 I remember seeing the taxi out of the corner of my eye. I was heading down the hill on my bicycle, and it was a four-lane road, and by the time I realised it, the taxi had pulled out into my lane and stopped right in front of me. I was going about 45 kilometres an hour, and I just hit the bonnet. I passed out, and I woke up on the road, dripping blood down into the asphalt. There was a bouncer from the pub across the road who ran over, and he picked up my phone and started dialing people at random, and luckily he managed to find one of my co-founders, and he rushed over. We jumped in an ambulance, went to the hospital, and I got a bunch of stitches in my head. That was two days before we launched our product, and I left the hospital, went home, had a snatch of sleep, then went back into the office on the Sunday, got coding, and we managed to launch on Monday, August 26, 2013. Every time you launch, you think it's going to be this wonderful, magnificent thing, and I remember we'd pulled up the real-time Google Analytics dashboard, and we're watching for this flood of little dots to come in as people drastically started signing up for Canva, and we sat there, and it was 10 p.m. We'd launched it at daytime in New York, and we saw one drop come in, then about 30 seconds later, we saw another drop come in, then about three minutes later, we saw another drop come in, and that was a very uneventful night for us. I think every launch kind of turns out that way. You think the launch is going to be huge, but it's the days after that really tell the real story of your company. This is our growth for the first year that we're in business, so we started off with 500 sign-ups that week, the week after we got 2,500, and the week after that we got 5,000, and it's with these small steps of people spreading your product, you building the product and responding to them, that you gradually build up to what we are now today. If you know what a era of white Canva is, we're a design tool for people who have no design skills whatsoever, so we can help you make anything from a presentation, to a book cover, to a magazine, to a flyer or a t-shirt, and if you're a non-designer, it's the perfect tool for you. We started about seven years ago, and we started with just three people sharing an office down in Sydney, Australia. We now have close to 800 people around the globe, and we have over 20 million people using the product in every country around the world. All those people put together make 100 million designs a month, which is always a figure that just kind of boggles my mind. That actually translates to 30 designs a second, so by the time I finish saying this sentence, 500 designs have been created on Canva alone. We were the first Unicorn down in Australia, so our first VC back to Unicorn, and we achieved that last year, and earlier this year we did another valuation round that valued us at 3.5 billion US dollars. Over those seven years, I've kind of learned a lot through successes and through failures, and today I wanted to share with you three concepts that I think have led to us becoming a successful company. The first of those is customer experience. The second is team building, and the final one that I'll talk about is growth. Customer experience has been really important to us, because we're a very product-led company. Every decision that we make, whether it's from the people that we hire, through to the features that we put in, through the way that we think about how to service our customers in the best way, is always product-led. This is really important to us, because our customers are our greatest ambassadors. We have a stream of tweets that we show in the office, and it's people who are really expressing their true love for Canva, whether it's through animated gifts, talking about how long they've been using Canva for, or even putting up marriage proposals to Canva. It's really the customers that make us come back day in day and improve the product and keep on building upon what we're doing. I remember the very first time we got some first real customer feedback from someone who's using Canva that we'd never heard of before, and this was from an orphanage in South America, and they'd written an email to us and told us that they'd been started using Canva to produce the newsletters for their orphanage. So they told their sponsors about new children who come into the orphanage, they told the stories of kids that had moved on and found new homes, and they really expressed how much Canva had changed their life, how much Canva had enabled them to tell their own story, and to change the lives of kids halfway around the world that we'd never met before. That was the moment that I truly realized that design had the power to improve people's lives and have a really positive impact on the world. It's always a tricky balance, I think, when you're building a product between maintaining your vision and listening to your customers. And I think it's a line that we've treaded fairly well. We have a really big vision at Canva. We want to empower the entire world to design no matter what their design need is. And along with that, once you put out a product, you'd really need to closely listen to your customers as well. And deciding when to forge ahead with your vision or to listen to your customers is always a tricky ask. One of the ways that we kind of did that in the early days was during the development of the product. It took us a year to build what we wanted to build before we could release it to anyone. And this was in 2012 when the lens start-up had just come out. Everyone was going crazy for MVPs. And I remember our investors hounding us every day, asking whether we'd launched the product yet. Have you launched a product yet? Have you launched a product yet? Have you launched a product yet? And everyone wanted to put out an MVP, but really we didn't know what an MVP was. What is the minimal thing that you can put out that's going to be successful? You as an entrepreneur are really the only person who can gauge that. What do you need to put out there that you think is going to be a success? We actually started testing something that was pretty bare bones. We'd whacked it together with duct tape and put it into a rough prototype. And we discovered again and again the same problems that people encountered. And the prototype just didn't cut it. This notion of an MVP wasn't what it was set out to be built to express. What we decided to do is to actually take the time to polish that MVP. So rather than put something out after three months or six months, we took the year to really flesh out the experience that we wanted to express as to how we think design could be done. And I think it was a really valuable use of our time. The product that we put out was an MVP in the true sense of the word because there's the minimum thing that we needed in order to tell the world how we wanted them to do design. One thing that we discovered in the very early days just before launch was through some of our qualitative research. And what we discovered is that we'd built a great product. It was really powerful. You could do lots of things in it. But people that came into the product were really scared of screwing up. They didn't want to add something to the page or change something on the page because they didn't think they were a designer. And anything they thought they could do was just going to make the design any worse. What we really focused on was making sure that they had a brilliant onboarding experience that could take them from someone who had no confidence about design and didn't want to change anything on the page to being a really confident designer who could change anything on the page and make it look good. And we focused on that onboarding experience for probably two months working on various iterations, doing various technical hacks to help people learn about the design editor. And at the end of it, we ended up with scores of all 10 in our user testing. And that was a really vital part of making a successful product before we launched. Like, another way that we think about being product led at Canva is having a real merger between our design teams and our engineering teams. I used to work at Google about 10 years ago and I worked on a product called Google Wave. And they made some technical decisions on that project that I think kind of really doomed it. One of those was using a product called Google Web Toolkit. Is there anyone here who's ever used this ancient piece of crap? There's a couple of people out there. Google, as a designer, Google Web Toolkit really killed me because it took 10 minutes for any change in the code to actually appear in the software. So if I wanted to change the color of a piece of text, I'd go to ask the engineer and say, hey, can you change this to blue? And they'd be like, sure, come back in 10 minutes and you can see it. And that kind of iteration cycle really hampers the way in which you can build the product and the way that design and engineering work together. One thing we've worked keenly on at Canva is to make sure that design and engineering are always in partnership and that design talks to engineering and informs them about what's happening. And engineering talks to design and informs them about what's happening. Together it creates a really great iterative loop that ultimately produces the highest quality product. Another way that we do this is by really valuing cross-disciplinary people. So we really like working with designers who understand about engineering and engineers who understand about design. When you have people like that, a real conversation can happen and you can develop a product that's greater than the sum of its parts. The second area I'd like to talk about is team building. And I like to think about teams as being this tension between three different areas. We have business, we have design and we have engineering. I often just shorten engineering to make it look more balanced. With business design and engineering I think they're the essential things you need in order to make a great company. Being right in the middle is a skill I think we've really nailed at Canva. You can kind of wobble around the middle depending upon what your company is. A lot of you will be building products that are highly technical. A lot of you will be building products that are highly consumer based. So you can kind of move that dot around the centre. But when you start moving that dot too far from the centre you end up with problems. This is what I experienced during my time at Google. They're a very engineering focused company and Google Wave was a very ambitious product that I was trying to build. Through that process I kind of experienced it through the lens of a designer. And through the lens of a designer the product being an engineering led led to serious problems in the overall experience of the product. I tried to counteract this with the startup that I started right after I left Google. It was a company called Fluent and we're working on a better way to do email. And we've seen what had happened when engineering led the bandwagon and we're like okay let's try and make it so that design and experience is leading the way. So we kind of massage the team more in the design direction and made design and engineering a real focus of this company. And we managed to make a really great product and got great feedback from our users. The one thing that we neglected to think about was the business part of this diagram. So we had no way of making money and investors weren't too impressed with our business model. So we ultimately had to move on from that company and luckily I met up with my co-founders Mel and Cliff. And I think it was through this journey, through Google, through doing my own startup that I'd realised a lot about myself. A lot about what I was good at and a lot about what I was bad at. And I kind of recognised in my co-founders the skills that I needed to create a great company. And together we've created something that is truly well balanced and really meets the needs of both business, design and engineering. We've tried to replicate this as we've grown the company. So as the teams have grown, as the product teams have grown, we make sure that design, business and engineering are all in balance and all working in partnership. The third area that I'll talk about is growth. And I think for startup growth is a no brainer. It has to be a focus of yours. There's a couple of different areas that we've thought about growth. The essential innovation that we had with Canva was about taking this area that was immensely complex. Something where you needed to go to five different people to get something done. You needed to start up six different applications and you needed a really deep knowledge about design, graphic design, printing in order to get anything done. And we managed to condense that from this really complex area down to a simple experience that anyone in the world could pick up. Someone who had never thought about design before, someone who'd never opened Photoshop before. What it turned out was that the market that it really suited in the early days was people who were really active on social media. So social media marketers, bloggers, people who really wanted to communicate with the outside world. And it was the perfect tool for them. We got really great traction. We got really great word of mouth. And very fortunately, people who love to post content to social media also love talking about stuff. So they love telling people about Canva and referring to their friends and their colleagues and spreading it for us. Over the years, we've kind of expanded the sphere in which Canva plays. So we don't just do social media graphics now. We do presentations and flyers and business cards and t-shirts. And through that growth, through from that initial seed, we've managed to grow the markets that we're in and also the product verticals that we're in. Probably one of the key moments, I think, in growth for Canva was when we made the decision at the end of 2015 to move beyond just being in English. So up until that stage, we just serviced English markets. There were people using us in 100 different countries, but they had to be speaking English in those countries. So at the start of 2016, we set ourselves a really big goal of making Canva available in eight different languages. And this was a huge technical accomplishment. We had to rewrite the entire code base, figure out how to get translations for eight different languages in real time, anytime an engineer committed code, it had to go through this automatic pipeline. And we managed to get it done. By the end of 2016, we translated into eight different languages, including Spanish, French, German, and a bunch of other European languages. And we set up the framework for what would be our international growth. In 2017, we said, okay, we managed to do eight languages in 2016. How big can we go with this in 2017? So we set ourselves a goal in 2017 of being in 100 different languages. And we managed to just scrape in on that goal by December 24, 2017. And this involves some really hard problems. It didn't involve just using Roman scripts. It involved translating the app into Korean, making content available in Korean, in Hebrew, in Thai, in Russian, heaps of different languages that were very different to our own. By making this change in the way that we thought about our market, and by opening up Canva to the world, it drastically changed the company and the trajectory that we're on. I think we're one of the earliest companies to actually go fully global out of any tech startup. Google was well over 10 years before they internationalized to this level. And I think Facebook did it around year eight. We did it in year four. And it's massively changed the market shape of Canva and who we service all around the world. In 2013, one of our biggest markets for the US with our international growth, countries like Brazil and Indonesia and India, rapidly rising in the top five. When you're thinking about growth, you also have to think about the growth of the actual company as well. It's not just about growing your customer base. It's about growing the people around you and the building around you and the teams around you. And it's a really complicated thing to deal with when you're doubling your headcount every year. We went from 10 people in our first year to 20 people in our second year, 50 people in our third year, 100 people in our fourth. And now up to 800 people. And each time that you double your team, all sorts of stuff breaks, the way that you hold meetings breaks, the way that you communicate vision to your teams breaks, the way that you do lunch, the way that we cook food for people, even the way that you do the toilets changes. And you have to constantly be thinking about this growth and adapting to new ways to work at scale. One of the ways that we do this with our product teams is to try and keep them as insulated as possible. So we got to a stage very early on where we grew from 10 people to 20 people. And we tried to keep all of them in the same team. It was really difficult to do that because at the size of 20 people, you've got multiple features going in, you've got different goals. Some people are trying to hit an activation metric. Some people are trying to get people to buy more images. And it just ends up in a big mess because you've got 20 people not talking about the same thing and all hitting in different directions. So we made the call at 20 people to really break our company down and make sure that we had small teams that were working with one another and that could work independently from the other teams and the company. We've got to the stage now where we have well over 60 teams. And we've had to introduce layering now. So we have groups that can consist of teams. And within those teams, we still have that core nucleus of a product manager, a designer, and roughly four to eight engineers. We've found that that's the right recipe in order to have that team totally unblocked, totally focused and totally heading in the one direction. I've run out of time today, but that's been the last seven years of Canva in about 18 minutes. I'll leave you with these three things is to focus on the customer experience. Make sure that you're building your team in the right way. And always be thinking about growth, not just growth in your customers, but also growth in your employees and growth in your company. Thank you. I hope you enjoy Slush.