Canva: Melanie Perkins (2019)

When she was just 19 years old, Melanie Perkins dreamt of transforming the graphic design and publishing industries. But she started small, launching a site to make yearbook design simpler and more collaborative. Her success with that first venture—and an unexpected meeting with a VC investor—eventually landed her the backing to pursue her original idea, and the chance to take on software industry titans like Adobe and Microsoft. Today, Melanie's online design platform Canva is valued at $6 billion, joining the list of Australia's "unicorn" companies. For more information on the HIBT Fellowship visit: https://npr.org/fellowsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:25Guy Raz?

  OK, so for today's show, we're going to run one of our favorite episodes from the archives. It's a story of Melanie Perkins, the founder of the design platform Canva. And right at the top of the show, you'll hear me say that the company is valued at $1 billion. Well, Canva is now valued at $6 billion. OK, on to the show.

• 5:49Guy Raz?

  Weren't any of the investors saying, you don't have a tech team, you don't have a chief technology officer? Like, I don't know if I'm going to put my...

• 5:57Speaker 01

  That was literally what everyone was saying.

• 5:59Guy Raz?

  Which makes sense, right?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes perfect sense, but how are we going to get this thing rolling?

• 6:04Guy Raz?

  How many people do you think you pitched over that, I guess, two-month period in San Francisco?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  I don't know, over 100 people, more. I was going through my rejections the other day. I was looking at some of the emails, and there was quite a... quite a dump here.

• 6:23Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:38Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how a college student named Melanie Perkins turned her passion for making better yearbooks into the design platform Canva, now valued at over $1 billion.

• 6:55Guy Raz?

  So there's a story that I think a lot of people have, and the details might be different, but it's basically a version of this. There was this one time, you had a very clever business idea. Maybe it was an idea for a super useful product or a service that would make your life way easier. Mine was actually the One Cup Coffee Maker. I swear, that was my idea. But like most people, I didn't do it. And if you're like me, you didn't have the time to work on it, or the money, or maybe it just seemed too overwhelming to get started. But the way the story always ends is that a couple of months later, maybe a couple of years later, you're shopping at a store, or you're surfing the web, and there it is. I can remember the very day

• 7:40Guy Raz?

  I saw the One Cup Coffee Maker at Target. Someone took my exact idea and made it happen. Now, does this story sound familiar? Because every business starts out as an idea. But to turn an idea into a reality, you have to get started, even if it means starting out small. You have to plant the seeds for a business to grow before someone else does. And Melanie Perkins, as you will hear, she did have a big idea. She wanted to transform the entire desktop publishing industry when she was just 19 years old. But instead of feeling overwhelmed by the scale of her idea, Melanie got to work. She started out small by focusing first on one little piece of the idea

• 8:25Guy Raz?

  that she thought she could make work, which happened to be an online tool to design and publish school yearbooks. Melanie grew up in Perth in Western Australia. Her mom was a teacher and her dad was an engineer. And when Melanie went to university to study communications, this was in the mid 2000s, she started using graphic design and publishing software, programs like Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Publisher. And she was frustrated that the programs were so clunky and so difficult to learn.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  And it seemed completely silly that you'd take there's so many instruction manuals and so many steps to do the most basic of things. Students would take a whole semester just learning where the buttons were, they'd learn how to design something. It seemed very apparent that this whole desktop-based thing would be completely archaic and outdated in the future. And so I had this very oversized vision for taking on all of these different industries from Microsoft Office and lots and lots of other industries as well. We thought rather than people using things like clip art, they should be able to have access to beautiful templates like designers do. But at that point in time, I was 19 and I had no business experience. And so rather than trying to take on the entire world of design, all these really big companies, we decided to take on school yearbooks in Australia.

• 9:37Guy Raz?

  You keep saying "we." When you say "we," who are you talking about?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  My boyfriend turned co-founder Cliff.

• 9:43Guy Raz?

  And you're still together 12, 11, 12 years later. So you decided to start like a web-based business that would help people design yearbooks. How did you come upon the idea of yearbooks?

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Well, we heard this vision for taking on the entire world of design. But yearbooks seemed to be like a really pressing need because school teachers would get thrown in to do this thing that had no design experience. I'd seen my mom put together school yearbooks for her school.

• 10:12Guy Raz?

  And it's a grind.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  It's a huge grind. And all of a sudden, these people with no design experience were expected to create something to look professional. And so we realized that it would be a really easy thing to do because there was such a strong market need for these people to create yearbooks.

• 10:25Guy Raz?

  So how do you go from having that idea to actually? Like, what was your next step? Because it was you and Cliff and he was also 19?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  I was 20.

• 10:34Guy Raz?

  20. By the way, what was it called?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Fusion Books.

• 10:36Guy Raz?

  Fusion Books. So. Were either of you guys like coders or software engineers? I mean, you were-

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Not at all. We just went and interviewed every software development company in Perth. And most people told us that we were completely mad.

• 10:48Guy Raz?

  But how did you even have the money to pay them?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  We got a 50 grand loan from friends and family, which was awesome. And then we got five grand back from GST, which is like our tax thing. So that was our marketing budget.

• 11:00Guy Raz?

  You went around to friends and family and said, "We have this amazing idea. We want to develop a web-based software solution for people designing yearbooks, which is a great idea."

• 11:10Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 11:12Guy Raz?

  So you and Cliff have a little bit of cash and you go around to software developers in Perth. Who did you eventually find?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  There was this amazing company called In Depth. And I went in with like an 80-page description of exactly what we wanted to build. Like, I had wireframes built up, even though I didn't know what that-

• 11:32Guy Raz?

  Like, you sketched out pictures of what the pages would look like?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, to the detail, what every single button was going to do, how it's going to work. Like, this project ended up being like five times bigger than they anticipated, but they were very kind and like we'd had a fixed-price contract.

• 11:48Guy Raz?

  And what was going to make this better than anything else available at the time?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think that there was just nothing much available, other than these desktop-based programs. So rather than everyone having to send emails back and forth and collect all those files, I wanted it just to be collaborative and online and really simple.

• 12:05Guy Raz?

  Because at that time, if you wanted to make a yearbook page, you would just go on Microsoft Word or like-

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, Microsoft Word or Publisher. And then also, it wasn't just that part. You'd then have to go get your stock photos or stock illustrations to actually make it look really good. And so there'd be so many different things that you'd have to piece together to create something really, really hacky.

• 12:27Guy Raz?

  And then you would like email that page to somebody and say, "Hey, what do you think?" And they'd say, "Oh, nah." But you wanted something more like Google Docs, where everybody could kind of jump in and make changes?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 12:39Guy Raz?

  So you go to the software company in Perth. And how long did it take for them to build out the software for you?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I think it was about six months before we had our first iteration and then immediately started on our second iteration.

• 12:50Guy Raz?

  And do you remember what year this was?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  That was 2008.

• 12:54Guy Raz?

  2008. So you just put it up there. On the one hand, yearbooks seem like a really niche market, right? Because it's one time a year when someone's using it. But on the other hand, every school does a yearbook, right? So it actually, it's surprising that there was nothing really out there to make it easy.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And on the plus side as well, because a yearbook actually has to get printed, that was how we were able to monetize. So we were able to give the software away for free and then actually sell the physical yearbooks.

• 13:23Guy Raz?

  So the idea would be that somebody would go on there, design their yearbook, hit submit, and then you guys would take that and then print it. And you would make money off of the actual printing costs?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:34Guy Raz?

  So what happened?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Well, we got 16 schools in our first year, which we were very excited about. And then we ended up getting printing presses in my mom's living room.

• 13:45Guy Raz?

  How did you, how did you put, how did you get printing presses?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  So Fuji Xerox had this really cool deal where they said that they'd give us the printer for free if we paid for the ink and cartridges. And they kind of believed that we had like a newspaper article in Perth and they obviously saw that.

• 14:03Guy Raz?

  Oh, there was an article about you guys?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:05Guy Raz?

  And they saw it and they thought, oh, we'll help out.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And they thought that'd help out and we'd become a big printing press company one day.

• 14:11Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  And so they gave us a printer. We ended up with a couple of them, actually. And so we would have a printing press going for 24 hours for three months a year. And it would just be printing out these yearbooks. And then we'd go to a binding place and they'd actually do the finishing and the binding.

• 14:27Guy Raz?

  Did any of these schools know that you guys were like 19, 20 years old?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  I don't imagine so.

• 14:36Guy Raz?

  So within your first year, do you remember like what kind of revenue you did?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Um, the first year revenue would have been very modest, but it was enough to be able to afford to do more marketing the next year. So we just reinvest our profits every year into the next year. And very fortunately, I guess, we had to become profitable quite quickly because otherwise we'd have no company immediately. So the first year we had 16 schools, the second year we had 50 schools, the next year we had 100 schools, and then it was like, I think it was 300. So it was growing quite rapidly.

• 15:08Guy Raz?

  Um, how, when did you start to think about building this into something bigger? Because by 2010, you know, you're two years in and I can imagine you can start to see this thing has legs.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So actually, the original idea of taking on the whole world of design and making it easy for everyone was actually planted right from the start. And then we narrowed it down to yearbooks. But we kept looking around and people would be like, oh, can we use this to design our canteen menus and our newsletters and our school flyers? Like, surely there must be more technology available now that does that. And there certainly wasn't. But then in 2010, I met Bill Tai, who was a Silicon Valley investor over from here. And he was just talking about all these companies and startups. And like, when I first heard him speak, it sounded like a window to a whole new world.

• 15:59Guy Raz?

  You met him in Perth. What was he doing there?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Um, he was speaking at a conference.

• 16:03Guy Raz?

  This is in 2010?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, even though like, we'd sort of had a company that we'd been growing, but the only thing that we knew at that point in time was there were a small business that really struggled to get a loan from the banks. We didn't have a credit history. And there was this whole world of startups that were taking on big industries. So I went up to him after a speech and someone there kindly introduced me and said, hey, she's got a cool company. And he said, yeah, if I went to San Francisco, he'd be happy to meet.

• 16:33Guy Raz?

  And you said, oh, okay, great. And you just like took his number?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:38Guy Raz?

  And email and stuff?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And so as soon as I met him, I realized that that was the next level. And that if I could do anything we possibly could to get there, it was this.

• 16:49Guy Raz?

  So you just emailed him and said, can we talk?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I kind of was like, hey, I'm going to be in Silicon Valley. I'm just going to be in the area. Want to catch up?

• 16:58Guy Raz?

  Did you, did you really have plans at that point? Or you just thought, let's see what he says?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  I was like, if I just say that I'm going to be there and he says that he'll meet up, well, then I'll go.

• 17:07Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  And so could not have been more over the moon that he actually even responded to my message.

• 17:13Guy Raz?

  Sure, sure. Come see me.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just completely dumbfounded.

• 17:16Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you presumably could go and book your ticket to San Francisco.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:23Guy Raz?

  And how long was, were you planning on going out, coming out for?

• 17:26Speaker 01

  I planned on coming out for two weeks.

• 17:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  My brother was living here and I thought I'd come and visit him. And I'd go and have this meeting that I was absolutely afraid of. It was an understatement. And so in between the time that he said that he'd meet with me and coming here, I put together my business plan. The future of publishing was what I titled it. And it had a picture of us beating Microsoft Office. And Adobe and Google Docs and a whole bunch of other companies. So we met on University Ave.

• 17:58Guy Raz?

  In Palo Alto.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  In Palo Alto at a cafe. And he said we'd go for lunch. So I brought my, I physically printed my pitch deck, which I also didn't realize was so uncool.

• 18:09Guy Raz?

  You're supposed to put it on like a, a computer, right?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  That, that's right.

• 18:13Guy Raz?

  Probably a Mac, like a sleek Mac.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  I totally didn't know this at the time.

• 18:17Guy Raz?

  You brought a stack of like stapled.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  I was sitting there, like I had my paper pitch deck. And he was like, do you have an iPad? And I'm like, no. And then I was like trying to flip the pages in my deck and explain about the future of publishing and how we're going to take on all these big companies. And trying to eat my lunch.

• 18:32Guy Raz?

  And he was there wrapped, like engaged?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  No, he was on his phone the whole time. It was so awkward. I felt like the biggest flop. And, but very fortunately, when I went home, I had an email from him. And he said, if I could find a tech team, he'd be happy to invest.

• 18:48Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he'd actually been messaging a lot of different people and introducing me to them.

• 18:55Guy Raz?

  While during the meeting, so he was actually on the phone messaging other people?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the next meeting I had was with Lars Rusmasen, who co-founded Google Maps. And meeting him completely blew my mind because I really didn't know, it sounds so bizarre, but I had no idea that people that made big world-changing companies were just regular, nice, hard-working, normal people. And meeting Lars completely changed my perception of what was possible.

• 19:21Guy Raz?

  And did he, when he met you, he said, hey, there's something here?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we ended up having an incredible conversation for hours. We both had a really similar view of what the future of communication and publishing should be like.

• 19:34Guy Raz?

  What was he saying?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  So there was a few philosophies. One of them was that over time, industries would converge. So rather than having the print industry being over here, having to use different software to create a website, and different software to create a presentation, and different software to create marketing materials, and some of those things being online and some of them being desktop-based, that all these industries would come together and be in one page and then be accessible to the world. It seemed crazy that you'd have to use so many different tools and go and learn a different thing for everything you wanted to create.

• 20:05Guy Raz?

  So you meet this guy Lars, and you say to him, hey, Bill says he's gonna back me if I find a tech team, can you help me? Is that what you said to Lars?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And Lars said he'd be happy to be in a fizer. But what that ended up entailing was him rejecting everyone for a full year.

• 20:25Guy Raz?

  Wait, why did Lars have to approve of the tech team? Was that Bill's condition or?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was Bill's condition.

• 20:31Guy Raz?

  He said, oh, I trust Lars. If Lars gives a thumbs up to your tech team, I'll fund you.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 20:37Guy Raz?

  So you are in San Francisco for the next three months.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Until my visa expired.

• 20:42Guy Raz?

  Okay, visa, great, because three-month visa, tourist visa. And where are you, like, working out of? What are you?

• 20:48Speaker 01

  So I was sleeping on my brother's, like, here at a one-bedroom apartment. I was sleeping in his living room floor. And I was working in, at Nordstrom, the shopping center.

• 20:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah, the Westfield Shopping Center.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  It's an amazing co-working space. I don't know why more people don't take this up.

• 21:02Guy Raz?

  It's free?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  It's free.

• 21:03Guy Raz?

  There's wifi?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 21:05Guy Raz?

  So the Nordstrom's in the Westfield Shopping Centre in San Francisco, okay?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And so I would go in there and I would work. And between that, I'd be going to every single conference that I could, like, anything, any meeting, anyone would take.

• 21:19Guy Raz?

  Just chatting with people, whoever would listen?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Like, literally, even on the bus, I'd be pitching people, trying to get them to join my tech team.

• 21:26Guy Raz?

  And are you just naturally kind of gregarious and outgoing? Was it easy for you to just show up? Like, you would just go up to people and say, "Hi, I'm Melanie. Can I tell you about my company?" Is that what you would do?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  So I'm actually naturally really introverted. But when I have a goal, I do everything I can to get there. And so, yeah, I would be getting up and, like, if people would let me do a one-minute pitch at a conference, I would get up and I'd be doing that one-minute pitch and probably-

• 21:49Guy Raz?

  Heart beating and racing?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Completely terrified, but I'd just keep on pushing myself because I wanted this to happen.

• 21:56Guy Raz?

  Your partner and boyfriend, Cliff, he was still at work, right? Presumably, for those three months, he was working on Fusion, the yearbook company.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:05Guy Raz?

  And how was it doing?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  It was doing well. It was growing. It had, like, he moved out from my mom's house to into our first office. Yeah, it was, it was an interesting time because we knew that there was this big, amazing opportunity over here, but it was really hard to make progress with. And then on the other side was Fusion, and that was a sure thing, growing every month, every year. It felt like I had been over in Silicon Valley achieving nothing, while, like, I'd left him with all the hard work. Pretty much summed it up.

• 22:32Guy Raz?

  So, three months, you're here for three months. Was it exciting or were you encouraged? Did you feel like this is moving forward?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  I think every day I felt like I'd make a little progress. But by the end of the three months, I didn't have a tech team and I left feeling like the biggest failure.

• 22:50Guy Raz?

  Why?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Because I had not landed a tech team, which meant that I hadn't landed investors, which meant that all I'd done, in my view at that point in time, was like, nothing. I'd learnt a lot, but I hadn't actually achieved anything. And so when I was going back to Perth on the flight, I wrote a list of the things that I'd achieved, and one of them was, like, staying alive, which is a little grim, but it was a thing.

• 23:16Guy Raz?

  It's a thing, it's a thing, yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  But then, yeah, then moved the company from Perth to Sydney and came back for round two.

• 23:25Guy Raz?

  Coming up in just a moment, why Melanie's next step in her search for investors was learning how to kite surf. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

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• 25:28Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So something you should know before we get back into Melanie's story is that Bill Tai, the VC investor Melanie met with at the Palo Alto coffee shop, he's a huge kite surfing fan. And Bill's taken these two things, venture capitalism and kite surfing, and kind of combined them into a conference he puts on called Mai Tai. And back when Bill met with Melanie, basically told her, hey, if you like kite surfing, I can invite you to this event and you can talk to some other investors there about your idea.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Because I made it seem like I was really interested in kite surfing. And so he said that if I could kite surf, I could go to this conference. And that was where a lot of VCs and investors would be. So I learned to kite surf and felt like I was going to risk my life quite significantly. It's really frightening.

• 26:18Guy Raz?

  And what's this conference likely? What do you do?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  They have tech talks like during the morning and then everyone kite surfs in the afternoon.

• 26:26Guy Raz?

  And how many people are there?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  A hundred and fifty or something.

• 26:29Guy Raz?

  Okay, so it's pretty big.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:31Guy Raz?

  And it's at a hotel in?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Maui.

• 26:33Guy Raz?

  In Maui, okay. And kite surfing by day and then mingling at night. You went or both you and Cliff went?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  We both went.

• 26:40Guy Raz?

  And you guys are, must be thinking, this is a way for us to get in front of potential funders, investors.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 26:49Guy Raz?

  So what did you, were you?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  So we weren't scheduled to talk or anything, but in one of the events, we just said, like, can we talk tomorrow? Can we do a pitch? And this was like at 10 o'clock at night. And eventually he said yes. So we ended up like just staying up until 6:00 AM, like preparing our pitch for the pitch of our lives. And eventually got up and was so incredibly nervous in front of everyone. But apparently it didn't do so bad because like this ex-CEO of Shutterfly came up and said he would be keen to invest. And a number of other people said that either give us intros or it would be keen to invest as well.

• 27:27Guy Raz?

  What does that mean? Does that mean like I'm ready to write you a check now? Or does that mean I'm interested in further talking more about this?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Further talking more about this? And waiting to see who else is going to invest before we invest is was the general feeling. So you had to get enough people who were interested to invest before anyone would invest.

• 27:46Guy Raz?

  So you did not leave Maui with like a stack of checks?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 27:49Guy Raz?

  You left Maui with how many checks?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Zero checks.

• 27:51Guy Raz?

  Zero, OK. So the next, so from Maui, you went back to San Francisco. Still on tourist visa.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 27:56Guy Raz?

  This is round two.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:58Guy Raz?

  Now it's you and Cliff.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:59Guy Raz?

  And what did you do over the next six or eight weeks? Like, did you, was it, did you start to pitch potential investors? Is that what you were doing?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, pitching everyone. Include, we're still pitching for other engineers at this stage because we still didn't have an engineer. We're pitching any venture capitalist or angel investor that would take a meeting.

• 28:21Guy Raz?

  Weren't any of the investors saying, hey, this is a really cool idea. And, you know, Fusion seems cool, but you don't have a tech team. You don't have a chief technology officer. Like, I don't know if I'm going to put my, that's just, yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  That was literally what everyone was saying.

• 28:36Guy Raz?

  Which makes sense, right?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes terrific sense, but how are we going to get this thing rolling?

• 28:41Guy Raz?

  How many people do you think you pitched over that, I guess, two month period in San Francisco?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Um, three months. It was, I don't know, between the, like, the first year and, I don't know, that year period, it would, over 100 people, more. I didn't count, but I was going through my rejections the other day. I was looking at some of the emails and there was quite a, quite a damn few.

• 29:07Guy Raz?

  So what was it that kept you going? Like, when you were just getting rejection after rejection?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I think you just know the game you're playing. Um, and, you know, we wanted to build the future of publishing. And we knew that this, well, like, in my head, this is just absolutely the future. There's no way that things are going to be desktop based anymore. Everything was very evidently moving online. There's no way that things were going to be fragmented across all these industries. It was going to be easier for people. And so I really wanted to create that. Even though it was frustrating, it was also, I knew it was a pretty important thing to do, to get people to see the same future that I did.

• 29:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  But I think it was really beneficial because we got so many different questions and comments and people not liking what we were doing at all. It meant that we really had to know what we were doing and really refine our strategy. So every single day we'd go back and revise our pitch deck. Every time we got a really hard question, that would go right to the front of the pitch deck. So the hardest questions were answered right at the front. So rather than people sitting and going through the entire pitch and then being like, oh, but you're the same as some random company that actually had nothing to do with us, we then put a slide in our pitch deck which showed the gap in the market and all of the other companies and where we believe the huge gap was. A lot of people would say they know nothing about design, they don't know anything about our industry, and so that was a reason to not invest. So we made one of the first pages of our pitch deck explaining the industry and where

• 30:27Speaker 01

  we believe this huge gap was.

• 30:28Guy Raz?

  This was in 2012, right? Okay, so let's say I'm one of these investors you're meeting with in the Bay Area, I would say. So yeah, this looks cool, but I have a lot of questions for you, Melanie. First of all, tech team, where's your tech team? You would say what?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  So we've already built a company with Fusion Books. We've demonstrated that we can make a profitable company that's been able to grow. We've launched internationally and we're just going to take it on to the bigger stage. I can totally understand why no one wanted to invest in us.

• 30:56Guy Raz?

  And then I would say, and I'd say, but you know, like, look, Microsoft or Google, the minute they see what you guys do, they'll crush you because they'll just put something else out, way bigger. And, I mean, you're just going to get crushed right away.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  You sound totally like one of those investors.

• 31:12Guy Raz?

  And what would you say?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  We'd say, there is this huge gap in the market because to actually create this huge industry, the future of publishing, you would have to completely cannibalize your industry. And if you look at the eras of publishing over the years, we started off with metal plates and then we moved into the tight setting and paste up. So this actually became the second slide in our pitch deck. Then we then moved into the desktop era and then we're now moving into this new era, which we believe is going to be online. And what you'll see, dear investor, is that no industry player has actually ever been able to go from one industry to the next and actually still maintain being the market leader. And so every single time there was a new era, a new market leader emerged. And so we believe that market leader can be us.

• 31:55Guy Raz?

  And then I would say, okay, but you know, it looks interesting, but you guys are way in Australia. I mean, like, would you guys consider relocating here, making it, moving your team here?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  So it depends when you ask this question.

• 32:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  So at a certain point in time, we ended up finding an amazing co-founder Cameron Adams, who had been at Google. And so he was going to be based in Australia. And we also met another amazing guy from Google, who Lars said was one of the best people we'd ever worked with, Dave Herndon. So Lars actually introduced us to both Cam and Dave. Dave had worked in the US, but he was Australian. He was going to be in Australia. And so it sort of started to swing the pendulum towards Australia.

• 32:35Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  And then the government in Australia had this matching funding thing, where they would match every dollar that we got from investors.

• 32:41Guy Raz?

  They wanted to incentivize you.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  To stay.

• 32:44Guy Raz?

  To stay in Australia. So Dave Herndon, who you just mentioned, he ends up becoming your chief technology officer, right?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 32:52Guy Raz?

  And I'm just curious, like, he was a really talented engineer working at Google. I'm sure he was very well-paid at the time. How did you convince him to join your tiny startup instead?

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Well, if you search the term on Google bizarre pitch deck, I can proudly claim the number one spot.

• 33:11Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  So I went on to... So firstly, we'd pitched Dave, and Dave was like interested in what we were doing. So he was a little bit concerned about joining. So what I did was I went to his Facebook page, and I took lots of the photos from his Facebook page, and I put together a pitch deck, and said why it would be such an amazing adventure to come and join and recreate the future of publishing and change the face of the internet using a storyline from the photos that I had taken from his Facebook page.

• 33:42Guy Raz?

  And that convinced him?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  I think that that definitely moved it in the right direction. I think that he realized that we had a lot of passion and we were going to do whatever it took to make this thing happen.

• 33:52Guy Raz?

  Okay, so now you've convinced a few high-profile people to join you. You're finally putting together this tech team to actually build this thing. But you're still pitching investors and getting rejections, right? When did that change?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  We had enough people that were somewhat interested that hadn't rejected us. So we had a bit of a strategy where rather than asking if people wanted to invest, we'd ask people for their advice. And you can go back and you can say, hey, do you wanna give me some advice? I'd love to show you my pitch deck. And then they'd give us some advice. And so that means they didn't say no to us at this point in time.

• 34:25Guy Raz?

  They would just give you feedback.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Give us feedback and they're like, okay, that's great feedback. We'll take that on board. And they're like, hey, do you wanna meet up again in another month? And look, we've done the things that we'd said we were gonna do. And once you had done that enough times, they realised that you actually do the things you say you're gonna do.

• 34:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  We kind of had enough people at that point, where they were kind of interested, that we'd kind of been demonstrating that we could do what we said we were going to do.

• 34:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  And then the tide turned because we hadn't, we were all of a sudden oversubscribed.

• 34:53Guy Raz?

  How much did you wanna raise in that first seed round?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  So we wanted to raise 1.5. I think we left San Francisco and we'd raised 7.50. But then over the coming months, we ended up filling out that round of about 1.6, I think it got to, where we're totally oversubscribed. And then the Australian government gave us 1.4.

• 35:14Guy Raz?

  A matching amount?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:16Guy Raz?

  So you've got 3 million bucks.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:18Guy Raz?

  This is what, early 2013?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2012. So it was a full year of development between landing investment and actually launching the product. And in that time, our best is like, well, like, what the hell has she done with our money? Like, it's a long time. So like, the lean startup was a big deal back then. And you launch and iterate and do something in a weekend and see if people like it.

• 35:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  But the whole point was that we took all these really complex things and made it simple and then great for everyone and accessible. And so that took a lot more time than a weekend.

• 35:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And so you spent that year developing this thing. And then spent a lot of time, like, on user testing, making sure that people actually understood it. People were scared of designing because people are conditioned for their whole lives, thinking they're not creative or can't design things. So we ended up with these things, got started challenges where they'd come and they'd change the colour of a circle and put a hat on a monkey. And all these little silly challenges that built up people's confidence with their design abilities.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  So that took a while.

• 36:20Guy Raz?

  And while you were sort of building out this technology, presumably you had to hire people too, right? How many people did you have to hire in that first year before you even launched?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  I think we had about 15 people.

• 36:36Guy Raz?

  So you had a team.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  We had a team, yeah, we had a team. It was incredibly exciting.

• 36:41Guy Raz?

  And it sounds exciting, but let me, just the flip side of this, which is all of a sudden, you've got $3 million of other people's money. You've convinced these really talented engineers to join you. You've got other people who've like given up their jobs to come and work for you. That's scary. That's a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. Actually, when I'm at Lars and started to think about this whole world venture capital and taking people's money, I realized that I had to make a decision at that point in time that if I was going to pursue this path, I would have to be at least partially okay with the idea of it not working out. And why that was something that was important is I'm really not someone that likes to give up ever on anything.

• 37:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  But yeah, certainly it was a lot of pressure, but I was also felt incredibly happy for it to have gone from something where everything was external, so trying to convince people to join my team, to something that was internal, like I could can work really hard to make sure that this was an amazing product. And I like that switch. That's my preferred place.

• 37:47Guy Raz?

  So you guys launch, I guess, in August of 2013 and you're ready with this online graphic design and like publishing tool and you hang the shingle out and the website goes live. And what happens? Like, do people come to it right away?

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Well, we're fortunate that because we had some high-profile investors in that first round, when we...

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Landed that first round of investment, we made, we announced it. We got some TechCrunch coverage and we were pretty stoked about that. And we ended up with a waiting list of 50,000 people before we launched.

• 38:19Guy Raz?

  Oh, so it was like by invitation only initially?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  And we said we weren't, we're this stealth startup that wasn't saying what we were doing.

• 38:26Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, we, we launched in August 2013. We'd spent a lot of time prior to that engineering it so people would have an amazing experience and to clap and to share it with others. And that certainly happened. And so within the first, you know, every month was the biggest and best ever.

• 38:44Guy Raz?

  Wow. And what, explain what the business model was and is like you, it's free to use, right? Like you can just go and design anything. So a subscription model, how does it work?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  So one of our philosophies right from the start was that we wanted design to be accessible to everyone. We wanted to be free. And so Canva is completely free to use and then you can purchase images for a dollar. And so it would mean that like if you're, you know, putting together your school assignment or you're, you know, just a really small business trying to create, get your social media off the ground, you could afford to create something that looked great. And then we also have a paid offering. So if you're using it for work, if you would like to save your brand colors and fonts and logos, then you can go on our premium offering.

• 39:26Guy Raz?

  And it's like a subscription, like a monthly amount? And, and so let's say I want to design like a yearbook page, right? And I can go and design it, but if I want to actually download it, I have to pay for that.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  No, that's free as well.

• 39:37Guy Raz?

  That's free. Okay.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. We wanted, we wanted to ensure that our free product was a complete value loop. Like you could go in, get your thing completely free.

• 39:44Guy Raz?

  It doesn't, it doesn't say Canva like printed on it or anything? Do you guys have ads at all?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  No ads.

• 39:50Guy Raz?

  No ads. So how, so you need a pretty significant percentage of your users to buy images? Because building this technology is expensive.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the concept was that we'd give away the software for free, but then you could purchase images, you could purchase fonts, you could purchase potentially layouts, but we're currently giving them away for free. But the idea is that you would always be able to have that base product for free for everyone. And we're actually profitable. So actually that business model's been working out all right for us. And you can also print your designs. They can click print and in 40 countries, you can have it delivered to your door.

• 40:28Guy Raz?

  I mean, one of the things that I'm really surprised about, and I'm a little disappointed about, actually, is that it sounds like you just didn't make any mistakes after you launched it. It just sounds like you put this great product out there and there were no bugs and everybody was happy with it. Is that, is it true? I mean, I'm like waiting for the disaster story where, you know, you launched it and then like it crashed for four days or something.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  I'll give you, I'll give you a tidbit. So it's, it certainly hasn't been smooth sailing, but I guess I'm always just focused on the next mountain to climb. So for example, when we launched, so we had, I've just told you the entire backstory of all of the effort that had gone into getting it to launch. So I was back in San Francisco, sleeping in my brother's apartment and he was actually away. So I'm just there by myself before, so I'm about to go to sleep and someone broke the embargo.

• 41:19Guy Raz?

  And broke the embargo that you're about to launch?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  About to launch, yeah. An article came out and they, their article said that we had a not very good product and that we had cheesy photography and that it wasn't very easy to use. And I felt at that point in time, like the last, I don't know, six years of my life was crushed.

• 41:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Very fortunately, that was a bit of a, fortunately, a false start. Everyone else seemed to like it and get what we're doing.

• 41:51Guy Raz?

  So as you scale and grow and hire more people, you are the CEO, you're the boss of the company. You're a self-described introvert. You're sitting here, you seem like just a kind and really delightful person. And sometimes you have to be tough as a CEO. Like you have to make tough decisions. You have to fire people. You have to... Review people, you have to have difficult conversations with people. Have you had to learn how to do that? Or does that come naturally to you? Or do you just avoid doing that?

• 42:28Speaker 01

  I think everything, every single day, right from the start, has been a learning curve. You know, there's been people that haven't worked out over the years. We try to just have the nicest conversation, try to actually help them to understand that why it wasn't working out, try to coach them to actually make them better. I don't know, there's just every, at every single stage, there's been things to learn. And I don't think that, you know, some things never get easier. But you just have to figure out, like, what is the best thing that you possibly can do and learn as you go. I think that that's one thing that I'm pretty good at is just in time learning. And over the years, there's certainly been a lot of things to learn.

• 43:03Guy Raz?

  You know, given that you are like one of the first Australian unicorns, right? I don't know, does that increase the pressure on you? Or does it, are you just super proud of it and, you know, just carry on? I mean, do you feel any of that weight?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  I think the ironic thing is, like, since I was doing my assignments in year two, I've always put a lot of pressure on myself. And so that same pressure just applies today. Like, of course, it's different, it's a different magnitude. But I think I've just always put a lot of pressure on myself. I've always wanted to do the best I possibly can. And now, yes, I feel a lot of responsibility for the livelihoods of a lot of our team members. But I think that, you know, that same pressure of just like trying to do my absolute best every single day, just, that's kind of been continuous.

• 43:49Guy Raz?

  I'm just curious, like, out of the hundreds of thousands of designs that have been created, you know, up until this point, with this tool that you brought into the world, like, do you, do you have any favorites?

• 44:02Speaker 01

  To me, the stories that really touch me are like, so we've got 20,000 nonprofits using Canva, and this is everything from people trying to end poverty to cure cancer. Like, seeing the stories. They're pretty damn cool. Like, we had a lady who found her birth mother, who she created a poster on Canva, posted on Facebook, found her birth mother. That was pretty cool. We've seen so many people who post their resume that landed them a job. Or, there's just like, so many stories. Every single day, I like, look through Twitter and I see so many touching stories of, you know, that one philosophy of that design should be accessible to everyone is actually being put into practice and having real world implications.

• 44:44Guy Raz?

  How much of, of all of this, this amazing story, do you attribute to your skill, your intelligence, your hard work, and how much to luck?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  I think it's a really interesting question, because I think that if you zoom out of luck, and you say, where were you born? Who were your parents? Who, what was the education that you got? You know, having good health. There's so many layers of luck. So if you look at all of those things, I couldn't be luckier. But then, on the other side of it, I feel like we've planted enough seeds that eventually one of those grows. And so that's kind of another version of luck. It's like, we planted maybe a thousand seeds and one of those seeds grew. And so you could kind of attribute that to either luck or hard work for planting a thousand seeds. So I'd say a little column A, a little column B.

• 45:33Guy Raz?

  How, how old are you now?

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Thirty-one.

• 45:35Guy Raz?

  So thirty-one, and amazingly, you're so young, but you're a veteran. I mean, you've been in the startup world since you were nineteen. Like, you started your first real company. So you, you have a lot of experience. I mean, you've got twelve years of experience doing this, raising money, starting a business, creating a brand, marketing. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  I think one of the wonderful things about this whole experience is that I didn't know a lot going into it. And I think that learning every single day as you go has actually been one of the most critical parts. Because I think if I knew all of the lessons that I've had to learn over the last twelve years, I would have been incredibly intimidated and potentially not even wanted to start. Had I listened to statistics, for example, and thought that that was something that I should be afraid of or frightened of, that probably would have dissuaded me. Because every single day, you're getting thrown in the deep end. But at the same time, like, I love challenges and taking on what seems to be the impossible from the outside. I don't know, when you don't know what you don't know, then you can't really be afraid of it.

• 46:49Guy Raz?

  That's Melanie Perkins, co-founder of Canva. The company says its publishing tool is now used by 30 million people a month. Oh, and by the way, when it comes to kite surfing, Melanie told me she actually got into it for a while, but she doesn't really do it anymore.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I did it for five years, and I can now officially kite surf.

• 47:08Guy Raz?

  Great.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  But I felt for five years like I was kind of risking my life. I'm kind of, I take risks in things that are kind of calculated. And so my risk-loss ratio was a little out with that. I felt like I could just die at any moment.

• 47:22Guy Raz?

  And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, it's at HowIBuiltThis or at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, it's at Guy dot Raz. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Liz Metzger, Farah Safari, Dareth Gales, J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Wu-Jung Lee. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

• 48:06Guy Raz?

  This is NPR.