Canva began as a yearbook tool and acquired Fusion for $1

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 3:42

   At the very start, we had this wild belief that, you know, desktop programs to create software was just like a really old and outdated way to do it. So I was at university and I was teaching design programs part-time and so it'd be things like Photoshop and InDesign and Illustrator and PowerPoint. So every time the students want to learn something they'd have to learn a completely new tool every time they want to design something and it seemed really crazy that it was so hard and complex to learn anything. It would take a whole class just to learn where some buttons were let alone how to design anything that actually looked good and so the idea of being able to design simpler and online and collaboratively was right there from the start, but we couldn't tackle the entire world of design back then when I was 19 at university. And so decided to tackle

2. 4:31

   school yearbooks in Australia. And we ended up building the software. We ended up with printing presses in my mom's living room and actually printing the yearbooks. And then we'd deliver them to the schools around Australia. And we ended up building the largest yearbook company in australia but wanted to take that much further people were saying can i use this to create brochures and newsletters and other things and then eventually we're like oh maybe we should actually take on that bigger bigger challenge melanie can you Talk about just quickly the transition from achieving better scale than maybe you guys anticipate with Fusion Books to the origins of Canva, this now huge productivity suite that is known globally, but started at some point.

3. 5:14

   So where do we go from Fusion to Canva? Yeah, so Fusion was being Fusion in Perth and I was being Canva. It was actually awkwardly called Canvas Chef for a while and I went to San Francisco. Cliff was running Fusion in Perth. Just because of the pizza, the pizza analogy. Yeah, exactly. It's like you had the base and the toppings and I really went heavy on the food metaphor, really good that it didn't stay Canva Chef.

4. 5:39

   We asked our French engineer what's Canvas in French and he was like Canva and we're like, oh, that's the company name. And then Cliff got the domain for two and a half grand. But, yeah, so Canva was then over, me being me, was over pitching and then Cliff came over to San Francisco for a while and then we moved Fusion from Perth to Sydney and then Fusion continued running while we were building out Canva and then eventually we decided for Canva to buy Fusion for a dollar because all of the IP was very much embedded in Fusion so it would have been a really awkward thing to have sold that off somewhere else. And your third co-founder Cameron kind of comes in as the maybe experienced software startup hand around this time too right? Exactly yes so Bill said he'd invest with me if I could find a tech team and the tech team had to be approved by Lars who

5. 6:29

   co-founded Google Maps and then Lars said no to everyone for quite some time like a period of years which was extremely frustrating because he believed that we needed to have a really solid tech team which he was absolutely correct about and he introduced me to Cam and then he introduced me to Dave and they were absolutely incredible and so Cam said yes to us and then the rest is history did you and cliff care if people took you seriously as founders at that time was sort of the the concept of entrepreneurship something that you guys even thought about or was it just hey