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Canva’s Melanie Perkins on scaling startup vision and values for global impact
Melanie Perkins says startups should set an ambitious vision, then turn it into goals and values that drive impact.
Upstarts · Alex Konrad
- Melanie Perkins is co-founder and CEO of Canva.
The best minutes
- 12:21A big vision helps founders find the next step3 min
- 22:23Values matter when a company is willing to pay for them3 min
- 27:41Start giving back before your company is big5 min
Also worth watching
- 32:59Canva turns its mission into measurable product goals3 min
- 19:56Canva used short-term goals and celebrations to build momentum2 min
- 3:39Canva began as a yearbook tool and acquired Fusion for $13 min
- 7:45Melanie flew to San Francisco after an investor ignored her emails2 min
Skip the show introduction and Canva recap, the kite-surfing exchange, and the Mercury sponsor read.
Full analysis · 6 min read
Real Alpha · Nov 8
Melanie Perkins says one percent giving should start early
- Canva's one percent pledge covers time, profits, product and equity.
- Perkins links early giving to compounding impact, but the episode offers limited outcome evidence.
- Founders can turn purpose into near-term goals while measuring both cost and effect.
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6 sections, the 4 other voices it tests Perkins against, and what it means for you. Every episode we cut gets one.
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Big visions set direction before resources appear
Perkins says someone told her that raising capital required a company worth a billion dollars. She took that literally, despite knowing little about Silicon Valley.
That story is less a lesson to copy a giant number than a planning choice. A destination can stop today's resources from defining the whole opportunity.
The host introduced Canva as having 260 million monthly users and a $42 billion valuation. Those figures show scale reached, not that ambition alone caused it.
Perkins says her team dreamed first, then worked backward. She once thought its vision would take two years, yet said its direction took much longer to bring to life.
Bridgit Mendler said on Sourcery in August 2026 that investors want year-after-year progress toward a real business. Northwood aims to build revenue from immediate needs before expanding its scope.
“you need to just dream of the future that you want”
Our read
The dream creates a direction, not proof of demand or a financing plan. Treat it as a hypothesis that must earn its next step.
Work backward until customers can test the next step
Perkins's sequence is explicit: picture the future in detail, then choose a step toward it. The useful distinction is between ambition and execution.
At 19, Perkins and Cliff narrowed the broad online design idea to Australian school yearbooks. That first market made the idea testable without claiming it solved every design use case.
Fusion Books became Australia's largest yearbook company, giving the broader Canva concept an operating base. Perkins says they called each customer and walked them through the software by phone.
That practice exposed usability questions a vision deck could miss. Sam Blond said on Uncapped in July 2026 that buyers need a clear path from onboarding to value.
His point concerns sales, but it tests the same principle at a smaller scale. For example, Canva's idea widened after customers asked to use the yearbook tool for brochures and newsletters.
Our read
A distant vision becomes credible through customer learning and steps that deliver value. The next move should create evidence, not merely resemble the ambition.
Near-term targets make ambition visible to teams
A shorter horizon can translate a distant vision into work people can see and own. Perkins suggests setting a concrete target for, say, the next six months, then later suggests three months for Alex.
She says goals should be tangible, and teams celebrate when they reach them. Celebrations can reinforce effort, but they do not validate a target's strategic value.
Canva's goals now live in Canva and spreadsheets, Perkins says, as the company has around 5,000 people. She says celebrations continue, while season openers became a challenge as the team went global.
That detail matters because rituals do not transfer unchanged as organizations spread. Guillermo Rauch said on Knuckle Up with Nakul in August 2026 that product leaders need room to own their work.
His account makes the scaling problem explicit: local owners need company-level direction. Shared goals and values can provide it without turning every team into a central checklist.
Our read
Visible goals can create momentum, but teams still need to check whether each target advances the mission. Celebration reinforces behavior, including behavior worth revising.
Values matter when leaders accept their cost
Perkins credits advice she received with a test for values. The advice asks whether a company would pay or lose money to uphold one.
That makes values a choice with a visible cost, not merely a statement. A principle that never changes hiring, product or customer choices has not constrained the business.
Canva wrote its values down when lunch conversations no longer reached everyone. Perkins says they put them on laptops and shirts, making expectations easier to identify.
Someone wrote to Perkins that an action appeared inconsistent with a Canva value. She said the concern was not correct, so this shows the value was invoked, not that a challenge changed the decision.
That is weaker evidence than a documented tradeoff, but it reveals a standard people can name. A founder can ask which real decision would become harder if a stated value mattered.
Our read
Values become operating rules only when they can constrain a convenient choice. Put the tradeoff into hiring, product and customer decisions.
Early giving illustrates a parallel path to impact
Canva's one percent pledge allocates one percent of time, profits, product and equity, Perkins says. She recommends starting while the company is small, when the commitment may be modest.
That is a proposal to make giving part of the operating model, not a reward reserved for later. She says Canva gave its product free to schools and nonprofits.
Perkins says she and Cliff plan to donate the vast majority of their equity through the Canva Foundation, about 30 percent of Canva. She says $100 million has gone directly to people in extreme poverty over the last few years.
She says another $50 million is pledged over the next few years. These commitments illustrate her case for starting early, but they are not proof of outcomes.
The episode gives no method for valuing donated product or measuring longer-term results. In Malawi, Canva is working on providing phones and Chichewa translation for AI access, with community input on accuracy.
As Canva's CEO, Perkins is presenting her own company's program while urging other founders to adopt a pledge. Readers should separate the commitment's size from evidence of reach and effects.
Our read
Early commitments can accumulate, but a pledge is an input, not an impact result. Budget for delivery and measurement alongside the percentage.
Mission pillars turn broad intent into trackable goals
Canva's mission, Perkins says, is to empower the world to design. She breaks it into pillars and then goals, so a broad purpose can guide work across a team of around 5,000.
Those pillars set the scope: everyone, anything, ingredients, languages and devices. For example, Canva began in English, launched Spanish, then moved through 20 and 100 languages.
Perkins says Canva is now becoming local in all 40 of its top markets. That is progress in motion, not completed localization.
Alexander Wissner-Gross said on Moonshots in November 2026 that measurable benchmarks can direct optimization toward outcomes people care about. His point supports measurement, but a language count alone cannot show design quality or user benefit.
For teams building AI features, pair coverage or adoption with whether users complete the task the product promises. Otherwise, a company can report access without knowing whether that access works.
Alexander Wissner-Gross · Moonshots · Nov 4Benchmarks can steer AI toward problems people care about
Our read
Mission pillars are useful when each produces a verifiable goal. Add an outcome measure, or progress can become an inventory of releases and markets.
What it means for you
- Write a future. Draft wild success and terrible failure, then choose one three-month step toward the future you prefer.
- Audit one value. Choose a recent tradeoff and record whether the team accepted a cost to uphold a stated value. If not, revisit the value or decision rule.
- Price the pledge. Model one percent across time, profits, product and equity. Decide what you can measure now, before those inputs grow.
- Pair goals with outcomes. For every mission pillar, track a near-term output and a user outcome, such as language coverage and task completion.
What to watch
- How Canva measures outcomes from free product access at schools and nonprofits.
- Whether Canva reports results from its Malawi phone and local-language AI work.
- How Canva deploys and assesses the additional $50 million pledged over the next few years.
Send this to founders turning a broad mission into operating goals.
Watch the minute where Perkins describes Canva's one percent pledge
Written by Real Alpha from the episode's transcript and the other moments it links, then checked against the transcript. Quotes are the speaker's exact words.
Minute by minute
- 2:17Canva pursues business and impact
Perkins says Canva usually focuses on its next mountain, though hearing how people use it around the world gives her a chance to reflect on its progress. She describes the company’s two-part plan as building one of the world’s most valuable companies and doing the most good it can.
- 3:39Fusion Books started with yearbooks
Perkins says design programs were difficult to learn, so she and Cliff started with Australian school yearbooks rather than trying to tackle all of design at once. They built software, printed books in her mother's living room and grew Fusion Books into Australia's largest yearbook company before taking on the broader design challenge with Canva.
- 7:11Fundraising took years
Perkins says she and Cliff did not know what a startup or founder was and wore second-hand suits to look serious when pitching. After meeting Bill Tai at a conference in Perth, she flew to San Francisco to meet him, beginning a multi-year effort to raise their first round; Canva launched in 2013 after the team assembled and developed the product.
- 9:56Customer conversations shaped the product
Perkins says Fusion Books taught her how to run a business, market a product and build something customers wanted. The team called every customer to give an over-the-phone tutorial, which helped them learn how people used software and what they needed. She says Canva still values marketing that educates and helps people achieve their goals.
- 12:21Dream first, then find the steps
Perkins says she took literally the idea that a company needed to be worth a billion dollars to raise capital, despite being an outsider to Silicon Valley. She argues founders should first define a detailed future they want, then identify the steps and resources to move toward it instead of only asking what they can build with what they already have. She recommends spelling out both wild success and terrible failure to clarify decisions and values.
- 16:26A plane ticket became an upstart moment
Perkins says kite surfing took her into a storm and nearly out to sea, but she identifies buying a ticket to San Francisco to meet an investor she had spoken with for five minutes as her clearest upstart moment. She says setting ambitious goals and continuing to dream helps a company keep growing.
- 19:56Turn vision into concrete goals
Perkins says a useful goal is a tangible outcome the team wants to achieve in the next few months, not a distant aspiration. Writing it down can help separate signal from noise, and celebrating when the team achieves it can build confidence for the next goal. She says the practice can work on a wall for a small co-located team or in digital tools at Canva's scale.
- 22:46Values need to guide real choices
Perkins says Canva wrote down its values as the team grew beyond the stage where leaders could talk with everyone every day. She argues that values matter only if people are willing to pay a cost to uphold them, and says they should shape how the company works, treats customers and builds its product. She also says early hires help set the culture that later hires will build on.
- 25:38Protect focus as demand grows
Perkins says she used to take almost any meeting, including an early-morning meeting that required her to leave at 4:30 a.m. As the requests became too much, she shifted her focus toward building Canva's product and team. She describes that change as continual recalibration and says the early outreach helped the company learn what worked.
- 27:41Canva gives as it grows
Perkins recommends Canva's 1% pledge: 1% of time, profits, product and equity. She says free Canva access for schools and nonprofits has provided $2.5 billion in value, while she and Cliff have committed 30% of Canva through the Canva Foundation. She says the foundation has given $100 million directly to people in extreme poverty over the last few years and pledged another $50 million.
- 32:34Connect mission to operating goals
Perkins gives Konrad homework: define wild success and terrible failure, make a vision deck, and identify values that are authentic to the company. She says Canva turns its mission, to empower the world to design, into mission pillars and incremental goals; its language work has progressed from English and Spanish to 100 languages and localization in its 40 top markets. She recommends challenging the vision deck repeatedly so it can align the team and investors.
Published Feb 12, 2026.
Transcript · 33 min read
Upstarts, hosted by Alex Konrad, with Melanie Perkins.
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
The world is made by 8 billion little brushstrokes on a painting, and we all need to think about the consequence of the brushstrokes that we lay down. I was by far an outsider from Silicon Valley. I knew nothing about it. Someone mentioned, oh, to raise capital, you have to be a billion dollar company. And I took that really literally. I was like, okay, we're going to make this an incredible company. What's the wildest, craziest thing? Welcome to the Upstarts podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging startup founders about their upstart moment. Upstarts are challengers who punch above their weight, take on the status quo, and achieve a big impact, all while building a big business too. I'm your host, Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. I'm joined today by Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva. Canva is a big business today. It has 260 million monthly users. It's valued at $42 billion. It does all sorts of stuff in productivity software from presentations to AI to basic image generation that we do at Upstarts for our stories on LinkedIn. It wasn't always that way. Canva was and still is in some ways an Upstart if you ask Melanie herself. She and her co-founder Cliff come from Western Australia. They took a long time to
raise money and they've been working on this company for over a decade. This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking that's already loved by 300,000 entrepreneurs. Mel, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me, Alex. It's great to see you. Having Canva on the Upstart podcast is really personal and exciting for me, Mel, because first off, the story I wrote for Forbes in 2019, the cover story on you and what you're building at Canva was one of my favorite pieces that I've ever written. I feel like you truly embody what an Upstart is in terms of that big ambition, that real sort of can-do attitude, not easily deterred.
And so I can't think of a better person to have on the show. It is also incredible to see how Canva has grown in the past few years, even just since that story. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Canva has almost 250 million or maybe already 250 million monthly users valued at over $40 billion. You still work with your co-founders, Cliff and Cameron, and it's just been, it's remarkable to see what a global business Canva is. Do you ever get to take a step back and think about all you've already achieved so far? We are typically always focused on that next mountain, but it is pretty cool to see how far we've come.
Read the whole transcript
And certainly every time we hear how Canva is being used around the world. So it really is a bit of a pinch me moment. When you think like, oh, it's now more than six years since our cover story. It's been a long time since you started Canva. Is every year kind of a brand new year where they just kind of sneak up on you? Or do you feel like, okay, we've been at this for a long time and we're starting to really see those rewards? We've got this really strong focus. We've got a two-step plan, build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can do. And I kind of see that as like a huge ladder all the way to the moon to achieve that but then every year we just like pick off like what is the next goal and what is the next goal to kind of start to move in the direction of both those two steps of our two-step plan sounds simple but it isn't quite I know it's a huge plan it's very ambitious and that's part of why I'm so excited to talk uh you know year after year with you but let's go back I'm curious where that ambition started you know you were an entrepreneur at a pretty young age with fusion books um I still fondly remember seeing a photo of you and Cliff standing next to, I think, a poster. It kind of gives like school presentation
vibes or sort of book fair vibes, that first Fusion Books photo. What was the ambition with Fusion Books? Were you just excited to be founders or what was sort of the goal at that time?
“and then eventually we decided for Canva to buy Fusion for a dollar because all of the IP was very much embedded in Fusion”
this is a cool product we're going to build it and maybe the the sort of blissful ignorance of you know being a first-time founder at that point was was was helping you achieve scale that maybe you didn't expect i mean we didn't know what a startup was we didn't know what a founder was but we were just a small business in and trying to look really serious so we wore suits everywhere
we're trying to be taken seriously as like university students like And it was quite funny. We'd go in and we'd go to like op shops and buy a suit to wear to try to look serious when we were pitching the software companies to build that first version of our software. We certainly weren't exposed to the whole world and all the education that comes about startups themselves.
“So the next year I jumped on a plane after he ignored a few of my emails, I jumped on a plane to San Francisco.”
Well, I don't think you would have to couch surf for your next startup if you ever did one. Yeah, it was definitely a lot of trials and tribulations. Like, you know, even through the yearbook stage, we learned so much about running a business. I learned so much about the printing industry specifically and so just about how to market a company how to make it profitable how to build something that customers want we would call up every single customer and give them an over the phone tutorial and so we learned so much about the ins and outs and how people respond to software and what makes them feel smart and what they want and what they need and so there's some really important principles that we still hold dear today certainly came out of that period of time like the importance that marketing should be educational and truly help people to achieve their goals. So I think there was just so many valuable lessons through that very hard period of time that have certainly set important foundations, you know, how to actually build a company that's profitable, which is not always the common thing from the Silicon Valley school of thought. One thing I've always loved about the way you operate as a leader is that,
you know, when we'll sit in a meeting and we try to remember something you said or something on the roadmap from years ago if you have your laptop you'll just pull it up and you have those decks going all the way back right I mean and yeah and they're pretty consistent it is pretty remarkable when when would you trace the origin of your global domination plan how far back does that go the first business plan I wrote was 2007 and that was we were going wild with ideas we were like this design thing is going to be a thing that everyone's going to want to do but it's really hard so it was all the way back then and then the first time it was like properly articulated as a the future of publishing was my 2011 deck that really captured what we're hoping to do and there's still things that we're bringing to life from that deck today but when you I mean to go from design software publishing to design software to sort of the sky is the limit we literally there There is a version that one of these exits has something like global domination, right?
Was that something that people got that you were just getting people to buy into? I mean, obviously, you aimed so big from the start. And I'm just trying to understand where that came from.
“you need to just dream of the future that you want”
That's awesome. We'll try that and we'll follow up and share with everyone how it goes. I'm excited to see that, Alex. When Canva turned 10 a couple of years ago, did you do a look back and say, you know, we exceeded our original 10-year plan or what was sort of your reflection at that point? Yeah, we did. We spent some time having a little trip down memory lane with the team, which was a lot of fun. We, I think the thing, like we had these grand ambitions right from the start and I thought that that would take two years to bring into reality. So my time estimation has been very awful, but I think that the direction that we were going and we wanted to go in has absolutely been coming to life, which has been really incredible.
And so one thing about a crazy big goal is you can't exactly estimate how long it's going to take, but it's so worthwhile that you want to will it into existence, even if it takes a little bit longer. So it's been very fun to look back at the old decks and be able to tick off all the things that have come to life. Well, I know you've literally put your life on the line in past reporting. I remember talking to you about Bill Tye, the investor, his firm is literally Kite VC because he loves kite surfing so much. And I know you went kite surfing and got caught in a storm and it was really scary. And you've told me never again, right?
You've finished at least that phase of your founder journey. Yeah, I have retired from kite surfing. I think that's the thing. You just never know the wild and wonderful paths you're going to go on a founder journey. Like the actual reality of bringing that to life has been a fascinating journey. And yes, it did involve kite surfing and getting dragged over coral and brought up into the sky and dumped on the sand and like taken out to sea and near shark bait and all sorts of things um so I am very grateful that none of the none of the bad things transpired in a way that was irreversible um but I I have to say, I'm not an avid kite surfer anymore.
Is Cliff allowed to kite surf now, or is it too much of a risk for a company of your scale? He can. I can't say he does it too frequently, but he does much more enjoy it intrinsically than I. Fair enough. And he's not, you know, he's not the CEO. So, you know, he can be in the hospital for a week. Was that the moment when you think back was your craziest upstart moment? Or I know it can be hard to reflect when you still have so much to achieve. And we'll talk about that. But when you think about sort of that moment where you were maybe, how am I here? What am I doing here? I am the crazy upstart punching above my weight right now.
What comes to mind first for you? I think the whole journey. But if I had to put one point, I'd probably say buying the ticket to go to San Francisco to meet with an investor I'd met for five minutes. And I was like, I'm going to be in San Francisco. go and then he was like okay I'll meet with you and you know that's that was a pretty big upstart moment um but then all through the journey it's like you know when we created this deck which was like the future of publishing and said that we're going to take on some big companies and do some big things in the world and we were such a tiny tiny company in Perth I think everything has been one of our values is to set crazy big goals and make them happen and we continuously do that I I mean, even today, we're continuously dreaming of crazy, wild things.
And I think that if you stop dreaming, then you stop growing and you become an old company. We're, I think, going to be an upstart forever. Great. Well, that means you'll be able to keep talking to me forever. So I'm very happy with that. When I launched Upstarts Media last year, I had big ambitions and a lot to figure out. I knew I needed a bank that could move at my speed and grow with me too. With Mercury, I was able to get started in minutes without leaving my desk. Mercury made it easy to send and receive wires and manage the cash flow of our growing business from day one. Now, I can spend less time with busy work and more time with the founders I like to cover.
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“because you celebrate what you want to replicate and so the more that you make these like fun quirky memorable celebrations”
goal is to be able to share your wisdom from building Canva with our audience. And so I've got to do my job to achieve that goal. And I'll send you a sticky afterwards. But I am curious,
“if you wouldn't pay money or lose money to uphold a value, it's not really a value, it's just a word on the wall.”
to do any sort of recalibration when you went from the upstart that that.
Maybe he was trying to get VC's attention, was trying to prove yourself to people. I mean, I remember meeting you and Cliff at a Cloud 100 event almost 10 years ago now. And I was told, hey, this is a really fast growing startup coming out of Australia. And I was like, okay, but I didn't really have a lot of prior knowledge. Of course, I was impressed. And we've now written about, you know, you guys in some capacity for a long time. But I'm sure you've had many of those moments and less so now. So was there a recalibration where it was sort of like, like, okay, people do get me, now they're actually trying to grab time on my calendar more than I can handle? And how do you kind of manage the shift in relationship where now you're sort of the leader and the known quantity to folks? That's a great question. Because in the early days, literally, if someone emailed me, or I emailed them, I was literally talking to anyone that would take a meeting. And going from that, where literally someone asked when I was in San Francisco they wanted to meet with me at 7am and I was in San Francisco and I had to catch the cow train down so I had to get up at like 4 30 to get there on time and I would just take a meeting
just because they would meet with me and then at a certain point in time if you're just doing every talk that people would want and taking any meeting like it started to become a little impossible to do so when my focus is always very internally and how we build our product and how we build our team so there was sort of that like moment where I you know and it happens gradually and I you kind of find that if you say yes to something well in the future by the time you get to that point in time that may not necessarily be the thing that is of great value to be doing and so it's just a constant recalibration I think every year I made you promise to do this podcast six years ago you just, you know, didn't know it. Alex, you, you believed in us since the early days, you have been like helping us to punch above our weight. So I was very keen to do your podcast. I am fascinated. Do you think that those early AM meetings, the hustle that you did show early on, I'm sure there were a lot of meetings that were ended up being a waste of time, but do you think it did help grow Canva? And if you had to do it all over again, would you say, yes, there is a period where that is a smart you know tactic to take oh absolutely it's like you don't really
know what's going to pay off and so you kind of you know you put that goal thing if you have the goal and you're just trying to get as much visibility for the company like in the in the very early days, we were just trying to do anything we could to see what sticks. And we're also learning so much through that process, learning what works, learning what doesn't work. And so I think when you have the goal, and then you just do everything you can to achieve that goal,
“I originally thought we'd do step one and then step two. And I realised that step one can fuel step two and step two can fuel step one.”
Is there any advice you would give founders? I'm sure you get asked a lot of questions by earlier stage founders these days. But is there a piece of advice that you tend to go back to to sort of be a good starting place or just a mantra?
I mean, we've covered some great stuff, but one lesson that perhaps came up along the way that a younger upstart or a smaller upstart should really be taking to heart, you know, besides maybe the goals and some of the great stuff we already covered.
“we started off in English launched in Spanish 20 languages 100 languages and now today we're truly becoming local in all 40 of our top markets”
for for this episode uh when when it does air i will do my homework i will create this and i will
post it with the episode and we hope that you will give feedback on social media or somewhere Mel so that we can see how Upstarts does and how we can improve it okay I would love to see that Alex that sounds fantastic done deal fantastic nothing like a taping that gives me some homework you know I feel like I'm giving you more homework than I so that's well we're so grateful to have had you on to talk about your Upstart moment and sort of the way that you've built Canvas Melody thank you very much for joining the show thank you so much Alex great to be here with you and I'm excited to see your homework Thank you.
