Emma Robinson and Kristine Segrist on Canva's B2B and Consumer Growth Engine

The B2B/B2C Binary Is Dead

Emma Robinson and Kristine Segrist are joined at the hip. Not by choice of org chart, but by design. Robinson runs B2B marketing at Canva—go-to-market, customer marketing, growth for enterprise products. Segrist leads consumer marketing—performance, brand, the whole global apparatus. They travel together, plan together, and address their teams together. The reason isn't about efficiency. It's about dismantling a fiction.

"This really strict binary of B2B and B2C, we just feel like that's a little bit of an outdated notion," Segrist explains. "People are constantly moving between different spheres of their life. They're not like, oh, what part of the org chart sent me this communication? They're just seeing things from Canva and either we're delivering value in that moment or we're not."

This really strict binary of B2B and B2C, we just feel like that's a little bit of an outdated notion that people are constantly moving between different spheres of their life.

— Kristine Segrist

The structural implication is radical. Canva's marketing org is matrixed around three business units—B2C, B2B, international—but those units share channel centers of excellence. At the start of every planning cycle, Robinson, Segrist, and their international counterpart lock themselves in a room together. The channels are consistent. The audiences are different. The creative ideas flow both ways. "B2C gives us a lot of creative ideas for B2B," Robinson notes. When Japan's team experiments with creator content on the logged-out homepage and drives unexpected growth, those learnings get pulled into other markets and business lines within weeks.

Attribution Without Bloodshed

The typical B2B marketing org wages silent civil war over attribution. Sales claims credit. Marketing disputes it. CFOs lose patience. Canva solved this by doing what most companies won't: agreeing on a model and sticking to it.

Robinson's B2B team tracks every touchpoint across the sales cycle. Algorithms weight each interaction. The entire model is built on a 50/50 agreement with sales—marketing and sales contribute equally to pipeline. That agreement eliminates the unproductive theater. "We actually have a very tight agreement with sales that we're pretty much driving sort of 50/50 across the attribution funnel," Robinson says. "And so we actually have a lot of rigor around that. It's a very well-agreed and aligned model with our sales team, and they feel very comfortable with it."

We actually have a very tight agreement with sales that we're pretty much driving sort of 50/50 across the attribution funnel. And so we actually have a lot of rigor around that. It's a very well-agreed and aligned model with our sales team, and they feel very comfortable with it.

— Emma Robinson

On the consumer side, the metrics are cleaner but no less rigorous. A massive data science team dissects awareness, paid conversions, signups, trials, and loyalty. The founders set visionary goals—typically around growing ARR, driving trials, expanding functionality usage—and those goals cascade into funnel metrics. Every channel gets measured. Every spend gets ROI accountability. The CFO gets a narrative. The team gets budget.

The result is what Segrist calls "a pretty productive conversation" instead of finger-pointing. No one is asking whose MQL it is. The focus shifts to outcomes, not turf.

Small Teams, Big Swings

Canva is a multi-billion-dollar company that still operates like it's 30 people in a garage. CMO Zach Kiske reports directly to co-founder Melanie Perkins. The org is intentionally flat. Hierarchy is resisted. The best ideas come from experiential teams, PMM, channel specialists—not a small strategy council.

"We're very intentional about that because some of our best ideas or most interesting ideas come from all over the place," Segrist says. "We want that fluidity, and we're really focused on trying to build teams that feel kind of small and empowered, like little swift boat pods that can just chase after areas that they believe will have impact without a ton of friction."

We're really focused on trying to build teams that feel kind of small and empowered, like little swift boat pods that can just chase after areas that they believe will have impact without a ton of friction.

— Kristine Segrist

AI has accelerated this model. Performance marketing teams can spin up tests at speed, find signal in the noise, and rally the org around what works. Small sprint groups surface insights that scale globally. The Japan homepage experiment is one example. Another: Canva's team constantly questions whether "working well" is good enough. Robinson describes the mentality: "Sometimes things are working really well to drive certain outcomes. So maybe you don't look at them again or push on them. But I think actually that constantly trying to beat yourself and not getting into control because something is working well is something we're constantly trying to do."

The culture isn't just about testing. It's about refusing to coast. Hitting numbers isn't the goal. Tripling them is.

From Tooth Fairy Notes to Fortune 500 Boardrooms

Canva's growth story is bottoms-up in the truest sense. Ninety-five percent of Fortune 500 companies have employees using Canva. Not because of enterprise sales blitzes, but because individuals discovered the product, found value, and brought it to work. Someone needed to remove a photo background. Someone else wanted to make a slide deck without wrestling Google Slides. Gen Z employees started building presentations in Canva instead of PowerPoint. The demand was organic, distributed, invisible to procurement.

That created an opening. Robinson's team watches product signals—usage patterns, feature adoption, team formation—and identifies moments when a conversation with the C-suite makes sense. "That really creates a nice conversation for us to then maybe have a conversation with the C-suite or decision makers to say, hey, we're just observing that obviously there's some value here. Is there a way we can structure this to help accelerate and unlock more for you at a tops-down level?"

That really creates a nice conversation for us to then maybe have a conversation with the C-suite or decision makers to say, hey, we're just observing that obviously there's some value here. Is there a way we can structure this to help accelerate and unlock more for you at a tops-down level?

— Emma Robinson

Enterprise needs are different. CIOs don't want unbranded content proliferating across the org. Marketing leaders need brand kits, SSO, granular controls. Canva's enterprise offering addresses those requirements without stripping away the creative flexibility that made people fall in love with the tool in the first place. The self-serve motion feeds the enterprise pipeline. The enterprise product protects what made the self-serve experience magical.

Running Fast at $3 Billion

Scale kills speed in most organizations. Canva is trying to prove that wrong. The marketing team still operates in what Segrist calls a "scrappy way." Bureaucracy is treated like cancer. Approvals are minimized. Small teams move fast, experiment often, and share wins across geographies and business units.

The structure enables it. Channel expertise is centralized. Business outcomes are distributed. The matrix works because Canva uses Canva—strategy docs, briefs, creative reviews all happen in the product. Collaboration isn't a value statement. It's infrastructure.

Robinson and Segrist spend their days running between passports at airports, addressing teams together, and making sure the line between B2B and B2C stays blurry. The approach isn't neat. It's not clean. But it reflects how people actually live and work. And at $3 billion in revenue with 95% penetration of the Fortune 500, it's working.