The next time you’re sitting through a company-wide meeting, half-listening to a leader drone on about updates or product launches (and hoping they don’t announce layoffs or budget cuts), remember this: at least they’re not rapping.
That’s what happened at Canva Create, a summit held in Los Angeles last week, in honor of Canva, a graphic design company known for helping non-designers produce good-enough flyers to advertise a yard sale or middle school talent show. In LA, Melanie Perkins, co-founder of the $40bn Australian brand, spoke to attendees about “brand-building, maintaining a strong company culture and scaling operations”, per Variety. (Something she knows a lot about: Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, who also spoke at the summit, is an investor and board member of the platform.)
After run-of-the-mill talks and discussions, the team decided to put on a show. Two presenters – and a cast of backup breakdancers, all of whom were most certainly regretting their respective life paths in the moment – performed a “rap battle” that they used to describe updates the tech company has made to the design app.
Sample bars included: “You can redesign your work / Canva got that glow up / We redesign errything / From the floor up.” On the topic of AI, which is known to steal art from actual human workers, one performer dropped: “We don’t train on your work without your permission / Safe and securrrrrr if that’s what you’re wishing.”
Canva is on the traditional corp Extend, Embrace, Extinguish mission to snuff Digital Content Design that is local only and has no AI. Canva bought Affinity Design Suite, which was the reaction of the non-corp creative world to not have to Adobe Creative Cloud, may it burn.
I believe we are in the era of “the great rug pull” of consumer empowered technology, moving to corp empowered technology stack, with them in control at all levels.
Canva is very much trying to become another juggernaut that dominates a space, but I don’t quite get how this is an example of EEE.
They are trying to dominate the market through the good ‘ol acquisition and consolidation strategy. AKA, buy up my current and would be competitors. Is there a standard that they are actually embracing and trying to extend? Example: Meta embracing and contributing to Activity Pub.