Melanie Perkins: CEO of Canva

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. My remarkable guest, Melanie Perkins has built a global company from Sydney, Australia. To be completely transparent, the company is Canva and I'm Canva's chief evangelist. In other words, Melanie is my boss. Be that as it may, she is a remarkable person and Canva is a remarkable company. People have created over 3 billion designs in Canva since 2013. Approximately 6 to 7 million designs are created each day in 190 countries. 90,000 schools and universities also use it. Melanie came up with the idea for Canva when she was at the University of Western Australia. She taught other students how to use design programs and realized that the software was far too complex and expensive. It was then that she realized the future of design was to be simple, online and collaborative. To test out the idea, Melanie and her co founder, Cliff Olbrecht launched FusionBooks, an online design platform for students to create their school yearbooks. Fusion Books took off in schools across Australia, New Zealand and France. And soon Melanie was able to prove that her new approach to design was possible and needed. She then set out to apply the ease of use principles of Fusion Books to a broader audience. And thus Canva was born. Melanie spent the next several years trying to raise venture capital. She was rejected hundreds of times before she found her first investors. I started working for Canva about six years ago. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable people. And now here is my remarkable boss, Melanie Perkins.

Canva has more than 30 million people using Canva across 190 countries across the globe. It has been used to create more than 3 billion designs now. So it's been growing rather rapidly since we launched in 2013.

Now take us back to Western Australia, Perth, and the genesis of Fusion Books, which eventually became Canva. So what's the genesis of Canva?

So years ago I was at university and I was teaching design programs and students would struggle learning the very basics. It would take a very long time to learn where the buttons were Learn how to actually design something that looked good. And so I thought that in the future it was so apparent that it should be online and collaborative and way simpler than this crazy complex software. And so what I wanted to do was to make that happen. But at that point in time, I had no business experience, no marketing experience, no software experience, or any experience that would be somewhat relevant. So rather than trying to tackle the entire world of design, decided to tackle school yearbooks in Australia. So my co founder, my boyfriend became my co founder, and we took over my mom's living room. That became our office, and we set to work and we created an online design system to create school yearbooks. Because teachers often had a really hard time creating a yearbook. They would get thrown in. They had no design experience and have to create one from scratch that would be seen by their entire school community. We kept on getting questions from our customers, and they were like, hey, can I use this to design our marketing materials, our canteen menus and other things? And we're like, surely it's been done now that there's other software available that enables easy design. And it certainly still wasn't the case. And then it was a long journey of going to San Francisco and pitching people. It was like three years between initially pitching investors and actually landing investment. But then eventually we landed investment, and there was a year. We had a year of pitching engineers as well landed engineers, and then a year of development. And then in 2013, we launched.

When you look back, was the plan for worldwide domination of graphics from the very inception. And you said, well, step A is school yearbooks, but the ultimate game plan is worldwide domination of graphics. Or did you create the Fusion books and then expand your horizons once that was going?

So in the very, very early stages, we had wild plans for this crazy future of lots of different things, lots of different areas that we're looking into. A philosophy that I've developed over the years is Start Nation go wide. I guess that has been exactly the way it's played out. But the start niche at the start was really due to circumstance. We didn't have the resources and the capital to go wide at the start. But I think that that played a really helpful hand by niche solving the problems of a market really well, Solving the problems of a market that were willing to pay for their yearbooks to get delivered and printed to their school really helped to set the foundations. And we learned how to manage a company in a financially sensible way. We learned how to grow, how to do marketing, how to ensure that we were able to expand internationally and all sorts of other things. I think that that was all of those really important lessons were really only learned because we started niche. So even though we had those wild plans at the start, it was really impossible to take on such big companies and such a big market. So yeah, it worked out pretty well, I would say.

So now how many rejections did you get from venture capitalists?

It would be, it was like three years of pitching. I spent six months in San Francisco, two lots of, until my visa expired. I went there for three months and then my visa expired and then I went back the next year again until my visa expired. And in that time I was pitching just literally any, anyone that would listen to me. I remember I had one meeting, they were like, okay, come to down to Palo Alto at seven o' clock for a breakfast meeting. I thought, okay, I jumped on the train at 4:30 in the morning and went down to Palo Alto for a breakfast meeting. Just doing absolutely anything I could. Pitching room, rooms full of investors. I learned to kite surf, to go to a kite surfing, an entrepreneurship conference, literally just doing anything I could to help get the wheels rolling.

I don't expect that the people who rejected you told you the truth, or at least the full truth, but do you believe that being a woman, being young, being from 12,000km away, were all these factors? If you were a man and you were in Silicon Valley, do you believe you would have got funded earlier or faster, easier?

I have no idea and I don't really spend a lot of time thinking like the about that particular topic. There were so many reasons people explicitly rejected us for. People would explicitly reject us for being based in Australia. People would explicitly reject us for a whole host of reasons. You know, we're too early where it was too big an idea people some one investor said that we couldn't possibly tackle digital products at the same time as tackling physically printed products that, you know, they had to be separated. So there was like so many different reasons we were rejected. Some of them I'm sure were reasons, you know, we certainly weren't the typical mold of a Silicon Valley startup for a million reasons under the sun. But I think that one of the, one of the really valuable things in all of the rejection was that every time we were rejected we would refine our pitch deck. And so the pitch deck became stronger and stronger and became more and more sure that this was definitely the future. Like every time we got a rejection we would refine the deck. And the heart of the question the early we'd Put it in the deck. So people would be like, oh, you're the same as some other random company. But, like, we're totally not. So one of the first slides in our deck became a picture of the market. And we'd say, this is the huge gap in the market. And there was literally a big circle. Another VC would say, I don't understand your industry. I can't possibly invest in design because I don't understand design. And so then the early pages in our deck became all of the industry. And this is how the current design process works and how it's really complicated. And our goal is to take this entire design ecosystem, integrate it into one page, and make it accessible to the whole world. Every time we were being rejected, we were refining our deck time and time again. I think that was really helpful process, albeit rather frustrating.

Do you think that with hindsight, being 12,000 km away from Silicon Valley was net negative or net positive?

I feel incredibly lucky that we really have the best of both worlds. We now actually have a couple of people over in the US and we're building out an office in Austin. But I think that in those days, we were really lucky to be able to tap into the talent pool in Australia. In Silicon Valley, there were so many companies competing for talent. I heard some stat that the average retention of an engineer at the time was like 15 months. So people were jumping around really, really frequently. Whereas in Australia, we were able to build an incredible pool of talent. And now we've had. We had some crazy number of people apply, like 14,000 people apply for our intern and grad program. We've been able to attract talent from all across the globe, all across Australia, and really build a very, very solid tech team.

This is a very hypothetical question, but if the US work visa system were different and you did not have to leave, what might have happened? Would you have created Canva and Silicon Valley? And who knows? Then you'd be in that morass competing for talent.

Yeah, Well, I guess one of the good things the Australian government did was they had this matching funding program, so they would match up to $2 million, any funding that you had. There was a Australian piece of paper. You had to, you know, the huge reports and all sorts of things you had to do to apply to get this Commercialization Australia grant. But it made it really attractive to stay in Australia because it meant that, you know, that early funding was then doubled by the Australian government. So that really helped to help to keep us in Australia. When a lot of VCs were saying that they weren't going to invest in us because we were based in Australia.

Of course, the irony now is that with the pandemic, no one really knows where anyone is anymore. And it does not seem to matter.

Right.

Because if everybody's on zoom, what difference does it make if the bits are coming from Sydney or from Sand Hill? You are ahead of your time.

Yeah, I think that's something that there's not that many things that are good that have come out of this global pandemic. That is absolutely for sure. But I think that one of the things it's really accelerated a lot of trends. And so I think the fact that we're able to now a lot of talent is being tapped across the entire world rather than just in specific geographic bounds is going to be really revolutionary. We're going to see a lot more creativity unlocked. We're going to see hopefully the flow of capital to a lot more far flung places than before.

So, you know, I was obviously involved with Macintosh and when I look back, I say, well, of course there had to be a better user interface for a personal computer. And you would say the same thing about iOS and I would say the same thing about Canva, that of course there had to be a better way than give people a blank window with 200 icons around it that you can't figure out what the hell each one does. But why at the time did no one else see this?

I don't know. I was teaching design programs and I would see my student. I sort of had this like two lenses. So one was seeing students struggling, learning to use them, and the other was knowing the power of being able to use them myself. And so I guess being able to see from those two different perspectives sort of gave me that interesting insight. Why no one else had that idea, I'm not quite sure. It seemed very blatantly obvious to me. I was like, why is everyone on Facebook and not having to go and learn for years to actually use these programs, whereas the buttons don't even make sense in these other programs? Yeah, I think that was the interesting insight that I had assumed that someone else would have come up with at that point in time.

How did you get the word out about Canva? Because you weren't buying super bowl commercials or advertising on Facebook. Was it purely word of mouth? Is Canva proof that cream rises and word of mouth is highly effective?

I think that the secret ingredient. We just hired the world's best chief evangelist and he got the word out.

Can I quote you on that? Okay.

Besides that okay. Besides that, I guess there was a few things. I think one of the most important principles that we believed in really early on was creating a very valuable free product. And so creating a valuable free product would mean that lots of people could then use that product and then that would help to accelerate word of mouth. I think that was really critical. I mean, even before that, solving a problem that affected a lot of people was also critical. I think if you solve a problem that affect a lot of people, that affects lots of people, and then you give a free product, I think that that together creates a very strong, strong channel for word of mouth. Something else we did in the early days was we knew a lot of people would come into the product and not necessarily know that they could design that they were scared of that. You know, everyone's told that they aren't creative. And so we knew that we had only a couple of minutes to capture people's attention. And so we spent a lot of time refining that onboarding experience. So when people came into Canva, within a couple of minutes they could create a design. We in the early days, we these things called the five starter challenges, where you do little things like put a hat on a monkey and change a color to a circle to the color red. Just these little things that would help to build up people's confidence and then we encourage them to share it on social media. So I think between all of these different things and then it really helped to accelerate word of mouth. The other thing that we did was we knew that Canva was going to be applicable to a huge wide range of people. But we focused on social media markets marketers to start with because we knew social media marketers would help to get the word out. They had a really strong need because they had to design really frequently, but they didn't necessarily have the design skills or background. So they seemed like a really perfect market to help to help to accelerate Canva's growth. But also perfectly great problem that they had that they needed to solve. All of those things together, I think worked very well, handy in hand. And I guess we've had a really wonderful team over the years that have ensured everything from search engine optimization. So if someone's searching on Google for business card, they're landing on Canva's business card templates. And just solving people's problems really effectively has really helped to lay the foundations for Canva's growth. Amongst other things.

I think that one of the most impressive things about Canva is the company culture. So describe your vision of the Canva culture, what it means and how to keep it going as you expand.

Yeah, from the very early days, we wanted to create a company that we wanted to work in. And so a company that we wanted to work in was going to be a company that lived really strongly by its values. It was going to be a company that focused on goals as opposed to red tape. A company that focused on delivering a lot of happiness and empowering our customers and community across the globe. And that all of those principles really helped to ensure that Canva's culture, right from the early days, even though it wasn't a focus in the early days, it was creating a culture that. That set up the foundations for Canva to grow and to be successful. So in the early days, we really focused on creating a culture that we wanted to work in and creating a company that we wanted to work in. And then over the years, we realized that we needed to solidify that culture and those things that we really valued actually in our values. So our values are be a good human, make complex things simple, be a force for good, pursue excellence, empower others. And these values have become really critical to the way that we live. I guess when you go from just a couple of people to a thousand people, it's really critical that we're not part of every single decision. And so ensuring that we are creating the values that everyone can live by and ensuring that they can make decisions based on that framework has been really critical. There's been so many things that we've had to do over the years to live by our values, and that's been. It's been really critical to the fabric of Canva.

One of the things that I've never seen in any other company is your concept of teams. And most companies, there's the CEO, then the CXOs, then the VPs, then the directors. And it's a very hierarchical structure. But would you explain how Canva teams work?

Yeah, absolutely. So Canva has a number of groups. We have 18 groups, and each of these groups have a mission and a vision and goals that they're striving towards every season. And then each of these groups have teams that also have a mission and a vision that they're striving towards. Why we've structured our company in this way is because we have so much to tackle. In Canva, every single button is essentially another industry or is often the size of another company. And so it's been really critical that we have these teams that are really, really strong on where they're wanting to Go. Something that I believe really strongly in is you can't grow bigger than your dreams. And so it's been really critical for every team to be having the having really big dreams and a vision that they can strive towards. I think that you go from being a startup to an old school archaic company when your company is bigger than your dreams. Most people are in just a single group. And so that group, you know, for example, we have a group called Content and Discovery and they're trying to ensure that all of the world's templates and photos and illustrations perfectly there and you know, we have millions upon millions of them that are then available and accessible to our entire community across the globe. And so that group has a very strong vision and mission and goals that they're striving towards every season. And another group, for example, is presentations. And one of our goals at Canva is to ensure that we have the most interactive and dynamic presentation format that doesn't put people to sleep with death by PowerPoint. And so we have a whole group that's really focused on that. But I guess that another company, a group, could be the size of their actual whole company. And so it's been really important to set this foundation at Canva that people can have a really strong impact and have the vision and mission that they can really get behind and empower our community.

I'm obviously conflicted because I'm chief evangelist of the company and you are my boss, but I will tell you that I have never experienced the company where people more relentlessly pursue perfection of their area. That is, the content people wanted to have the best content. The onboarding people want the best, you know, the security people want the best, everybody wants the best. Usually there's a company that says, all right, so we're an engineering based company, we're just going to make great products and whatever happens with marketing happens. Or we're a great marketing company so we can take any product that engineers throw at us and we can do it.

So.

But at Canva, everybody is trying to, what I would say, relentlessly pursue perfection. How did that attitude come to be?

Firstly, we have an amazing team that is without a doubt, we hire amazing people that do have that motivation and passion and personal relentless pursuit of perfection. I think that the organizational structure helps to facilitate that creativity and that desire and drive because people have a lot of ownership over their own area. So they have that mission and they have that vision and they have that ownership of their, of that particular area. So the presentation group, their mission is to create the best presentation product in the world. And so rather than it sort of become like a lot of companies have this top down structure that actually it gets the vision and mission gets watered down. People get further and further away from their customer as the company grows. I'll tell you a little anecdote. We were early on and we kind of went from being just a few of us to I think we got to about 50 or 60 people and we're like, there's this massive problem here. A lot of people aren't having as close a connection with the customer. We aren't achieving as much as we did in our early days because there's 60 people now all trying to do things, but there's no people who are owning things. And so we then took that group of 60 people and we split them into smaller teams. And each of these teams had a goal that they were striving towards, had a mission that they were striving towards. And then they had to have a pitch deck that explained what they were going to be doing in the future. And so I think breaking it up and giving ownership was really, really critical to helping to facilitate that same drive and passion that you have when you're a little startup. As we've grown and that's still the same philosophy that when a group gets too big or a team gets too big and they don't have that ownership and the connection with customers, we then have to break it down again. So then they do have that mission and those goals again.

Do you think that model will scale to 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 employees?

Every time we double in size, we're having to reinvent things. But I guess at Canva we really are a mission and goals driven company and we've actually just solidified the fact that we are a mission and goals driven company as part of our internal framework goals. And so I think that hopefully as we are 10,000 people or even more so in the future, I think that it's critical that we stay being true to being a mission and goals driven company. Because if we don't have a mission and everyone knows where we're driving towards and we have that shared place that we're trying to get and then goals along the way, what point is there?

So Canva is Australia's second maybe most visible unicorn. Has that changed things? Is there a positive and a negative to being labeled a unicorn?

I think if we look back to those early days where we're pitching investors trying to get anyone beyond the bus, like, hey, are you an Engineer. Just like, trying to get anyone to join. And funny anecdote. Lars Rasmussen, who co founded Google Maps, said that he'd help me to find a tech team. But what that actually entailed was a year of him just saying no to every single person that I brought him, every applicant. But that did mean that we ended up with a very high bar for our tech team, which was incredibly helpful because Canva is a rather complex beast. But I guess. What was your question again?

Oh, my God, I forgot it too. Holy shit, we're losing our mind. I'm 66. I have an excuse. What did I ask? Like, the problem with these interviews is as soon as I ask, I'm thinking about the next question, so. Oh, oh, I know.

Duh.

The impact of being a unicorn.

Great question, guy.

I asked it twice. It's so good.

So I guess hiring over the years has become substantially easier. So in the early days, it was really hard to hire anyone. It would take as much convincing and pitching as I possibly could. And, you know, it was a really long and arduous process. Now we have an incredible number, thousands upon thousands of applicants who are trying to. Trying to get into Canva. We've had people studying for months and years to get into Canva, which is kind of cool. But I guess that, you know, that's the visibility there has really helped. There's so many different aspects of that. But I guess every time we grow in size, we're having to continuously reinvent every single process, every single system, because what works today at a thousand people certainly has had to be reinvented many, many times. Since we're a tiny company, even things like lunch lines. I remember when we were about 50 people, we went from lunch lines. One of the goals for the Vibe team became lunch lines. Less than two minutes, because the lunch lines had started to get to 10 minutes. And so we had to have a couple of trestle tables. There's few little things that we had to do in order to get shorter lunch lines. But I guess that's just a little anecdote of the many, many things that continuously break as we grow.

I remember way back when, because believe it or not, I've been with Canva for about six years. I remember when one of my major tasks was you guys identify someone that you really wanted to hire. And then I would call them or Skype them or do whatever it took and convince them that I, Guy Kawasaki, was telling you, you should go work for Canva. So just listen to me and do it. And that was one of the most fun part of the job.

I really appreciated that guy. Those early engineers that we brought on, all those early team members were so critical to Canva. Setting the foundation and the technical bar across each of our specialties really high has been incredibly important, and I thank you guys for that.

I think my average was about 70% success rate, but those were very fun days. So I have some questions about the lessons of Canva now. So question number one, Based on your experience, what's your advice for women with big ideas?

That's a great question. There's a whole host of things. I think one is to solve a problem that affect a lot of people. And I think that that fundamental, fundamental starting premise of a company is so incredibly critical, because if you're solving a problem that no one cares about, it's going to be a lot harder to get your first customer, Certainly going to be a lot harder to get anyone to pay for it. So that fundamental premise is really critical and cannot be underestimated. I think if you have a product that you are able to give away for free, or at least a good amount, where people could really get to know your product and get to love it, I think that's also really valuable. That freemium model is incredibly important. But I guess we took it one step further than just freemium as such, because we actually wanted to create a free product that was incredibly valuable, that even if you didn't have the financial capacity to pay for Pro Subscription, you could certainly get value out of it. A product that you can give away for free to help spread that word of mouth, I think, is a really critical thing as well. I guess getting started. If you look at our journey, there were so many things that would have been incredibly intimidating. Getting started was just taking that first step with fusion was incredibly intimidating. But I think that if we hadn't taken that step, we never would be here today. And you kind of have to learn the lessons as you go. Every time you take a little step, you're going to learn something more. You're going to gain a little bit more experience, and you'll be ready for the next step. And so it's really critical just to get started. You're going to have to learn everything as you go. I kind of like the phrase just in time learning. And unfortunately, there's no easy way about it.

It's not like 50% of the companies that are funded are led by women today. So they still walk into a venture. Well, they don't walk into a venture capital firm. Anymore. But they turn on a zoom to turn on zoom to pitch and they look at who's in the room and it's 90% men to this day. So what's your advice when you're trying to raise money as a woman?

I think that, you know, if you're trying to raise money actually regardless of your gender, your ethnicity, whatever, where you live, I think it's really critical to like we pitched hundreds of investors and to not take that rejection personally, I think is an important, like it's like growing really thick skin. I think that if you take the rejection personally, if I blamed it on the fact that I was Australian, that I was a woman, that I was, you know, not the typical mold of an Australian of a Silicon Valley startup, I think that would have been really disempowering to me because that would have meant that I was blaming it on a factor that I couldn't control. I personally blame everything on, blamed everything on, oh, my pitch deck wasn't good enough, my strategy wasn't good enough, which was actually ironically very empowering because it meant that I could continue to refine my pitch deck and my strategy over and over again until it got to a really good place. And then it meant investors kind of self selected. So investors that rejected me, it may have been for a legit reason, it may have been for illegitimate reason, but they rejected me nonetheless. They didn't get to invest in Canva, whereas the investors that believed in our vision and believed in me invested in Canva and have got to see the fruits of their reward. But I think that there's so many different investors out there. Finding investors that believe in your vision is so incredibly important and believe in you. And yes, it may take a while, it certainly did in our case, but it did mean that we ended up with wonderful investors around us that really believed in us, believed in our vision and have been with us for the long term. So we've had investors who were in our early round that have been investing all the way up and they're continuing to invest today, like Blackbird Ventures and Felicis Ventures. They were right from the early stages. And I think that it's really wonderful to see. But yeah, I guess it takes a little bit of self selection which works out, which works out rather well.

The next lesson from Canva, and I don't mean this in a negative or pejorative way at all, but how much of making a company successful is really about faking it until you make it.

I believe very strongly that you have to Be extremely truthful. So I have a policy set canva that you always round down numbers, that you never say anything that is even a little bit incorrect, because I think that that is a terrible slope, a terrible slippery slope. If you start to exaggerate a little bit, you've seen, I'm sure, a number of companies that that exaggeration just kind of snowballed. So I think that being incredibly truthful with your numbers are very, very important. On the flip side of that, I remember in our early days when we went to Silicon Valley and Australians tend to have a tendency to not talk up what they have done or achieved, whereas America, Americans kind of, it's a little more second nature to be a little bit more forthcoming with your accomplishments. And so that cultural difference was a huge surprise and learning curve because people would be like, you're going to have to actually speak about fusion and how well it was going and how all these sorts of things. And so I guess those sorts of things had to become part of our pitch deck and become part of our pitch, otherwise no one was going to invest in us. So I guess we had to not fake it until we make it, but at least talk about the things that have been going well. But on the topic of faking it until you make it, I think that it's really critical to see it in your own mind's eye. It's really critical to be able to have that complete vision of where you're going and what you're wanting to achieve and what you're wanting to accomplish. And so early on, before we had a product developed, before we had anything at all, in my mind's eye, we had beat all the big incumbents. We had created this amazing online design system and it was really simple and accessible and available to everyone on the whole planet. So I think it is really important to see clearly the picture that you're wanting to create ahead of creating it.

But did you not tell your first investor that you loved kite surfing even though you had no idea how to kite surf?

I didn't know. I said I started to learn to kite surf. And so during my traumatic stages of learning to kite surfing, Silicon Valley in San Francisco Bay Area. I did, I did pretend to like kite surfing when I didn't like kite surfing. That is true. I didn't say that I could kite surf. I said I was taking kite surfing lessons.

Okay. Do you have any insight or lessons or advice about running a company with your boyfriend, fiance, and soon husband?

That is a good question. I think that everything In a startup, in fact, everything probably in life is a constant learning curve and a co founder fiance relationship is nothing different. But I'd say one of the most important things is I guess a couple of things. I think being really aligned on your vision, being really aligned on your values is utterly critical. So I think that when you're aligned on where you're wanting to go and I get then it makes all the small decisions a lot easier. So I think that's why we believe so strongly in being a mission and goals driven company. Because once you believe in where you're going together, then you can set goals along the way and it makes all of those small decisions a lot simpler. I think the key to any relationship is communication and so you cannot ever over communicate or maybe you could if you pushed it to the absolute extreme. But I think the danger is often under communication, communicating about every, every single thing as to where you're wanting to go, the steps that you're wanting to take to get there. I is utterly critical. I think that you know, as, as in, as is everything in life. You're constantly learning and I think going into it knowing that you're going to be learning together is also critical.

Who has been an inspiration for you as an entrepreneur?

There are so many people I would have to say there's this incredible lady, Layla Jana, who she wrote a book called Give Work and she started a company called Sama Sauce. And it's really terrible to be speaking about her in past tense because she passed away quite recently and she had such an incredible, she had such an incredible philosophy about giving people work was a critical ingredient to helping to take people out of poverty. She had set up centers in refugee camps and in all sorts of places across the globe that had a lot of underemployment. And she is someone that I found incredible inspiration in the work that she did. And I know that her legacy will certainly live on and it's a terrible loss to the world that she's not here to live it out but I guess through everyone else's work and through the work that she has done that her legacy will continue to live on.

One, what keeps you up at night? Now.

We have a two step plan. Step one, build one of the world's most valuable companies. And step two, do the most good we can do. And step one keeps me up at night a lot trying to ensure that Canva is set up on a path to. We have had this vision for a really long time empowering the entire world to design. We've got over 30 million people, but that's not the 3, 4 billion people on the Internet. So we have an incredibly long way to go there yet. But then so much more that we need to do and there's so, so much more of our product that we need to build out. We often say we're 1% done. We literally mean that we've got an incredible amount of our product to build out, an incredible amount of more people to empower. But step two is also something that we're giving a lot of consideration to. When I was little, I remember I traveled to Bali for the first time. I was 11. And I was looking at the huge inequality between. I mean, I went to a nice school in Australia. I had a nice family that got to put me through, have a good education. And the inequality that some people weren't being able to go to school and get a good education and people didn't have the basic rights and opportunities that I had. I thought that that was an incredible privilege and opportunity that I needed to one day do something about. And fast forward a few years, I have an even bigger opportunity and responsibility to do something to help the world. And we think every day about how can we possibly be useful to the world. How can we channel the platform and the resources that we have to have the biggest positive impact and leave this world a little better than we found it. There's a lot of ideas swirling around our head. We've got through canva, we've got 50,000 nonprofits where we give away our paid product for free to help empower those nonprofits to achieve their goals. But we still have such a long way to go on every single front. So we've still got a lot to do on both steps of our two.

Step plan is Bill Gates and what he's doing now sort of an aspirational model for you?

Bill Gates is incredibly inspiring. I think that what he has achieved and what he has accomplished is really awesome. I have this philosophy that there is a lot more goodness in the world. There is a lot more people that are wanting to achieve wonderful things and to help lead the world a better than they found it, that they're not necessarily being able to channel that in the most effective ways through the current way politics is, through the current way the world is. I would love to see a lot more of that goodwill get to be realized. So yeah, there's, there's a lot to be done.

And people often want to know when I'm interviewing all these remarkable people, ask them if they ever Made a mistake. What was their biggest mistake? So what was your biggest mistake, Melanie?

Ah, so many things. You make mistakes every day. I guess that's the thing. Like every time you make a mistake, you have to learn from that mistake. If you make the mistake a couple times, you probably have to learn a little faster. You know, there's certain things that, you know, took so long to get investment. It took so long to find our tech team. Sometimes there's parts of our vision still that we're in our earliest pitch decks that we still haven't realized. Is it a mistake or is it just that it's a hard slog? I think every time you make a mistake, you have to learn a lesson and hopefully you can accumulate those lessons and make better decisions going forward. Yeah, there's been so many things along the path, it's hard to even call out one specific thing.

And the last topic is, because many people always ask me this, so you can tell it from your side, how did you come to find me?

So actually it goes back to our philosophy about finding social media marketers, creating great product for them. So one day I believe, believe Guy Kawasaki tweeted a picture that my co founder, you can correct me if I'm wrong, Guy, my co founder, found on. On Twitter and realized it was a Canva design. We then had a chat, a chat over. Was it Skype at the time? I remember one particular particular moment. Guy. We'd been pitching Guy for a little while and Guy said, I'm 59. I've got one last big thing left in me and this is it. And that was sort of how we ended up getting to work together. And we could not have been more blown away by this huge chief evangelist of Apple. Amazing, incredible person. He was going to come and work at Canva. We couldn't have been more excited. And even to this day, there's so many people that I hear saying that they heard about Canva through Guy Kawasaki. You've been an incredible evangelist for Canva, really helping to get the word out, really helping people to see why people should care about what we're doing. And I think that you really helped to put Canva on a bigger stage when we were, I think it was 2014 that we met.

Something like that. Yes. Yes.

So back in those very early days, we were just starting to get the word out about Canva. But having guys megaphone to the world, you know, having Guy being able to open so many doors for us was incredibly powerful.

I remember those days, Melanie, when we used to just Jump for joy. When a thousand new people signed up for Canva in a day. And like, how can this keep going on?

Totally.

Oh, my God, those were the days, huh?

And in the early days, like when it was the weekend, we didn't realize you were like, oh my gosh, what's happening to our company? It's going down. And then we didn't realize about the summer slump in the U.S. oh my gosh, on holidays. But is it going to ever return? Are we just. Are we doomed? And now, over the years, we start to see these really cyclical trends. People are using Canva at work, so they might not be using it on the weekend. People are using Canva when they're working, so they're probably not using it as much when they're on holidays. So it's been fascinating to see.

Oh, God, those are the days. I tell you that I tell people this all the time. That I started my career with Macintosh and I'm ending my career with Canva in between. Let's just say I made some suboptimal decisions. But what two great bookends. And you've expressed your gratitude to me many times. And I just take. I just want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to you because it has been really great fun, a great sense of accomplishment, and I have had the opportunity to dent the universe twice. And I work for Steve Jobs and Melanie Perkins. I mean, how many people can say that?

You're too kind, Guy.

It doesn't get better than that. So I think I have more than enough material and I'll let you get back to work democratizing design.

Thank you very much, Guy. Feel free to cut anything. You very well could be liberal with the cutting.

You don't have to be afraid of what I cut. You have to be afraid of what I add. It's time to read some comments and reviews. This comment is called what a guy this guy is. Listening to podcasts almost always gave me headaches. How did all these people come up with so amazing stories and did so good in their lives? And thanks to you, I can now hear life stories directly from these remarkable people. I can hear their summarized thoughts on what matters a lot to me. Where do they stand in their lives at this moment? Did I do well? Could have I done better? What to do now? Some lessons learned. I can be a good teacher and still fail the test in my class for a number of reasons that do not have anything to do with knowledge. I needed to be well first. It is really important that I did my best. Even if I didn't turn out the very best. Now I recharge and move on. And now the only headache I have had since I listened to each and every one of the interviews that you did is I hope it's not going to end. This is a review and comment by Jovicj. Thank you Jovicj and it's not going to end. One more review Great interview with Julie Packard. KHB Graystar this is my first time listening to one of Guy's podcasts. He has a great style as an interviewer and I love learning more about one of my favorite local heroes, Julie Packard. Well done Guy. Thank you khbgreystar and thank you Jovicj. Really appreciate the comments. If you want me to read your comments on a future episode, just go to the Apple Podcast app and leave a review and rating. I look forward to reading it. So there you have it. The inside story of Canva, one of a handful of unicorns from Australia. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, it means a private company that has a valuation of greater than $1 billion. It has been an honor and pleasure to work for Canva and Melanie and Cliff. I began my career in tech evangelizing Macintosh. I'm ending my career in tech evangelizing Canva. It can't get better than this. I've never worked for a finer group of people than the employees of Canva. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. My thanks to Jeff C. And Pig Fitzpatrick, who are the finest people in podcasts. Until the next episode, wash your hands, wear a mask, practice social distancing and listen to doctors and scientists, not necessarily politicians. Be safe, be well. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.