Melanie Perkins, Canva CEO: From information to imagination

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1:15Hello, I'm Zoe Kleinman, the BBC's technology editor, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. Today we are spending trivians on war and peanuts on peace. Wind power in the United States has been subsidized for 33 years. Isn't that enough? Solar for 25 years, that's enough. I don't have army. I don't have missile rockets. I have my body. I have my voice. I love singing and so my goal was always to do better and better at it. I was still in an induced coma in hospital when the world was defining me.

1:56For this interview, I met Melanie Perkins, CEO and co-founder of the online graphic design platform Canva, over a video call where she was speaking to me from Sydney. Unlike many of today's Silicon Valley-based big tech companies, Canva started out in the Australian city of Perth with a mission to empower the world to design. It offers a variety of templates and tools to help users without technical skills or a design background create a range of professional-looking graphics and presentations, from wedding invitations to business pitch decks. Since launching in 2013, it's grown to become a multi-billion dollar business used by around 250 million people every month.

2:38But it's a far cry from the early days, when Perkins was rejected by over 100 investors as she sought to get it off the ground. Perkins, who is still only in her late 30s, is well known for her entrepreneurial drive, having quit university at just 19 years old to launch her first venture. The success of Canva has since catapulted Perkins into a number of lists ranking the world's most powerful women, compiled by the likes of Forbes and Fortune. And as the real world becomes increasingly shaped by the digital world, tech leaders like her are offering insight on how society can best adapt to the change.

3:17I really think we've gone from the information era to the imagination era. and the information era is what we've really built many of our schools around, which is learning knowledge, reciting knowledge, and then that's being built for a workplace, which is really about knowledge management, taking knowledge and managing that. And I think that the world that our students are going to be going in is a very different world, and it's really important that we start to tool up our students for this imagination era. And so rather than it being about what can you learn and what questions can you know the answers to.

3:51It's actually about what questions can you ask and how can you find out those answers with the tools and technology that we have available. It reminds me a lot of when calculators came in and it was like all the teachers were like, what are we going to teach our kids if calculators can do all the maths? And it's like, no, we need to take that technology. We need to utilise the technology because if you learn how to solve a problem and you learn how to use the best of technology and putting it to good use, it doesn't really matter what happens in the world, you'll be ready for it. And so I think that's a critical shift that we need to make in all of our schools to equip this next generation.

4:26Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Melanie Perkins. I'm really interested in the development of Canva as a company. It started out as a spark of an idea in Perth. You had lots of rejection early on. It's become a multi-billion dollar business. You've got 250 million users every month. At what point did you start to think, maybe this is going to work? I think that over the journey, you always find a little something that you get very overly excited about. And so in the early days, when we started to see users go from zero to getting the first few, to getting a few hundred, to getting a few thousand, to getting hundreds of thousands, and when we crossed a million, we couldn't believe it.

5:10And now, you know, when someone from the team goes out and they're wearing Canvas swag and people come up to them like, I love Canva and tell us their Canva story. You know, that's pretty, pretty incredible. If Gen X grew up with Microsoft and millennials grew up with Google and Meta, is Gen Z your audience? Yeah, I have heard that a lot of Gen Z use Canva, which is pretty cool. But fortunately, we are used by all generations. We aren't just by Gen Z. We're talking to you in Sydney, your Sydney HQ. What's the vibe like in Australia? Is it very different to Silicon Valley? I think we have a great vibe in Australia, but fortunately our team is all over.

5:49In fact, I just found out today we've got 450 team members now in Europe, which is pretty incredible as well. So we've got 5 ,000 people across the globe. In Sydney, yeah, the vibe is pretty great. We're just heading into summer right now, and I think the spirits are high. Is the tech scene very different? When we started out with our very first company, Fusion Books, there was not a tech scene to be heard of. In fact, we didn't even know what a startup was when we first started. And now there is a burgeoning tech scene. There is an incredible amount of investors and startups and larger companies or startups that have grown over the years.

6:27And so it's certainly changed in the last decade. Have you ever been tempted to move to Silicon Valley? Yes, in the very early days when we were trying to get that first round of funding, I think it would have been easy to move to San Francisco. But we were very fortunate that the Australian government actually offered something called Commercialisation Australia, where they matched our funding that we received. And that actually kept us in Australia because we were able to say to investors, hey, we can match the funding if we stay in Australia. So that was really helpful. What are your thoughts about the social media ban that's coming in shortly?

7:01I think it's really important that young kids get to be young kids. I think the Australian government has really been on the front foot trying to ensure that that's the case. I mean, you're a parent yourself. Do you worry about the impact of social media on kids? I think that the world that our daughter is growing up in is something that is constantly top of mind, making sure that everything from the other day she was asking me about when people don't have enough money to buy food, what do they do? and I would love the answer to be that everyone in the world has food, has enough food in their bellies and I think that it's really on all of us to help make the world a world that we're proud to leave for the next generation and so I think that's a constant thought process for me actually.

7:47We've put our two-step plan at Canva, build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can do and as part of step two we've given$50 million over the last few years We've just pledged another 100 million over the next three years to give money to people who are in extreme poverty. And I don't think it should be considered just a problem that has existed forever, that we're going to leave the next generation, that some people on this planet don't have their basic human needs being met. So it's very much top of mind, in fact. You're a billionaire yourself and you've pledged to give away much of your fortune, most of it.

8:19How is that going? Yeah, it's a very important thing. We want to start doing it as soon as we could because we know there's going to be so much to learn over the years to come. And so we have absolutely started that process. We're getting started quite actively in Malawi right now. But then with Canva, we've also been very active in that. We've given a paid product away for free to non-profits and schools for quite some years now. And so we've crossed more than a billion dollars in product given away each year. And we think that's really important because we want to empower nonprofits to achieve all of the incredibly important missions.

8:55And we want to empower schools around the world with more than 100 million teachers and students using Canva now. And so we want to ensure that quality tools are in the hands of everyone around the world rather than it being something that only wealthy schools can afford. The word billionaire has never sat right with me whatsoever because I really feel like we're just custodians of that. And our job is to use that money to help in the most meaningful way we can during our lifetime. That's really interesting to hear you say that being a billionaire has never sat right with you. And yet that is what you are.

9:26It's not all I am because it's the amount of money that Canva is valued at that it's not money for me to go and buy things with. It's literally to give away. And we've committed to giving it all away over our lifetime. time. Let's talk a bit about AI and the growing calls that it's a bubble and it's about to go pop. Do you think that's the case? And if it does, how will that impact Canva? We've always been focused on building a really valuable company. And when it's fashionable to be spending at all costs, we have invested in being profitable. So I've been profitable for eight years, even when it was not the trendy thing to do.

10:07And that still applies today. where we have always been about solving real problems for real people. And so whether or not something's in trend or out of trend, we are building an enduring company that solves real problems for real people. So it doesn't matter too much to us what happens in the wider macroeconomic environment. But do you think that there's going to be a sort of day of reckoning for the AI industry? I mean, some of the valuations that we're seeing are really quite eye-watering, aren't they? I won't be a prophecy predictor of what's going to happen. I think it's anyone's guess. I think that there is a lot of real value being created.

10:42I think that, you know, the world is seeing a huge shift in the technology that's empowering the world. And, you know, we're certainly seeing that in our own data of the adoption of AI. But, yeah, I'll leave that for people who are better predicting. Do you think that the way in which we're teaching children in schools is keeping up with the pace of this revolution? You know, the world of work that they enter is going to be very different to the world of work that we know. It was actually something I spoke about at a recent event that we had. I really think we've gone from the information era to the imagination era.

11:14And the information era is what we've really built many of our schools around, which is learning knowledge, reciting knowledge, and then that's been built for a workplace, which is really about knowledge management, taking knowledge and managing that. And I think that the world that our students are going to be going in is a very different world. And it's really important that we start to tool up our students for this imagination era. And so rather than it being about what can you learn and what questions can you know the answers to, it's actually about what questions can you ask and how can you find out those answers with the tools and technology that we have available.

11:51It reminds me a lot of when calculators came in and it was like, all the teachers were like, what are we going to teach our kids if calculators can do all the maths? And it's like, no, we need to take that technology, we need to utilise the technology to the best of our ability and then we need to put it to good use. And I think that's absolutely what needs to happen in schools today. And we see certainly some very front-edge schools doing that today, where it's a lot more about problem-solving and it's about learning empathy and it's about learning real problem-solving skills and abilities. And I certainly hope to see a lot more of that.

12:21Because if you learn how to solve a problem and you learn how to use the best of technology and putting it to good use, it doesn't really matter what happens in the world, you'll be ready for it. And so I think that's a critical shift that we need to make in all of our schools to equip this next generation.

12:38You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

13:21With the European Athletics Championships, the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place, 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport. And the More Than The Score podcast will be following all the action, bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists. More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

13:57For this episode of The Interview, I'm speaking to Melanie Perkins, CEO and co-founder of the Australian online graphic design platform Canva. There was a winter sunrise outside the windows of the BBC's Glasgow HQ in Scotland, where I sat down to chat with Melanie. But it was the other end of the day for her in Sydney, Australia. She had an impressive array of bookshelves behind her, which I discovered were not virtual, but also not hers. She was attending an event at a museum at the time of our video call. She told me she always aims to finish work at 7pm, but it rarely happens that way. If she was tired, she didn't show it.

14:36She was friendly and spoke passionately, especially when we covered issues that are obviously personally important to her. OK, let's return to my conversation with Melanie Perkins. The other thing that's going on is that AI is totally reshaping the jobs market. and a lot of jobs that exist now are predicted to not survive, including maybe design. You know, Canva was set up to democratise design, but there is a design industry. There are designers for whom that is the way they make their money. I think that we'll see across every industry that every profession changes quite radically. And if you think about when printing presses came in, the amount of jobs that were displaced because of that, or if you think about when TVs were invented, or when, you know, even when, you know, we did a skit recently when, you know, different technologies come into the music industry and what has happened over the years.

15:27When the gamophone was invented, everyone was like, what's going to happen to music? But I think that the job specifically, the tools that you use, totally change. That's been a constant trend that you see every full of decades in every single industry, those things change all the time. But the end outcome that you're trying to achieve doesn't really change. You can see a lot of those things extremely persistent over the years. The job of a teacher, the tools change consistently, but actually the job of nurturing a young mind and helping them to be equipped for the workforce over the years to come, that changes radically.

16:01But then the actual, the undercurrent stays the same. And the same with design. I think actually what we're seeing is a proliferation of design. You know, if you wind your mind back a couple of decades, design was, you know, that one billboard that would happen or that one ad that would be placed in the local newspaper. And now all of a sudden design is every single touchpoint with a company. And we're seeing that time and time again. So the tools change, absolutely. We're continuously needing to tool up and learn new skills. But the actual, the end goal of each profession, I think actually stays remarkably similar.

16:35I know someone who used Canva to design her wedding invitations, whereas previously she would have employed perhaps a graphic designer to do that job for her? Yeah I think what we're seeing is a lot of people being able to design when they couldn't previously it was out of their reach you know we're seeing students being able to create take that idea and turn it into a presentation or seeing people being able to create their own wedding materials or small businesses being able to create their you know small business but we're also seeing graphic designers being able to create an incredible amount of brand identities and content for businesses themselves so many graphic designers actually use Canva themselves.

17:10And we have an incredible creator program. So I think that we're kind of in that vein of the tooling continuously changes, but the goals often stay quite similar. And yet AI tools use data, vast amounts of data that was produced by, essentially by humans. It's using graphic designs that were created by people. Is there a solution, you think, to this conflict between training these tools and the copyright responsibilities that we have towards the original creators? Yeah, something that we have been very proactive with on Canva is we have a creators program where people can opt in to actually get a financial pool to have their work trained on, but that's very much opt-in for our creators.

17:53And then on Canva itself, we don't train on people's data unless, again, they opt in very proactively. And so we've been very intentional about ensuring that we are taking the side of creators on all of our AI. What do you think about the proliferation of AI slop? Does that bother you? I think everyone is going on their own AI journey. And I think when you first use AI, you think that the first output is good. And it might not be. In fact, I think that the only way you get better at using AI is actually using it more. And then you start to realise how you need to shape it, how you interact with it, how that first piece is actually just a draft, and you need to be able to shape it from there.

18:36And so I think that maybe everyone goes through their AI slot phase where they're kind of learning how to use it and how to make it sound like them and what is authentically them. And so I think it's a process for everyone. And I think everyone goes on that by themselves in their own time and their own journey. And where are you in that AI slot journey? I'd like to think I'm quite a sophisticated AI user at this point in time, but I'm sure when I look back in a few years' time and I look back at my productivity and my output, I'm probably going to think that I was AI slop too. But that's only because it's a continuous journey.

19:10And we're continuously learning and honing our skills. And I think that's something that we all need to be learners in this new world. You know, if you think your skills are done and dusted, if you think that you don't have anything more to learn, I think that's where the real problem stands. When you started out, you were rejected by 100 investors early on. Do you think things have got easier for female founders since then? Yeah, I think the 100 investor rejections I got were extremely painful at the time, but I also used it to refine our pitch. And so every time I got a rejection, I would then use that to say, they'd say, I'm the same as some company, and then I'd end up with another slide in my pitch deck that said, this is where the companies fit, and this is the huge gap in the market that they were resolving on.

19:55They'd say, I don't understand design. And so we had a lot of slides at the start that explained the design industry and how big it was because other people would say it's too small. And so those rejections we really used to fuel the clarity of our pitch deck. Has it gotten easier? I'd like to think so. But in a way, the challenges that we had at the start, I think, made our company better. So it probably wouldn't have been good for me to get the first check figured out on day one. I think that that really helped to refine our strategy. you. I think that's a very positive way to frame it for yourself definitely.

20:29What would you do differently now? I feel like if I did anything differently it could be like butterfly wings and maybe everything would have changed. So I wouldn't wish things to be completely different because I think that the hardships were actually quite helpful along the journey. I mean maybe I would have been a little easier on myself perhaps throughout. It does sound quite brutal, 100 hundred rejections. It was. It was as brutal as it sounds. I'm sorry to make you relive it. We'll move on from that now. You don't need to worry about them anymore, clearly. I've heard that you have a mood board in your office with goals for 2050.

21:07What's the biggest priority for 2050 for you? You've done your research. So my 2050 goal, it was really about thinking about all of the challenges that I am pretty worried about for the world, and my 2050 wall was sort of my solution to that, is, you know, there's a quote that I love, which is, everything good was once imagined. And so if we don't imagine it, then it literally can't be the reality that we live in. And so I think one of the big challenges for society is loneliness and lack of purpose. And if we kind of extend that out, people not having much sense of a community. And I think My 2050 wall is the antithesis of that.

21:49It is about where community becomes really strong and vibrant around the world, where we have bigger goals we're trying to achieve for our planet, for our countries and for our local communities, where we equip kids in schools to solve problems and to actually do things with the skills, not just learning, they're actually starting to put it into practice to solve real problems in their community. And that's certainly the world that we're going to help work towards. Whether or not we can achieve it, we certainly can't achieve it on our own. But I think that that's the world that we all would like to will into existence rather than one where we're passive observes and a freight train that we don't really want.

22:24So that's the long term goal. How about 2026? What's happening next year for you? So our mission to empower the world to design, we break down into what we call our mission pillars to empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device. It's definitely a mouthful. But what we do is every year is we pick what is the next most important thing for us to do under each of those mission pillars. And so you would have seen through this year we launched email and we launched Affinity. And we continuously pick off like what is the next big thing that's going to help empower the world to design.

22:58So there is a lot in the works which we are extraordinarily excited to bring to life next year. You said for 2025 you removed email from your phone. Did you keep that up? Yes. So I only, I can't say it's continuous. I only down email and Slack for a very short period of time, but only for like an hour if I really, really need to do something. I pretty much don't have email and Slack on my phone, which is really helpful. So when I'm working, I work rather than kind of, I like to work really hard, but then I like to not be working when I'm not working. Do you find it easy to just be sort of very single-minded like that and switch off?

23:36I mean, what are your working hours like? At what point do you say, right, that's it? My aspirational working hours is finishing work at 7pm. I can't say that I'm very good at that. But I am good at, like, once I've finished work, actually shutting my laptop and actually switching gears and doing whatever else it is, spending time with family and going for walks. So I think it's really important. I think if you're always half working and half doing personal life, you never really get the opportunity to like switch gears, have a different mind space and be able to go into work fresh again the next day.

24:09And so I think it's really important. You know, I've certainly in the early days we worked seven days a week, 18 hours a day, which I don't think is necessarily healthy to do for years on end. So I think it's important to be able to actually have some time off work. Would you consider going smartphone free? I quite like GPS and other things like that and being able to get in contact with people on phone and text message. So I feel like the deleting of email is probably as far as I need to go. I have considered that, but I feel like I'm at a good juncture there. You're not planning to push those boundaries any further?