This week Canva Co-Founder and COO Cliff Obrecht joined Harry Stebbings, Rory O’Driscoll and Jason with honest, unfiltered insights on scaling to 240 million users, navigating AI transformation, and preparing for public markets.
Canva’s CoFounder Joins 20VC + SaaStr on The Coming IPO, Where AI Works Today, Employee Liquidity, Figma’s IPO, and Much More!
After 13 years building Canva into a $4 billion ARR juggernaut, Cliff Obrecht’s key insight is deceptively simple: “In the end, the thing that bails out our incompetence is your growth rate.” Whether facing 50x valuations in 2021 or 10x today, the fundamentals remain constant — compound growth covers a multitude of sins, while everything else is just noise.
The $4B ARR Reality Check: What Actually Drives Growth at Scale — 90% is Organic
Canva will close 2025 “very close if not at $4 billion” in revenue, growing nearly 40% and reaccelerating after a post-2021 adjustment period. For Obrecht, this trajectory validates a contrarian approach to scaling that most B2B companies get wrong.
“One thing you need to buck the trend of as you become a larger company is insular thinking and treating your user base like a wet tea towel that you need to ring out,” Obrecht explains. “90% of our user acquisition is organic.”
The reacceleration story breaks down to three core drivers, with AI playing a surprisingly modest role:
1. Core Flywheel Optimization (70%) “We just needed to reaccelerate all our core flywheels. We spoke about paying up for the team.”
2. International Expansion (10%) “Going really heavy on international enhanced that.”
3. AI Integration (20%) “I would probably say 20% [of reacceleration comes from AI].”
This distribution challenges the narrative that AI is the primary growth driver for established SaaS companies. Instead, Obrecht’s thesis is that AI amplifies existing strengths rather than creating new ones.
The AI Integration Playbook: Workhorses, Not Gimmicks
Canva runs billions of AI inferences monthly, but Obrecht’s approach differs markedly from AI-first companies. The philosophy: “We’re all about creating workhorses, not gimmicks. AI is just accelerating [our mission] massively, making it quicker, faster, and better for customers to achieve their goals.”
The 10% GPU Tax Is Real
Like Notion, Canva is paying the “GPU tax” — roughly 10% of revenue going to AI infrastructure and model providers. “100% yes, it already is [10% of revenue],” Obrecht confirms. “If you look at Lovable, their pass-through to Anthropic or model providers will be way more than 10%.”
But this isn’t sustainable at current levels. Canva’s optimization strategy reveals how smart SaaS companies should think about AI costs:
Near-term Reality:
Heavy compute costs for new AI products
Pass-through pricing to OpenAI, Anthropic, others
Unified credit model for usage management
Long-term Optimization:
“We’re betting on distilling these models down, understanding user queries and where I need the frontier model versus where I can deploy the model that’s on-device or self-hosted”
“Companies will get better at picking the right model for the right job”
“We view some of those upfront costs as more of a marketing cost than a long-term enduring cost of goods”
The Credit Model Solution
Facing 240 million users and October’s “whole slew of new AI products,” Canva solved the margin problem with usage-based pricing layered onto subscriptions:
Free users: Limited AI credits
Premium subscribers: Expanded credit allocation
Heavy users: Usage-based pricing beyond thresholds
“We need to maintain that margin,” Obrecht notes. This hybrid approach lets Canva capture AI value without destroying unit economics.
The Billion-Dollar Balance Sheet Strategy
Perhaps Canva’s most contrarian move: maintaining a billion-dollar cash position while profitable. “We’ve had a billion sitting on our balance sheet for ages — that’s a flex, people,” Obrecht says with characteristic directness.
This wasn’t accident but strategy, informed by hard experience:
The 2021-2022 Lesson:
2021: $40 billion valuation at 50x revenue
2022: Crashed to $26 billion as markets corrected
Lesson: “The markets will do what they’re going to do, but as a company, we can compound growth, compound margins, and deliver value to customers”
The Insurance Policy Approach: “The truth is it’s a rocky journey. There’s probably some bumps ahead. I think most founders will be happier with a bigger balance sheet. The really great ones are the guys who can take the capital and then have the discipline not to use it foolishly.”
For Canva, cash isn’t just defensive — it’s offensive optionality for when markets inevitably shake out competitors who “pissed it all away in performance marketing.”
IPO Strategy: Employee Liquidity Trumps Everything
After 13 years and eight years of profitability, Canva doesn’t need public market capital. But employees need liquidity, and secondary markets aren’t cutting it.
“We’re 13 years old as a company. Our employees should have liquidity. They’ve created all this value. How can we make it easy for them to access that wealth that’s built up?”
The secondary market reality check is brutal:
Problems with Private Liquidity:
“While secondaries, annual secondaries are a mechanism for that, it’s pretty janky”
“Particularly in some jurisdictions, it’s downright impossible”
Employees need employer permission for their own wealth access
Supply-demand imbalances when major companies (like Figma) go public
Public Market Arbitrage: “The public markets now are valuing companies a lot higher [than private markets]. Ultimately the volume of capital dictates that multiple and there’s such an immense amount of capital being deployed in public markets that just is driving up those valuations.”
Canva brought in Zoom’s former IPO CFO Kelly and is “gearing up to be an IPO ready company.” The timing question remains open, but the infrastructure is being built.
Distribution Moats in the AI Era
While AI companies fight for attention, Canva’s distribution advantages compound. The company is now the #5 most-referenced domain on ChatGPT and the #1 productivity app in the platform.
“Over 5% [of images uploaded to Canva] now come from ChatGPT,” up from 0.02% eighteen months ago. This represents “LLM SEO” — winning discovery in AI platforms the same way companies optimized for Google search.
But Obrecht’s insight goes deeper: “As soon as these LLMs started taking off, we had the conversation: is our SEO team working on LLM optimization? And there’s definitely a team at Canva working on that.”
The lesson: Distribution advantages require active maintenance and adaptation, not passive hope.
The Mercenary Problem vs. Mission Alignment
Discussing Meta’s AI talent acquisition spree, Obrecht revealed Canva’s cultural philosophy: “When I was a B2B founder trying to be driven but touchy-feely, I was sort of anti-mercenary. If you’re not on my journey, I don’t want you. This is a long path — Canva’s been doing this for 20 years.”
This mission-first approach creates different talent dynamics:
Advantages:
Lower churn during difficult periods
Aligned decision-making during market volatility
Sustainable culture at scale
Trade-offs:
Potentially slower talent acquisition
Higher bar for cultural fit
May miss short-term optimization opportunities
For Canva, the trade-off makes sense: “Sometimes you need mercenaries and sometimes there’s a tool for the job. But I think this is… Zuck knows this is a bunch of mercenaries. Some of them are going to fall in battle.”
Pricing Strategy: From Seats to Consumption
AI is forcing SaaS pricing model evolution. Canva’s hybrid approach previews the future:
“We need to rethink our seat-based pricing model because some of the tools, particularly around marketing tools we’re creating, enable a single marketer to deploy tens of thousands of pieces of content.”
The new reality:
Traditional seats: Base functionality at fixed price
AI consumption: Usage-based pricing above thresholds
Value alignment: Pricing scales with customer outcomes
“One person can do inordinate amounts of work and that’s using a huge amount of compute. You can’t charge 20 bucks a seat for that level of breadth.”
Key Takeaways for B2B Leaders
1. Growth Rate Forgives All Sins Market valuations will fluctuate wildly, but sustained growth compounds through any cycle. Focus on fundamentals, not noise.
2. AI as Accelerant, Not Strategy AI should amplify existing strengths, not become the entire value proposition. Workhorses beat gimmicks at scale.
3. Cash Is Strategic Flexibility In uncertain markets, balance sheet strength enables opportunistic moves while competitors struggle.
4. Employee Liquidity Drives IPO Timing For profitable companies, public markets provide liquidity solutions more than capital access.
5. Distribution Moats Require Active Defense Winning new platforms (LLMs) requires the same systematic approach as traditional SEO.
6. Mission Beats Mercenaries at Scale Cultural alignment becomes more valuable as companies mature and face inevitable challenges.
The meta-lesson from Canva’s journey: building at scale requires different muscles than early-stage growth. The companies that understand this distinction — and build accordingly — separate themselves from the pack.
Cliff Obrecht co-founded Canva in 2012 and serves as Chief Operating Officer. Under his leadership, Canva has grown to 240 million monthly active users and approaching $4 billion in annual recurring revenue.
The full convo here:
