Melanie Perkins Keynote (Canva), Sunrise North Island

excellent well well i'm here actually not that long ago i was actually here earlier this month it was absolutely incredible to be here um and i feel extremely fortunate we actually got to go to queenstown um and so yes getting to spend a little bit of time in this beautiful country so today what i want to talk about is two very important things i want to talk about the importance of perseverance and i also want to talk about the importance of dreaming um and so what i'm going to be doing is sharing the 10 year story behind canvas overnight success so i want to tell you a little bit about something that i have done at yoga a couple times so you go into the room and you've got your yoga mat and you're kind of sitting there and everyone's ignoring each other and feeling very serious ready for their practice and sometimes the teacher will say turn to the person next to you and introduce yourself and the really wonderful thing about that is it kind of breaks the ice and makes everyone realize everyone else is just humans and you kind of feel like a little bit more friendship to the people around you so what i'd like you to do is exactly that for a moment turn to the person next to you and literally shake their hand and say hi so you've got a friend for the day and someone you don't know [Music] three one thank you very much okay now i want to ask you a couple of really really awkward questions just to kick things off so stand up if you have ever failed at something or been rejected literally stand up for me yeah that is pretty much everyone hey unfortunately but that is the reality of life and i want you to sit down if when you were rejected you felt like giving up yeah i would try to totally sit down okay i'm i'm impressed to see the number of people that are still standing i think and you may sit down now that is a very perseverant crowd i think that the reality is when you are rejected you feel a lot like giving up and stopping because that is kind of a natural human reaction because that feels really really awkward when you are rejected but i think what's really important is to persevere and continue and continue again and get rejected and rejected again which feels completely outrageous and like the exact opposite of what feels natural because rejection is hard and trying again and being told that something isn't working that you don't have whatever it is that you need it doesn't really feel like you should try and try again but what i want to do today is to show that rejection perseverance are two very critical ingredients to succeed at literally any goal that you put your mind to so i'm going to share our story today and then i'm going to talk a little bit about dreaming and we're going to do a little fun workshop so it wasn't that long ago that i was at university in perth western australia and i was teaching design programs and thought they were really really hard and complicated um and there was this whole crazy world so usually you'd have to go purchase adobe then study design for a while then purchase and download stock photos from a stock photography library and purchase fonts from a font library and purchase layouts and defect each image and prepare factors and illustrations and then design you take all those ingredients and actually create design then upload an email the pdf and then make revisions and then prepare it for web or print thought this was crazy and that in the future this entire design ecosystem should be integrated into one page and made accessible to the whole world um so who's used a professional design tool before yeah quite a few of you um it's crazy just how complicated they are there's also lots and lots of big companies obviously microsoft and google and you know a couple of other ones in there um but then lots of other companies like stock photography sites and stock layout sites and font foundries and file sharing services and professional print companies thought that was ridiculous they should be integrated into one page you should be able to have one click access to all the professional design tools a library of millions of images a design marketplace you should be able to collaborate online and then finally you should be able to click a button and export it to a video or a social media platform or a website or a presentation um you shouldn't have to use different tools for each of these things not a bad vision hey i thought it was pretty cool but the reality was that i was 19 and i was at university and i had no business experience or software experience or marketing experience or literally any relevant experience so my boyfriend became my business partner we took over my mom's living room and set to work um and created rather trying to take on the entire world of design at this point in time decided to take on school yearbooks in australia this is us standing very proudly with our very first website um and we then took over my mom's entire living room an entire house um we ended up with printing presses you can see in that photo there um we had printing presses and stuff and then we started taking over her garage and ended up with that being our storeroom of ink and paper and waste cartridges um and had deliveries of trucks with paper because we were printing these yearbooks um and yeah then we started a tradition which we've continued today which i particularly like which is having lunch together um every day and that's really fun because you get to know people um outside your um and as human beings rather than just as team members and we started to take increasingly dorky photos um but this was actually that growing team um with that without some of the first yearbooks that we had created um and then we were just doing absolutely everything under the sun in order to help expand this so um i made all of these banners and were going to expose it was a fail don't don't go to an expo where there are more exhibitors than there are attendees that did not work so well um but we're just trying everything we possibly could um and i even went in this inventor of the year competition it was called wa inventor of the year so we wanted to sound really inventory so this was the title the world's most sophisticated and easy to use multi-user publishing system well that sounded pretty cool and then i also was trying to look really professional so i started wearing business suits to every single meeting but we came runner up in wa inventor of the year um and met this guy called bill thai who was over from silicon valley he was this investor from silicon valley and despite the fact we've had a company for a number of years we had not um heard much about the whole venture capital world or the whole startup world um and so this was really like a whole new window into another world um and so i put together another deck the future of publishing and talked about the convergence of industries and how we're going to beat google docs and microsoft web ups who is totally chained to the old way of doing things we're going to become the dominant online publishing system of the future um bill said that if i met with him he'd be happy um if i went to san francisco he'd be happy to meet with me so i went to san francisco um and i just got rejected a lot um so it was really um so i was pitching people trying to get them to join my tech team i was pitching investors trying to get them to invest and most people were saying that for various reasons and they were ready uh that they weren't really quite ready unfortunately right now i do not think that it is quite the right fit just now we've reached the conclusion that the eight million dollar cap is above the top end of what we think is fair value my biggest issue is physical distance a lot of people said that they need to be able to ride their bicycle to our office and they couldn't really do that from silicon valley um and etc etc they weren't happy to invest in australian startup so many other reasons and each of these hurt a lot um and yeah i'm not sure it's going to make sense just right now other people told us that um the size of the market does a design product for non-designers was just like an oxymoron why would you do that there was so many rejections and each one of them really hurt um and [Music] i asked the question that at the start who has been rejected and pretty much everyone stood up and who feels like giving up and half of you sat down well i'd be in the half that sat down because rejection really hurts but i think that what you feel like doing and what you kind of need to do to actually get to that goal can sometimes be quite opposite things so we persevered for years it was actually three years between first meeting and investor bill and then actually landing investment um but then eventually we raised our feed round and we're extremely excited because all of a sudden we could start to grow our team and we did and we started after a year of development to be ready to launch canva to the world and we were so incredibly excited to finally get canva out into the world and then we started to grow our community and after one year we had 1.3 million designs created per month and our team was excessively excited about this and after two years we had 5.8 million designs created per month you can see those 1 million designs looked really tiny and if you kind of go like five years back from the start of that graph that's really where the journey really began and now after five years we have an incredible team of 700 people across the globe and give me a drumroll for you just yeah thank you now we have 110 million designs created per month [Music] it's pretty wild in fact yesterday 5 million designs were created this is in 190 countries across the globe this is everyone getting their small business off the ground creating a school assignment creating a presentation social media graphics marketing materials that entire vision that we have initially had has actually started to come true which is completely crazy and really really exciting um we've had 1.8 billion designs being created now um every month more than 20 million people are using canva and we have this incredible team we've got you know 700 members and you know a few offices across the globe and last night i was searching for love canva and there's just so many people saying that it's really really cool to see we've got 30 000 non-profits where we give our non-profit our paid product away for free and the number of non-profits that are using the product um to help really get to their mission and to be more effective is incredibly cool we also have some support of some really incredible investors a number of them will be in the room today i guess despite the fact i was trying to tell you about the pain and the rejection and the problems and the trials and tribulations over the last 10 years that was 10 years in a tiny little nutshell and that really was my highlight reel and that's why i love this quote so much um the reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes footage with everyone else's highlight reel and i think that that is what i want you to all take away today is just how true that is here's a note that i wrote to myself back in 2011. this was quite a low moment all that rejection started to actually weigh on me mel you're extremely tired you're in a challenging situation though you can pull through nothing bad is really happening you're just feeling depressed because you're used to achieving things quickly it's a hard environment there is no doubt you will succeed and you'll find the team you need get the investment you need and build the company you've always wanted you have chosen to put yourself in a challenging situation if it wasn't challenging you wouldn't feel satisfied when you get to the end goal i think that that i had i saw that years afterward and i'd kind of forgotten just how intense that period of time was being rejected time and time again it doesn't feel nice but it's also a really important thing because you learn every time we were rejected we'd refine our strategy we'd pick ourselves up and do it again and again and again we'd get a little better each time but we kept on continuously trying to move towards that but i think what's so incredibly important to know is that every single person is on this roller coaster ride and one day you feel like you're on top of the world and the next you feel like the world is on top of you and it kind of just keeps see-sawing between those things but you just have to keep on making a little progress each time and i think knowing that this is the case for absolutely everyone like no one has had it easy no one has been able to just like walk out and have everything work for them it's constantly a battle it's constantly a challenge and there's so many things you need to do i think knowing that that's the same for absolutely everyone can be slightly more encouraging so i think what we have to do is just keep on planting seeds until one eventually grows so hopefully that gave you a little indication of the importance of perseverance and the importance of dreaming but what i want to do right now is to double down on the importance of dreaming this is a great quote from jeff bezos that i thought was particularly apt friends congratulate me after a quarterly earnings announcement and say good job great quarter and i'll say thank you but that quarter was baked three years ago i'm working on a quarter that'll happen in 2021 right now i thought this was particularly interesting so where do you live do you live raise your hand in the past do you live yeah there's a few people living in the past that kind of makes sense because there's a lot of things you need to take from and learn from there who lives in the present feeling like you kind of day to day having to operate yeah most people kind of get dragged here because that's kind of where you literally are and then one year in the future yes a few more hands excellent what about five years in the future excellent to see a few hands and what about 10 years in the future a couple a couple okay so i think that the reality is that there's always a lot of noise and especially if you're starting a startup um there's so many things that take priority and brings you back to the to the present or the past even um so what i want to do today is just take a little moment to dream together why why is dreaming so important if you don't dream about the future you can't make it happen frankly knowing where you're headed can help you move a lot faster so i think for me if i have a really clear understanding of where i'm going i can make lots and lots of quick decisions but if i don't have a clear understanding of where i'm going it makes decision making way harder it also helps with our investors and teams so by having a really clear picture of where we're going we've been able to show that to investors got rejected a lot in the early days but then eventually found some amazing investors who believed in our vision but then we could just demonstrate that we and continue to execute upon that for our team we show every one of our team members when they join canva our vision we've got a vision deck and we go through this in a great amount of detail which means that they can help to achieve that dream and we can continue to um tick off the things and just work towards that you can only grow as big as your dreams i think that that is also a pretty important note to make because if you can't dream that far you can't really get that far and so what we do at canva is we really transform our dreams into our mission and goals and so our mission is to empower the world to design which has meant that we need to empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device um so the mission is sort of that big moon where you want to go in the long run and then goals are little steps along the way so i'll show you how this works in practice um so as i mentioned empower the world to design requires us to be in every language um so we put up on the wall our goals um one this was back in 2016. we said we're going to launch spanish um and we did which was incredibly exciting and then we had these little fun celebrations this was a little tomatina festival where we threw tomatoes the team chose their own celebration at the team that had made this magical thing happen um but we've released dubs and we've had a little holly festival where we threw in all sorts of fun things we've done over the years um and then we launched in 20 languages in 2016 then we launched in 100 languages in 2017 um then in 2018 we launched in some hard languages so we launched in china we were launching right to left languages um like arabic and hebrew and urdu and this year there's been a really strong focus on international feature parity so ensuring everyone can complain their local currency in short and everyone can have their local fonts um and now english markets more account for more than 50 percent of our community so you can tell how having that really big mission and then taking incremental steps inc and having little goals every single year every single season for us seasons of winter summer autumn spring we think that's a bit more fun than quarters um it is really really important to get there and it's just had such a huge impact um and so i guess across each of these every single year we're making little steps in these in this direction so when planning what most people do and it makes perfect sense why this happens is you kind of look at the lego blocks that you have right now you're like i've got two lego blocks what can i do with my two lego blocks and that's sort of planning from the present moment in time and that makes a lot of sense because you kind of need to look at what you've got and then you need to make decisions based on that but what i think is really important to do which i think can be done a lot more of is planning where you want to be in 10 years so you don't have the lego box to go and build that amazing city but i think it's really really important to get a clear picture in your head of what you'd like that city to look like even if you have absolutely none of the tools none of the equipment and certainly none of the lego blocks to actually make that happen so a really fun thing to think about is what do you think your industry will look like in 10 years time and in fact you don't even need to think about it for your own industry if you don't even have an industry yet you can think about the future of cars the future of transportation the future of communication and this is a really really fun exercise to do when i do that i always think that the future is kinder and more efficient and more egalitarian and get a really really clear picture of that in your head so it's a really fun question to ponder another fun question to oh yes so what you don't want to do this is what i think is you don't want to have a little ladder and you climb to the top and you get to the top of that ladder and you're like what do i do next you also don't want to have a really tall ladder but not take the steps have any steps to get there that's just called dreams but without actually ever turning that into reality what you want to do if you can possibly do this is have a really long ladder all the way to the moon but then to be able to take little steps in that direction and those steps don't need to be big at all they can just be a really tiny little step um but at that step you'll learn something and then you'll be a little bit more prepared a little bit more experience ready to take the next step so when i was talking about our experience with fusion books that wasn't we had this big vision but rather than being you know in the middle and being like oh my god that's a big vision that's impossible to do we sort of just took a little step at a time in that direction another fun question to ponder is what would you like the world to look like in the future and the more time that you can spend on these questions that are really fun to ponder um the more that you can actually start to turn that into reality you might be able to think about the un's sustainable development goals how could you turn these things into reality how could you create a company that could move in that direction and this is a really really fun exercise to do if you've got a founding team actually with your whole company we do this with different groups all the time is what would wild success look like in 10 years and what would wild failure look like in 10 years and so by using these sorts of questions it helps to take planning from looking at the lego blocks that you have or very specifically often don't have and starting to think about the possibilities starting to think about what is that dream state that you would like to be working towards so there's three pretty fun questions to ponder to help you dream more about the future so hopefully today i've helped to instill the importance of perseverance and the importance of dreaming here's a really lovely quote that's on our print packaging that means a lot to me it always seems impossible until it's done thank you that is the end

Channel: Blackbird Ventures

Views: 26,196

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Id: Yn0LNYt25PM

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020