A WA journalism graduate’s journey from radio to Canva, then pasta – and back to tech

Anna Guerrero had what may be one of the most jarring career changes in tech.

The West Australian-born former Curtin journalism student spent nine years on the rocket ship Canva – eventually leading a team of 500 – before taking a sabbatical in Italy in 2023, where she ended up rolling thousands of ravioli at a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Clove founder and former Canva head of content Anna Guerrero.Credit: Hamish Hastie

Guerrero, 33, has now combined those experiences in a cooking app venture which has won over her former Canva bosses.

Speaking with budding entrepreneurs at her former university last week, Guerrero said her serpentine career path was a testament to the power of going with the flow, given she didn’t study or seek out a tech career. She actually started in journalism.

After graduating in 2013, Guerrero left Perth’s northern suburbs for a job placement to read the overnight news at Sydney AM talkback station 2SM. Eight months later she made the jump to print and online news, working for publishing house Indesign Media.

Her new office in the startup haven of Surry Hills was right around the corner from a little-known graphic design company that had just moved from Perth.

“It was really a bit of a coincidence. My office Indesign was around the corner from Canva, and they had just moved their office there from Perth,” Guerrero told this masthead.

Guerra would bump into the Canva team in the neighbourhood, including its founders and fellow West Australians Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, and hailing from WA helped her connect.

It was this connection that got Guerrero an interview at Canva, eventually securing one of its first non-technical roles to publish a book about graphic design. The team was about 20-people strong at the time.

“I though, ‘I’m going to be a published author, my career is off to a great start’, and then that project never ended up eventuating,” Guerrero said.

“When I started out they said, ‘There’s no book’, and I was like, ‘What do I do?’”

She was moved into a marketing role and helped build the company’s SEO strategy, which has been credited for its rapid growth in the early years.

In Guerrero’s nine years there, Canva grew to 3500 staff and a valuation of about US$26 billion ($39.7 billion) with more than 75 million users.

As the company’s head of content, Guerrero oversaw a team of about 500.

After nearly a decade working for one of Australia’s most extraordinary tech companies, Guerrero left the fast-paced industry in 2023 for a sabbatical.

She flew to Italy to join one of the most esteemed Italian culinary schools in the world, ALMA.

By chance, this school also opened the door for her to work at Michelin-starred restaurant San Brite, set against the backdrop of the Dolomites mountain range.

Guerrero worked from 8am to midnight six days a week at the restaurant, which had seven tables.

“My role was making fresh pasta, I rolled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ravioli – it was very intense, six days a week and I was living with everyone from the restaurant,” she said.

She completed a season at San Brite, but the tech bug was still biting and while she was at the restaurant Guerrero came up with a new venture: a recipe, meal plan and grocery list app embedded with AI.

When she arrived back in Australia in late 2023, she teamed up with fellow Canva alumnus Samuel Killin to build a prototype and started pitching to funders.

In late 2023, Guerrero and Killin secured $4.15 million in pre-seed funding led by venture capital firm Blackbird.

The firm was particularly impressed by the app’s use of AI to collect and save recipes from across the web – including from TikTok and other social media videos.

The new venture – Clove – also has a fan in Obrecht.

“Best feature is how you can pull any cooking vid/short from social and paste the link, and it turns it immediately into a recipe you can easily use,” he said in a LinkedIn post in May.

Food tech is a busy space, but Guerrero said there were still gaps.

“When you think of movies, you think of Netflix but when you think of cooking, there’s not really one place that everyone goes. It’s very fragmented,” she said.

“Clove kind of brings it together into one place so that it’s something that’s more accessible and easy for more people.”

Clove’s AI recipe builder is a major drawcard for the app, but Guerrero said it was an admin tool rather than the heart of the app.

“When we launched, a lot of people said, ‘Oh, you’re building an AI cooking app, you’re generating little recipes’. We decided not to do that because I think recipes are inherently quite emotional and quite personal and quite subjective,” she said.

Guerrero said AI was a useful tool – but companies needed to address ethical concerns around it.

“I think all the companies that are building with AI now do have a kind of responsibility to build the ethics around it,” she said.

“I think that there’s a lot of possibility ahead with where AI will go and I really think the best applications of AI so far are really a combination of things that I think can be an accelerator rather than a replacement.”

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