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LEADER DEEP DIVE 🕵🏻

Melanie Perkins - CEO at Canva

Melanie Perkins (born 13 May 1987) is an Australian billionaire technology entrepreneur. She is Co-Founder & CEO of Canva, a company she founded with Cameron Adams and her (life) partner, Cliff Obrecht.

Perkins is one of the youngest female CEOs of a tech start-up valued over $1 billion dollars. And as of May 2021, one of Australia's richest women, topped only by a boring, rusted on oil magnate.

Canva is the darling of the Australian, and I’d go as far as saying Southern Hemisphere’s tech ecosystem. Melanie was the powerhouse driving force behind it.

But the Canva story is also somewhat of a love story. More on that later.

There has been some great cultural phenomena to come out Australia over the years. Crocodile Dundee took over cinemas in the 1980’s. Heath Ledger’s wow us as The Joker in The Dark Night. All while the global debate raged over whether Vegemite is delightful or disastrous. But there is no better good news story than the story of Melanie Perkins and Canva.

Well it’s simple, they created an entire category, dominated it for years—who is Canva’s closet rival—and did it all with an energy and spirit that other leaders could learn from (**cough cough ELON cough**).

Add to that, she did it all with her life partner, and COO, Cliff Obrecht by her side. I haven’t seen something that wholesome happen in Australia since the famous case of the kangaroo that adopted a wallaby. (*made up case). Let’s see how she did it.

Early years

First, we need to go back to the beginning, to a far away land of Perth, Australia. Perth, for context, is 2044.56 miles (3290.40 km) to the west of Sydney. Or slightly less than the distance between London and Azerbaijan.

Melanie, or Mel, as we'll call her - was a regular happy child, running around doing all the typical things kids do. But with a certain entrepreneurial streak.

Mel first made money selling spray-on tattoos at a local fair. And later founding her first business at 14, when she sold handmade scarves to people in her community. No one would have predicted she would go on to become one of the most successful tech CEO’s in the world.

But something inside her was brewing…

After finishing high school Mel went on to study commerce but couldn’t help herself and started tutoring fellow students on the side.

Mel would go on to recall: “I never forgot the freedom and excitement of being able to build a business. That was one of the driving forces that led me to launch what would evolve to be Canva.” 

It wasn’t long until that energy boiled over into her first real foray into business, her and her partner Cliff’s little startup - Fusion Books.

Fusion Books

The idea for Fusion Books came while Mel was part-time tutoring. She was working with Photoshop and InDesign students, and noticed the design tools she was teaching with were very hard to use.

With problem in hand, Mel (and Cliff, but mainly Mel) saw an opportunity to create a novel solution. They would create a platform that let students and teachers in Australia design and print yearbooks on their own.

So they went out and started building.

Operating out of Perkins' mother's lounge room - Fusion Books ran on a shoestring budget, often employing the old fake it ‘til you make it technique.

When customers called to speak to the manager, Cliff would change his voice and pretend to pass the call on, giving the impression they were much larger than they were.

During this time the workload was a lot for Mel. “I was doing customer service, quality assurance, all of the product management and marketing,”. In the end, juggling her studies and business was too much, so she decided to drop out and go all in on the business.

Mel had a vision for the future from Day 1 at Fusion. Something you will notice that runs through her entire entrepreneurial career. She wanted to make design accessible to everyone. And she wanted to do it on the largest scale.

Take a quick look at this image from the first Fusion Books pitch deck.

For a quick moment, I want to break the fourth wall here a little and ask you to look at the above image one more time. Take a good look at it. This image ooooozes confidence. The image reeks of conviction.

Not on does Mel have the cojones to pitch Fusion Books beating out Google and Microsoft, but she does so in somewhat of a mocking tone. It’s simple awesome. And her technical ambition was equally high.

I mentioned Fusion as a ‘little startup’ in jest earlier. The ruth is though, that within five years, Fusion Books had superseded all incumbents. They were now Australia’s largest yearbook provider. But this story is not about Fusion Books.

This story is about the dominant global powerhouse that is Canva. And it all started in a chance meeting with a kitesurfing obsessed venture capitalist.

Canva, the startup

Fusion Books, come late 2000’s, was thriving Australian market. So Much so that Mel & Cliff entered a competition to be crowned the Western Australia Inventor of the Year. The budding powerhouses actually missed by one spot from taking the award, but were invited back the next year to attend.

This is the sliding doors moment of the Canva story.

It was after the awards the following year that Mel and Cliff were able to have a quick chat with Bill Tai, an investor from Silicon Valley. Tai had flown over for the awards, and their meeting had opened up a whole new world Mel never knew existed. And she was keen to explore it.

Only problem was, shortly after the meeting and flying back from Aus - Bill went unresponsive.

Here is Mel’s exact email to Bill: “Hi Bill, hope all is well. I’m going to be in San Francisco from 21st May to 1st June. Are you still interested in an investment in my area? If so, would be great to meet up and have a chat.”

I am going to pause here for a minute, to highlight Mel’s tenacity. This will be another theme through the story of Melanie Perkins. Nothing seemed too hard, nothing was impossible. Ever.

“It’s never too late to exercise the power of determination. Figure out something you’d like to succeed at, and then do it,” she would later go on to say. And it’s fair to say it worked out well.

Not only did Mel get a response from Bill, he added: “you should also meet up with Lars Rasmussen at Facebook (ex Google Wave lead), I’ll intro you separately.”

Lars would go on to become a pivotal early investor in Canva.

The 2-week trip that Mel, had originally planned on ended up being a 3-month deep-dive into the world of Silicon Valley.

On her first meeting with Bill, Mel would later go on to tell the story: “I’d read that if you mimic someone’s body language they’ll like you more. So I tried to do that too at the same time — when Bill put one arm behind his chair, I realised it was too far. I didn’t have enough hands to flip the pages in my deck, eat my lunch and put my hand behind my chair. It was quite distressing!”

Overall though, at the time, she thought she had bombed the meeting. Interestingly, Mel shared something she did ~2011 during challenging times raising money and building Canva. She wrote a letter to herself.

I find that quite incredible. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of someone writing a motivational note to herself in times of high stress. And it was high stress.

For all the success that was to come it actually took more than 100 rejections for Canva to start seeing success in their Seed Round. And to get there Mel had to learn a new sport, kitesurfing, along the way.

It won’t surprise you when I tell you that Bill Tai and Lars Masmussen are avid kite surfers. Check the hints in their LinkedIn bios.

And now, so is Mel! (Quick note: the internet tells me this image is of Mel but I am only 60% sure it is).

Once things started to come together for her, Mel forwarded an email to Cliff with some exciting news. Cliff replied with: “You are the best business woman in the world and I am so proud of you, well done you WILL SUCCEED I HAVE NO DOUBT.” (love story part I told you about again)

The eventual raise panned out well for the tenacious founders. They had their first believers, they had their team and they had their money, with Blackbird leading the round of which ended up a $3M dollar raise.

A digression

Startup founders are wild creatures. They are the crazy ones. I often think Hunter S. Thompson was referring to startup founders when he penned is famous line - ”A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

That is what I think of when I think of Mel.

And before you judge me for throwing shade at the star of this story, know that Mel thinks of herself in the very same (or similar) way.

In a 2018 blog she wrote, Mel shared a Derek Sivers clip and would go on to say:

“I love this video clip below — I sometimes feel a little bit like that crazy guy dancing alone on the mountain and Cliff helped to turn me from being a ‘lone nut’ into a movement.”

Nikola Tesla claims to have been visited by aliens, van Gogh cut off a left lobe Nikola Tesla said he had an alien encounter, van Gogh cut off a left lobe and Marie Curie had a penchant for carrying test tubes filled with radioactive isotopes around in her pockets.

Fun fact: Bill Tai, our kitesurfing angel from earlier - originally wrote Mel and Canva a check for $25k, one of their first investments. But Mel wasn’t having it. She sat down with him and debated him for an hour until he committed to investing $100k.

All. The. beSt. PeOpLe. aRRe. aBiT. cRAaaazYy.

Canva, the scaleup

Canva officially launched in 2013 with more than 50,000 people signing up in the first month. This is what you would call immediate product market fit. Mel saw the future, predicted it, spoke it into existence and then built it.

“I think innovation is solving a problem. That can be a small problem that just affects you, that can be a large problem that affects society. Innovation is getting to the crux of a problem and solving it.” - Mel would later say.

In the first few years of Canva, Mel was not shy about telling the world her plans. Even if they seemed ultra ambitious.

Today, Canva is available in 190 (of the world’s 195) countries and over 100 languages. And 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Canva, making it one of the most used graphic design tools on the market.

The business has over 60 million monthly users. If Mel said it was world domination she’s after, I’d say she’s well on her way.

So how did an Aussie upstart figure skating hopeful create one of the world's largest private companies? Through visionary thinking, returning to first principles and building a product users LOVE.

"Their first product was a really great product. It was really well executed and beautiful. It's rare for a product to come out into the market and get so much love early on” original lead investor from Blackbird, Rick Baker would say.

The chart below shows what happens when an incumbent product gets complacent and stares down the barrel of an upstart with incredible user-centric design.

In 2018 Mel was kind enough to put her thoughts onto paper as to what she has learnt and why Canva has been so successful.

Plug these tactics and strategies in at your startup and you are sure to be a unicorn in no time. Cheers Mel!

Melanie, the leader

On leadership, Mel is incredible as one would imagine - an example I love is the fact that she personally onboards all new hires still to this day.

On the call, she serves to inspire - where Canva came from, where it is today and where they are going into the future. All while discussing their culture and ensuring everyone understands the vision for the organisation.

Mel is also super deliberate about how she builds culture. One this she believes in is that everyone in the Canva team should have lunch together. “Having lunch together is one of strongest things you can do for culture,” Mel says. “When people are feeling strong friendships and social networks, they feel part of something.” 

Having lunch together was one of the most important ways in which they bond - Mel, Cam and Cliff all agree. “We used to have lunch around mum’s living table,” Mel reflected. “Now we have a chef who comes in and cooks.”

What’s next for the juggernaut that is Canva? Simple.

Further global expansion / domination

Canva is a juggernaut. Recently tipping over the $1B ARR milestone. Think about that. One-thousand-million dollars, paid to you on a recurring basis, by users who adore you. That’s Canva.

But what’s next - and why should we want to follow along. Well it’s simple actually. In a 2021 campaign, Canva announced their simple two step plan for the future.

“We have this wildly optimistic belief that there is enough money, goodwill, and good intentions in the world to solve most of the world’s problems, and we want to spend our lifetime working towards that” Mel said as part of their launch.

“We truly believe that good for humanity is good for business. And the more that we can do to grow Step 1, the more that we’ll have contributed to Step 2.”

On the heels of this announcement, Canva launched a pilot program with GiveDirectly, helping distribute $10 million to some of the world’s poorest people in Southern Africa.

Melanie, the philanthropist

On a personal level, in December of 2021, Mel and Cliff signed up to The Giving Pledge. Committing to giving away their fortune during their lifetimes. That could happen in several ways, including setting up their own charities.

“We have this wildly optimistic belief that there is enough money, goodwill, and good intentions in the world to solve most of the world's problems,” their pledge letter read.

Fun facts

• Perkins is derived from the Anglo-Saxon corruption of ‘kin of Pierre’ (Pierre kin>Pierrekin>Perkins), brought to England by the Normans.

• Mel was an aspiring figure skater as teen, getting up to train at 4.30am each morning before attending Sacred Heart College in Perth.

• Cliff proposed to Mel with an engagement ring worth just $30 in Turkey's Cappadocia area.

• Gary V, Owen Wilson, and Woody Harrelson all invested into Canva’s Series A.

• Blackbird VC have participated in every single investment round in Canva’s history. First check until forever as they say.

Playbook

• Working from first principles. Mel asked herself - ‘why are students wasting all their time on the unimportant task of learning the tool before even doing the work.’

• Visionary thinking. Mel identified a gap in the market with Fusion Books, and expanded that vision to Canva. She saw the future: user-friendly design - catering to non-designers.

• Determination and drive. There aren’t many entrepreneurs with THIS level of determination. One word: kite-surfing.

• Build a global footprint. Mel aimed for global reach from day 1 of Canva, ensuring the platform catered to different languages and cultures around the world.

• Continuous learning, innovation and user-centricity. Canva is the best product in the world, by a mile, for the people that it serves. And it is always asking those people how to serve them deeper. And their users love them for it.

Future

The only player I could see disrupting Canva is the Sam Altman lead AI movement. AI may kill designer, could it kill design-tech also. Canva seem to be harnessing the power of AI better than most. So, I think not.

And Canva is a category builder. A behemoth in the design industry, whose product development cadence seems to be accelerating rather than slowing.

It’s my firm belief that Canva will continue to grow into one of the world’s biggest companies while doing lots of good on the way.

Before we finish, I’d like to leave this deep dive with a final thought from Mel herself.

Extra reading

• 21 questions from Aussie startups - Jan, 2018

• A message for those who feel they’re on the outside - Sept, 2018.

• A note to the Canva Community - Sept, 2021.

And that's it! You can find Melanie’s Twitter/X here, LinkedIn here and you can also up your low-skill design game here at Canva.

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