Melanie Perkins
Co-Founder & CEO, Canva. On 3 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
3shows
5appearances
85statements
22resolved
21supported
0contradicted
95%fully supported
85said about them ↓ Everything Melanie Perkins said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
Perkins: Realistic goals lead to giving up when roadblocks hit
“If you start with a Reasonable goal or a realistic goal, then you kind of get to get to when you're like, oh, cool, whatever. Or more importantly, if something happens, you know, all the problems and roadblocks come along as they always do, then you're like, o…”
Perkins: Most early investors knew nothing about design or Canva's market
“Most investors knew absolutely nothing about design or the industry that we're in.”
Perkins: Canva donates $1.5B worth of software annually
“Between our education product and our nonprofit program, where we also give away our paid product for free, We've, we're giving away 1.5 billion dollars of product a year now”
Founders should answer their hardest investor objections immediately in the pitch deck
“Every time we got a really hard question, that would go right to the front of the pitch deck. So the hardest questions were answered right at the front.”
Melanie Perkins: No publishing market leader has ever survived an era transition
“And what you'll see, dear investor, is that no industry player has actually ever been able to go from one industry to the next and actually still maintain being the market leader. And so every single time there was a new era, a new market leader emerged.”
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…”
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 …”
Perkins: Transformative building requires working backward from an ideal future
“Most planning is often done by looking at the bricks and trying to stack them. And then you kind of, you know, you can create only so much. And so I guess the column B thinking is thinking about what is that magical, wonderful Future. That you then want to inv…”
Perkins: Canva achieves ambitious goals despite inaccurate delivery timing
“I think with a crazy big goal, the thing we have been really great at is achieving them. The timeframe that we achieve them on has not always been very reliable. We have certainly not been able to have pin dart. What's the, what's it? We have not been very acc…”
Perkins: Internal systems break every time a company doubles in size
“Like every time the company doubles in size, pretty much all your systems break, all the things that were working don't work.”
Perkins: Canva spent two years without shipping product during codebase rewrite
“We were doing a front-end rewrite, and we thought it would take about six months. It was really important because it was critical for cross-platform, it was critical for right to left, it was Critical because we could only have five people working in our edito…”
Perkins: Copying organizational playbooks from other companies rarely fits your company's foundation
“And it's kind of like building a house that you want every brick in the house to match. And if you go and try and take some bricks from someone else's house and stick it in your house, it's probably going to not look very matched. And so trying to find things …”
Perkins: Most companies' daily execution diverges from their stated mission
“Often people have a mission that's kind of on the wall somewhere, and then what they're actually doing and the way they actually make money And the way that, you know, the way people actually spend their time is in a very, very different direction from that or…”
Perkins does not keep work email on her phone
“I don't have emails like on my phone, and so when I shut my laptop, I actually tune out, and then I, if there's a real issue, I'll get an emergency call or page.”
Perkins: Testing 10 random online users yields representative product feedback
“It's amazing to me how you can find 10 random people on the internet and they can give such astute feedback. That then is so representative for such a large number of people.”
Perkins: Co-founders pledged 30% Canva equity to philanthropy
“Cliff and I owned a little over 30% of Canva, and so we decided we were going to take 30% of Canva and use it to do the most good we can do.”
Perkins: Canva pledges $100M over four years to fight extreme poverty
“Announce that we're going to be giving another hundred million dollars over the next four years to people in extreme poverty.”
Perkins: Canva's free education product reaches 100M monthly users
“Education product is now used by a hundred million people each month.”
Perkins: 100 million people design presentations in Canva monthly
“Like a hundred million people, I design a presentation in Canva for each month now.”
Perkins: Canva sits directly between creativity and productivity suites
“From a macro perspective, there was creativity tools and productivity tools, and what Canva really does is we're literally smack bang in the middle of that Venn diagram of creativity and productivity rather than making a Customers have to make a choice between…”
Perkins: AI shouldn't be front-and-center just for investor hype
“Just because AI is all the rage and investors really like AI, doesn't necessarily mean it should be front and center
in, but if it can genuinely help your customers to achieve their goals, so, you know, the thing that I was mentioning before, enabling people…”
Perkins believed desktop-based graphic design software was destined to become archaic
“It seemed very apparent that this whole desktop-based thing would be completely archaic and outdated in the future.”
Perkins predicted publishing and design tools would converge into one online platform
“One of them was that over time, industries would converge. So rather than having the print industry being over here, having to use different software to create a website, and different software to create a presentation, and different software to create marketi…”
The other half of the tape: Melanie Perkins's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 80 times in 14 episodes across the shows. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 31Wesley Chan 13Lenny Rachitsky 12Cliff Obrecht 9Cameron Adams 6Nikhil Basu Trivedi 2Tom Hulme 1Rory O'Driscoll 1
Statements about Melanie Perkins, by other people (5)
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”
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…”
Working with Canva's married co-founders requires transparency around after-hours alignment
“It is always tricky working with a couple because They're on it 24 seven. When you leave the office and they head home, they're still talking about product business strategy, all the things. I think they've done a really good job of Evolving those ideas overni…”
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…”
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…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 64
Lenny's Podcast 16
2026 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- Insights from Coatue's Growth Investor Lucas Swisher · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Canva Slashes Growth | Talent Exodus at Google | Revolut's $50B CEO Package | Musk's $55B Terrafab
- Anthropic's Super Bowl Ad: Who Won & Lost? | Sierra Hits $150M ARR: Is Customer Support Too Crowded? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield
- “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (co-founder)
- Tom Hulme & Stan Boland: Lessons from Jensen Huang & How to Fix the UK Tech Ecosystem · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 22 mentions in 2 episodes 11 per episode
2023 32 mentions in 2 episodes 16 per episode
2022 8 mentions in 1 episode
2016 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Felicis' Wesley Chan on The Rise of IoT, Getting Recruited by Larry Page & Creating Google's Biggest Success Disaster
- 20VC: Why The Best CEO's Are The Best Capital Allocators, How You Can Build A Business In A Space You Are Not Passionate About & When Is The Right Time To Put The Pedal To The Metal with Josh Hannah, General Partner @ Matrix Ventures
- 20VC: Rob Go @ NextView on WTF Is Seed Investing Today and Why Raising Too Much Money Can Harm Your Startup
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Melanie's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Canva | 3 | 44 | 91% 10/11 | full record on How I Built This → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Canva | 1 | 28 | 100% 6/6 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Canva | 1 | 13 | 100% 5/5 | full record on 20VC → |