Food and toilet paper helped Canva become a tech unicorn
Summary
Team building through shared meals; keeping a "healthy tension" between business, design, and engineering needs; creating a company culture around six core values that resulted in Canva taking a closer look at reducing its toilet paper footprint; and continual innovation were some of the attributes that laid the foundation for the company to achieve unicorn status, according to Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams. What he failed to mention though, during his keynote at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit on Tuesday, was the companys approach to security, an area that recently landed the Sydney-based startup in hot water. In May, the data of roughly 139 million Canva users were stolen when the companys graphic design service was hacked by infamous hacker GnosticPlayers. Stolen data included details such as customer usernames, real names, email addresses, and city and country information, where available. He pointed to how Canva was forced to move from using coupled to decoupled software to "make sure each team can work independently but still feedback to the core solution".