You thought the hottest rap battle of the summer was between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. You were wrong. It's between Canva and an enterprise CIO.
In its Canva Create At last week's event, Canva introduced its new enterprise offerings. But few people would be talking about it if it weren't for an unexpected rap battle that took place forty-five minutes into the performance.
instagram.com/mysocialdesigner/?hl=en&img_index=1″>Roger Coles, a graphic design content creator, takes the stage, framed by a team of dancers. As a dancer backflips across the stage, Coles steps forward to begin his rap, which is presented as a summary of everything we learned in the performance, but wait! A challenger is coming!
“Wait sir!” says a woman emerging from the crowd, microphone in hand, looking a little more professional than everyone else in her navy suit. She plays a worried CIO of a large company, who doubts that Canva can meet her security offerings.
“Logs, SCIM, SSO? Can you really tell me that there is much control? she raps, while a large screen behind her animates every word.
Coles responds: “You can even manage automated licensing, compliance and privacy.”
“I can see that, but are you likely to integrate all of our systems easily?”
“Actually, in fact, you see, we can integrate all of them, even Slack, I think!”
By now, the CIO has abandoned its role as corporate curmudgeon, smiling and dancing in sync with Coles. Soon, they join in for the chorus: “You’ve opened my eyes/with Canva Enterprise.”
Of course, people on social media immediately made fools of the rap. What rap act has ever used terms like SSO and API?
“This is the most embarrassing shit I've ever seen in my entire career.” x.com/anothercohen/status/1794546736880640150″>saying Alex Cohen, founder of a startup, in an x post with almost 9 million views.
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Some compared it to the HBO satirical show “Silicon Valley” or the “L to OG”song from “Succession”.
But for Canva, that was the point. Enterprise software is inherently boring, so why not spice it up?
“We decided to be ourselves, do something different and not take ourselves too seriously,” said Canva founder and COO Cliff Obrecht. wrote on Linkedin. “Haters gonna hate.”
A Canva spokesperson told TechCrunch that more than 50 million people watched the rap battle in 48 hours, leading to a 2,500% increase in people talking about Canva Enterprise on social media.
For better or worse, we must take into account the fact that perhaps technology companies continue to be embarrassed because it is effective.
“An enterprise security rap battle may not be for everyone, but for an enterprise software launch, it certainly got everyone talking,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Perhaps people reacted so strongly against Canva's corporate reputation because we've seen so much corporate shaming over the years.
Heather Morgan, who, along with her husband, pleaded guilty to laundering more than $4 billion in bitcoin from the Bitfinex exchange, worked as a rapper named “Razzlekhan.” Last year at Paris Blockchain Week, billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper sang a song about bitcoin, in which “Satoshi Nakamoto” rhymed with “a perfect token.” Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Randi Zuckerberg, starred in a music video about crypto, which turns Twisted Sister's song “We're Not Gonna Take It” into the crypto meme “We're All Gonna Make It.” At one point, she declares, “Carpe su cryptodiem.”
It's amazing that these people choose to do this so publicly, but doing it privately is even stranger. We learned a lot about facebook from Frances Haugen's whistleblower leaks, but amid the damning documents about child safety, we discovered something damning in a different way: an internal song about corporate profits. If you've never seen anyone rap about family planning and fertility benefits, facebook-benefits-video-may-be-its-greatest-crime”>now you have.
facebook's earnings video is a time capsule. The company was not yet called Meta and the video goes from Zoom to in-person (everyone wears a mask except the one singing), to virtual reality.
“Now let's move that thing and jump into the metaverse!” sings one performer, actually lengthening the last note of the “-verse.” As he puts on the Quest 2 headset, the camera pans to show a “Thank you essential workers!” sign in the background. (And once they jump into the metaverse, of course, the avatars have no legs.)
This is just one recent story of the most embarrassing musical performances in the world of technology. But maybe we expected something different from Canva because it's not your typical Silicon Valley company.
Silicon Valley's strategy has been to prioritize growth over profits, but as a company born in the Australian tech ecosystem, Canva became profitable before raising venture capital. And yes, counterintuitively, that's weird.
“We grew up in Perth, Western Australia, which is the most isolated city in the world,” Obrecht told TechCrunch a few years ago. “We didn't know what venture capital was.”
Canva may not have known what venture capital was when it was founded in 2012, but it's sufficiently assimilated into the tech bubble to embrace corporate shaming.
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