Will Jones
For eight years, one of Australia’s most prominent CFOs built his identity around a company worth billions. Then he had to figure out who he was without it.
In most professional narratives, a role like CFO of Canva would be the destination. Eight years spent helping build one of the world’s most valuable private technology companies, from roughly US$10 million in annual revenue to more than US$2 billion. A US$1 billion capital raise. A US$26 billion valuation. Australian CFO of the Year in 2023.
For Damien Singh, it turned out to be a chapter, not the final one.
“For eight years, my identity had become closely tied to being ‘the CFO of Canva,'” Singh reflects. “Stepping away from that role meant letting go of that identity and rediscovering who I was outside of it.”
That kind of reckoning is more common than the startup press tends to acknowledge. The visible milestones — the rounds raised, the valuations achieved, the leadership titles accumulated — tend to obscure the quieter question that often arrives after a major chapter ends: what now, and more importantly, who are you when the role is gone?
The Work of Stepping Back
Singh’s path after Canva hasn’t been a straight line to a new venture with a new set of metrics to hit. It has involved what he describes as a genuine process of reflection — dropping what he calls “the ego and the sense of performing a role” and reconnecting with a simpler version of himself.
That process took time. It also produced clarity. What emerged was a sense of purpose less tied to institutional identity and more grounded in what he actually values: helping founders build organisations that endure, sharing the practical experience accumulated over nearly a decade inside a high-growth global company, and contributing to things that create lasting impact.
“The most fulfilling part of the journey isn’t the titles or the milestones,” Singh says. “It’s the opportunity to help build things that matter in the world and improve people’s lives, and to support others as they pursue their own ambitions.”
Building the Next Thing
Today, Singh’s work sits across early-stage investing and strategic advisory, focused on founders building ambitious technology companies at the pre-seed and seed stage. As the former CFO of Canva who helped scale the company from roughly US$10M to more than US$2B in revenue over eight years, his support for those founders is grounded not in theory but in direct operating experience.
His portfolio already includes an early investment in Adora — an AI-native product mapping platform founded by former Canva operators, which has since raised a US$7 million Seed round led by Blackbird Ventures. He has also participated in the Athletic Ventures Champions Fund and, separately, taken ownership of Gwalia United FC, applying the same principles of financial sustainability and long-term thinking to women’s professional football.
The Value of the Gap
There is something instructive in how Singh describes the period after Canva. Rather than treating the transition as a problem to be solved — a gap to be filled as quickly as possible with a new title — he allowed it to be something rarer: a space in which to actually decide what he wanted to build next, and why.
The result is a second chapter that looks less like a sequel and more like something genuinely new: focused on helping build and support organisations that create enduring value for the people and communities they serve, with the accumulated wisdom of a rare professional journey behind it.
For founders navigating the question of what comes after their own defining chapters, that perspective may be worth more than the next funding announcement.