Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, shares how she successfully recruited early technical lead Dave Herndon using a custom visual presentation.
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“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 going to be a great time, which was quite funny.”
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Opinion
Hiring elite engineering talent in Sydney is easier than in San Francisco
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Insight
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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.”
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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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