Jon Kopaloff
- People on X are complaining about a "cringe" performance at a recent Canva event.
- The hip-hop routine gave some people flashbacks to Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical "Hamilton".
- Canva reportedly continues to attract interest from investors, though it doesn't have any firm plans yet for an IPO.
Forget Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer dancing at the Windows 95 launch party. On Sunday, some in the tech world were focused on a new bizarre performance.
The routine took place last week on the stage at Canva Create, a conference hosted in Los Angeles by the company behind the design and editing app. In it, a singer is performing a hip-hop song and dance routine praising the virtues of Canva with six backup dancers surrounding him.
Suddenly, another singer posing as a hypothetical chief information officer from one of the company's clients appears onstage.
"We've got pretty high stakes, no room to err," the CIO sings as she challenges the first singer on Canva's abilities as a jazz track plays in the background. "We need more than a cute little post to share!"
"You can even manage automated licensing, compliancy, there's privacy," he responds to another question later in the performance. Canva did not respond to a request for comment on the performance from Business Insider.
A video of the performance went viral on X, formerly known as Twitter, over the weekend. Even in an industry known for odd spectacles at conferences, some users said the routine stood out:
Other posters pointed out the performance's similarities to "Hamilton", the musical written by Lin-Manuel Miranda that's famous for using slant-rhymes and rap battles to tell the life story of Alexander Hamilton:
Early Canva investors and employees made $1.6 billion on a share sale last month which valued the startup at $26 billion, according to the Australian Financial Review.
The sale indicated strong interest in the company's shares as the company considers going public in the future, the Review reported. A date for an IPO has not been set.