Melanie Perkins

Co-Founder & CEO, Canva · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutive@MelanieCanva ↗LinkedIn ↗canva.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of visual design platform Canva. Prior to Canva, she co-founded the online yearbook design system Fusion Books.

13statements → 7claims → 5claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4.23/5average certainty → 1.46/5average debate potential → 68said about them ↓

5 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

7 assertions · 1 opinion · 2 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Melanie argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Canva reached 10 million users and 80 million designs by mid-2016

“So we now have it in over ten million users across the globe who have created over eighty million designs.”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 2:57 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

none yet certainty 3

100% certainty 4

100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

230 words/min while actually speaking · 25.2 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Melanie Perkins: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,572 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said13 What others said68 Episodes1

Everything Melanie Perkins said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Hiring elite engineering talent in Sydney is easier than in San Francisco

“So we've been very fortunate that it's a lot easier here, I think, to find incredible engineers than it is perhaps in San Francisco.”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 9:09 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Insight

Starting Canva in Perth forced the team to build without standard VC playbooks

“Because in Perth, there really wasn't much of a VC scene at all, and so it meant that we were sort of just starting out a company without really knowing that there was a whole brand of other companies from our tribe, so we're sort of figuring everything out as…”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 13:29 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Insight

Canva iterated its pitch deck over 100 times to pre-answer investor objections

“Every time we got feedback back from investors, whether or not it was positive or negative, we'd incorporate that back into our pitch deck and we continuously refined it. And so, at the start, we started off with a pitch deck that was just a few pages, and by …”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 14:31 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Assertion Supported

Canva reached 10 million users and 80 million designs by mid-2016

“So we now have it in over ten million users across the globe who have created over eighty million designs.”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 2:57 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Assertion Supported

Perkins recruited Canva's tech lead using a personalized pitch deck of his Facebook photos

“Actually, one of the reasons that we're able to end up hiring Dave Herndon was I sent him a visual pitch deck where I'd taken photos from his Facebook and created this story about how if he joined Canva, he'd be full of challenges and adventures, and it was go…”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 11:16 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Disclosure

Perkins bootstrapped her first startup and was forced to reach profitability quickly

“And in our case, we had no external funding for our first company, so we had to become profitable very quickly.”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 4:10 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Disclosure

Bill Tai conditioned his early Canva investment on Perkins finding technical co-founders

“I went to San Francisco and met up with Bill, and he said he'd be happy to invest if I could find a technical team”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 7:00 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Disclosure

Canva grew to over 100 employees across Sydney and Manila by 2016

“We now have over a hundred staff across our two offices here in Sydney and our other offices in Manila.”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 8:07 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Assertion Supported

Canva raised its first round pre-product by demoing Perkins' previous bootstrapped startup

“With Canva, we actually, we raised our first round of funding before we actually built a product, and so we used Fusion Books as the demo of like, hey, we can actually build things and market a company and grow, and so that was sort of our proof point that we …”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 9:38 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Assertion Supported

Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen acted as Canva's initial technical hiring filter

“One of the first people that I met was Lars Rasmussen, who co-founded Google Maps, and he was extremely helpful because he would actually, he realized the technical complexity of the project that we were trying to build, and so acted as the filter on who could…”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 9:54 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Five venture capital firms flew to Sydney to pitch Canva for investment

“When we raised our most recent round, we had five firms fly here to Sydney, which was a lot of fun to see how the tables had finally turned after so much effort in the initial stages.”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 16:15 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Canva received over 200,000 user emails containing product suggestions and bug reports

“We've had over 200,000 emails From our users. A lot of those are suggestions and ideas for how we can improve the product or have new features. Some of those are bugs, of course.”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 18:54 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

Assertion Supported

Fusion Books became Australia's largest yearbook company before expanding internationally

“And it became the largest yearbook company in Australia and launched in France, New Zealand,”

Melanie Perkins Jun 10, 2016 ▶ 2:52 20VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva

The other half of the tape: Melanie Perkins's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 64 times in 11 episodes on 20VC. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 31 Wesley Chan 13 Cliff Obrecht 9 Cameron Adams 3 Nikhil Basu Trivedi 2 Tom Hulme 1 Rory O'Driscoll 1 Mike Cannon-Brookes 1

Statements about Melanie Perkins, by other people (4)

Disclosure

Canva co-founders pledged 99 percent of their equity to charity

“Mel and I, we own 31% of Canva, and we put 30%, so like 99% of what we own in, into a charity that we can't spend on our own stuff”

Cliff Obrecht Jan 27, 2023 ▶ 42:08 Canva's Cliff Obrecht: How We Turned Our Yearbook Company to $40B Business | 20VC #971 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Assertion Supported

Canva lowered its 2026 revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20%

“The facts are that Canva You know, large privately held company in the kind of creative suite space discloses its revenue, even though they're private, and, you know, they were at three billion in gap revenue last year. Going into this year, they're growing at…”

Rory O'Driscoll Aug 12, 2026 ▶ 1:46 Canva Slashes Growth | Talent Exodus at Google | Revolut's $50B CEO Package | Musk's $55B Terrafab

Disclosure

Canva's Obrecht: Melanie Perkins and I take opposite approaches to building trust

“Mel and I are completely, so Mel is my wife and the CEO of Canva. So my boss which is and definitely the worthy boss. But we have totally opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to trust. So I trust by default and you can lose that trust. Mel, it takes a l…”

Cliff Obrecht Jan 27, 2023 ▶ 10:00 Canva's Cliff Obrecht: How We Turned Our Yearbook Company to $40B Business | 20VC #971 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Opinion

Canva's phenomenal user growth mirrors Google Analytics' mass-market expansion playbook

“And that's what, you know, I think that's what Cliff and Melanie at Clamba have done. It's absolutely amazing. If you look at their user base, if you look at the forums, if you look at their incredible growth, Over the, even the past year has been nothing shor…”

Wesley Chan Jun 29, 2016 ▶ 20:57 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster