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Melanie Perkins

CEO & Co-Founder, Canva

Search every verified Melanie Perkins interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, has discussed the company's growth and her approach to risk in recent interviews. In a 2019 episode of How I Built This, she recalled that as a 19-year-old she saw the desktop-based design software model as "completely archaic and outdated," noting that students spent semesters learning software buttons rather than design skills. She described pitching her idea to over 100 investors, many of whom rejected the concept because the company lacked a chief technology officer. In a 2020 How I Built Resilience interview, Perkins said she hoped the COVID-19 pandemic would lead to a world "more connected, more caring about humanity" and that Canva aimed to support small businesses, students, and teachers relying on the platform. She also mentioned her five-year experience with kitesurfing, which she described as a calculated risk where she "felt like I could just die any moment." Canva's valuation was reported at $6 billion in 2020, and the company has been described as one of Australia's "unicorn" startups.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“Affinity is is free and will be. It's it's a critical thing. Um, you know, we knew that that was a really critical part of why Affinity was created in the first place is being able to make it more accessible. And then a key part of Canva has always been having our free product.”

“Investing in our own models has been a really core part of our strategy and we were able to bring the cost down, the latency down. Um, so that's been a and and the price has been driven down radically. Like if you look at the price of an of LLM queries, it's grown down 50 times in the last three years.”

“We grew by 100% over the last year, 95% of Fortune 500 companies and getting really deep footprints with thousands of people at companies now, which is extraordinary to see. We think that this with Canva AI 2.0 you know, it will radically change that. It will be a huge step change again and becoming the system at the center of work.”

“For the first million users we're giving everyone an AI pass which we're really excited about. So it's a $100 monthly pass we're going to be giving everyone in that first million so they can just go completely wild and test out all these new products.”

“We're generating enough renewable energy to match what goes into every Canva Print order across the US and Canada. It's a huge step towards reaching our net zero goal.”

“In October last year, we committed $100 million to support people living in extreme poverty in Malawi. Those payments are rolling out to families as we speak with our partners GiveDirectly. We also make Canva's premium products free for millions of schools, universities, and nonprofits around the world. This has amounted to more than $2 billion dollars worth of product value donated each year.”

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