Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, details how Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen evaluated engineering talent for Canva during its early founding phase.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 actually be in this founding technical team”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Melanie Perkins
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 PerkinsJun 10, 2016▶ 9:0920VC: 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 PerkinsJun 10, 2016▶ 13:2920VC: 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 PerkinsJun 10, 2016▶ 14:3120VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva
AssertionSupported
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 PerkinsJun 10, 2016▶ 2:5720VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva
AssertionSupported
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 PerkinsJun 10, 2016▶ 11:1620VC: 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 PerkinsJun 10, 2016▶ 4:1020VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.