Melanie Perkins is the CEO and co-founder of Canva, an online design and publishing tool which makes graphic design simple for everyone. Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown to over 15 million users across 190 countries, with more than 1 billion designs created, at 36 designs per second. Today, Canva is growing with over 600 team members across 3 offices in Sydney, Manila and Beijing, working together on a mission to empower everyone to create beautiful design.
After hundreds of revisions to the Canva pitch deck, Melanie has now raised more than $140 million from investors including Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, Yahoo! CFO Ken Goldman, and funds such as Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures. Today, Canva is valued at US$2.5 billion, making Canva the second Australian startup to achieve Unicorn status.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What was the strategy to enter China and have there been any pivots along the way?
- Who could disrupt Canva and its massive growth?
- What is the implication of the acquisition of Pexel and Pixabay and Canva’s expansion through partnering or acquiring other companies?
- What is the future of graphic design and what can people anticipate in the next 2-3 years?
Please take a few seconds and leave us a positive review as it helps the show grow and motivates us to create content. Thank you for helping and giving back to the show!
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- Website for Canva
CONNECT WITH SHAWN:
https://linktr.ee/ShawnflynnSV
- Shawn Flynn’s Twitter Account
- Shawn Flynn’s LinkedIn Account
- Silicon Valley LinkedIn Group Account
- Shawn Flynn’s Facebook Account
- Email Shawn@thesiliconvalleypodcast.com
Disclaimer to the Transcripts:
Intro 00:00
- Website for Canva
You’re listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast.
Shawn Flynn 00:02
On today’s show, we have Melaine Perkins, who is the CEO and co-founder of Canva, an online design and publishing tool which makes graphic design simple for everyone. Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown to over 15 million users across 190 countries, with more than one billion designs created. After hundreds of revisions to the Canva pitch deck, Melody has now raised more than 140 million, and today’s value of Canva is at $2.5 billion, making Canva the second Australian startup to achieve unicorn status. This episode was a lot of fun. Melanie’s smile and personality radiates throughout this interview. I know everyone at home is going to have as much fun and enjoyment listening to it as I did recording it. Enjoy.
Intro 00:54
Welcome to the Silicon Valley Podcast with your host Shawn Flynn who interviews famous Entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and Leaders in Tech. Learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 01:17
Melanie Perkins, thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule today to be on Silicon Valley.
Melanie Perkins 01:22
Thanks so much for having me.
Shawn Flynn 01:24
Now, Melanie, give us a little history about the evolution from its start to what it has become now.
Melanie Perkins 01:30
Yeah, absolutely. So, I was at university and I was teaching design programs, you know, super complicated. But I thought that in the future, they would all be online, collaborative, and really simple. But at that point in time, I was 19. And I had no business experience, thought, software experience or product experience, or literally anything that would be relevant. So rather than trying to take on the entire world of design, at that point in time, I decided to take on school yearbooks in Australia, and turned my mom’s living room into my office and we had printing presses there. My boyfriend became my co-founder and we set to work. And we did that for a number of years and grew profitably internationally.
And then, we wanted to take it to the much broader market of enabling everyone to design everything, and that’s where I found that. It was sort of three years between pitching to investors and actually landing an investment, a year pitching to engineers, trying to get them to join my team, and then a year of development. And then, eventually, in 2013 we launched, which was incredibly exciting to get Canva out into the world.
Shawn Flynn 02:33
Could you talk a little bit more about 2013 and that initial start?
Melanie Perkins 02:38
So, we knew Canva was going to solve a really big problem that a lot of people face. So, a lot of small businesses really struggled to try to create their marketing materials, their social media graphics. They don’t necessarily have the budget to create a lot of content. And now with the world becoming increasingly visual, everyone seems to create so much more visual content than ever before.
Shawn Flynn 02:58
And when Canva started, I saw that you want to be the world’s most sophisticated and easy to use multi-user publishing system. And also, that you wanted to take the entire design eco-system integrated into one page and make it simple and accessible for everyone across the globe. When you’re telling this to people, what was their initial reaction?
Melanie Perkins 03:21
So funnily enough, that the first thing you said, “the world’s most sophisticated and easy-to-use online publishing system,” so in 2008, for my first company, we went in… it was called WA Inventor or the Western Australian Inventor of the Year. So, we were trying to sound very inventor. So that was where that quite long title came from, the title of our pitch.
Melanie Perkins 03:44
And then, when we were pitching for investors, we were explaining that we’re going to take all these different eco-systems, all these different industries. So usually, when a professional designer has to create a design, you have to go and spend a number of years using and learning something like Photoshop. You then have to go to a stock photography library and a stock illustration library. You then have to go collect all the content from fonts and stock layouts. And then, you have to collaborate an email and Dropbox, and then, finally design. And then, you have these programs to go and prepare your design for web or print or videos or website. And all these things are completely different. You have to learn all and navigate all these different things online and offline. So, we thought this was completely ridiculous. And we’ll just take it all and integrate it into one page and make it accessible to the whole world. It was quite a large undertaking. And back in 2011, when we started pitching this to investors, I can now understand why most investors thought that we are a little bit crazy. Fortunately, we’ve gotten… done exactly that. But I do understand investors’ apprehension when we’re first pitching this idea.
Shawn Flynn 04:54
Now, if you went back in time and heard yourself pitch, would you have invested?
Melanie Perkins 05:00
I would have thought I was rather ambitious. And I think the reason why we eventually were able to attract investment was we knew the market intimately. So, at that point in time, the Lean Startup was really popular. And the whole point, as I’m sure you know, like the Lean Startup is like get some the cafe iterate it, whether people like it. And we’re coming in with a completely different mentality, we’re like there is this huge problem that people face, we want to solve. And in order to create an amazing user experience, we’re going to have to go across all these different things that were completely separate previously. So I think that the thing that I care about most when I’m seeing other companies, or in Canva itself, was that we’re actually out to solve a problem that affects a lot of people, a lot of people cared about and why it mattered.
Shawn Flynn 05:47
So, most investors probably don’t have a design background, I’m just guessing.
Melanie Perkins 05:51
So that was actually, the exactly, the first thing that we had to figure out was originally when we were starting to explain Canva, we sort of dived into our solution, the product that we’re building, and what we’re doing, and then realized pretty quickly that investors exactly didn’t necessarily do their own designs, or even their own presentation. So, they couldn’t really relate to what we’re talking about. And so then, we had to completely flip my deck.
And it became firstly explaining about because people would say, “Oh, but isn’t some other big company going to go and just do this themselves.” And we had to explain how, in the publishing industry, every few decades, new technology would be born that will completely change who was leading the market leader. And that had happened four times in history. And the market leader always changed every time there was this huge tectonic shift in technology. And really help them to understand the problem that people are faced, and then the size of the market. At that point in time, they may be a little more interested in isolation. And we continue to iterate on it time and time again, every time any investor would come across with a problem we’d have to come in and iterating the deck again. So that’d be like, “Oh, yeah, the same like some other company.” But like we’re totally not. So then, one of the early slides became a market landscape and showing where the huge gap was in the market.
Shawn Flynn 07:07
So how many times would you say you had to redo your pitch deck? And without Canva, how many hours do you think you spent redoing the deck?
Melanie Perkins 07:16
Literally hundreds, every time an investor would meet with us, our strategy was rather than saying, “Hey, would you like to invest?” We would say, “Hey, give us some advice.” And so, we ended up with every time I didn’t have an investor meeting, we would then iterate on my deck and amend to that as our deck ends up being really strong, because it had so much iteration. And it really meant that we had to become very confident with our strategy. And in fact, a lot of the pages in our deck, our original deck, is still the pages that are in it today, except we’ve ticked a few of those things off now, which is quite nice, rather than being very theoretical philosophical, which is pretty cool to say.
Shawn Flynn 07:50
With building out the platform, the initial test, what was the feedback? How did you get the users to give you comments to reiterate, to improve the product at the very initial stages?
Melanie Perkins 08:03
Yeah. So once we’ve been in development for about a year, building out the foundations of Canva, and then the first thing that we did was we used a site called https://www.usertesting.com/, where you actually watched videos of people using your site, which was really interesting because we realized, as soon as we did that, that people were really scared to click that, they are scared to interact, because people are told that design is a really hard thing that they can’t do. I think that the first thing that we had to do was to add an element of playfulness. We spent a lot of time iterating on our onboarding flows. And you’ll see silly little things like change the color of a circle or put a hat on a monkey. And these very small, little challenges, that it kind of switched the game from being “I don’t know how to use this” to like, “Oh, I change the colors in a second, or I’ve put a hat on the monkey,” and it helped build up people’s confidence in what they’re doing.
Shawn Flynn 08:57
So, you actually used gamification to introduce your product to the beta testers?
Melanie Perkins 09:02
Yeah, and all of our users. I guess the problem that we realized early on, was that people don’t necessarily know they have a design need until they know how to design. If people came into our product and then it was going to be, you know, a month or so before they had to design and then they had to learn how to use the product. And then they would then promote it to a friend. We knew that that wasn’t going to help candidates spread very rapidly. So, what we wanted to do was when people came in, we gave them a design, because we gave them the five-star challenges. And then in a short period of time, they built up their confidence. And then they were ready to share that with a friend because they would then also be more ready to take on design challenges as they came along. So, we wanted that all to happen within the first few minutes of using the product, which certainly helped Canva to spread.
Shawn Flynn 09:47
And earlier, you have mentioned that technology gets disrupted and you saw the shift. What was that shift?
Melanie Perkins 09:56
Absolutely. So back when we were starting out, everything was based on the desktop computer, despite the fact that the internet obviously had taken off in a very big way. And you know, Facebook was taking off at the time. And it was like, why a desktop? Why is the design program still desktop-based? Why are they still so hard to use?
Melanie Perkins 10:15
The other huge shift was, when I was teaching design programs, I was teaching design programs or teaching Dreamweaver, or teaching video programs. And all these things had a completely different UI, which meant that people had to go and learn to navigate all these different systems. And so, what we wanted to do with Canva was to take all those different products that you might want to create and put them into one platform. So rather than having to learn all these different things, you could learn one product, and then you could click a button, and you could turn that presentation into a website, or get it printed and delivered to your door, presented immediately, or turn it into something that can be shared on your blog. So, the whole point was that you could use one product to create anything you want.
Shawn Flynn 10:54
It sounds like you’re solving a thousand problems at once. I would like to see that look on that first investor’s face when he’s like, sees the sheet and just going “Uhm, there are 100 pain points you’re tackling here.”
Melanie Perkins 11:06
Yeah, I find it difficult to imagine what other people must have thought.
Shawn Flynn 11:13
Now, since Australia, you’ve now expanded. You have teams in Manila, China, and Australia. Can you talk about that team atmosphere and the culture? And how actually having teams in all these different countries with such different cultures, how that kind of gels together, how that works for you?
Melanie Perkins 11:31
Yeah, absolutely. So, our team actually speaks 40 languages, natively within our team, which is pretty cool. So Canva is used widely across the world, we’re in 190 countries, we are in 100 languages. So, it’s been really critical for us to have that global viewpoint built into our DNA. And as we grow, we want to continue to have more and more people from across the globe being able to bring that local vantage point. So, we’ve got it a team based in Sydney, the Philippines. And last year, we launched in China as well. And I think it’s been really awesome to have such a global viewpoint. One of the things that we did early on was, we launched a lot of foreign languages, because they were kind of easy languages for us to get into. And we tackled some of the harder languages that had different scripts and alphabet. And then last year, we tackled a lot of the hard languages. So, we were launching in China where we had to have, obviously, our service base there. We had to build up an amazing team there. And we also launched invites in left languages, so things like Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu, which obviously was a huge engineering effort. But I’ll go right from the start, it was to empower the whole world to design. And when we say the whole world, we literally mean everyone, which meant that it was really critical to have a global viewpoint from our team, from the way we localize our product. And now we’re focusing really on providing a heavily localized experience. So, ensuring that not only do we have some fonts available, we have a huge wide variation of fonts available that are template to localize. The people can pay their local currency using local payment methods. So just getting deeper and deeper into the localized experience.
Shawn Flynn 13:05
That’s amazing, this world reach and view from the beginning. So many companies have had challenges entering the China market, but you seems to be smooth going through the motion like it’s nothing. Could you talk a little bit about the preparation to enter China? And if there’s been any pivots or major roadblocks in this journey?
Melanie Perkins 13:27
Yeah, I think because we’ve had such a global viewpoint from the start when you launch in China, and you can’t just do basic localization. Just translating the language, we really had to localize the product heavily. So, we partnered with the biggest stock photography site in China. We also partnered with the biggest font foundry over there. We’ve had to ensure that we connected with their local app, so things like Weibo and WePay. So, we’ve really had to ensure that we’ve had a very localized experience, which has been critical to ensuring that people in China are having a great experience.
Shawn Flynn 13:59
And what is a Canva season opener?
Melanie Perkins 14:03
Yeah. So, in the early days, every Friday, we get off, and everyone would say what they’ve been working on. Then the company grew a little too much for that and it was starting to take a little too long. The routine, we’d get up and present what they’re working on. But then there’s others that take too long. And then we needed, we started doing it every month. And then we’re like, “Okay, this is getting ridiculous.” And so, what we now do is every season, so like literally, autumn, winter, spring, summer, the teams get off and they present the goals that they’re working on. It’s actually crazy in the season opener week, so much work gets launched. It’s a lot of fun. And it also means that you can probably tell we’re doing quite a lot as a company. And so, ensuring that everyone has context of everything that’s going on across the company is also really critical. And so that’s exactly what happens at season opener. And then it is also a little fun. So, we often have a theme, and a lot of people get into the theme quite heavily. It’s a little bit of fun to show everyone’s creativity as well.
Shawn Flynn 14:59
So, these season openers, is it localized to each office or do the offices get together and actually collaborate, maybe online or work together to create?
Melanie Perkins 15:09
We have a season opener here in Sydney, and one in Manila, and the China teams are comparatively pretty small right now. So, they often come and join our other season openings. But they also do their own localized season openers as well. So, a little bit, a little bit of both.
Shawn Flynn 15:24
Melanie, now with locations all around the world, tell me a little bit about the atmosphere in Canva, the working environment, what’s the hustle and bustle daily life like?
Melanie Perkins 15:34
Yeah, something that we have spent a lot of time on is ensuring that right from the start, we wanted to make sure that Canva was a place that we wanted to work at. And so, every decision that we’ve made has really been founded around that. And so, what I wanted to do was to ensure that it can, that we always had lunch together. And so even in our earliest days, with our first company, we’d always have lunch together as a team. And that’s something that we’ve continued in each of our offices, which is a really nice tradition. That means you get to know people outside the immediate people you’re working with. And you also get to know people as humans as well, which is really lovely. We’re 600 people now. So, we have been growing very rapidly. We’ve been doubling each year, and we’re hiring internationally. So, we’ve got people from all over the world joining Canva. We’ve got a lot of people from the US who’ve actually even moved over here. Sydney is an amazing place to live.
Shawn Flynn 16:23
Now with that massive growth, I’m guessing people there are working seven days a week, 20-hour days, probably someone’s hitting them with a stick to make them keep typing… What’s the atmosphere like in the building?
Melanie Perkins 16:35
Quite the contrary. We’ve had a really strong focus on ensuring that people actually have a life outside work as well. And so, people work flexi-time here. There’s everything from like nails club, to skateboard club, to book club, to board game clubs, to every sort of club under the sun, which really helps. There’s a dog club. I joined that one recently. All sorts of different things. They are actually enjoying their lives as well.
Shawn Flynn 17:05
And then your headquarters is in Sydney, Australia. Why not move to Silicon Valley?
Melanie Perkins 17:12
In the early days, investors said exactly that. In fact, a lot of investors didn’t invest because of that very reason. I think that it worked out very fortuitously, our CTO and co-founder, Cameron, our Canva co-founder, and Dave’s our CTO, they both came from Google Wave, which was based here in Sydney, which meant that we’re able to attract a really strong tech team and get really strong tech foundation here. And we’re also able to build a really strong team. And because of that foundation, it’s really meant we’ve been able to attract people from all over the world here in Australia. I’m quite glad that I’m not in Silicon Valley. I’ve heard there’s some crazy retention rate of like 15 months or something for an engineer. I don’t know how people build companies if that is the actual retention rate. We’re very lucky to have a lot of people here at Canva that have been here for years. Even though we’re growing really rapidly, it’s really lovely to have such amazing people around who are loyal and are really trying to build this thing.
Shawn Flynn 18:08
I gotta ask again, it was mentioned earlier, when you said you’re with investors, and they would say, “Well, why can’t a bigger company just come and compete with you?” Is that a fear that you have now? And if so, what’s stopping the competition?
Melanie Perkins 18:23
I think one of the most critical things for any company is to focus on what you’re doing and what your customers and what they need. And I remember in the early days, investors would say like, “Oh, someone’s always just going to go and completely do it.” And I think that what we said then that I still believe now is that it’s, we were just completely reinventing everything from the monetization model, to the way people don’t pay for the software, they pay for the ingredients, they pay for it, because they want to increase their productivity. Like there’s just so many ways that we’re rethinking the whole industry, and also it is quite technically complicated what we’re doing. There are a few things that we thought would enable us to have, haven’t gotten this market.
Shawn Flynn 19:05
And Melanie, Canva just announced its acquisition of Pexels and Pixabay. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Melanie Perkins 19:13
Absolutely. When someone’s creating a design, it’s absolutely critical that they have awesome ingredients. So, we wanted to ensure that people had amazing photography, amazing illustrations, amazing templates. And so, with Pexels and Pixabay, they were two of the world’s largest stock photography, free sites in the world. So many countries, I think it’s 200,000 contributors from across the globe. So, we really wanted to ensure, as I’ve mentioned, with that global focus, that we have these amazing, this amazing photography from such an amazing community across the globe. And so, we’re incredibly excited to be now partnered and to have acquired these companies, to be able to have all their amazing photography exposed to our community.
Shawn Flynn 19:55
And also, Canva has quite a few partnerships. One, including integration with Dropbox. Is the expansion goals for Canva more of acquiring companies or more of partnering?
Melanie Perkins 20:06
A little of column A, a little of column B. I think it’s really important that Canva fits into everyone’s workplace. Our whole point of Canva is to make everyone’s work way easier. And so, it’s really important that people can pull all the ingredients that they want to be able to access and use their designs and not have to leave Canva. And then the other thing is that we want people to be able to take their design to wherever they want it to go with just one click. And so that’s exactly why partnerships like Dropbox are really important. And we are continuing to do a lot more in that space over the years to come.
Shawn Flynn 20:39
And with Canva acquiring other companies, there’s probably been a time in the past, especially with this amazing growth of companies wanting to acquire you… Have you ever had investors, or that kind, push you in that direction? Or what are your thoughts on that?
Melanie Perkins 20:53
Yeah, I think because we have had such a big vision right from the start. And we feel like we have done literally one descent. What’s possible… There’s actually still things in our deck from years gone by that haven’t been done yet. Investors haven’t been pushing us to fail in any way whatsoever. I think investors that have invested in Canva really believe in what we can achieve, and in our future roadmap and vision. So yeah, we’ve got a lot to do.
Shawn Flynn 21:18
Can you tell us a few of these things that are in this amazing pitch deck that I’m really curious about? Because something tells me it’s a treasure map that is going to be accomplished in your next steps.
Melanie Perkins 21:28
Yeah, I can touch on a couple of things. So, one of the things right from the start, we realized that large companies and large enterprises have a lot of problems creating design. So often, the sales team, for example, gets completely neglected by the design team. Because the design team is focused on all of the above-the-line things or you know, the high-value marketing material. The sales team needs to create a lot of amazing content, creating custom pitch decks, the social media team needs to create lots and lots of social media content every single day. The exec team or… a lot of organization needs to be creating lots of presentations. And so, it’s really hard for brand managers to ensure that their brand is consistent across all these channels. And so, we knew this right from the start that Canva would be able to have a significant role to play in large companies and enterprises. And so that’s something that we’re really excited to be launching in the not too distant future. And to really enable companies to have that efficiency. They shouldn’t have to be sending PDFs across the organization, going backward and forwards, making markup. They should be able to create amazing templates that the rest of the organization can use and to know and feel confident that they’re going to be staying on brand. So that’s one of the things that we’re really excited about, what’s coming in the not too distant future.
Melanie Perkins 22:41
Another thing I can touch on is presentation. So, we think that presentations have been so outdated, whereas the web has been growing, and everything’s becoming dynamic. And people being able to embed YouTube videos, and Tweets, and Facebook posts and all those sorts of things, websites. I guess our overarching mission is to enable everyone to design anything and publish anywhere. And when we mean anything, we literally mean anything. So, you can probably tell there’s quite a lot to happen in that space yet.
Shawn Flynn 23:15
Going back to the company, it’s my understanding that Canva is actually profitable. Isn’t that not supposed to happen to a unicorn company?
Melanie Perkins 23:24
I know. You think that, right? I think because we’re solving a problem that so many people care about. I think that’s really helped us to grow because our product is free. And that’s also been another really critical part of Canva’s story, is that we wanted to ensure that we have a valuable free product that anyone in the world can access, regardless of income, regardless of how much you make, or where in the world you live. We wanted to ensure that everyone can access it. And so, the fact that we’re profitable is actually… What you can do with Canva, you can purchase $1 images. So, you can purchase $1 images, you can pay just $1 illustrations.
And that was a payment stream that we had right from the start. And then you also upgrade to increase your productivity, we have a product called Canva Pro. And so, you can save your color palettes and logos and fonts, and arrange your things in folders, and in a click of a button, turn your design into all sorts of different formats for social media. So, all these sorts of things that people want to do to increase their productivity, they can do with Canva Pro. And so, I guess that’s why and oh— you can also print your design. So, in 44 countries, you can click print your design and get it delivered to your door. And now in the US, you can click print and get your design printed on a t-shirt, which is pretty great for company swag. So, the whole point of Canva is that we have a really valuable free product, but then when you want to pay you can, to increase your productivity or to get your design physically printed.
Shawn Flynn 24:47
Now with that price model, that the premium, are you seeing it really taking hold in these emerging countries and just the user base, they’re growing rapidly because of the options more or less that they have, and they can still use everything?
Melanie Perkins 25:00
Design is such a universal problem. It’s universal across every industry. Teachers need to create content, marketing managers for businesses, startups, everyone seems to create lots and lots of visual content. And that’s not innate or specific to a certain country. It’s not innate or specific to a certain age or demographic. It’s very universal, which I think is why we’ve been experiencing so much growth.
Shawn Flynn 25:23
Well, Melanie, thank you for your time today on the Silicon Valley Podcast. Is there any way that people can find out more information about you or Canva? What would you recommend them visiting or doing?
Melanie Perkins 25:36
Well, on Instagram, I have three posts. I’m not sure that that’s going to be that exciting for anyone. But I tweet a bit generally. About Canva, just check it out at canva.com.
Shawn Flynn 25:47
Great. We’ll have that link in the show notes. And Melanie, thank you for your time today. And we look forward to having you on the show again in the future and great success for step one and step two of your plan.
Melanie Perkins 25:59
Thank you so much.
Outro 26:01
Thank you for listening to The Silicon Valley Podcast. To access our resources, visit us at TheSiliconValleyPodcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn @ShawnFlynnSV. This show is for entertainment purposes only and is licensed by The Investors Podcast Network. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
