How Canva CEO Melanie Perkins turned her small Australian college startup into global unicorn | E939

hey everybody welcome to this week in startups i'm your host jason calacanis here in silicon valley angel investing in startups for the last 10 years over 200 of them seven have become unicorns but one thing i've learned through meeting with thousands of founders a year is that a great founder can come from anywhere and to never underestimate anybody that is what our firm launch does when we invest in companies we look for founders everywhere and when i went to sydney last year everybody kept saying to me canva canva you have to meet canva you gotta meet melanie from canva and i said what's canva and they said you know that thing i was showing you where we were making all the graphics for our events that's canva and i said oh that thing's awesome canva is a tool that allows anybody to become a graphic designer and i first found out about it actually a couple years ago when guy kawasaki who worked for apple for about 15 minutes and wrote about three books about working there became the chief evangelist i'm joking guy he's a friend he became the chief evangelist for canva and just this past week melanie perkins was in town and i saw the news that mary meeker who is one of the most famous analysts in the history of the internet and venture capitalist who just started her own firm made her first investment and that investment was in melanie's company canva and it valued the company and 2.5 billion dollars which makes you not only the most successful founder since atlassian in sydney it uh makes you i think one of the first companies to hit this kind of valuation in such a short period of time congratulations thank you very much it's a little bit thanks for coming on the podcast i know you're super busy and you don't do a lot of press do you that's true i'm pretty focused on what we're trying to do at canva so tell me when did you start canva and what was the origin story here so it's been pretty a pretty long journey i was at university a while ago now and i was teaching design programs and thought they were really complicated and in the future they should all be online and collaborative and a lot simpler but this was when i was 19 and i had no business experience or product experience or marketing experience or like literally any relevant experience whatsoever and so we started um creating school yearbooks in australia so we created a platform so schools could create them um and that went really well and we started to launch and then yeah it was a pretty long journey ended up meeting an investor um who flew over from silicon valley and he said if i went came here i'd meet with me and um i did wow and yeah it was three years between pitching investors and landing investment and then it was a year of development and then finally in 2013 we launched so it's been a while but you pit this original idea i've heard before which was to bring yearbooks online and the pain point was graphic design is just arduous and painful people use illustrator photoshop it's all single single player mode and those tools cost a lot of money and what does it take somebody to learn photoshop or illustrator today yeah 30 40 50 hours um way more than that like you just learned where the buttons are broadly and like let alone how to actually design something that looked good um i just saw so many people struggling to learn like where are the buttons like how to actually create something but then it's not just the tool that you have to learn you then have to go and purchase photos from a stock photography library and then go to a font library in a template library and collaborate over email and go backwards and forwards many times getting all the content from people then you can design then you have to prepare it for web or print and i'm like we thought this was completely ridiculous right and it was all desktop-based and thought that it should be online and collaborative and the product launched in 2013 yeah and i think the reaction was like this is kind of simplistic and i think people dismissed it a little bit am i right well yeah the first article that was written about canva yeah like so we've been sort of being sort of like five years in the making like you know between all of the pitching investors and getting rejected hundreds of times and people pivot engineers and all of this stuff and then finally we launched in 2013 and and a journalist broke the embargo and said that canva wasn't the best like though they wrote quite a critical article oh no what did they say they were like your stock photography is cheesy it's a really simple tool and they weren't saying very nice things at all and i felt like my whole world had just crushed down and i was like quite sad at that point in time um actually i was here in silicon valley oh in san francisco like staying in my brother's apartment but he'd gone away and i was like um they're in his living room on the floor by myself and just like what is that techcrunch article or mashable as you remember i'm not going to name the publication jackie look it up put it down they're not really around that much today oh okay they're not around that much today hmm but anyway that's outside so that's super negative but but from there things picked up fortunately and things have started to grow rapidly like when all the other press came out they were much more complimentary and then the community started to get on board and we were getting interest from across the globe and since then it's just been growing phenomenally quickly so we now have um 15 million monthly active users in 190 countries we're used in like 80 of fortune 500 companies like just it's grown pretty rapidly and it's 500 000 paid users i read yeah 500 000 paid users that's unbelievable and the the what is the product start at um so 20 bucks a month or something yeah so the the broad concept is that it's completely free to use so the idea is that regardless of your income regardless of where you are in the world you can use canva and like create awesome presentations and pitch decks and marketing materials um but then if you want to increase your productivity you can pay and then when you do that it's called canva pro we just rebranded it last week and yeah it's um 12.95 and you get access to all this amazing stuff so it's only 1200 it's 400 more than photoshop i'm joking 12.95 a month exactly which is like what is that a year 150 bucks isn't that and you get access to like a million photos the whole point is like it's really like we want to give as much value as we possibly can and people think you're insane for giving it to them for 12 a month don't they that's exactly the goal yeah so the churn is incredibly low people don't quit because why would you quit something that's cheaper than netflix that you use for business yeah it's it's pretty impressive to see like i guess that's the whole point is we want to give as much value like when we launched um photoshop was fifteen hundred dollars like who can afford that it's crazy so yeah especially not students and everyone else so we wanted to make sure i was accessible and that's why everybody was pirating it like crazy exactly so you paid all that money then had to spend hundreds of hours of learning it and then your license like the they upgrade the software what every 30 months or something you got to delete it off your thing and reinstall it was just so arduous with what i love with canvas like you can get on it and have your invite or your business cards whatever you need to get done like within 15 minutes yeah and you're just done simplicity and taking features out is kind of the new feature isn't it yeah one of our philosophies was click minimization so the idea of trying to like ensure you have the least number of clicks to get the maximum amount of value or to move you towards your goal as quickly as possible and so if you look at the number of clicks that had previously been required to create a presentation and going to all these different libraries and all these different content places and collaboration um compared to what it requires what what's um what you can do in canva it's pretty phenomenal yeah and when did the product start to take off when did you start charging for it because it was completely free at the start wasn't it yeah it's and that we will forever have a completely free plan yeah um and the idea of like there's no cap on the number of designs you can create you can create as much as you want um and so we launched in 2014 our paid product and it grew to 500 000 was there some tipping point where it just took off um i should show you some of our charts it's quite funny it's just a pretty nice looking exponential pointy curve yeah just like it's it's been just been growing really consistently for now five years it's one of the magical things about sas products when people buy a subscription and you over service them they don't quit and it compounds so com.com which we invested in the meditation app i don't know if you use it but it uh yeah i think they have a million subscribers now so very similar to you in terms of the footprint and when that happens you can just invest in the product massively at least 500 600 people you have what do they do what are they what are the departments yeah so we have the full spectrum so we have a lot of engineers i think we've got about 250 or three a lot of engineers and then we have a lot of product designers and graphic designers and copywriters and product managers and data analysts and yeah the full swag so when we get back from this quick break i want to know how you got your first investors in america and then what the startup scene was like in sydney you're in sydney yeah i started in perth you started in perth but now it's in sydney correct um i want to know what the startup scene was like when you started back in whatever 20 2009 2010 period how you cleared market with the american investors because here in america the general rule of thumb was investors didn't want to go more than 25 miles to their portfolio companies and i just booked my ticket to sydney for the launch festival and it's a slightly outside of that range so when we get back i want to understand how you got all these investors here to invest in a company all the way in sydney when we get back on the sweden startups [Music] have you ever wondered how to buy shares in a private company well there's a couple of different ways to do it you could be an angel investor or a venture capitalist here in silicon valley build a huge company have a fund and take all this time to meet with a hundred companies to maybe invest in one or you can use equities then you can wait and see which companies are hitting critical mass escape velocity like uber like pinterest like airbnb and on those platforms you can buy shares in pre-ipo companies that have matured a bit right they're not angel investments these are more mature 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lurker yeah so you're not participating you're just learning i like all of our community's tweets yeah and uh canvas started ballpark 2012-ish and you somehow got an american investor to buy into the original idea the yearbook idea or to the canva idea the camera audio who was that investor and how did you meet them yes so i mentioned before uh an investor bill ty he was in perth uh bill ty kite surfing built up the kite surfing bow tie i know bill he retired rich yeah he's still doing things lots of things he's doing a lot of kite surfing apparently from his instagram yeah that's very true as well he's the kite surfing vc he was at charles river ventures crv yes and then he left because he had some spectacular investment i can't remember which one it was but anyway he so you met him yeah so he was in perth and i met him at a conference and we had a five-minute chat and um he said yeah if i went to silicon valley he'd meet with me and so i jumped on a plane silicon valley actually truth be told i emailed him a number of times asked him to sign an nda and he kind of didn't respond to my emails um i guess in retrospect not really that surprisingly you're like what yeah that is like the 101 rookie mistake the founders okay admittedly i made every single rookie mistake under the sun because i i didn't even know about startups or venture capital i didn't even yeah he was the first one that i'd met i think right so and in the event he was speaking or something like that and you just what like stage dived or just grabbed him in the hall and we're like hey yeah went up to him afterwards and you had a little chat and um yeah and how old are you at the time you said you were 19 or 20. um so i'd had a company for a couple years i must have been about 21 or something like that so bill ty is this major baller american venture capitalist yeah you accost him in the hallway and say can i get five minutes and he says email me if you come to silicon valley i'll meet with you yeah exactly and then i i messaged him a few times didn't get much of a response and then i was like okay well hey i'm going to be in the area i was totally not going to be in the area but i'm going to be in the area like would you want to catch up and he was like yes such a power move such a power move you said i'm going to be in the valley yeah next week would you like to get coffee exactly so now you took the social pressure off of him of oh my god she's flying thousands of miles at some huge expense i did this exact same thing with jeff bezos oh really i had uh met jeff and i was doing weblogsync which was in gadget and autoblog and all these blogs and i was with my partner brian i said i think jeff bezos will invest because we have mark cuban and mark andreessen's going to invest and we're going to get pesos i'm going to email him next week you have anything on your calendar i said to my co-founder i said no so i emailed him i said hey jeff nice seeing you at this conference same exact story i'm going to be uh in your area on tuesday and wednesday next week uh we'd love to tell you more about what we're doing with engadget and auto blog and joystick and he wrote back in like under an hour and was like sure and this person will set it up we went and they said he has 20 minutes and he spent an hour and 20 minutes with us ah congrats but it was the same exact plan and so what happens in that meeting you show him the prototype or you just explain to them broad strokes here's the plan so with my first company i was in my mom's living room we had a printing press because we were physically printing these yearbooks so i became an amazing print operator like changing print cartridges and changing the paper and we actually for three months a year did this 24 7. um and so it was a pretty intense experience but anyway that the point of that story was that i had a printing press so i printed off my pitch deck on paper the future of publishing the future of publishing wow and i am i sat down with billy it was on university avenue university cafe um yeah of course which is now shut down which i'm kind of disappointed about side note it's a very silicon valley moment very silicon valley and i sat down and i was super like nervous right i actually was terrified and sat down and was like okay like trying to eat my lunch i'd read that if you mimic someone's body language they like you more and he had that right apparently apparently builds empathy i think it's called mirroring mirroring yeah exactly this is what therapists do i always say also cult leaders okay i have interesting and founders of companies well when you're trying to make someone like you yeah exactly and so he but he was sitting there with his like arm behind his chair and i was like okay so i'm going to try and sit with my arm behind my chair so now you're like man spreading and getting the arm out i'm trying to eat my lunch and trying to flick through the future of publishing while trying to sell the vision of the future of publishing and he was very unattentive he didn't didn't seem to be interested at all he was on his phone and i was like oh my god this is the worst thing ever i have completely flopped and um but i went back and he'd messaged me and he said that um he'd be happy to invest if i could find a tech team and so he'd also introduced me the last rasmussen who co-founded google maps and i met up with him the next day and i chatted to him for hours and we realized like there was a lot of alignment in like what we believe the future of communication would be like um and he was really happy to help find a tech team but what this actually entailed was just me trying to bring every single engineer i met um on linkedin met on the bus just like literally any anyone i would that would possibly join my tech team and him rejecting them just time and time and time again and it was incredibly frustrating because this went on for a whole year of him just being like nope like this person's not good enough you've got a really hard technical project you need to have someone amazing that's like built a huge scalable platform before and like that was really frustrating because i wanted to get started on the future of publishing right but then eventually after a year ended up finding our amazing co-founder cameron adams and our cto dave herndon and eventually got to work so they forced you to find a tech team yeah and they were right they were actually i'm really truly grateful for that pain yeah it is you know it's so funny because number one i always tell investors turn your phone off in meetings it's just such a bad look what he was actually doing was intro me to people so i told you that so you found out after afterwards i realized he was actually trying to connect me with his network and this is why i tell investors always have your moleskin not like your stylist and your ipad pro and take notes on because people assume that you're checking your email yeah and they get super insulted and a founder at this very table i was interviewing a founder a couple of weeks ago for our accelerator and i turned my phone off like i did before we started i turned it over and my fitbit vibrated like with a notification i was like wait a second i turned i'm on airplane mode which is like the foolproof way yeah yeah and i look and it's oh i set the reminder to walk 250 steps an hour so i cleared it the founder emailed us and said i'm withdrawing my application to your accelerator and you know i don't think it's a fit for this reason this reason and jason was on his watch during the meeting so i don't think he's that interested and i wrote an apology letter and i was like i am so sorry i in my book in chapter whatever i wrote never be on your devices i had turned my phone on airplane mode and the stupid fitbit watch because we were sitting for over an hour reminded me to stand but it is so important devices are when people look at their devices other people assume they don't care that's fair and i think it's fair but at the same time he was like he was my only connection in silicon valley and he a he was doing the right thing and even if he wasn't doing the right thing even if he was literally just on facebook or something like he um he was my one little tiny window into this whole world no it is amazing i think this is why bill ty is such a great investor and he's so legendary is because the number one rule of investing is to never underestimate anyone including the 22 year old from perth who is printing yearbooks in her living room but what that shows is that you're dogged and you're resilient and you're willing to do whatever it takes and that's what the you know the higher order of success is for founders is being dogged right i mean this is the thing you've learned you you got your uh your product decimated by some reviewer who's no longer publication's no longer publishing but you know you're constantly going to get kicked like that and you have to ignore it and stay focused on the work so you get these founders you raise what like 500k or something or a million in that first round um we raised 1.6 from investors and we got 1.4 million matching funding from the australian government which was very handy so wait a second so you raised three million yes i'm guessing that's for 30 of the company or so you don't have to confirm it but that's ballpark what the round would be or less even but anyway you raised that money so now the government you they own 14 percent of canada no it's free i know i'm joking uh yeah this is unbelievable when you think about it it was actually the reason why we were able to stay in australia was because we like sold that to investors we're like hey we can get this matching funding and if i think if it wasn't for that it would have been really challenging was that sydney or perth or new york in sydney so we moved from perth to sydney um because of that 1.4 million dollar grant or report oh so winding the story back a little yeah so i went over came to silicon valley for the first time until my visa expired and then i got kicked out of the country or specifically left like the day before um then i went back to perth moved my company from perth to sydney and then learned to kite surf to go to this kite surfing entrepreneurship conference to try and meet more investors and then um this came for another three months here and then landed an investor was this mai tai yeah exactly yeah see is people don't realize if you kite surf you can just be unlimited funded or if you don't cut stuff you really work really hard to learn to kite surf so then you can get invited to the conference how many days have you cried surfed a lot actually i've i've but i've retired now so you can get up on the board and everything no problem yeah i can actually get back to the same spot but um yeah i i i was going to my tie for some years i got up on the board i did it twice on necker island and both times the wind stopped on the second day so i like only did a half thing so i had to restart the next time i went and i got up on the board congrats and i had this 35 seconds of you know when you're holding the kite perfectly on the perfect angle and you feel like you're flying i mean is there another experience that is similar to kite boarding you've ever had when it's just dialed in like that and you're perfectly flying along the waves i have to admit that for a long part of my short-lived kite surfing career there was a less flying and more just like gulping water and being like taking down ladies in the sky and like dumped on the sand and like taken out and having to get saved by a boat and almost which was the 30 sec 36 second of that experience yeah well yeah for a moment there is joy yes and for most of the other time there is like just trying to save your life well that's what happened i literally am now flying away from necro island and i don't know how fast you go when you catch these things but it feels like 30 or 40 miles an hour or something really fast yeah and it's somewhere between being on like a moped and a motorcycle it's it's not like a bicycle let me leave it at that point fast yes and i just face down boom and then you get dragged by the kite and my face is ripping along the water and you know all the water goes into your lungs and you're choking yeah and gagging on water and they had to send a boat to get me yeah because they're like well he's gone i was like i'm halfway to mosquito so you go to that you they put in 1.4 million but they had no equity wow that is the biggest win in the history of government grants you realize has there ever been a government grant of 1.4 million dollars that created 500 jobs it was yeah incredibly powerful it's extraordinary what is it what does the government of new south wales think of this like are you like their hero yeah we there it was actually a federal grant um so it was available yeah across all of which across australia yeah you don't have to pay it back no it's a really cool program there's a lot of paperwork but like the amount of hour per uh the payback was pretty good then you start making some money and you raise another round of funding from a bunch of well-known folks who did the series a then after that felicia's letter series a wow that's another great investor yeah and then blackbird were like one of our earliest investors in our first round i think they've invested in or they have invested in it blackbird is the sydney based vc yeah and the woman who works there uh who i had dinner with when i was in sydney sam wong is over there but their black bear is black bird vc they're funded by the atlassian guys um yeah they're investors they're investor lps yeah yeah so that's actually a really great moment for australia the previous unicorn are lps and blackbird vc firm and so you got um funded by them and then i want to hear the story of how you meet i think the most powerful woman in silicon valley at this point mary meeker and ray's how much did you raise in this round 70 mil 70 million which is mind-blowing had a 2.5 million dollar 2.5 billion valuation i want to hear how you met mary and how this deal came about when we get back on this week in startups walker corporate law is a boutique law firm that specializes in representing entrepreneurs and their startups and they charge a fixed fee so whatever you want to get done you're not going to have that terrorizing pdf coming from your law firm and you open it up and you wonder is this the month that i get a huge legal bill nope scott walker is going to tell you what you're going to pay and he's got attorneys working with him in his partnership who have decades of experience this is a boutique firm and they specialize what that means is flat rate pricing no getchas gotchas no surprises and world-class decade multi-decade attorneys who've done this and who are choosing to do it and you can reach scott walker directly the founder just like me you can reach them directly ninety 415-979-99 ninety eight four one five nine seven nine ninety nine ninety eight scott walker corporate law dot com put jason sent me in the subject line scott at walker corporate law say uncle jason sent me he knows who uncle jason is and you can visit walkercorporatelaw.com but go ahead email scott he's a mensch he takes care of the people i send to him he is a great attorney and he does a great job for founders he's chosen the path of supporting early stage founders and just like me he operates right in that early stage the first couple of years of a startup to set them up for success and he's great at what he does mergers and acquisitions licensing arrangements terms of service privacy policies all that stuff he can do for you and he can do it at a great price with fixed fees no surprises so go ahead 415-979-9998 or scott at walker corporate law okay let's get back to this amazing episode welcome back to this week in startups my guest is melanie perkins and she is the co-founder and ceo of canva if you haven't used canva go to canva.com and just buy the pro version it's free yada yada but the pro version is basically free too it's 12 bucks and if you have to create anything that's graphical it'll come out i would say if you have no talent and you try to make an ugly design on canva it'll come out as a seven and a half and if you have any taste at all like if you have the ability to pick a three or four star restaurant on yelp you'll get to an eight and a half i know this because just last week somebody emailed me an invite to their event a very close friend of mine and i said my god this is the ugliest invite i've ever seen and i just cc sam the president of launch who uh accosted you for a selfie she's one of your super fans she turned around and made a canva invite that looked like a million bucks in five minutes excellent to hear so go to canva.com right now and start an account and tell everybody and all your friends about it it's incredible um you have multiplayer mode can a company buy like 100 seats yeah exactly and they do oh they do yeah and then what they can have a shared repository exactly so they can collaborate they can have all their designs and templates and brand colors and logos and fonts oh you can put in your brand kit yeah exactly oh i didn't know how long have you had that product and how do you price that one um the same price it's actually yeah it's for 12.95 as well wow we need that for our company because we just did our whole style kit and everybody's making ads is the reason canva got so big so fast because so many people are making their own ads now for social media because i noticed that the ad templates seem to be all over the place like you have standard banners but i think instagram and facebook and twitter all generated this whole other level of advertising has that been a big part of it yeah actually there's heaps of ads created heaps of social media content presentations have been growing like crazy you've had 20 million of them created um yeah powerpoint acts and keynotes yeah yeah oh i didn't know you had templates for that yeah you should definitely jump on that we're investing very heavily in that space actually it's interesting because i've been trying to find nice templates online and there's all these third-party places but they charge like 50 bucks for a template you're saying that one-time 50 purchase of a template you just get the whole library on canva for 12 a month yeah exactly and you don't even have to pay that that's unbelievable and you don't have to pay that right you can get it for free and but yeah that's that was i guess the whole point was that you don't have to go to all these different sites to get all the pieces of content it should just be there and collaborative and online it's so funny my team is watching this episode live and in the slack chat room they just told me that our inside ai event they did all the graphics on canva and this is for print graphics too going back to your uh pivot we did all like the stand-up banners and stuff like that all on canva and all the uh ads and you just bought some stock photography yeah tell me about that pixels and pixabay are two of the largest free stock photography sites they've got over a million images 120 000 contributors and we're very excited for them to have joined the canberra family um just last week we announced that so a million different uh images now on the service yeah for free for free yeah you know it's interesting uh i know a lot of these photographers are a little upset about these stock photo places in the creative commons movement what do you think of that controversy we sort of provide for the entire spectrum so we've got 50 000 schools using canva now and so they obviously need a heap of free content to be able to do all their projects um and then we also have paid photography we also launched a unlimited photo subscription last week where you get access to 50 million images for 12.95 oh wow so that's like an add-on yeah that's another product that you can get which is pretty cool like 50 million images for 12.95 it's not a bad deal yeah all these stock photographers i think are bumming like how do that was an incredible industry to be in it used to be when i was in the magazine business in the 90s stock photographers would get gosh tons of money for like they got royalties on all this and just i guess the number of cameras out there you can take really great photos with your iphone camera and they're nobody can tell the difference for web or even print if you'd have to be very high resolution print now for you to need a super high rest stuff what about video you guys in the video space yet or no because i got pitched on canva for video last year but i was like if canva for video i didn't say this is the founder i want to have the feelings but video was going to be thing wouldn't canva do canva for video it seems like the natural extension i would definitely agree with that premise yeah okay so it doesn't exist now we've got we're dabbling with videos so you can start to put your videos in your designs you can export it already as a video um but there's there's a lot of news coming in that space yeah that's to be awesome for you that unlocks like a whole bunch of new subscribers because all these marketers are like doing videos for their websites restaurants are doing videos it's kind of making its way yeah i guess our premise is design anything published anywhere and so you can kind of see that most things fit into that into that basic uh goal so is the person who loses in canvas great success adobe is that the is that who you're taking customers from or keeping customers from going to is that the the battle you're in do they hate you a little yeah um on both fronts um but i think the power playing as well like people used to be stuck with publisher and clipper and heinous fonts and really have you seen their templates like that they're not brutal yeah they're natural yeah so i guess the i guess a lot of people who had previously been previously used microsoft we are now using canva um and then also for designers like designers have this other huge pain point they usually have to send a pdf backwards and forwards like hey can you change this tiny little typo and so the idea is that they can create templates on canva that the rest of the organization can then use so we kind of hope to replace pdf as a form of collaboration because that is like not really a great form of class we used to basically have somebody on staff or you know somebody on staff would learn photoshop or illustrator and that's just gone for the bottom half of users does it did adobe create a competing product or are they threatened do you think they're threatened by you guys or they just think it's like a different class of user i don't know we just kind of stick to our doing our own thing like we've got a really strong focus on serving our community and that's really where our team's attention and focus is all right you've gone through some media training i like it what about all these other competitors i know there were like a ton of them figma easily all visually all these ones but none of them have hit any kind of scale what what do you think the differentiator has been for canva i think like i guess right from the start we really set out to solve a really significant pain point like having seen firstly when i was teaching design programs and then with fusion like see really seeing the pain points that people were having um really seeing the power of having this online collaborative platform um and then just being really true to that so having be you know even as we were starting our small business with the first company um by trying to get a brochure and getting quoted fifteen hundred dollars when we didn't have fifteen hundred dollars to like make a brochure no um and so i think just being really focused on the customer's pain point and what they're trying to do um has been pretty powerful but then i've been just blown away by our community so we've got 150 000 youtube videos have been made about canva people are tweeting about it they're having their own facebook groups with you know tens of thousands of people like just what are they doing sharing what they're building yeah and like giving each other tips and workshops and like and for all sorts of niche industries so like there's youtube videos about canva for youtube thumbnails and for beekeepers and for dentists and in all sorts of languages have people is it sort of like etsy in that if you become really good at canva you can then become a graphic designer and make 20 30 bucks an hour like on the back of your 12 subscription yeah i see all the time job ads going up saying either like canvas a required skill or the inverse people are putting it on their resume and then even on upwork there's people that are advertising like canva is a specialty that's mind-blowing so yeah it's pretty cool to see it's like a legitimate scale now yeah you're you're canvas certified yeah exactly to do this how did you meet mary meeker how did that all go down um so i guess you're running a process and she bit or did you like just she reached out to you so we met her a little while ago um and mood her business partner actually flew over to australia um to to come and visit us um and mary and her partner flew um mood flew over but i met mary a couple of years ago and then um yeah we we really hit it off and i think that they really understood our vision so when we're looking it's actually kind of funny so in our early days we were pitching every single investor under the sun and be like hey please please invest in our company um and not many people thought that was a great idea at that point in time but then um in in more recent years we've been very lucky that a lot of investors have been trying to get into canva yeah um and so we really just got to have the pick of like who we thought would be able to help take us to that next level of scale and we really look for investors that believe in our vision and what we're trying to do it's kind of fun it's a bit of a self-selection process the people who believe in us and our vision invest and people who don't um don't and it kind of works out well because it means that you're surrounded by amazing people that really believe in what you're trying to achieve i think it's a very positive way of looking at what every entrepreneur goes through in the first half of their journey which is pain pain and suffering and nose and being under-resourced yes and then you go into the second phase where you're being annoyed and pulled in every direction everybody wants you to speak at their conference everyone should be in their podcast everybody wants to invest in your company everybody wants to put you on the cover magazine and you're fighting against a deluge of inbound how have you managed that and stayed focused is it hard um i don't find it that hard because i just pretty much haven't been doing much external things yeah as you can as i know i know i came to sydney and they're like we have the greatest keynote ever and i'm like fantastic booker and they're like she's not interested i'm like i'm sorry oh wait a second i came all the way to sydney and she's too busy for me but you're here now which is all that matters i i think like in the early days we had to do a lot of external things so i was really like you know the internal and external locus of control like it was a very external i have a very internal locus of control but i was having to ask permission please be my investor please join my team and now like it's sort of really lucky because we've just it's really about us executing and us delivering upon our communities needs and um building up this platform that we've always been dreaming about um and so i've sort of went through a really strong phase of just being able to purely service and work with our community um realize now we probably need to start to build canvas profile a little stronger in the like i think it's a good idea but you know i appreciate the focus because i see a lot of founders in the earlier phase to you getting caught up in their tedx talks and summit at sea and web summit and this summit and that summit i'm like how about we summit profitability yeah we are profitable yeah can we sum it like filling the four positions in our management team that are empty right now like there's other mountains to summit right now other than like going on a cruise with a bunch of to like you know say we're going to change the world like being laser focused and that's the purity i think of the moment you probably had the last couple years is when you have that product market fit and you know it that is the ultimate pressure reliever isn't it as a founder yes definitely yeah i think that like that is love your customers yeah i love you 100 so having seeing like the stories from our community so there's been a billion designs created and in those like billion designs are the most amazing stories like a lady found her birth mother um sheriffs in the us use it to create wanted posters yeah um like so many people have like helped get their small business off the ground like all of these amazing stories and like that literally is what fuels our team and it makes us super happy i think on the other side of things it always feels like we haven't yet done enough we say we've done one percent and we like really mean that that's kind of almost an exaggeration like there's just so much more that we want to do and achieve yet i think that's probably the reason why people are willing to pay the price they paid in terms of valuation for the company which let's face it its valuations are very high right now but if you think about having 500 000 subscribers right now and that's only one revenue stream i should stay yeah so we've got 500 000 subscribers we had like 250 000 um print orders through our print product now okay um and then we also take a little bit of a vig on that yeah and then we have a marketplace as well so people can purchase images um but if you're thinking about the raw number but the royal number of subscribers it's very interesting when if you when i remember when com was coming up and people were like yeah i don't think they can get to like more than 10 or 20 000 subscribers like people willing to pay for meditation and people don't understand the scale of the planet you know you got three or four billion people online of the seven and you know 50 bucks a year or 150 bucks a year is not a lot of money and it's because it's monthly and subscription there's no and you make it free but even if you pay there's really little at risk in these sas products so they could be 50 million people subscribing to this easily i mean that sounds crazy to people that would have as many subscribers you could have more subscribers than america online had or similar to hbo in america for your product i mean it could absolutely go 100x from here yeah absolutely and there's a few more industries we're going to be getting into yet oh really design anything publish anywhere oh design anything publish anywhere is that the tagline yeah that's that's literally like what we're working on okay so you're going to put 3d printers in space and you can build out the mars colony ahead of time have you thought about that 3d printing and stuff like that or is that just too corny um something to be kind of fun is like i mean this isn't really part of the big macro vision but just being able to like do you know you can print so we launched t-shirts last week actually oh did you really so you can actually now brilliant yeah you can get your dessert your design like firstly on your you know any of your swag and marketing materials on your t-shirts so you know you could do that yeah that's a that's a reasonable size thing but then websites as well so at the moment you can already click publish and it turns into a website um but we're going to dive deeper into that so there's a lot of different things that's interesting so you could see yourself as a squarespace or wordpress competitor coexister exactly and the t-spring because and definitely to take on powerpoint so that's a that's a pretty big one as well just do you need to have a separate brand for that is as a product person i think that's primarily what you'd say your superpower is other than getting people to give you tons of money and believe in your vision when you're making your books um so are you a product designer but i love product yeah it products my my heart and soul so do you feel like the product now has so many features that you would have to put like maybe those things in other products or have canvas slides canva like have like a suite of products is that gonna be the ultimate i guess the goal is like one of the philosophies from the early days was that you should be able to have one product and have all of the tools and assets and everything that you need and everything should be hidden by search bars so you can search for whatever it is that you want yes um but then the idea is that we only make a small change if you want to design a presentation it's pretty much the same thing as designing a video but with a couple of tiny little tweaks to optimize for that forum or for a website you shouldn't have to go and learn a whole new tool you should be able to do that in the same thing and if you want to design a t-shirt why don't you do that in the same thing too so that's that's the goal so it's interesting thinking about locus of control that you brought up before if the designer is where it all happens that's the input that's the creative process that's kind of the well what comes from the well and where does the water flow exactly it flows to a website it flows to a t-shirt it flows to a mug exactly you know eventually pretty much like each button in canva is a separate industry so there's like one button and that's the stock photography industry and then there's another button and that might be the template sort of yeah there's like fonts and lots of these things have previously been completely separate sites do do you have in the marketplace people who are canva experts that you can hire as part of it or do you just let that kind of go to up work in other places yeah that happens across the web elsewhere so uh when we get back i want to know what you what's the goal for the next 10 years because you're now what is it six years old five we've launched five years ago launched five years ago and you spent a year building and then two years on the pivot before that but yeah five six years on this it's been yeah it's like eleven years since we first got to the other overnight success in 11 years yeah like any of the other ones uber just went public nine years after i invested in this thing but let's talk about that uh yeah thanks um it's uh it worked out it all worked out in the words of gary campbell did you see that quote yeah it was hilarious they're like so like carrot camp you created uber it changed the world what are you feeling right now i'm glad it all worked out they're like are we talking to forrest gump or something like he's just like yeah i guess it worked out when we get back hey what about an ipo and would you do that here or would you do that in sydney and what are the next five six years going to be like uh for you in canva what do you what do you have to do as a founder to get you know the next five years uh what do you consider success when we get back and wrap up here on this weekend startups [Music] almost all the wealth created here in silicon valley and technology comes from equity not salary people's salaries maybe pay for their rent but people's boats and planes and houses and vacations that comes from equity and we are specialists in this ourselves here at this week in startups and as an investor and all of that gets tracked on something called a cap table cap capitalization table but they're always broken and they're always wrong we're always having to go back and check them as angel investors and make sure that the employees and everybody's getting the same amount of equity that they were promised because hey this is compensation it really matters you have to get it right but companies and attorneys are still using spreadsheets and paper certificates to issue their options and to keep track of equity this leads to problems if these things are messed up and they're updated so frequently with every single new hire or if you get a valuation or a new round of funding and it leads to tons of inaccuracy well carter fixes cap tables and equity management and more than 10 000 companies you heard that right nvc firms like slack coinbase flexport august capital and myself jason calacanis we have hundreds of billions of dollars in equity captured and managed perfectly by carta c-a-r-t-a and you can simplify your cap table and make sure it's perfect and not have any drama nobody wants cap table drama trust me it is not pleasant as a founder to have to deal with that you will get 20 off your cap table software and 409 a valuations if you go to carta.comtwist c-a-r-t-a-dot-com-slash-twist it's super affordable it's easy to use you're gonna get 20 off at that link c-a-r-t-a dot com slash twist you have to get your cap table correct go to carta.comcarta.com twist okay let's get back to this amazing episode all right it took me 17 emails and uh a year and a half but i got melanie perkins on the podcast and it was worth it uh we've learned so much today and i think it's just a great lesson for everybody in resiliency not giving up and being focused on your customer and your product congratulations on the acquisitions of pixabay and pixels pexels uh and mary meeker and uh what is her name bond bond capital putting in 70 million but that's people don't realize you raise this money it's they just think like oh wow the founders got 70 million maybe you took some secondary who knows but um you have to then turn that 70 million into at least five or 10x to make them happy this is an obligation what do you have to do as a founder and ceo over the next five years to make all these new investors and the team successful well we have a two-step plan okay so step one it's very simple yeah step one build one of the world's most valuable companies okay great and step two do the most good we can do okay build the world's most valuable company one of the worlds but i can't hopefully not one of but you know let's be let's be honest one of the world's most valuable companies which the most valuable companies would be in the 250 billion range and above right we would agree uh that's where the googles and the facebooks and the apples live in that 250 to billion dollar trillion dollar range so you got 100 exit it actually seems possible yeah not completely implausible i would so then the question is possible or probable i would put it between those two it's completely possible and it's starting to feel probable because if you can get to 500 000 there was some point you were at 500 subscribers and you said wow if we could 10x this and then you 100x didn't wow so that's pretty easy i think you'll get there um and then the second part is to do a lot of good yeah do the most good we can do we'd kind of like to do the most good you can do yeah and i feel like that's quite a lot of good yeah well i mean if you help people make the world more beautiful and make them more efficient at work efficiency is great for humanity net net mm-hmm how do you think about this ipo market because you guys are in that nine figure revenue zone i think uh based on my estimation because i can look at five 100 employees yeah yeah you guys are in the 75 125 million dollar zone you could go public sydney it's easy to go public isn't it like you can go public with 10 million and 20 million in revenue there how do you think about the public markets watching uber and pagerduty pinterest lyft all these companies go public do you think it's too early or just right and in sydney did the founders want to go public we're not in a rush i mean we're profitable and we've got like quite an incredible number of investors like in the last round we had general catalyst join as well and um blackbird and felicis who have been long time supporters and so i think for us there's certainly no rush and there's no lack of capital um and we're able to continue to invest really heavily in our long-term success um so yeah there's no rush how do you think about it something is that like a personal goal for you though i mean it's kind of like every founder dreams of that i mean it might be a step on the journey to to go number one there is a window though are you getting a lot of pressure to do it or no no pressure and in sydney how do people think about it because you can go if people don't understand the markets there allow for people going going public with what 20 million 10 million it's it's a much more it's a it's a much more orderly process there than it is here i think here it's like a lot of drama and big numbers but do a lot of companies go public there like startups yeah quite a few and you must have had the opportunity to go when you had 10 or 20 or 30 million in revenue you turned it down yeah i mean there's not any specific point to do that really i think like like i guess you know one of the themes that are probably coming out a little i don't really like distraction i like getting to build a company right and i feel really fortunate to be able to build that company without too much distraction at the moment so acquisitions though are probably the best part of having this war chest since you're profitable anyway you can just start buying these companies and it adds so much value how do you think about acquisitions if it adds a lot of value to our community and we've got really strong values alignment with the founders and what we're trying to achieve together then yeah it makes a lot of sense we've made three acquisitions now how have you done in terms of integrating them what have you learned about that yeah it's been really successful so the first team from zeetings um they had an amazing intro they have an amazing interactive um presentations product they've joined our team and are really leading our presentations um product now which is incredibly awesome they've got such a like strong founder mentality and then pexels and pixar they're going to continue to operate independently and continue to serve their community and then all of their photography and everything will be available on canvas so it really works awesomely both ways so i think every every company is unique in how it should work together how is the united states your largest market yeah so we're in 190 countries now um are you localized language-wise yeah so we must have been hard yeah it's like a third-party company to do that or you just like hire people in each country how does that work yeah we've had about 200 translators across the globe translating um and last year we launched in china and we really we've set up a team there and really had to localize very heavily there including moving servers and everything over there to do it properly um we also launched the other hard languages we were sort of leaving towards the end was launching in arabic and hebrew and urdu all the right to left languages oh yeah so yeah we launched in that last year after a lot of custom demand and so it's pretty exciting to see just how broadly across the globe canvas they use now and you can launch in these other countries and operate without having a ton of employees in those countries now it's pretty amazing what remote has done like you're a company from sydney with the majority of your revenue from america yeah no do you have a team here or um we've got a few people here like a handful yeah but yet it's your largest market and it doesn't matter it's not mind-blowing when you think about it it's pretty cool like when you look at like just how far flung our user base is it's it's pretty cool to see yeah it's crazy in fact yeah like i was backpacking in um chilly over christmas and there was like a camera design and that just happens all the time just like running into camera designs and people who love it which is very cool yeah and china that's got to be intense to yeah try to do business there it was a big initiative in investment but it's certainly paying off it's growing phenomenally quickly what do you do you start a separate company there and partner with alibaba or somebody no we've set up a full team there we hired some amazing people to to move there and we moved a bunch of people from sydney over there wow um and we've really invested like with local partners so the biggest stock photography and font company there became partners we did a big media um conference and had heaps of journalists and yeah really went all in there are people there getting in businesses starting to do sas subscriptions is it like a thing like it is here in the states yeah it is a thing i think that um there's a saying there that sas is not software as a service it's software and a service and it's um it's quite fascinating there's a bit more like hand holding and sort of a bit more top down than bottom up in in some regards oh in china in china ah so you have to get buy-in from the top and then they deploy it that kind of makes sense if you think about management philosophy like you know bottom up what about japan yeah we're in we're in japan as well it's a completely different market though does it does it work to localize a product there or is it harder um yeah i mean it's critical to localize the product and then we've partnered with a um kddi which is a really large telco there yeah and it's been growing really quickly there too amazing well listen continued success uh congratulations if you go back in time to your 22 year old self and whisper some advice that you learned as a founder growing from uh hey uh what do you call those books yearbooks yeah growing from a yearbook entrepreneur yearbook entrepreneur the premise was still the same simple design it's not as obscure as it sounds it's pretty amazing that a 19 or 20 year old decided to start a yearbook were your parents like entrepreneurs where did this gene get into you were they founders of companies or entrepreneurial not so much but what they were all are i was just like ridiculously supportive of like our wild ideas as kids or were they yeah they were like great go for it yeah pretty much um like when i was 14 i started a tiny little company that made scarves and sold them to shops around perth and that was really helpful because it meant that i could actually terrifyingly pick up a phone and get my scarves at 14. yeah what was the first moment you realized in your life you were an entrepreneur was there some like movie you saw about entrepreneurship or some moment where you saw a business operating and said that's for me do you remember i'm just always like solving problems and i like from quite a young age i remember going to bali for the first time and just seeing the complete inequity um between like what i had as a child growing up like with a good education and all the rest of it and seeing kids on the street and being like okay well that's something that i would like to help solve at some point which is why we have our two-step plan right make the world better make a ton of money and then you're gonna give it all away yeah and be a philanthropist and but hopefully i feel like there's enough goodness in the world there's enough goodwill there's enough money to solve all of the problems in the world we just need a little help to to re-orientate society a little i think that's right i mean if you look at capitalism it is the best system out there some people argue it gets a little out of control at times or the numbers get so big because what you've learned and we've all learned is these products can go global and when they do it creates a very large footprint of a business right it's pretty mind-blowing but almost every capitalist i know has taken the giving pledge which we have here in the united states we just agree to give away i took it like you give away half your money when you die and who cares like you're gonna makes total sense you're dead yeah um and just amazing things are happening on a philanthropic basis and all these problems are not gonna be solved by governments like governments generally don't solve problems so my theory yeah is that to solve the world's problems we actually need governments and companies and non-profits and entrepreneurs and vcs and everyone to work together to reach the goals so i think that like there needs to be a lot more collaboration and a lot more voice given to goals um that we all have because we all want a better world yeah we just don't happen to have a functioning government in our country right now how's it going over there i think it's definitely a little more um there's room for improvement let's say that across the globe to actually give goals of people more of a voice and so we've got we've got a few things in the works coming up yeah uh and what was that advice you'd give to your younger self like you must have learned something about this crazy entrepreneurial journey and what matters i think what matters maybe i think i'll just give a couple of words it'll be okay it'll be okay and i think that i along a lot of the journey you just don't really know you're kind of like just walking down a dark dark tunnel and being like i think this is the right way and then you start having people behind you and now we've got 600 people behind us and it's like i think this is the way my tiny little candle in front of me is only burning a little over here but i i think that this is the direction it's not a wall you just don't really know because it is a dark tunnel yeah well i think you'll be okay i think you've got a little bit more of a spotlight now then i can see a little further you see a little further yeah yeah behind you have the competitors like running down the hall you get a lot of competitors now too huh a lot of fast falls that's annoying isn't it yeah but i guess you know what what's the saying it's a compliment i'm not really sure that really applies it's a little annoying but at the same time because you got people copying i know because one of them pitched me when i was in sydney or something and they were just like we're gonna take on camera and i was like okay i explained and they were like yeah well we're gonna just make it cheaper and i was like isn't it like 10 bucks a month or something like i don't think that strategy is gonna work like to undercut the person who's already got the it made no sense they had no pitch but the pitch was basically we're going to beat them by being cheaper i was like i don't think that's going to work i'm not deeply concerned about that yeah no what is there anything that concerns you at this point what concerns you oh everything concerns me we're one percent done we've got 99 to go there's like i think that that's just paranoid as a founder like i think our job is to continuously focus on the things that need to be improved which does kind of give you a slightly warped view because it's not i don't often sit there like yeah hey this is just all working out like things are set it's always like oh my god we haven't done this thing yet like this was in the business plan years ago we haven't done it yet or this shouldn't be happening we need to make this better and faster and more efficient or whatever it might be and that's just continuous yeah i think that's the difference between entrepreneurs and then maybe non-entrepreneurs or non-entrepreneurial people is that sense of urgency and you can always tell the we have a in i was an entrepreneur for most of my career but i'm also an investor now and the velocity of people's ability to launch product is correlated with their success and that is driven by a sense of urgency like well this was on the plan and we still don't have a vr ar tool and you can't make minecraft levels and fortnite levels in canva why not and it's like well because that's insane like there's tools for that and it's vr and ar goggles don't even exist yet like we might want to wait a year or two for the to exactly exist yeah all right what did i miss any any questions i missed what's your favorite it was very extensive thank you for your excellent questions uh it's a pleasure how old are you now i'm 32. 32. congratulations i think you are the youngest female founder to ever become a unicorn did you know that perhaps i mean the only other one was theranose and that was a complete utter fraud and you have 500 i liked the vision i was deeply disappointed about that actually yeah you know what it's it's disappointing in a way but it happens so infrequently that i kind of think like yeah there's going to be one sociopathic crazy person out of every 10 000 founders and like that one just happened to get a lot further than the others like so much other good is happening in the world that people get super fixated on it but it would have been cool to get a blood test like that yeah it would have been cool if the vision they were selling was was real it was rio yeah yeah the problem was the vcs i knew who were looking at it they said oh uh great we'll we'll invest this sounds like a great idea can you show us the machine and she was like back to the nda she's like yeah you got to sign this nda but i can't actually show you the machine they're like we're investors we're giving you money from lps that are like endowments or whatever like we we have to do this thing called due diligence oh no it's machine's proprietary i can't show it to you yeah i think that that's one thing that's really critical as a founder is like we try to always undersell numbers so we round down if we have a number i think like it is really critical to make sure that truth is a very very strict line in the sand and you don't ever cross that yeah managing expectations and not young founders it's good that you learn managing expectations is a slightly different different kettle of fish because you are needing to get people to understand your vision and what you're trying to do and achieve but it's also it's critical for people to know where you are today and not to be shifty with that one yeah it's interesting like if you people take the rosiest picture sometimes and then they double it and that is really dangerous especially when you have shareholders we have a special term for that here in america it's called uh lying well it's lying but it's also called securities fraud when you're if you sell a share yeah and some fact and your dac or your diligence was wrong yeah and you knew it yeah and you sold shares of the company then you've triggered securities fraud and that happened like three or four times yeah i think that like the whole relationship with vcs is built on trust and so you have to be strictly honest all right uh we'll see you all next time on this week in service bye bye [Music] you

Channel: This Week in Startups

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Id: 8TBSg79Gf0M

Length: 64min 33sec (3873 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2019