Melanie Perkins: CEO of Canva

Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People

Guy Kawasaki

Documentary, Society And Culture, Management, Evangelism, Innovation, Remarkable People, Education, Society & Culture, Apple, Silicon Valley, Writing, Technology, Marketing, Guy Kawasaki, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Pitching, Social Media, Business, Macintosh, Speaking

4.6 • 667 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week's remarkable person is Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva. Melanie co-founded the start-up from her mother’s living room. Canva, an online design software company, is based in Australia, thousands of miles from tech’s Silicon Valley power corridor. Getting a meeting—much less funding—proved tough. Perkins heard “no” from more than 100 investors. Let's listen to Melanie talk about how Canva got its humble beginnings and how she handled all the no's that they heard over the years. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In my years of entrepreneurship, I've seen countless startups. And here's the truth.
0:07.3	Smart spending drives growth, which is something Brex has championed. Brex isn't just a corporate credit
0:14.0	card. It's a strategic tool to help your company achieve peak performance. Corporate cards, banking, expense management, all integrated
0:24.1	on an AI-powered platform that turns every dollar into opportunity. In fact, 30,000 companies
0:32.9	are trusting Brex to help them win. Go to brex.com slash grow to learn more.
0:44.4	I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. My remarkable guest, Melanie Perkins, has built a global company from Sydney, Australia.
0:57.9	To be completely transparent, the company is Canva, and I'm Canva's chief evangelist.
1:03.4	In other words, Melanie is my boss.
1:06.5	Be that as it may, she is a remarkable person, and Canva is a remarkable company. People have
1:12.2	created over 3 billion designs in Canva since 2013. Approximately 6 to 7 million designs are
1:19.0	created each day in 190 countries. 90,000 schools and universities also use it. Melanie came up
1:27.3	with the idea for
1:28.0	Cambo when she was at the University of Western Australia. She taught other students how to use
1:33.2	design programs and realized that the software was far too complex and expensive. It was then
1:39.0	that she realized the future of design was to be simple, online, and collaborative. To test out the idea, Melanie
1:46.3	and her co-founder, Cliff Obrecht, launch Fusion Books, an online design platform for
1:51.8	students to create their school yearbooks. Fusion Books took off in schools across Australia,
1:57.2	New Zealand, and France, and soon Melanie was able to prove that her new approach to design was
2:02.2	possible and needed. She then set out to apply the ease of use principles of fusion books to a
2:08.2	broader audience, and thus Canva was born. Melanie spent the next several years trying to raise
2:14.6	venture capital. She was rejected hundreds of times before she found
2:18.7	her first investors. I started working for Canva about six years ago. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is
	...

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