Canva’s rap battles are part of a long history of Silicon Valley embarrassment

You probably thought the hottest rap battle of the summer would be Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake. But you’d be wrong. It’s Canva vs. a corporate CIO.
the Create with Canva At an event last week, Canva announced its new enterprise services, but few people would have been talking about it if an unexpected rap battle hadn’t broken out 45 minutes into the presentation.
Roger Colesgraphic design content creator comes onstage surrounded by a crew of dancers, one of whom backflips across the stage, and Coles stomps out and launches into a rap that sounds like it sums up everything we learned in the presentation, but wait a second: a challenger approaches.
“Wait a second!” calls a woman with a microphone from the crowd. She’s dressed in a navy suit and looks a little more businesslike than the others. She’s playing the role of a CIO at a major corporation who wonders whether Canva has its security in order.
“Logs, SCIM, SSO? Are you sure you have enough control?” she raps, as every word she says is animated on a large screen behind her.
“We can also manage automatic licensing, compliance and privacy,” Coles replies.
“Okay, but is there an easy way to integrate all our systems?”
“In fact, you can integrate everything, even Slack, trust me!”
Now, the CIO has shed his role as corporate bigot and is smiling and dancing in unison with Coles. Soon, they’re singing the chorus together: “Canva Enterprise woke me up.”
Of course, people on social media were quick to mock the rap – has anyone ever used terms like SSO and API in a rap performance?
“This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen in my career.” Said Startup founder Alex Cohen’s X post has been viewed nearly 9 million times.
It was featured in HBO’s satirical shows “Silicon Valley” and “L to OGThe song ” ” from “Succession”.
But for Canva, that was the whole 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 Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s founder and COO. I have written “Hate it, hate it” on LinkedIn
A Canva spokesperson told TechCrunch that within 48 hours, more than 50 million people had watched the rap battle and there had been a 2,500% increase in people talking about Canva Enterprise on social media.
For better or worse, we have to acknowledge that tech companies continue to rely on the trope “embarrassment” because it works.
“A rap battle about enterprise security might not be to everyone’s taste, but it certainly generated conversation during an enterprise software launch,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Maybe the reason people reacted so strongly to Canva’s corporate rap is because we’ve been inundated with corporate harassment for so many years.
Heather Morgan pleaded guilty to laundering more than $4 billion in Bitcoin from the Bitfinex exchange along with her husband, and used her side hustle toLazrekanAt last year’s Paris Blockchain Week, billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper Sang a song about BitcoinIn 2017, he rhymed “Satoshi Nakamoto” with “token perfect.” Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Randi Zuckerberg, said: Cryptocurrency music videois a take on the Twisted Sisters song “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and turn it into the crypto meme “We’re All Gonna Make It.” At one point, she declares, “Carpe your crypto diem.”
It’s incredible that these people would do this in public, but it’s even stranger that they would do it in private. We learned a lot about Facebook from Frances Haugen’s whistleblower leak, but in the incriminating child safety docs we found something else reprehensible: songs about company benefits. If you’ve never heard anyone rap about family planning or fertility benefits, Now you.
Facebook’s employee benefits video is a time capsule: The company wasn’t even called Meta back then, and the video moves from Zoom to in-person (everyone wearing masks except for the singer) to virtual reality.
“Now, let’s move that thing and jump into the metaverse!” sings one performer, really emphasizing the last note of the “-verse.” As he puts on the Quest 2 headset, the camera pans to reveal a sign in the background that reads, “Thank you, essential workers!” (And once they’ve jumped into the metaverse, of course, their avatars won’t have legs.)
This is just the recent history of the tech industry’s most awkward musical performances, but Canva isn’t your typical Silicon Valley company, so maybe we were expecting something different.
The Silicon Valley strategy is to prioritise growth over profits, but as a company born in the Australian tech ecosystem, Canva is profitable before it has raised venture capital – and, counterintuitively, this is unusual.
“We grew up in Perth, Western Australia, 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 launched in 2012, but it was assimilated into the tech bubble enough to embrace corporate shaming.