Canva CEO Melanie Perkins

**Zoe Kleinman** (0:02)
Hello, you're listening to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm the BBC's technology editor, Zoe Kleinman, and today I'm speaking to Melanie Perkins, the CEO of Canva, the graphic design platform. In an exclusive interview with the BBC, speaking from Sydney, she tells me despite her billionaire status, her ethos is to do good.

**Melanie Perkins** (0:22)
It's not money for me to go and buy things with. It's literally to give away. And we've committed to giving it all away over our lifetime.

**Zoe Kleinman** (0:30)
She's worried in a world of artificial intelligence, we're not equipping the next generation with the right skills.

**Melanie Perkins** (0:36)
I think that the world that our students are going to be going in is a very different world. And it's really important that we start to tool up our students for this imagination era.

**Zoe Kleinman** (0:46)
But despite fears the job market is rapidly changing and some jobs will not survive, including in design, she thinks professions are resilient.

**Melanie Perkins** (0:54)
We're continuously needing to tool up and learn new skills, but the actual, the end goal of each profession, I think, actually stays remarkably similar.

**Zoe Kleinman** (1:02)
Dealing with rejection, how a billionaire thinks and the democratisation of design, that's all coming up on today's programme.
From a university dropout to one of tech's most powerful women, Melanie Perkins' story is remarkable. She launched Canva from Perth in 2013 with this mission, empower the world to design. Today, the platform is used by 250 million people every month, offering tools for everything from wedding invites to pitch decks. Melanie overcame more than 100 investor rejections to build Canva into a profitable multi-billion dollar company. She sat down with me and told me when she knew the concept was going to work.

**Melanie Perkins** (1:45)
I think that over the journey, you always find a little something that you get very overly excited about. And so in the early days, when we started to see users go from zero to like getting the first few, to getting a few hundred, to getting a few thousand, to getting hundreds of thousands, and when we crossed a million, we couldn't believe it.

**Zoe Kleinman** (2:02)
We're talking to you in Sydney, your Sydney HQ. What's the vibe like in Australia? Is it very different to Silicon Valley?

**Melanie Perkins** (2:09)
I think we have a great vibe in Australia, but fortunately our team is all over. In fact, I just found out today, we've got 450 team members now in Europe, which is pretty incredible as well. So we've got 5,000 people across the globe. In Sydney, yeah, the vibe is pretty great. We're just heading into summer right now, and I think the spirits are high.

**Zoe Kleinman** (2:29)
Is the tech scene very different?

**Melanie Perkins** (2:31)
When we started out with our very first company, Fusion Books, there was not a tech scene to be heard of. In fact, we didn't even know what a startup was when we first started. And now there is a burgeoning tech scene. There is an incredible amount of investors and startups and larger companies or startups that have grown over the years. And so it's certainly changed in the last decade.

**Zoe Kleinman** (2:52)
Have you ever been tempted to move to Silicon Valley?

**Melanie Perkins** (2:55)
Yes, in the very early days, when we were trying to get that first round of funding, I think it would have been easy to move to San Francisco. But we were very fortunate that the Australian government actually offered something called Commercialization Australia, where they matched our funding that we received. And that actually kept us in Australia because we were able to say to investors, hey, we can match the funding if we stay in Australia. So that was really helpful.

**Zoe Kleinman** (3:17)
What are your thoughts about the social media ban?

**Melanie Perkins** (3:20)
I think it's really important that young kids get to be young kids. I think the Australian government has really been on the front foot trying to ensure that that's the case.

**Zoe Kleinman** (3:29)
I mean, you're a parent yourself. Do you worry about the impact of social media on kids?

**Melanie Perkins** (3:33)
I think that the world that our daughter is growing up in is something that is constantly top of mind, making sure that everything from the other day she was asking me about when people don't have enough money to buy food, what do they do? And I would love the answer to be that everyone in the world has food, has enough food in their bellies. And I think that it's really on all of us to help make the world a world that we're proud to leave for the next generation. And so I think that's a constant thought process for me, actually. It was what our two-step plan at Canva, build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can do. And as part of step two, we've given $50 million over the last few years. We've just pledged another $100 million over the next three years to give money to people who are in extreme poverty. And I don't think it should be considered just a problem that has existed forever, that we're going to leave the next generation, that some people on this planet don't have their basic human needs being met. So it's very much top of mind, in fact.