Canva’s Melanie Perkins on scaling startup vision and values for global impact

0:00The world is made by 8 billion little brushstrokes on a painting, and we all need to think about the consequence of the brushstrokes that we lay down. I was by far an outsider from Silicon Valley. I knew nothing about it. Someone mentioned, oh, to raise capital, you have to be a billion dollar company. And I took that really literally. I was like, okay, we're going to make this an incredible company. What's the wildest, craziest thing? Welcome to the Upstarts podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging startup founders about their upstart moment. Upstarts are challengers who punch above their weight, take on the status quo and achieve a big impact.

0:36All while building a big business, too. I'm your host, Alex Conrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. I'm joined today by Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva. Canva is a big business today. It has 260 million monthly users. It's valued at$42 billion. It does all sorts of stuff in productivity software, from presentations to AI to basic image generation that we do at Upstarts for our stories on LinkedIn. It wasn't always that way. Canva was and still is in some ways an Upstart, if you ask Melanie herself. She and her co-founder Cliff come from Western Australia. They took a long time to raise money and they've been working on this company for over a decade.

1:14This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking that's already loved by 300 ,000 entrepreneurs. Mel, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me, Alex. It's great to see you. Having Canva on the Upstart podcast is really personal and exciting for me, Mel, because first off, the story I wrote for Forbes in 2019, the cover story on you and what you're building at Canva was one of my favorite pieces that I've ever written. I feel like you truly embody what an upstart is in terms of that big ambition, that real sort of can-do attitude, not easily deterred.

1:49And so I can't think of a better person to have on the show. It is also incredible to see how Canva's grown in the past few years, even just since that story. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Canva has almost 250 million or maybe already 250 million monthly users valued at over$40 billion. You still work with your co-founders, Cliff and Cameron, and it's just been, it's remarkable to see what a global business Canva is. Do you ever get to take a step back and think about all you've already achieved so far? We are typically always focused on that next mountain, but it is pretty cool to see how far we've come and certainly every time we hear us you know how canva's being used around the world it really is a bit of a pinch me moment when you think like oh it's you know now more than six years since our cover story it's been a long time since you started canva is every year kind of a brand new year where where they just kind of sneak up on you or do you feel like okay we've been at this for a long time and we're starting to really see those rewards we've got this really strong focus we call it we've got a two-step plan build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can do.

2:54And I kind of see that as like a huge ladder all the way to the moon to achieve that. But then every year we just like pick off like what is the next goal and what is the next goal to kind of start to move in the direction of both those two steps of our two-step plan. Sounds simple, but it isn't quite. I know it's a huge plan. It's very ambitious. And that's part of why I'm so excited to talk, you know, year after year with you. But let's go back. I'm curious where that ambition started. You know, you were an entrepreneur at a pretty young age with Fusion Books. I still fondly remember seeing a photo of you and Cliff standing next to, I think, a poster.

3:28It kind of gives like school presentation vibes or sort of book fair vibes, that first Fusion Books photo. What was the ambition with Fusion Books? Were you just excited to be founders or what was sort of the goal at that time? At the very start, we had this wild belief that, you know, desktop programs to create software was just like a really old and outdated way to do it so I was at university and I was teaching design programs part-time and so it'd be things like photoshop and in design and illustrator and powerpoint so every time the students want to learn something they'd have to learn a completely new tool every time they want to design something and it seemed really crazy that it was so hard and complex to learn anything it would take a whole class just to learn where some buttons were let alone how to design anything that actually looked good.

4:16And so the idea of being able to design simpler and online and collaboratively was right there from the start, but we couldn't tackle the entire world of design back then when I was 19 at university. And so decided to tackle school yearbooks in Australia. And we ended up building the software. We ended up with printing presses in my mom's living room and actually printing the yearbooks. And then we'd deliver them to the schools around Australia. And we ended up building the largest yearbook company in Australia, but wanted to take that much further. People were saying, can I use this to create brochures and newsletters and other things?

4:54And then eventually we're like, oh, maybe we should actually take on that bigger, bigger challenge. Melanie, can you talk about just quickly the transition from achieving better scale than maybe you guys anticipate with Fusion Books to the origins of Canva, this now huge productivity suite that is known globally, but started at some point. So where do we go from Fusion to Canva? Yeah, so Fusion was being Fusion in Perth and I was being Canva. It was actually awkwardly called Canvas Chef for a while. And I went to San Francisco. Cliff was running Fusion in Perth. Just because of the pizza, the pizza analogy.

5:31yeah exactly it's like you had the base and the toppings and I really went heavy on the food metaphor really good that it didn't stay canvas chef we asked our French engineer what's canvas in French and he was like Canva and we're like oh that's the company name and then Cliff got the domain for two and a half grand but yeah so Canva was then over me being me was over pitching and then Cliff came over to San Francisco for a while and then we moved fusion from Perth to Sydney and then Fusion continued running while we were building out Canva. And then eventually we decided for Canva to buy Fusion for a dollar because all of the IP was very much embedded in Fusion.

6:11So it would have been a really awkward thing to have sold that off somewhere else. And your third co-founder Cameron kind of comes in as the maybe experienced software startup hand around this time too, right? Exactly. Yes. So Bill said he'd invest with me if I could find a tech team and the tech team had to be approved by Lars who co-founded Google Maps and then Lars said no to everyone for quite some time like a period of years which was extremely frustrating because he believed that we needed to have a really solid tech team which he was absolutely correct about and he introduced me to Cam and then he introduced me to Dave and they were absolutely incredible and so Cam said yes to us and then the rest is history.

6:54Did you and Cliff care if people took you seriously as founders at that time? Was sort of the concept of entrepreneurship something that you guys even thought about? Or was it just, hey, this is a cool product, we're going to build it? And maybe the sort of blissful ignorance of being a first-time founder at that point was helping you achieve scale that maybe you didn't expect? I mean, we didn't know what a startup was. We didn't know what a founder was. But we were just a small business and trying to look really serious. So we wore suits everywhere. We're trying to be taken seriously as like university students.

7:30And it was quite funny. We'd go in and we'd go to like op shops and buy a suit to wear to try to look serious when we were pitching the software companies to build that first version of our software. We certainly weren't exposed to the whole world and all the education that comes about startups themselves. When you got to sort of the next step, thinking about Canva and sort of the origins there, you did start to meet with investors and other people in the startup ecosystem. The way I remember it, it was an uphill battle at first for you coming from Perth, Australia, these young founders. Did you feel like that was the hardest moment to be taken seriously or as an upstart?

8:15Or what was it like to sort of then transition to the origins of Canva? Yeah, so we were in a competition. I was going in every single competition I possibly could to try to get some visibility for Fusion Books and then also win some prize money. We were literally doing anything we could to get the business off the ground. And I went in something called WA Inventor of the Year and we came second. And then the following year, we're invited to the conference. This is for all of Western Australia, I assume, WA? Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the big time right there. Exactly. And a mining company, unsurprisingly, won the number one spot.

8:53And we came second and we were trying to sound really inventory because it was the inventor of the year. And our application was the world's leading multi-user online publishing system in 2008. And it's ironically pretty much what we're doing today still. And then I was invited to a conference. Bill Tye was over in Perth and I went and spoke to him after the conference and then he said if I was in San Francisco he'd meet with me so the next year I jumped on a plane after he ignored a few of my emails I jumped on a plane to San Francisco and then he fortunately did meet with me and then that kick-started a multi-year journey of trying to raise our first round yeah it was a long arduous journey to get to 2012 where we eventually put together the tech team and then a year of development.

9:42And then 2013, we launched the product. When you look back, do you think of those years romantically, like it was so fun or like now knowing that it worked, you know, it was all going to pay off or was it difficult? Like how do you think about the early days, especially now that, you know, Canva is just at such remarkable scale? I think I'm shocked that it worked. I wouldn't go in and try and play that game again because I probably wouldn't come out. Well, I don't think you would have to couch surf for your next startup if you ever did one. Yeah, it was definitely a lot of trials and tribulations.

10:19Like, you know, even through the yearbook stage, we learned so much about running a business. We learned so much about the printing industry specifically. And so just about how to market a company, how to make it profitable, how to build something that customers want. We would call up every single customer and give them an over the phone tutorial. and so we learned so much about the ins and outs and how people respond to software and what makes them feel smart and what they want and what they need and so there's some really important principles that we still hold dear today certainly came out of that period of time like the importance that marketing should be educational and truly help people to achieve their goals so I think there was just so many valuable lessons through that very hard period of time that have certainly set important foundations you know how to actually build a company that's profitable which is not always the common thing from the Silicon Valley school of thought.

11:11One thing I've always loved about the way you operate as a leader is that, you know, when we'll sit in a meeting and we try to remember something you said or something on the roadmap from years ago, if you have your laptop, you'll just pull it up and you have those decks going all the way back, right? I mean, and they're pretty consistent. It is pretty remarkable. When would you trace the origin of your global domination plan how far back does that go the first business plan i wrote was 2007 and that was we were going wild with ideas we were like this design thing is going to be a thing that everyone's going to want to do but it's really hard so it was all the way back then um and then the first time it was like properly articulated as a the future of publishing was my 2011 deck that really captured what we're hoping to do and there's still things that we're bringing to life from that deck today.

12:02But when you, I mean, to go from design software, publishing to design software, to sort of the sky is the limit, we literally, there is a version, one of these exits have something like global domination, right? Was that something that people got that you were just getting people to buy into? I mean, obviously, you aimed so big from the start. And I'm just trying to understand where that came from. So you have to understand that I was by far an outsider it from from Silicon Valley I knew nothing about it and I was someone mentioned um oh to raise capital you have to be a billion dollar company and I took that really literally I was like okay we're gonna make this like we're gonna make this an incredible company what's the wildest craziest thing I think right from the start I knew the future of publishing and the future of design was going to be completely different from where it was back then I didn't know if we could build that.

12:55And so I think it really, it boils down to something that I believe in really deeply, which is that you need to just dream of the future that you want. You don't necessarily have any idea of how to build that and bring it to life, but just getting really clear in your mind, what it is, the future that you think would be absolutely the future. What is the dream future? And then take that and then whittle it down into like, what is a key step that we can take towards that? And I think that's served us really well over the years, because if we dream really big and like dream in detail about what is that future that we'd like to will into existence, then you can go and collect all of the ingredients.

13:29I think there's two different ways a company can operate. One is dreaming first and then figuring out the steps to get there. And the other, which I think is what most companies operate like, is you look at the building blocks that you have around you, look at the bricks and you say, what can I build with these things? And that makes a lot of sense because that is kind of the reality that you're living in. And you're trying to think, you know, how high can I stack these bricks versus how can I build a castle on the hill? How can I build this wildest imaginary thing and then work your way there?

13:58But I think that that's something that everyone can do a little more of is just dream what would wild success be? What is the future that I would love to be living in? And then once you get that really clear in your mind, I think it makes it easier to work for years on years to actually will that into existence if you're really sure that's the future that you want and the world deserves. That really resonates with me because as a founder, you know, with Upstarts, we're revenue funded, and media is a really tough business. And so it is sort of like, you know, how can we win on the field each day?

14:29How can we expand a little bit? But I totally hear you that if you get caught up too much in just winning in that moment and doing, you know, what feels achievable or what you've already earned in that moment, you maybe don't think quite so big, you maybe sell yourself short. Totally, Alex. The fun exercise I love to do is like what would wild success be in 10 years and what would terrible failure be? And I think that doing that can be with yourself, it can be with your team and getting really crystal clear on that and then maybe turning the wild success part into a deck, a vision deck. I think that that can add a lot of clarity because all of your decisions will be guided by that.

15:05If terrible failure would be being successful but not being values aligned, like not actually delivering value to the world, it helps to crystallize what you want and what you don't want. And if you do that exercise, I find a parallel exercise really fun. It's like what is the future of media or what is the future of X industry or Y industry? And then the more crystal clear you can get about what you believe the future to be, then the more that you can orientate your company to help bring that future to life if that's the future that you want. That's awesome. We'll try that and we'll follow up and share with everyone how it goes.

15:41I'm excited to see that, Alex. When Canva turned 10 a couple of years ago, did you do a look back and say, you know, we exceeded our original 10-year plan? Or what was sort of your reflection at that point? Yeah, we did. We spent some time having a little trip down memory lane with the team, which was a lot of fun. We, I think the thing, like we had these grand ambitions right from the start. And I thought that that would take two years to bring into reality. So my time estimation has been very awful. But I think that the direction that we were going and we wanted to go in has absolutely been coming to life, which has been really incredible.

16:20And so one thing about a crazy big goal is you can't exactly estimate how long it's going to take, but it's so worthwhile that you want to will it into existence, even if it takes a little bit longer. So it's been very fun to look back at the old decks and be able to tick off all the things that have come to life. Well, I know you've literally put your life on the line in past reporting. I remember talking to you about Bill Tye, the investor. His firm is literally KiteVC because he loves kite surfing so much. And I know you went kite surfing and got caught in a storm and it was really scary. And you've told me never again, right?

16:53You've finished at least that phase of your founder journey. Yeah, I have retired from kite surfing. I think that's the thing. You just never know the wild and wonderful paths you're going to go on to found a journey. Like the actual reality of bringing that to life has been, has been a fascinating journey. And yes, it did involve kite surfing and getting dragged over coral and brought up into the sky and dumped on the sand and like taken out to sea and near shark bait and all sorts of things. so I am very grateful that none of the none of the bad things transpired in a way that was irreversible but I am I have to say I'm not a not an avid kite surfer anymore.

17:34Is Cliff allowed to kite surf now or is it too much of a risk for for a company of your scale? He can I can't say he does it too frequently but he does much more enjoy it intrinsically than I. Fair enough and he's not you know he's not the ceo so you know you can be in the hospital for a week was that the moment when you think back was your craziest upstart moment or i know it can be hard to reflect when you still have so much to achieve and we'll talk about that but when when you think about sort of that moment where you were you were maybe how am i here what am i doing here i am the crazy upstart punching above my weight right now what what comes to mind first for you i think the whole journey but if I had to put one point I'd probably say buying the ticket to go to San Francisco to meet with an investor I'd met for five minutes um and that was I was I was like I'm gonna be in San Francisco and then he was like okay I'll meet with you and you know that's that was a pretty big upstart moment um but then all through the journey it's like you know when we created this deck which was like the future of publishing and said that we're going to take on some big companies and do some big things in the world and we were such a tiny tiny company in Perth I think everything has been one of our values is to set crazy big goals and make them happen and we continuously do that I mean even today we're continuously dreaming of crazy wild things and I think that if you stop dreaming then you stop growing and you become a you know an old company we're I think going to be an upstart forever great well that means you'll be able to keep talking to me forever so exactly I'm very happy with that.

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19:43Why accept them for something as important as your money? Visit Mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes, like I did. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC. Speaking of the goals, you literally, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you literally put goals like on the walls of the early Canva office. was was that just to inspire yourself to inspire the team you know to me as maybe a cynical new yorker i would say that's a little on the nose but i could see it maybe working for canva so what was what was going through through your mind with that alex it's so fun you being in your new seat as as the founder of upstart because i feel like i can give you all of these like weird little wonderful things and you're welcome to take any of them so i'll share i'm gonna learn i'm literally just getting a playbook for for building out my own company from you right now it's very very Very selfish.

20:36So I do find it really, really valuable to write a goal on the wall, but a goal isn't like an aspirational goal that like something that you'd love to be doing one day. It's like, what are you going to be doing? Say in the next six months that you would really, really love to achieve. And it helps to separate the signal from the noise. And so that might be a number of guests that you'd like to have on. That might be something that you really tangibly can be working towards to achieve. And I find that it's really helpful. So if you were to take the full rubric so you do the wild success you break that down into a vision and then you break that down into we used to call them season openers until we became a global team and then that was a little bit of a challenge so now they're just openers i went to a season opener they had very elaborate themes i remember there was a game of thrones one one year yeah very impressive exactly and so like for maybe for you so if you're like okay what's the what's the thing that you'd love to achieve in the next three months that will work towards that ultimate vision and then you stick that on the wall we have to do it in in canva and in spreadsheets nowadays because there's quite a few goals around the 5 000 people at the company but when you're smaller and if you're co-located just sticking it on the wall is a bit of fun but then when you actually achieve that goal then we used to have and we still do have fun celebrations and those celebrations are like hey we achieved that thing that we set because you celebrate what you want to replicate and so the more that you make these like fun, quirky, memorable celebrations, then the next time you stick the poster on the wall of the goal that you'd like to achieve, the more confidence everyone will feel that that actually might be possible.

22:06And so I'm kind of actually want to interview you, Alex, and ask you what your goals are. But I'm not sure if I'm allowed to do that right here. Well, I mean, one goal is to be able to share your wisdom from building Canva with our audience. And so I've got to do my job to achieve that goal. And I'll send you a sticky afterwards. But I am curious, as you brought on more people, scale the company, especially globally with other offices, how do you how did you get people to really buy in and sort of embrace that that vibe and not just feel like they're checking off a box or, you know, they need to just sort of go along with this sort of branding that the company does to appease the boss, you know, but not really fully buy-in.

22:50There's a few parts of that. I think one of the things that was really important in the very early days, we could talk to everyone. We'd like be there chatting to them literally over lunch every day. And then you get a little bit bigger and you can't necessarily chat with everyone over lunch every day. And so it was really important to consolidate our values. And so even though we'd been living them every day, we hadn't really articulated what they were. And so getting them down on pen and paper, so they're literally on people's laptops, they're on people's t-shirts is actually it could sound trite but actually really valuable because if everyone knows the values that you care about as a company then there's actually expectations to uphold that and you know even today in my inbox someone's like hey we know the value of Canva is this this particular thing seemed to be against that is that really you know correct and then we actually are like no actually that wasn't correct but if you don't articulate the values that you value as a company, no one will know of what you care about.

23:46And so it's surprisingly important to articulate the values of things that you care about. And I was given really great advice when we were going through that process, is if you wouldn't pay money or lose money to uphold a value, it's not really a value, it's just a word on the wall. And so it's really important to make sure the values are things that you really care about. And so when we were going through that process, I wanted the values to resonate internally. I wanted them to resonate with how we wanted to relate to our customers, what we wanted our product to bring to life in the world as well.

24:16And so trying to make sure that they kind of stacked all the way through to avoid them just being words on the wall that aren't meaningful. And so I think that's one part is the articulation and then like continuous embodiment of values. And then I'd say, you know, just that learned experience. So, you know, the more, you know, in the early days, each hire is so critical because that sets the foundation for the values and the culture. And then every time someone joins, you're building upon that. And so it's really, really important to get that right. Because if you get that wrong in the early days, you're kind of going to be scaling something that you might not necessarily believe in or want.

24:53Did you have to do any sort of recalibration when you went from the upstart that maybe was trying to get VC's attention, was trying to prove yourself to people? I mean, I remember meeting you and Cliff at a Cloud 100 event almost 10 years ago now. And I was told, hey, this is a really fast growing startup coming out of Australia. And I was like, OK, but I didn't really have a lot of prior knowledge. Of course, I was impressed. And we've now written about, you know, you guys in some capacity for a long time. But I'm sure you've had many of those moments and less so now. So was there a recalibration where it was sort of like, OK, people do get me.

25:32Now they're actually trying to grab time on my calendar more than I can handle. And how do you kind of manage the shift in relationship where now you're sort of the leader and the known quantity to folks? That's a great question. Because in the early days, literally if someone emailed me or I emailed them, I was like literally talking to anyone that would take a meeting. And going from that where literally someone asked when I was in San Francisco, they wanted to meet with me at 7am. and I was in San Francisco and I had to catch the cow train down so I had to get up at like 4 30 to get there on time and I would just take a meeting just because they would meet with me and then at a certain point in time if you're just doing every talk that people would want and taking any meeting like it started to become a little impossible to do so when my focus is always very internally and how we build our product and how we build our team so there was sort of that like moment where you know and it happens gradually and you kind of find that if you say yes to something well in the future by the time you get to that point in time that may not necessarily be the thing that is of great value to be doing and so it's just a constant recalibration I think every year I made you promise to do this podcast six years ago you just you know didn't know it yet no Alex you you've believed in us since the early days you have been like helping us to punch above our weight.

26:57So I was very keen to do your podcast. I am fascinated. Do you think that those early AM meetings, the hustle that you did show early on, I'm sure there were a lot of meetings that were ended up being a waste of time, but do you think it did help grow Canva? And if you had to do it all over again, would you say, yes, there is a period where that is a smart, you know, tactic to take? Oh, absolutely. It's like, you don't really know what's going to pay off. And so you kind of, you know, you put that goal thing. If you have the goal and you're just trying to get as much visibility for the company, like in the very early days, we were just trying to do anything we could to see what sticks.

27:34And we're also learning so much through that process, learning what works, learning what doesn't work. And so I think when you have the goal and then you just do everything you can to achieve that goal, you're going to learn so much through that process as well. Melanie, could you talk a bit about how you've structured Canva and how you and your co-founders are thinking about giving back and sort of how Canva can be a good actor, you know, beyond the product and the company itself. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the first things we did was take the 1 % pledge, which I strongly recommend you do, Alex.

28:06It is 1 % of your time, 1 % of profits, 1 % of your product, and 1 % of your equity. And even if that's not a lot today, over time, that can really steamroll. And so as a result of the 1 % pledge, we gave away our product for free to schools around the world and nonprofits. And now that's$2.5 billion of value that we've been giving away. And so I think these things, even though they might not seem like a lot in the early days, they become an incredible amount over time. Feels a little silly as a bootstrap startup, but maybe eventually. Alex, that's exactly why you should do it now, because as you do it, like it might be worth pretty much nothing today.

28:49It might be worth not that much at all. But then as you grow over time, that could become more and more considerable. And so doing it now when it isn't considerable is the time to do it for sure. And then we also took the, well, Cliff and I said that the vast majority of our equity is going to be donated through the Canva Foundation. And so that's 30 % of Canva, which is quite a considerable sum now. And we've started to deploy it. So we've put in over the last few years$100 million to give directly, where they give money directly to people in extreme poverty. And that's been extraordinary to see how$500 can mean that people can all of a sudden get an operation that they need, afford education, health care, just the real basic necessities of life.