Former Disney chief Bob Iger and Tesla chair Robyn Denholm, both Canva board members, dialled in to the company all-hands as the founders addressed staff in the wake of nearly 1,300 job cuts, with Iger declaring the restructure “the right thing at the right time.”
Cliff Obrecht told Canva employees on Tuesday that the founders would “happily” step back if they were no longer the right people to lead the design giant, as staff questioned senior management about last week’s restructure affecting nearly 1,300 roles.
CEO Melanie Perkins said the job cuts were a required part of “refounding Canva,” and Obrecht was responding to an employee asking if Canva’s current leadership was the right team for that job.
“We always ask ourselves if we’re the right people to lead this company,” Obrecht said, according to a transcript of the interaction seen by Forbes Australia. “If we’re not, we’ll happily stand aside. It’s something we talk to our board [about] a lot. We’ve been talking through this [restructure] process with our board a lot.”
Former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Tesla chair Robyn Denholm, both Canva board members, dialled into the all-hands. Obrecht gave the floor to Iger, who said he’s “been through many of these cycles” before.
Denholm quietly joined Canva’s board in July 2024, a role that had not been publicly revealed before Tuesday’s meeting.
“I feel very confident that Mel [Perkins] and Cliff and the leadership of Canva are doing the right thing at the right time,” said Iger, who led Disney for almost two decades across two stints and joined Canva’s board in 2022 after investing in the company.
“It’s critical that the people running the company act to implement the strategy that they’ve created, and we hope that they do so with determination and resolve,” Iger said, “but also with empathy. And I think you can sense that the founders of your company are certainly doing it in that regard.”
“Our exhortation to the founders of your company is to make sure that when disruption happens, particularly when it creates a seismic shift in the business, it’s imperative for the company and the founders, the leaders, to recognise that that disruption is happening,” Iger said. “And then to very quickly create the right strategy to contend with that disruption … to protect not only present value, but to maintain long-term value for the company.”
Canva has attempted to do just that by leaning heavily into AI products. It announced Canva 2.0 in April, a reimagining of its platform around AI, but had to delay many of its more ambitious products due to the rising costs of serving AI to millions of non-paying customers. In October it launched Craft, its first foundation model, which it says will enable frontier-AI smarts at a fraction of the cost.
Perkins last week announced Canva’s first major restructure since the company was founded in 2013. In a note to staff she described the cuts as being necessary to streamline its operations, noting that building products had begun to require “more handovers and coordination than necessary.”
The cuts came as Canva grapples with the threat of losing customers to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Investors have slashed the company’s valuation to as low as US$30.4 billion, down from the US$42 billion it entered 2026 at.
Perkins and Obrecht each own an estimated 18 per cent of Canva and are worth US$7.6 billion apiece, according to Forbes estimates. Fellow cofounder Cameron Adams, who holds about 9 per cent, is worth an estimated US$3.8 billion. But most of that wealth is earmarked for charity: Perkins and Obrecht signed the Giving Pledge in 2021, promising to give away more than 80 per cent of their fortune through the Canva Foundation, while Adams has also pledged the majority of his wealth.
“This is without doubt the hardest moment in our thirteen-year history,” Perkins wrote to staff. “This has been our hardest year yet, and as we shared earlier this year, our growth has slowed for the first time in a decade.”
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