This week on the podcast we were joined by Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and COO of Canva. He was an amazing guest. It was great to get his take on the IPO landscape, where Canva is on the AI adoption curve, and the advice he no longer gives to founders. A few takeaways: Managing your company well is the only thing that matters. Valuations can be wrong by a lot. If you keep growing and keep compounding, you can still come out on top. In Canva’s case, that means a billion dollars cash in the bank and eight years of profitability. It’s easy to build hype, especially around AI. It’s much harder to cross over into the mainstream the way Canva has done. Initial product traction for an AI tool is great, but scaling to people who don’t know or care what people are saying on X is how you build a billion-dollar company, and it will be interesting to see who is able to do it. The internal mandate for AI is to try everything. There are some guidelines (you only get two LLMs but they don’t care which two) but for now, Canva employees can use what they want. He expects to consolidate as the winners become clearer over the next 12-24 months. When public markets were valuing companies as lower than the private markets, the incentive to IPO wasn’t particularly strong, especially for Canva who simply didn’t need the money. With the public markets the way they are today, however, it becomes a bit more appealing. The cost of running AI is high but it will come down. Cliff is already starting to see it. It gets more efficient as you pick the right model for the job, running AI on device or self-hosted, etc. For now, it might cost 4 cents an image, but over the next six months, they’re counting on it dropping to .02 cents an image. The upfront costs are not indicative of long-term spend. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/guuQUdN7
Anthropic Raises $13BN & OpenAI Buys Statsig for $1.1BN All Stock
https://www.youtube.com/
Mantas A.
1mo
Great episode!
Head of Innovation Banking AU & NZ | Innovation | Growth | Venture | Global
1moFantastic to have an Aussie 🇦🇺 and and Irishman 🇮🇪 on the same venture podcast 👍