content writer, a contract content writer. He was seen at the time. He's been with the company about 10 years now. He's now a CMO. Wouldn't change him for any of the best CMOs in the world. He's absolutely phenomenal. Same with Jenny, our head of people. Well class. Absolutely well class. And these people didn't come from fancy tech companies. But that being said, there are great companies that have built great people and we definitely compliment homegrown talent with really amazing people we bring into the business. It's the ying and the yang. It's the art and the science. It's all about the vibe.”
2023-01-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Canva Co-Founder, Cliff Obrecht on The Journey From 100 VC Rejections to a $40BN Company, Why Good Enough is Not Good Enough, The Secret to Hiring Non-Obvious Talent and Relationships to Money and Why They Are Giving Away Billions · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source