Stripe’s John Collison and Canva’s Cliff Obrecht sat down together at Stripe Tour, the US fintech’s event in Sydney on Wednesday, and found plenty of common ground on what AI is doing inside two of the world’s biggest private technology companies.
They were less aligned on Taylor Swift.
Obrecht, the Swiftie of the pair, was explaining just how radically Canva had changed the way it builds products when he reached for a line from Look What You Made Me Do. The old Canva, he suggested, couldn’t come to the phone because it was dead.
Collison looked lost.
“Is that the Call Me Baby film?” he replied, presumably grasping for the Carly Rae Jepsen song.
“No, that’s Justin Bieber,” Obrecht replied, erroneously, before giving up.
The exchange was a comic detour in a conversation that offered an unusually detailed look at what AI is doing inside Canva and Stripe — not merely to the products they sell, but to how the companies themselves operate.