The world is made by eight billion little brush strokes on a painting, and we all need to think about the consequence of the brush strokes 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, all 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 and 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. This 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. And 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 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 how Canva is being used around the world, it really is a bit of a pinch-me moment.
When you think like, oh, it's 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 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. And 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 year after year with you. But let's go back. I'm curious where that ambition started. 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. It 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 the goal at that time?
At the very start, we had this wild belief that desktop programs to create software was just like a really old and outdated way to do it. So, I was at university, I was teaching design programs part-time. And so it'd be things like Photoshop and InDesign and Illustrator and PowerPoint. So every time the students wanted to learn something, they'd have to learn a completely new tool every time they wanted to design something. And it seemed really crazy that it was so hard and complex to learn anything. And it would take us whole classes to learn where some buttons were, let alone how to design anything that actually looked good. And 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 delivered 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 and then eventually we're like oh maybe we should actually take on that bigger challenge.
Melanie, can you talk about just quickly the transition from achieving better scale than maybe you guys anticipated 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.
Just because of the pizza. The pizza analogy.
Yeah, 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. So it would have been a really awkward thing to have sold that off somewhere else. So,
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.
Did 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 and you know, 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 or 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, you know, get some win some prize money. We were like 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 and then at the conference,
This is for all of Western Australia I assume. WA.
Yeah. Exactly. I mean, that's the big time right there.
And the a mining company unsurprisingly won the number one spot and we came second and we were trying to sound really inventive because it was 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 Tai 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 kickstarted 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 and 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. Even through the yearbook stage we learned so much about running a business. We learned so much about the printing industry specifically and 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, you know, 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.
One 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 it's 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. And then the first time it was like properly articulated as 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.
But 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 decks has something like global domination right was that something that people got that was 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 from Silicon Valley. I knew nothing about it and 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? 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. And so I think it really 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. I 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 try and 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? But I think that that's something that everyone can do a little more of is to 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, you know, years on years to actually will that into existence. If you're really sure that 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, you know, how can we win on the field each day? How 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. So
Totally, Alex, a fun exercise that 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, it 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 vision deck. I think that that can add a lot of clarity because all of your decisions will be guided by that. If terrible failure would be being successful but not being values aligned like not actually delivering value to the world. You know, 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 is like what is the future of media or what is the future of you know 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.
When Canva turned 10 a couple 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. I think the thing like we had these grand ambitions right from the start and I thought 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. And 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.
