Inside Canva's Unique Culture: How Coaches Replace Managers and "Giving Away Legos" Drives $2.3B Success

Canva's co-founder reveals how their unconventional approach to management, product-first philosophy, and AI integration built one of the world's most successful design platforms.

Key Takeaways

• Canva generates $2.3 billion ARR, surpassing Figma, Miro, and Webflow combined while maintaining 60% year-over-year growth
• The company uses coaches instead of traditional managers, with nearly 1,000 internal coaches supporting employee development
• "Giving away your Legos" philosophy helps employees scale by delegating responsibilities as the company grows rapidly
• Product development takes priority over financials, with board meetings featuring one slide on finances and the rest on product roadmap
• Building for joy and delight, not just utility, proved essential for organic growth and word-of-mouth marketing
• AI integration focuses on three pillars: proprietary technology, strategic partnerships, and developer ecosystem integration

Timeline Overview

• 00:00–12:45 — Scale and Success Reflection: Canva's $2.3B ARR surpassing Figma, Miro, and Webflow combined, Cameron's personal journey from Google Wave designer to co-founder, and the rare moments of stepping back to appreciate building something generational
• 12:45–18:30 — Fundraising Failure Story: The near-disaster when a lead investor tried to cut valuation by 50% two days before closing, forcing founders to fly to Silicon Valley during Christmas week, and how this shaped their seven-year commitment to profitability and independence
• 18:30–28:15 — Product-First Culture: Why board meetings feature one slide on financials and the rest on product roadmap, the challenge of hiring external executives who don't understand Canva's visual-first culture, and how product types influence company thinking patterns
• 28:15–38:45 — Giving Away Your Legos: Molly Graham's concept of scaling by delegating ownership, how email copywriters must evolve from writing every email to building systems for 100 million users across 190 countries, and finding joy in team building rather than individual execution
• 38:45–49:20 — Coaching Over Management: The revolutionary system where 1,000 employees coach colleagues in their specialties, how performance reviews work with 360-degree feedback, and why they avoided hiring product managers for six years while developing their own methodology
• 49:20–58:10 — MVP Philosophy and Delightful Products: Taking one year to build their first version despite lean startup pressure, why products must "spark joy and light up people's eyes" for organic growth, and the critical onboarding breakthrough that taught users "I didn't know I could be a designer"
• 58:10–68:35 — Growth Through SEO and Global Expansion: Andre's end-to-end strategy mapping jobs-to-be-done from Google search to template customization, expanding to 100 languages by year four, and how Brazil's mobile-first business culture shaped product development
• 68:35–76:20 — Freemium Strategy Evolution: Starting with $1-per-element pricing, transitioning to subscription models that created hockey stick revenue growth, and balancing democratizing design mission with building a viable business for global impact
• 76:20–84:45 — AI Integration Approach: Three pillars of proprietary technology, strategic partnerships with OpenAI and Runway, and developer ecosystem leverage, plus how machine learning teams evolved from backend recommendations to customer-facing creative tools
• 84:45–90:00 — Enterprise Future Vision: Upcoming Canva Create event unveiling work kits for marketing, sales, and HR verticals, enterprise security features, and the strategy to redesign collaborative work for Fortune 500 companies while maintaining intuitive user experience

Canva's Extraordinary Scale and Product-First Philosophy

• Canva has achieved remarkable financial success that few people fully grasp, generating $2.3 billion in annual recurring revenue while remaining profitable for seven consecutive years. The company's valuation and revenue now exceed the combined totals of design competitors Figma, Miro, and Webflow, with growth actually accelerating to 60% year-over-year despite their massive scale.
• Cameron Adams reflects that the magnitude of this success becomes most apparent during company gatherings, particularly their 10th birthday celebration in Sydney Harbor where thousands of employees gathered. "When the team all get together and we celebrate is when we finally have those moments where you get to kind of step out of yourself look at this huge sea of people and realize what you've achieved together," Adams explains.
• The company's board meetings exemplify their product-obsessed culture, featuring just one slide dedicated to financials while the remainder focuses entirely on product updates and roadmap discussions. This approach stems from their belief that product development ultimately determines company success, with financial lever-pulling being secondary to creating exceptional user experiences.
• Board meeting structure reflects their core philosophy: "We've always been an incredibly product-led company we always think first and foremost about the product that was the whole Genesis of camera itself having a product that we thought people would love to use and desperately needed to get out into the world."
• Their sustained financial performance has enabled this product focus, as Adams notes they can simply show "that one slide with the graph going up and up and to the right" before diving into what matters most. This approach has attracted investors who understand that driving product value to customers represents their most important strategic activity.
• The company's growth from three founders to 4,500 employees while maintaining this product-first mentality demonstrates how deeply embedded these values are in their organizational DNA, influencing everything from hiring decisions to strategic planning processes.

Revolutionary Coaching System Replaces Traditional Management

• Canva operates without traditional managers, instead employing a coaching system where approximately 1,000 employees serve as coaches for their colleagues across different specialties. Each employee receives coaching from someone in their specific field who understands the required skills, growth trajectories, and internal opportunities available within the company.
• Coaches focus on specialty-specific development, meaning product managers coach other product managers, engineers coach engineers, and designers coach designers. This structure ensures coaches possess intimate knowledge of the skills needed for advancement and can provide relevant guidance for career progression within Canva's unique ecosystem.
• The coaching philosophy emerged from formative external coaching experiences the founders received early in the company's development. "It was driven actually by a formative coaching experience that we had as Founders quite a few years ago from an external coach and we decided to bring that into Cana as a whole philosophy," Adams explains.
• Performance reviews incorporate 360-degree feedback from colleagues alongside coach input, creating a comprehensive evaluation system that occurs every six months. This collegial approach to management emphasizes collaborative growth rather than hierarchical oversight, fostering an environment where development becomes everyone's responsibility.
• The company invests heavily in training their internal coaches, focusing on developing growth mindsets and essential coaching skills rather than relying primarily on professional coaches. Only about five dedicated professional coaches work across the entire organization, handling special situations while the broader network handles day-to-day development needs.
• This coaching structure supports Canva's rapid scaling by ensuring knowledge transfer and skill development happen organically throughout the organization, creating multiple pathways for advancement and reducing bottlenecks that traditional management hierarchies often create.

Giving Away Your Legos: Cultural Foundation for Scaling

• The "giving away your Legos" philosophy, originally popularized by Molly Graham, forms a cornerstone of Canva's culture and gets introduced to every new employee during cultural onboarding sessions. This concept acknowledges that startup growth requires constant personal evolution as responsibilities multiply and complexity increases exponentially.
• Adams illustrates this concept with the example of an email copywriter who initially writes all company emails but must eventually transition to building systems, processes, and teams capable of handling communications across 100 million users in 190 countries and 100 languages. Individual execution becomes impossible at scale, requiring fundamental shifts in how people approach their roles.
• The philosophy addresses the psychological challenge of letting go of work that provides personal identity and satisfaction. "You often build up a lot of self-identity in doing that and you get a lot of joy out of it like that's why you're a writer in the first place but finding joy in the other things of building a team passing on your experience helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering uh is really what giving away your Lego is about."
• Implementation requires providing concrete opportunities for growth rather than simply encouraging it theoretically. The coaching system works in tandem with this philosophy, helping employees identify when they're ready to transition from individual contributor to team builder, and providing support throughout that evolution.
• Success stories emerge when employees embrace new challenges beyond their comfort zones, such as proposing new product features or entire team formations. When these ideas make strategic sense, leadership empowers employees to execute them directly, creating ownership opportunities that facilitate natural career progression.
• The concept extends beyond individual growth to organizational health, as companies that fail to implement similar philosophies often struggle with scaling bottlenecks where key individuals become single points of failure, limiting overall growth potential and creating unsustainable workloads.

Visual Thinking and Cultural Fit Requirements

• Canva's hiring philosophy prioritizes cultural alignment and internal development over importing external expertise, recognizing that even world-class professionals may fail if they cannot integrate with the company's unique culture and collaborative approach. This strategy has resulted in most leadership positions being filled by employees who grew with the company.
• The visual nature of Canva's product creates specific cultural requirements for success within the organization. Adams theorizes that product types influence thinking patterns, noting how Spotify's audio focus leads to extensive verbal problem-solving, while Canva's visual communication emphasis requires ideas to be presented through mockups, prototypes, and visual representations.
• External hires often struggle when they attempt to import processes from previous companies without understanding Canva's established systems and collaborative culture. "Just coming in wholesale and totally changing the process just because that's what you've done somewhere else isn't going to get you the most level of success," Adams observes.
• The company's idiosyncratic growth patterns and self-developed processes mean new employees must invest time in understanding existing systems before suggesting changes. Adams recommends that incoming employees "just listen for a couple of months like figure out what is really working at camber and why it works before you try and change it."
• Visual communication requirements extend beyond design roles to all functions, creating a company-wide expectation that ideas must be communicated through visual means to facilitate understanding and collaboration. This approach aligns with their product mission while ensuring consistent communication standards across diverse teams.
• Cultural fit assessment has become increasingly important as the company scaled to 4,500 employees, where new hires must integrate not just with immediate teams but with the broader ecosystem of leaders and established cultural norms that define Canva's operational approach.

Product Management Philosophy and Development Approach

• Canva's approach to product management diverges significantly from traditional tech company models, influenced by Adams's determination to avoid replicating Google's engineering-driven methodology. Instead, they developed a system that emphasizes experience and visual communication, reflecting their core product values and user needs.
• The company resisted using the term "product manager" for six or seven years, preferring to develop their own framework organically. "We didn't want to have the term product manager for a long long time uh it wasn't until about year six or seven where we actually had product managers uh we decided to cave just because it was easy to explain to people," Adams reveals.
• Product managers at Canva serve as connectors who integrate team ideas, data, and various organizational elements while navigating constant changes in feature scope, timelines, and constraints. This role requires comfort with ambiguity and skill in facilitating compromise and adaptation when unexpected challenges arise.
• The visual nature of their product demands that product managers think and communicate visually, creating mockups and prototypes to facilitate discussions and decision-making. This requirement differs from companies where product managers might rely primarily on verbal communication or written specifications.
• Development timelines reflect their commitment to delivering exceptional user experiences rather than rushing to market. Their initial product took one year to build, countering prevalent "lean startup" advice to launch immediately with minimal features. This approach enabled them to create the joyful experience necessary for organic word-of-mouth growth.
• The founding team's domain expertise in creative tools provided crucial advantages in knowing what to build and when it met quality standards. Adams emphasizes building for problems you personally experience: "Even today we build for ourselves uh and I think this is advice that that probably a lot of product people wouldn't give you is that you shouldn't build for yourself you should build for your customer but I think we're fortunate that we are our customer."

Growth Strategy Through SEO and Internationalization

• Canva's growth strategy centered on an end-to-end SEO approach developed by Andre, who joined from a failing startup and crystallized how search optimization could drive sustainable growth. His methodology mapped user motivations and jobs-to-be-done through the complete experience from Google search to product usage.
• The SEO strategy focused on creating landing pages that matched search intent perfectly, such as users searching for "Halloween poster" finding a dedicated Canva page with relevant templates and streamlined onboarding. "He thought through that whole end to end flow from first landing on Google and typing into the search box through to that magic moment where they're like cam just helped me do something amazing and I want to do it again," Adams explains.
• Early internationalization became a crucial growth driver, beginning three years after launch when the team localized into five languages in the first year, eventually expanding to eight. The following year brought expansion to 100 different languages, dramatically expanding their addressable market and growth potential.
• Geographic constraints in Australia forced global thinking from the beginning, as the domestic market of 25 million people couldn't support massive scale. This limitation became an advantage, pushing international expansion while US-focused startups might remain domestically focused for years.
• Internationalization revealed new product requirements and user behaviors, particularly in markets like Brazil where users run entire businesses from mobile phones and create different content types for audience engagement. These discoveries influenced product development and expanded their understanding of global design needs.
• Brazil, India, and Indonesia now rank among Canva's top five markets, growing faster than the US market and demonstrating the compound benefits of early international investment. The combination of SEO and internationalization created massive surface area for content discovery and user acquisition across diverse global markets.

AI Integration and Future Enterprise Vision

• Canva's AI strategy operates through three distinct pillars: building proprietary technology where they have unique advantages, partnering with leading AI providers for commodity functions, and leveraging their app ecosystem to integrate third-party AI innovations. This approach balances internal development with strategic partnerships and community contributions.
• The company has maintained machine learning teams for seven years, initially focused on backend systems like recommendation engines before expanding into customer-facing AI features. Current capabilities include image generation, design creation, text summarization, and translation across 100 languages, all integrated seamlessly into the design workflow.
• AI development focuses on democratizing design further by helping more people create higher-quality designs faster. "We view AI as the next way of democratizing design and empowering the world to design helping more people design helping more people design quicker helping more people design quicker with better quality," Adams emphasizes.
• Strategic partnerships with companies like OpenAI and Runway ML provide access to cutting-edge capabilities without requiring massive internal investment in commodity AI technologies. This approach allows Canva to focus resources on AI applications most relevant to their design mission and user base.
• The app developer ecosystem has experienced significant uptake from AI developers creating music generators, virtual avatars, and presentation tools that integrate directly with Canva's platform. This ecosystem leverages their 170 million monthly users to attract innovative AI applications while providing users with expanded capabilities.
• Upcoming enterprise launches will introduce verticalized work kits for marketing, sales, and HR teams, alongside comprehensive enterprise security and collaboration features. This expansion represents Canva's evolution from individual and small business focus toward redesigning how large organizations approach collaborative work and visual communication.

Building Culture That Scales: Key Lessons from Canva's Journey

Canva's extraordinary success stems not from revolutionary technology alone, but from intentionally building a culture that scales human potential alongside business growth. Their coaching-over-management philosophy, "giving away your Legos" mindset, and unwavering product focus created a self-reinforcing system where employee development drives business results. Most remarkably, they achieved this while maintaining profitability for seven years and growing 60% annually at massive scale—proving that sustainable culture and explosive growth aren't mutually exclusive when leadership prioritizes long-term thinking over short-term optimization.

Practical Implications for Leaders and Organizations:

• Replace traditional management hierarchies with specialty-based coaching systems where experts develop others in their field rather than managing cross-functionally
• Implement "giving away your Legos" as an explicit cultural value, providing concrete growth opportunities and coaching support to help employees transition from individual contributors to team builders
• Prioritize cultural fit and internal development over external expertise hiring, recognizing that domain knowledge without cultural alignment often leads to failure at scale
• Design products and processes that align with your core mission—visual companies should think visually, audio companies should think auditorily—rather than importing generic frameworks
• Take time to build delightful user experiences that "spark joy" before launching, as organic word-of-mouth from enthusiastic users drives more sustainable growth than rushed iterations
• Focus board meetings and leadership attention on product development rather than financial metrics when growth and profitability are strong, trusting that great products drive great business results
• Expand internationally early if domestic markets are limited, using localization and SEO strategies to create massive surface area for growth across diverse global markets
• Build AI and emerging technology strategies around three pillars: proprietary development where you have unique advantages, strategic partnerships for commodity capabilities, and ecosystem integration for community innovation
• Maintain profitability as a strategic choice for independence rather than just financial prudence, ensuring you never have to fundraise from positions of weakness or desperation

The next decade of Canva centers on collaborative enterprise experiences, building on their foundation of individual empowerment to transform how teams create and communicate visually. With 95% of Fortune 500 companies already using Canva, their enterprise strategy focuses on providing the security, scale, and specialized features large organizations require while maintaining the intuitive experience that drove their initial success.