Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, shares key takeaways from Canva's early fundraising process.
0:00 / 0:33exact quote · 33.5s
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“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 the end, we'd actually had a much better pitch deck that incorporated all of the tricky questions into it and pre-answered them. So the trivial question is earlier on in the pitch deck that answer would be solved. So that was a very helpful process because it meant that by the time we had a 100th revision to the pitch deck, we had a very clear way of articulating our vision.”
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Hiring elite engineering talent in Sydney is easier than in San Francisco
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AssertionSupported
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“So we now have it in over ten million users across the globe who have created over eighty million designs.”
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AssertionSupported
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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.”
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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 PerkinsJun 10, 2016▶ 7:0020VC: Start Niche, Move Broader & Become Profitable Quickly with Melanie Perkins, Founder & CEO @ Canva
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