Technology History | 48 Pirrama Road, Pyrmont — Wave Was Cancelled and Canva Got Its Third Founder

On 4 August 2010 Google announced it would stop developing Wave as a standalone product, and the team that had built it sat on Level 5 of this building. Wave came from Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers behind Google Maps, and it was written by Google's Sydney engineering office here on the Pyrmont waterfront. It was demonstrated at Google I/O in May 2009, opened to the public on 19 May 2010, and cancelled eleven weeks after that. Urs Hölzle's announcement credited it with character-by-character live typing and files dragged from the desktop into a browser, then said it "has not seen the user adoption we would have liked." Cameron Adams had joined Google in 2007 to work with the Rasmussens on Wave's design, after running his own design agency in Melbourne. Lars Rasmussen's account is that Adams would build a working first version of an interface himself rather than hand a picture to the engineers, which is not how most designers work. When Wave was killed, Rasmussen left for Facebook and Adams toured other Google teams, spending a month in Mountain View on the hastily assembled Google+ project before deciding against it. In 2011 he left with Wave engineer Dhanji Prasanna to build an email startup called Fluent, which found users and never found a business. Melanie Perkins had by then been introduced to Rasmussen by the investor Bill Tai, and he had agreed to advise her — which in practice meant a year of rejecting every technical co-founder she brought him. Adams was the one he did not reject. He joined Canva in June 2012 as its third co-founder and chief product officer. The two things Google named in Wave's obituary, many people typing into one document at once and files dropped straight into the browser, are the two things Canva's editor is built on. Google Australia has given Level 5 of this address as its own for well over a decade, and Accenture occupies Level 3. The six-storey waterfront block in the photograph is that building, and the sign on its roof belongs to Accenture rather than to Google. Photo: Maksym Kozlenko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons