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Business Insider
02-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Canva's cofounder says creatives are making a mistake by not embracing AI in their work
Canva's cofounder said creatives should embrace AI, and it'd be foolish not to do so. Cliff Obrecht said designers are reacting to AI as they did to Canva in its early days. But Canva helped free designers' time for more "high-value work," he said. Cliff Obrecht, who cofounded the design software company with his wife Melanie Perkins, said designers are reacting to AI like they did to Canva in its early days. "So at Canva, when we launched, a lot of designers said, 'Canva, we hate you. You are ruining our industry. You are like letting everyone design,'" Obrecht said on a Tuesday podcast episode of Masters of Scale. "And so over time, it didn't take long, within four years, designers didn't feel threatened by Canva," he said, adding that Canva's tools helped designers free up time for "high-value work." He said he sees "AI as just another step in that evolution," and that it's time for creatives to embrace the new technology. "Not embracing AI as a creative is, you can see where it's going. It seems folly," he said to the podcast's host, Bob Safian. Canva first launched AI-powered tools in 2023, with its "Magic" branded tools, which assisted in copywriting and designing. In April, it launched its Visual Suite 2.0, which integrated tools for design, writing, coding, and data visualization. This comes as creatives from various industries have raised concerns over the last few years about AI killing their jobs. In 2023, Adobe employees slammed the company after it launched Firefly, an extensive suite of generative AI tools. Adobe employees, whose customer base consists of creatives, said the tool would kill the jobs of some of its customers. There were also concerns that Adobe could use creators' content to train its AI models, something the company denied in a blog post in 2024. The AI debate has reached Hollywood. In 2023, more than 11,000 Hollywood film and TV screenwriters went on strike to criticize the use of AI in the film industry and demand more regulation in the field. However, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the cofounder of DreamWorks, said in an AI conference in December that top Hollywood showrunners and creators are embracing AI and seeing it as a useful resource to their creative processes. In June, former Disney exec Kevin Mayer said in an Opening Bid podcast that AI could make video and storyline creation more efficient for creatives.
Business Insider
02-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Canva's cofounder says creatives are making a mistake by not embracing AI in their work
Canva 's cofounder and chief operating officer says it's foolish for creatives not to embrace AI. Cliff Obrecht, who cofounded the design software company with his wife Melanie Perkins, said designers are reacting to AI like they did to Canva in its early days. "So at Canva, when we launched, a lot of designers said, 'Canva, we hate you. You are ruining our industry. You are like letting everyone design,'" Obrecht said on a Tuesday podcast episode of Masters of Scale. "And so over time, it didn't take long, within four years, designers didn't feel threatened by Canva," he said, adding that Canva's tools helped designers free up time for "high-value work." He said he sees "AI as just another step in that evolution," and that it's time for creatives to embrace the new technology. "Not embracing AI as a creative is, you can see where it's going. It seems folly," he said to the podcast's host, Bob Safian. Canva first launched AI-powered tools in 2023, with its "Magic" branded tools, which assisted in copywriting and designing. In April, it launched its Visual Suite 2.0, which integrated tools for design, writing, coding, and data visualization. This comes as creatives from various industries have raised concerns over the last few years about AI killing their jobs. In 2023, Adobe employees slammed the company after it launched Firefly, an extensive suite of generative AI tools. Adobe employees, whose customer base consists of creatives, said the tool would kill the jobs of some of its customers. There were also concerns that Adobe could use creators' content to train its AI models, something the company denied in a blog post in 2024. The AI debate has reached Hollywood. In 2023, more than 11,000 Hollywood film and TV screenwriters went on strike to criticize the use of AI in the film industry and demand more regulation in the field. However, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the cofounder of DreamWorks, said in an AI conference in December that top Hollywood showrunners and creators are embracing AI and seeing it as a useful resource to their creative processes. In June, former Disney exec Kevin Mayer said in an Opening Bid podcast that AI could make video and storyline creation more efficient for creatives.
Fast Company
01-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone talks AI, reinvention, and reclaiming relevance
Yahoo is at a critical inflection point. Despite having a large user base—across Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo News—the media company hasn't reclaimed the buzz of its early days. CEO Jim Lanzone candidly discusses the fear of being 'left behind' and how he's pushing the brand to shed its old skin. He explains the wide-ranging implications as AI remakes search engines into answer engines and shares insights about the line between fantasy sports and gambling. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I wanted to ask you, you talk about it like Yahoo is sort of in a turnaround or a restart. But I mean, Yahoo News is the number-one news site on the internet, right? Yahoo Finance is the number one. Your fantasy sports platform is huge. You've got a big ad tech business, which I'm sure you talk about here. Second-largest email platform. You've got search, not Google-size search, but still substantial . . . All that sounds pretty robust. Yeah. Amazing ingredients with which to do a turnaround. So the way I would think about it is that absolutely the brands are still extremely relevant and they've had very loyal user bases. As a business, I think a lot of people know, but some maybe don't, that we were spun out of Verizon. Over the years, Yahoo was a stand-alone public company. It was acquired by Verizon in the mid-2010s. They also acquired AOL, which we also own and is one of our brands. And we were acquired for about $5 billion. So if you think about the other brands in and around our rankings in the traffic rankings, they're all trillion dollar brands. And so we had something to work with in terms of the size and loyalty of some of the audiences. But in some cases, email's one of them. We had a big announcement last week. The core product hadn't been improved in over 10 years. And so in the last nine months, every product that we operate has been relaunched with brand-new versions. And so taking advantage of the size of that audience to rebuild the business to be super valuable is the more turnaround side of it. And when you look at something that is robust, like the fantasy sports, as the NFL season comes, which will be your next big burst, right? We actually have a lot planned for it this year. I was curious, how much of the goal is to use this opportunity to introduce those users to other things you have, versus give them new things around what they already are coming for? I mean, what you'll find is that our individual brands have in some ways different audiences. People who really use Yahoo Finance as their way to make more money and save more money and attract stocks and all that is pretty independent of people who love fantasy or love checking sports scores with Yahoo Sports. I definitely think the secret sauce of Yahoo, especially for advertisers, since we're here, is that, collectively, it's hundreds of millions of people who have a first-party relationship with us, which makes our ad targeting extremely effective. So one Yahoo overall is something that actually is true about the actual business. Getting people to use Yahoo as one point for everything is something that will happen over time, but we're not going top-down in how we go about it. But it sounds like you don't necessarily, at least right now, need to convert people into being like, 'I'm a Yahoo, and I do everything in the Yahoo world.' I think that was the '90s Yahoo, and I think the internet kind of moved past that. That said, we did relaunch the Yahoo homepage in February after months of testing different variations of it because the user base gets pretty locked in with how they do things, and you can really mess it up in the link chain if you change something. So we found one that really worked, and the most interesting thing about it was we went back to adding more portal-like features. Over the years, it'd become kind of just a newsfeed, and we added things back that were more utility-based around weather and other things and found that people love that. So actually, the Yahoo homepage that is more of a place to get things done is probably more the direction we'll head with it than just straight news. Not everything about the way the internet was framed in the beginning was wrong. Right? It's interesting because having competed against the people at Yahoo for the first 20-plus years of my career and taking that eye towards it, working here, you do kind of get an appreciation for how . . . If you go back and look at the 2007 version of the homepage or 2003, there was some magic to that and how it all worked, especially with the way the internet has gone with a lot of slop and misinformation, disinformation, clickbait, and people trying to get you to do things. The fact that it kind of had everything in one place, I don't know, it was maybe taken for granted a little bit. So we actually have taken some inspiration from that. Obviously we try to modernize it. But yeah, we've taken some inspiration from it. So with the generative AI wave, media is changing like crazy. As search engines like Google become more of an answer engine as opposed to a search engine, sites like a lot of yours may see some of their referral traffic decline. At the same time, you have a search business yourselves. And if you follow where that is going to become more of an answer engine, you may encourage the development in that direction in people's habits, which could undercut the other part of your business. I'm just curious how you think about those pieces fitting together. Yeah. And I spent the first 10 years of my career in search, and a lot of what we did back in the day was absolutely moving things towards an answer engine. And so I would say that's not really new. What people know as Google OneBox, a lot of the search engines in the early 2000s were doing, already brought answers like the weather or music lyrics or multimedia or translations directly into the page. So this has always been the case. Now, there are certain kinds of queries called navigational queries. Those are trying to get you directly to a website. I do find it interesting that a lot of the generative . . . A lot of the large language models, they're getting a lot of their traffic and sending it to places that are more canonical. So for ChatGPT, 50% of their citations are Wikipedia. For Perplexity, almost 50% are Reddit. And so those are more evergreen, deeper, almost more educational responses. A lot of Yahoo's content is real-time, stock prices, sports scores. So for us personally, we operate in a kind of a different space. But you don't expect that referral traffic to decline? So a couple things. So one is I actually strongly believe that the role of search is not to take traffic from the open web, but to send traffic. And in our case, Yahoo's been doing that for over two decades. We have relationships with all of our publishers where we share revenue, we send traffic downstream. And so I actually think that's part of what Yahoo's always done really well is help create a healthy ecosystem. That was also part of the bargain of the open web for search, that you would make yourself available to the engine that would then send you traffic downstream. Having that traffic get cut off and just subsuming that data to then keep it for yourself was not part of that grand bargain. I think we're in the early days of figuring out how that's going to go. What I actually think will happen in search over time, because I think we're still in the primordial phase here of what AI versions of search will look like, is that the page will respond to your query and to what the search engine knows about you personally to have a different version of the search results page depending on the query type and depending on you. And so you're never going to get the same kind of response to each one of these. I personally really believe that it should ultimately wind up sending traffic downstream to the sources, and little citation links probably are not going to do that.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Block's CFO explains Gen Z's surprising approach to money management
One stock recently impacted by a whirlwind of volatility is Block—the fintech powerhouse behind Square, Cash App, Tidal Music, and more. The company's COO and CFO, Amrita Ahuja, shares how her team is using new AI tools to find opportunity amid disruption and reach customers left behind by traditional financial systems. Ahuja also shares lessons from the video game industry and discusses Gen Z's surprising approach to money management. Pentagon Pizza Index: The theory that surging pizza orders signal global crises What is a fridge cigarette? The viral Diet Coke trend explained 5 signals that make you instantly more trustworthy at work This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. This embedded content is not available in your region. As a leader, when you're looking at all of this volatility—the tariffs, consumer sentiment's been unclear, the stock market's been all over the place. You guys had a huge one-day drop in early May, and it quickly bounced back. How do you make sense of all these external factors? Yeah, our focus is on what we can control. And ultimately, the thing that we are laser-focused on for our business is product velocity. How quickly can we start small with something, launch something for our customers, and then test and iterate and learn so that ultimately, that something that we've launched scales into an important product? I'll give you an example. Cash App Borrow, which is a product where our customers can get access to a line of credit, often $100, $200, that bridges them from paycheck to paycheck. We know so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That's a product that we launched about three years ago and have now scaled to serve 9 million actives with $15 billion in credit supply to our customers in a span of a couple short years. The more we can be out testing and launching product at a pace, the more we know we are ultimately delivering value to our customers, and the right things will happen from a stock perspective. Block is a financial services provider. You have Square, the point-of-sale system; the digital wallet Cash App, which you mentioned, which competes with Venmo and Robinhood; and a bunch of others. Then you've got the buy-now, pay-later leader Afterpay. You chair Square Financial Services, which is Block's chartered bank. But you've said that in the fintech world, Block is only a little bit fin—that comparatively, it's more tech. Can you explain what you mean by that? What we think is unique about us is our ability as a technology company to completely change innovation in the space, such that we can help solve systemic issues across credit, payments, commerce, and banking. What that means ultimately is we use technologies like AI and machine learning and data science, and we use these technologies in a unique way, in a way that's different from a traditional bank. We are able to underwrite those who are often frankly forgotten by the traditional financial ecosystems. Our Square Loans product has almost triple the rate of women-owned businesses that we underwrite. Fifty-eight percent of our loans go to women-owned businesses versus 20% for the industry average. For that Cash App Borrow product I was talking about, 70% of those actives, the 9 million actives that we underwrote, fell below 580 as a FICO score. That's considered a poor FICO score, and yet 97% of repayments are made on time. And this is because we have unique access to data and these technology and tools which can help us uniquely underwrite this often forgotten customer base. Yeah. I mean, credit—sometimes it's been blamed for financial excesses. But access to credit is also, as you say, an advantage that's not available to everyone. Do you have a philosophy between those poles—between risk and opportunity? Or is what you're saying is that the tech you have allows you to avoid that risk? That's right. Let's start with how do the current systems work? It works using inferior data, frankly. It's more limited data. It's outdated. Sometimes it's inaccurate. And it ignores things like someone's cash flows, the stability of your income, your savings rate, how money moves through your accounts, or how you use alternative forms of credit—like buy now, pay later, which we have in our ecosystem through Afterpay. We have a lot of these signals for our 57 million monthly actives on the Cash App side and for the 4 million small businesses on the Square side, and those, frankly, billions of transaction data points that we have on any given day paired with new technologies. And we intend to continue to be on the forefront of AI, machine learning, and data science to be able to empower more people into the economy. The combination of the superior data and the technologies is what we believe ultimately helps expand access. You have a financial background, but not in the financial services industry. Before Block, you were a video game developer at Activision. Are financial businesses and video games similar? Are there things that are similar about them? There are. There actually are some things that are similar, I will say. There are many things that are unique to each industry. Each industry is incredibly complex. You find that when big technology companies try to do gaming. They've taken over the world in many different ways, but they can't always crack the nut on putting out a great game. Similarly, some of the largest technology companies have dabbled in fintech but haven't been able to go as deep, so they're both very nuanced and complex industries. I would say another similarity is that design really matters. Industrial design, the design of products, the interface of products, is absolutely mission-critical to a great game, and it's absolutely mission-critical to the simplicity and accessibility of our products, be it on Square or Cash App. And then maybe the third thing that I would say is that when I was in gaming, at least the business models were rapidly changing from an intermediary distribution mechanism, like releasing a game once and then selling it through a retailer, to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection. And similarly with banking, people don't want to bank from 9 to 5, six days a week. They want 24/7 access to their money and the ability to, again, grow their financial livelihood, move their money around seamlessly. So, some similarities are there in that shift to an intermediary model or a slower model to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection. Part of your target audience or your target customer base at Block are Gen Z folks. Did you learn things at Activision about Gen Z that has been useful? Are there things that businesses misunderstand about younger generations still? What we've learned is that Gen Z, millennial customers, aren't going to do things the way their parents did. Some of our stats show that 63% of Gen Z customers have moved away from traditional credit cards, and over 80% are skeptical of them. Which means they're not using a credit card to manage expenses; they're using a debit card, but then layering on on a transaction-by-transaction basis. Or again, using tools like buy now, pay later, or Cash App Borrow, the means in which they're managing their consistent cash flows. So that's an example of how things are changing, and you've got to get up to speed with how the next generation of customers expects to manage their money. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘We're on the cusp of more widespread adoption': Laura Shin on Trump, stablecoins, and the global rise of cryptocurrency
With the first family actively engaged in memecoin ventures, speculation about the future of cryptocurrency has never been hotter. Laura Shin, crypto expert and host of the podcast Unchained, reveals the sector's emerging economic, political, and geopolitical implications. Shin also provides context for why stablecoins are growing so fast and how the current administration is shaping the is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Starbucks just developed an ingenious way to add 15 grams of protein to almost any drink 5 ways to rewire your brain for happiness RIP to the almost future of computing: Apple just turned the iPad into a Mac You call yourself a no-hype crypto journalist, so can you give us a short, no-hype overview of where we are right now in crypto's evolution? Yeah, I would say we're probably on the cusp of more widespread adoption. The number-one biggest reason is simply that the Trump administration is really embracing crypto. That has not been true of previous administrations. In fact, the Biden administration was probably, I want to say, actively hostile. I don't know if people will love that term, but that's probably a pretty accurate description. For a long time, there were a lot of entrepreneurs who were cautious about doing things in the U.S. This administration is more, not only open-minded, but even in some regards almost a little bit too embracing of crypto, you could say. I think there's going to be probably a decent number of crypto IPOs this year, but then on top of it, stablecoins are probably the first major application that has really found what the industry likes to call product-market fit. We're seeing that stablecoins have a huge amount of uptake, especially in so many other jurisdictions where they don't trust their local currency. It could be Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey or Nigeria. There are just a lot of places where people don't actually have a great way to save their money, and they maybe don't also have really great ways to send money across borders. So, stablecoins are fulfilling that role and Congress is probably on the cusp of finally passing legislation here in the U.S. around stablecoins. For a layperson, someone not engaged in the crypto world, can you just explain what a stablecoin is relative to a memecoin, relative to whatever the portfolio might look like? Yeah, so a stablecoin is any blockchain-based asset that is pegged to the value of some other asset—99% of all stablecoins are pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. The way that stablecoins really took off initially was that on a number of crypto exchanges, people wanted to be able to buy and trade using dollars. I wrote this book called The Cryptopians, and it covers 2013 until 2018. Even at that time, people would recite back to me the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ether in dollars. No matter whether they were European or Asian or just wherever they were in the world, they always knew the price in dollars. . . . Here's a really simple example: There's a serial entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her name is Roya Mahboob, and she had this microblogging platform, and I think a lot of the people writing for it were women. They had a hard time paying them, because a lot of women in Afghanistan, they don't have bank accounts, or if they do, then their male relatives might actually take the money that they earned from them. So [the platform] set them up with Bitcoin wallets and then taught them how to use them. One of the women was in an abusive marriage and saved up the Bitcoin and then used that to eventually divorce her husband, so that gives you some kind of agency. I have some close Turkish friends, and I think it was in 2018, the value of the lira was just going down and down. So it's like people in those places I think grasp these kinds of things a lot more quickly, like the value of crypto. Having a form of money that isn't influenced by a central bank, that's stablecoins. Because the stablecoins are generally linked to the U.S. dollar, it's a way to sort of have dollars without having dollars, right? Exactly. I mean, you're getting the stability of that U.S. market, which there's some irony in that, because of course one of the philosophical ideas around crypto is that it's not linked to a government, that it's separate. Now we're going to get really deep into this. So you're correct that this is people wanting U.S. dollars, which is a form of currency linked to a specific government, but of course the people who want those dollars are people who don't otherwise have the privilege of easily accessing them. Bitcoin, of course, existed before stablecoins ever existed. There have been times when the Bitcoin price would go up, and then it would crash for a little while, and then it would go up again and then it would crash, and so that's kind of when you started to see stablecoins also take off. A lot of people view Bitcoin as a good long-term investment, but on any short-term timescale, you don't really know where the price is going to be, so if you need the money on a shorter-term timescale, then you would probably rather have something more stable, and so that's where the interest in stablecoins came about. There's a reason why 99% of the stablecoins are denominated or pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar, and it's of course because we're the global reserve currency, so there's a lot of safety there. Trump seems like he's done a full 180 on crypto. I mean, he said it was a scam during his first term and then supported it very strongly in his campaign. He's launched his own Trump coin three days before the inauguration. Do we know how much of Trump's crypto position is about political opportunity or financial opportunity, or some larger philosophy about markets? I don't think there's a larger philosophy. I think most people probably know what Trump's MO is. But let's just say he's president and he took a luxury jetliner from the Qataris, so whatever it is that you think that says about him, it applies to his activities in the crypto world. What I will say though, aside from his personal dealings, which by and large in my opinion, they're business dealings, things that would help his family or him. He launches this memecoin, which by the way, to make one of these things costs almost no money, so I just want to make that clear, and you're basically printing money out of thin air, right? But then on top of that, the people who got in very early, they just had some agreement where they had to hold their coins until whatever it was, 90 days or I forget what the number of days was. Now, fortuitously, when that deadline came, [Trump] announced that he was going to have a dinner, and in order to participate in the dinner, you had to be one of the top holders of this coin, so of course the price shot up right at that time when this unlock was happening for those insiders. Just note the timing there and put those two facts together and you can make your own conclusions, but, well, let me put it this way: Trump saw that the Biden administration alienated the crypto community. He realized these people have money and they hate the Democrats. . . . He said, 'I'm the crypto candidate,' and he even went to the Bitcoin conference last year. He made all these promises to the crypto community and Bitcoin communities. On top of that, people in his personal orbit, his family, realized this industry is going to get bigger, this industry's all about money, and so they have been taking advantage. So you will see, and this is very interesting, there were a number of people who were very passionately pro-Trump during the campaign, and then once the memecoin thing happened, because not only Trump, but also Melania launched a memecoin, and they were not happy about what he was doing. It was reported that their company, World Liberty Financial, was doing deals with different token teams where basically they were just exchanging money. 'I'll give you this amount of money if you buy the World Liberty Financial token, and we'll buy this amount of your token. I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine.' But people in the industry also kind of look down on that, because it's not organic. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
