In the latest episode of The Platform Journey, Avanish sits down with Warren Chen, Head of Ecosystem Partnerships & Developer Success at Canva.
In this episode, Avanish and Warren talk about:
Guest: Warren Chen
Warren is Head of Ecosystem Partnerships and Developer Success at Canva, with over a decade of experience in App Platform Ecosystems at Salesforce, Atlassian, and Canva.
Host: Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
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Avanish: Welcome, everybody, to another edition of The Platform Journey. This season we’re trying to go a little bit more global, so today I’m super excited to have another old friend and colleague, Warren Chen. Warren is head of ecosystem partnerships at Canva, an Australia-based company. They do some really, really cool stuff in the design and marketing space. And by the way, I am a user too. So, Warren, welcome to The Platform Journey.
Warren: Great. Thanks for inviting me, Avanish. Really excited to be here, and appreciate that you are a Canva user as well. [Laughter] Spreading the Canva gospel.
Avanish: Yeah. I’m no designer. My creative instincts are minimal. But even I can make some pretty cool stuff with Canva.
So, Warren, talk a bit about both Canva—for those who may not have heard it—and about your own journey to get here. You’ve had some fun stops along the way, and I think it’d be great for people to understand a bit of that journey.
Warren: Yeah. Maybe let me start with Canva. I think your introduction to Canva is actually exactly what Canva is all about—making design easier and accessible for anybody to do. Historically, design has been very challenging. [There are] a lot of separate tools you have to become an expert in to get something of really high quality out of it. Canva was largely created to really democratize design and make design accessible to anybody, like you or I.
As for me, I have over a decade of experience in platforms and ecosystem partnerships, starting in my days at Salesforce on the AppExchange back in 2012. I spent seven years there in a couple different roles, and a little bit on the technology side as an ISV technical evangelist. Think of it as a solution architect working to launch new technologies to/with our ISV (independent software vendor) partners so that we’d get new types of apps and capabilities into the AppExchange.
Then I spent two years at Atlassian, another Australian tech company. I was head of marketplace partnerships—so, ISV partnerships—controlling how we engaged with the marketplace partners through more strategic partnerships and alignment, and maturing the programs that we used to support them.
[I’ve been in] my position at Canva in ecosystem partnerships and developer success for the past nine months. Pretty much anything that is developer-facing is my domain. The partnership side, advocacy, and support are all within my purview.
Avanish: Awesome. Let’s dive into that a little bit, Warren. You described at a high level what Canva is. Maybe just take it one level further down and describe why you need a platform strategy and an ecosystem? Where does that come into play for your value prop?
Warren: Yeah. Canva was launched in 2013 [and] grew to a million users pretty quickly. Fast forward to last year, we hit a hundred million monthly active users. Today, we’re at 135 million. A lot of that growth is because we have the capabilities and functionality to design whatever you want. It originally started more around static assets. For social media, for printing—like posters or résumés. Over the past 12 years, we’ve been maturing the product suite to include things like presentations, websites, being able to do whiteboarding, and having a lot of core capabilities ourselves.
Our platform journey actually started about five years ago [when] we introduced the first set of extension points. These were very static and one-dimensional in terms of what you could do. They were trying to make adding capabilities into Canva as easy as basically doing a design. You could bring content into Canva, you could manipulate an element (like do an image filter), you could publish from Canva. It was very targeted towards specific use cases. We’ve been maturing those capabilities as we think about what our developers have been asking for over these past several years, in terms of the capabilities they needed to deliver higher-quality apps to Canva users.
Avanish: You said a really key point there, which is listening to users. They’re starting to treat you as a platform, basically, and therefore exposing connection points, extensions, etc., just becomes part of the natural way to expand your footprint.
Warren: Definitely. We saw some real success with our extension points, which led us to want to expand the capabilities. One of our most successful capabilities actually started off as an edit extension—the background remover capability, which we introduced back in 2020 as an app. That was a viral success almost from day one. There’s a good story about how the growth was so fast on that first day that they released it, they had to actually stop their holiday dinner to spin up more tech capacity to handle the volume. Within six months, it was such a success that Canva acquired a company called Kaleido, and it became a core feature. That’s one example of success that came from the ecosystem, and really showed that Canva and Canva users could benefit from that platform-ecosystem mode.
Avanish: Love it. Great example of why the strategy is often implemented, right? There are things that someone else may have a deeper insight around, and exposing them to the customer base proves—or not, sometimes—whether they’re interesting, valuable, etc. Pretty cool.
You’re there to help them continue on this journey. It is a journey, as we all know. It never ends, if it’s done right. Where do you feel like you are on that journey that started, you said, five years ago?
Warren: Yeah. I mean, to be honest with you, I think we’re still very early, in the first couple of steps of that journey. Mel and Cliff, our founders, have a saying: Canva is 1% of the way to where they want to be. We’ve been at 1% literally since our founding, because we keep dreaming bigger. We keep having bigger aspirations, and we keep seeing that there’s more we can do to help our users design and delight [both] themselves and those that they’re designing for with Canva capabilities.
On the platform side, even though we started five years ago, frankly, we didn’t have a lot of third-party developers building these extension apps. That’s why we revisited our platform strategy about a year and a half ago, as to how to rebuild our platform to be a lot more flexible and allow higher-quality, more powerful capabilities. We then built our new platform, which we just launched two weeks ago. I think we’re very early in our days, especially when it comes to building an ecosystem around the platform.
Avanish: I should have said this in your title – it’s not just the ecosystem partnerships, but also developer success. That is a fundamental piece, I think, of any platform strategy. Those developers could be your own developers; they could be developers inside a services partner; they could be developers inside an ISV; they could be independent. All of those are covered under that, I would assume. Talk a bit about what developer success means for Canva, or for anybody thinking of a platform strategy. What is that?
Warren: Let me maybe go back to my early days entering into platform ecosystems at Salesforce. We had some great leaders back then, including yourself.
Avanish: Thank you.
Warren: One of the first lessons I learned is that we need to think of our ISVs, the people who are building on our platform. In Canva’s terminology, we call them developers [but] we need to think of them as customers, just like we would the end user of whatever they or we are building on top of our platform. There was a saying that there’s the big C—that’s the consumer or the end customer—and the little c,which is the developer. I think that’s something that I’ve taken to heart and introduced everywhere I’ve been when it comes to working with our development partners.
I don’t love the terminology ISV and software vendors, because people think of vendors as somebody who you’re paying for a service. I like calling them partners, because they really are partners—it’s a joint success story that we’re looking to develop and mature together.
Avanish: I really appreciate that, because people don’t always think of the developers that way. I think it’s often hidden in some kind of developer marketing/developer relationship role, without the visibility that it deserves, without the investment and focus, or, frankly, the product strategy and roadmap, that they need. I love hearing that that’s both a priority and how you think about that.
Let’s take that as a baseline. You’ve got a developer-centric view of the world—a view of developers as partners and customers, as you were saying. As the value prop has evolved, as the story has evolved—at Canva, or as you led this at Atlassian—what are some of the key success factors? Because you’re in a pretty competitive market space. There are incumbents who have been around for decades, whose products are notoriously expensive and not easy to use. Developers are key, but they can be very sophisticated. They can be very, very, very technical. How do you address their needs? What are the key factors that you feel have allowed you to achieve success?
Warren: I think there are two key ingredients. One, it’s not just the platform and ecosystem teams supporting and building for the developer. It needs to be an all-company effort. You need to have alignment and buy-in from the top down to really have a culture where you’re not just building an end-product; you’re building a platform, with a product that’s built on top, and providing that platform to others to build capabilities on top. We’ve been championing that story for several years now here at Canva, and we have buy-in all the way down from Mel and Cliff, our cofounders. I think that’s part one.
Part two is, as we start working with the developers who are interested in building on our platform, we have to really listen to them—really understand what they’re trying to do. What’s their business model? What’s their business case? What’s their app use case? Make sure that you’re delivering the best possible set of capabilities (that, obviously, is supporting what Canva’s trying to do as well) that you can.
If you can’t do something, for business reasons or technical reasons, be transparent about it. Have that open line of communication and let them know why you’ve made certain decisions. That’s how you build trust with your developers, and ultimately that’s what keeps developers coming back and building more.
Avanish: Hard to disagree with any of that. It’s a companywide mindset. You mentioned the founders. I’m being kind of repetitive here, but I think boards and investors and others need to be aligned on that too, because it’s not an easy thing to do.
Trust is fundamental. And it comes from transparency. It comes from being candid when you have to be. Having worked with a lot of developers and developer communities, they have choices. The minute you break that trust, or if you do a bait-and-switch on them, they can go elsewhere.
Warren: Yeah. They have long memories.
To your point about having even the board on board… Over the past several years, I’ve had opportunities to speak to board members and talk with founders about how important this is. It’s a big investment, and it’s not a one-time investment and then you can take your foot off the pedal, so to speak. It’s a constant investment to keep improving and growing what you can do with that platform. Having that buy-in from the board down is paramount to the long-term success and viability of your platform and the ecosystem that you’re building around it.
Avanish: Yeah, yeah. I think the resourcing, the investment strategy, the patience that you have to have—if everybody is not aligned with that, and there are a lot of internal silos or give-and-takes, it becomes challenging.
Warren, again, you’ve seen this movie a few times. We talked about the goodness and the alignment, etc., [but] it’s not always easy. What are some of the challenges that you have encountered? How do you work around those? Talk a bit about some of the lessons you’ve learned.
Warren: Even when you have that alignment and shared vision that we have a platform strategy within the company, every single quarter, every single plan period, there is prioritization going on. The investments that you’re hoping to have in the platform don't always take shape. It really comes down to how you use those investments, and those areas [where] you are able to build out new capabilities, to the full span. It comes down to prioritizing what you’re focused on and making sure that you’re doing things that add the most value to all three parties: the end consumer, to show them what they can get from the apps that are being built; the developers who are building those apps; and then, ultimately, us as a platform provider. Are we going to get that ROI [to justify] those investments that we’re making? I think that’s the main challenge.
I think the other thing is, building platforms is hard. It’s not a linear trajectory in terms of building capabilities. You’re going to sometimes take some backward steps in order to make improvements or rebuild things that might not have been architected the right way the first time. If there have been changes in how technology is being deployed, you have to adapt to that. Take that in stride and don’t get too down about it. We might have to take a pause and introduce new features or abilities because we’ll need to make some improvements to the core platforms that we’re building. Just [make] sure that you’re sharing that information with the developers that are building on your platform. They are all developers, they are all technologists. They understand some of the challenges there. Instead of trying to hide from it or pretend it doesn’t exist, just be transparent about it.
Avanish: Again, I think those words are super key. They’re guidelines and principles that you have to live by if you’re in this business. Transparency. Openness. “Hey, things didn’t exactly work like we planned, or it’s not as complete as we had hoped. But here it is; give us feedback.” Also, I love the fact that, as you said earlier, you really treat them as a partner, not as an arm’s-length transactional relationship. They want to be partners. They’re committing their success to your commitment, to your investment, and to your strategy as well. So that’s super, super important there.
You mentioned ROI. That’s not a term we often hear in these conversations, and I think it’s super important. How do you measure success? What are some of the measures that you’ve defined for yourself, your teammates, your business, that say, here’s how we think about success?
Warren: The first thing I’ll say is, for every single company, every single ecosystem I’ve worked at, there’s a slightly different measure of success. [However,] there are probably some underlying measures that go across all [ecosystems,] around the technology and innovation moat. A healthy developer ecosystem building really cool new apps and capabilities can help build that moat around your platform, around your app. That’s one area that we’re really focused on here at Canva.
I think the other metrics really come down to where you’re at in terms of your platform and ecosystem maturity. Right now, we aren’t really overly concerned about direct monetization of the platform. We know we need to get there. We know we need to offer those capabilities to our developers, because that’s ultimately what’s going to help them build a business around what they’re doing with Canva. But right now, we’re a little bit more focused on the supply side, which is making sure that we’re offering the capabilities to the developers so they can build the apps that Canva users really want.
It was really delightful and powerful, and Canva users are seeing that value and using the apps more and more. Ultimately, that’s what’s going to lead to the long-term success for us as a platform, and lead to success for the developers building on the platform. Everything is about how much app usage are we getting? How many new, similar apps are we getting that our Canva users are really excited about? That’s our focus.
Avanish: If I were to just interpret that in terms of specifics, the metrics would be adoption. Whether it’s a new app, new developer, new offering, it sounds like the speed and sheer breadth of adoption are pretty important. It’s not about monetizing, either from the end customer or the partners. It’s basically asking, “Is this valuable,” and ultimately testing its stickiness.
Warren: We’re definitely focused on just pure adoption right now, then we’re focused on the stickiness. “Okay, they’re using the app one time. Are they using it consistently? Is their monthly usage average going up? Are they using more than just one app?” Those are things that we’re going to start to track very soon. But [right now] we’re just focused on making sure we’re getting those apps out there, and that we’re seeing good adoption by our end users.
Avanish: Yeah. I’ll go a bit on a tangent here. I was at an event recently, hosted by a venture firm, and they had a world-renowned chef as their guest speaker. One thing he said in his opening remarks, which I thought was fantastic, was he compared founders to restaurant chefs. The analogy was twofold. One, you have to be passionate about what you do because it’s a hard job, and you work seven days a week, 18, 20 hours a day sometimes.
For the second point, which I thought was just brilliant, he’s like, “You may have someone come into your restaurant once. They only become a customer when they come back.” That, I thought, was genius. Really, that determines your relationship, and in tech we call it stickiness. In the restaurant business, they probably don’t use that term, per se. But that’s how they measure. If someone is coming back and bringing their friends and staying back longer, that means that we have something of high value, and obviously in this case high taste, for them.
Warren: Well, I’m a huge foodie myself, so I love that analogy. I will probably have to tuck that away and use that myself at some point. [Laughter]
Avanish: And sometimes you have to change your menu a little bit. Sometimes you have to adapt. But until they come back for the second time, they’re not really a customer. I thought that was great.
So, Warren, you’ve been sprinkling a lot of really important points throughout the chat here. A goal for these kinds of conversations is to extract a bit of guidance or lessons learned. If you were to chat with someone—a former colleague, a friend, someone you meet at an event—who’s thinking similarly, what are the key things they should be thinking about?
Warren: That’s a pretty wide-ranging question, Avanish. I’m going to focus on where we’re at with Canva— which I would consider early-stage in terms of both our platform and our ecosystem—and the things that you should be thinking about, maybe even before you start building your platform and approaching developers to join your ecosystem.
The first thing is to really understand what your users want when it comes to capabilities that app development partners will be building. Make sure that you know what they want and that you’re creating capabilities that will empower developers to build those things. That’s part one. Part two is to really think about and listen to those developers that you’re targeting, and understand who they are.
The other thing that you may not think is important early on is monetization, or how somebody would make money, potentially, through your platform. That, I can tell you, is a question that I get even at this time, with our maturity at Canva. Have an idea of where you envision your platform maturing to, [not just] from a capability standpoint, but whether and how you are going to monetize within the platform. At least have a POV, even though it could change. Again, be transparent with the developers you’re working with about how that’s evolving. But at least have thought through what that monetization model, what that business model, would look like on your platform.
I think those are the two must-dos early in building out your platform and building out the ecosystem, because your developers are going to ask you about those.
Avanish: Understanding the needs, and understanding what the underlying commercial or business model is or could be. Subject to change, perhaps. Those are excellent points.
Warren, one last question. Who do you look to—if you can name some names—as folks who’ve thought this through well and would be good role models, good examples, of how to think about this from all the points of view you raised?
Warren: I’m going to exclude anybody that I’ve worked for in the past and look outside [to] ones that I’ve admired from afar, so to speak. There are two that come to mind. One is Shopify. I think they’ve done an amazing job of building that ecosystem of partners around the e-commerce workflow that they’ve built out. They have done an amazing job with that. They’ve seen a lot of success with how each partner that touches on different steps and stages of that e-commerce workflow adds a lot of value and is filling gaps that they couldn’t fill themselves. The second is Stripe. I really admire what they’ve done with their platform and their APIs. They have a robust set of capabilities, it’s really easy to use, and it’s really documented well. Those are the two that I have always admired and said, “They’re doing all the right things,” from what I can tell as an external admirer.
Avanish: Great examples. Warren, it’s been a delight to have you on. I really thank you for sharing your thoughts. Any final comments? Any final thoughts from you?
Warren: I think two things. One, it’s been a pleasure learning from you, early in my career, so thank you for inviting me. I always get some wisdom from every time I talk to you. The second thing is, if you’ve never used Canva before, please go out there and use it. We’re adding a lot of new capabilities. We’re making a lot of investments in our ecosystems. If you’re a developer, definitely come and check out our Apps SDK, which we just GA’d. I’m just really excited about the journey we’re on here at Canva, and I think we’re going to build a world-class platform that will benefit both our end users and the developers who decide to build with us.
Avanish: Fantastic. Warren, always a pleasure. Thank you for the kind words, and best of luck on the journey at Canva.
Warren: Thank you, Avanish.