Come With a Prototype
Canva cut its AI costs by about 90% by training its own models. Cliff Obrecht on free users, template-first design, and asking your data directly.
· 5 min read
Cliff Obrecht is the cofounder and COO of Canva, which he started in 2013 with his wife, CEO Melanie Perkins, and Cameron Adams. He was a school teacher in Perth, Western Australia, when he and Perkins built their first company, Fusion Books, a self-funded school yearbook tool that was profitable from the start. Silicon Valley investors rejected them more than 100 times before they raised their first round, and they chose to stay in Australia. Canva now has more than 200 million free users and over 30 million paying users. It is in the middle of what Obrecht calls the biggest transition in its history: from a creative platform to a combined creative, productivity, and AI platform. These signals are from an interview that John Collison, cofounder of Stripe, did with Cliff Obrecht onstage at a Stripe event in Australia.
