Canva: Melanie Perkins

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When she was just 19 years old, Melanie Perkins dreamt of transforming the graphic design and publishing industries. But she started small, launching a site to make yearbook design simpler and more collaborative. Her success with that first venture — and an unexpected meeting with a VC investor — eventually landed her the backing to pursue her original idea, and the chance to take on software industry titans like Adobe and Microsoft. Today, Melanie's online design platform Canva is valued at over $1 billion, joining the list of Australia's "unicorn" companies. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," how Tristan Corriveau collected used bars of soap from a hotel and recycled them into liquid soap with The One Gallon Soap Company. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:28.0	What weren't any of the investors saying, you don't have a tech team, you don't have a chief technology officer, like I don't know if I'm going to put my...
0:36.0	That was literally what everyone was saying.
0:39.0	Which that sense, right?
0:40.0	Yeah, it makes perfect sense, but how are we going to get these things rolling?
0:44.0	How many people do you think you pitched over that, I guess, two months, period in San Francisco?
0:49.0	I don't know, over a hundred people more.
0:52.0	I was going through my rejections the other day, I was looking at some of the emails, and there was quite a... quite a demp.
0:59.0	From NPR, it's how I built this.
1:05.0	A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements, they built.
1:11.0	I'm Guy Raaz, and on today's show, how a college student named Melanie Perkins turned her passion for the film.
1:20.0	Melanie Perkins turned her passion for making better yearbooks into the design platform Canva, now valued at over a billion dollars.
1:35.0	So there's a story that I think a lot of people have, and the details might be different, but it's basically a version of this.
1:42.0	There was this one time, you had a very clever business idea, maybe it was an idea for a super useful product or a service that would make your life way easier.
1:53.0	Mine was actually the one cup coffee maker, I swear, that was my idea, but like most people, I didn't do it.
2:01.0	And if you're like me, you didn't have the time to work on it or the money, or maybe it just seemed too overwhelming to get started.
2:08.0	But the way the story always ends is that a couple of months later, maybe a couple of years later, you're shopping at a store or you're serving the web, and there it is.
	...

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