melanie perkins
episode 29
The Moonshots Podcast takes on an Australian flavour with a deep dive into the world of Canva founder - Melanie Perkins. Discover how bootstrapping and tenacity has helped create a pioneering design company.
SPECIAL GUEST
Brendan Yell
Director, Community Development, APAC at SendGrid
LinkedIn
show outline
A-BLOCK
Intro
Fusion Book Bootstrap Story
Solve a Problem
Getting to Product Market Fit
The New Hustle documentary on YouTube
Aussie profile of Canva, VinoMofo, & SafetyCulture
B-BLOCK
Finding Talent
Rejection is a Step Towards Success
From Nietzsche to Silicon Valley
Guy Kawasaki Democratising Design
One Last Thing...Powerpoint is dead
Melanie Perkins - Canva
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the moonshots podcast. It's a huge, a ginormous and a special edition it's episode 29. I'm your co-host Mike Parsons. And I was always I'm joined by the man himself, Mr. Chad Owen from Brooklyn, New York. I can't contain my excitement tonight, Mike, because we have a very special guest with us today.
Why don't you go ahead and introduce our third co-host for today's show? Well, um, I am I'm fired up because we have the Commonwealth games here in Australia. Australia is winning tons of metals and if there was ever a gold winning. Ozzy startup entrepreneur and innovator. It has to be an a man himself.
Mr. Brendan yell. Welcome to the show. Hey guys. Great to be here. Well, we, we, uh, you and I are waving our Aussie flags at the moment. How do you think Brandon? We can transform our Brooklyn hipster. Uh, how can we, how can we make chat a little Australian? What would he need? Would he, would he need, you know, a glass of beer while he watches the Commonwealth games?
Would, would he need an Akubra hat? How do we transform him to, to celebrate our Ozzy special edition? Oh, look, I think he would, uh, need a glass of be washing down some Vegemite on toast, I think would go great. Oh, there you go. Now, now I'm asking a rather controversial question here. Chad, have you ever tried this greatest strain?
Delicacy Vegemite I have. And. I can see why people like it I'll give it that. Um, I think, uh, yelly that that's, uh, a from no from Chad, I'm not sure we've sold him on that. What other Australian food delicacies, could we maybe win him over with, uh, Brendan? Well, I dunno, I'm individually might. One's an interesting one.
I like it myself, but I do understand why people taste it and think it tastes like alien, mucus, so fully get that. Um, I'm going to get some, maybe some kangaroo steaks. We do love our kangaroos down here and they are on the coins and the Australia notes, but we do actually eat them too. They're kind of tasty.
Yeah. Well, we could, I could obviously go I've I've had crocodile pizza at an Australian restaurant. Um, what about bearer Monday? Maybe we need to go a little bit upper class and get the, get the bear Monday fish on the grill going for, for Chad. What do you see? Oh, look, the lovely filler bar Monday is always super tasty.
I can highly recommend it. Yeah, that sounds, that sounds pretty good to me. And now I am a former rugby player and rugby fan, so I feel like that gives me like a few points. Yeah, that's pretty good. There's a bit too tough for me. I'm afraid I had, I played, I played fullback, so I was like as far away from the action in the scrum as possible.
I'm not sure. I think you lost your points.
Okay. Well now listen, I have a good foot. I'll say that much. I could, I could, I could make those kids. Very good now, um, putting your best foot forward is definitely what the focus of this show is going to be. Chad, why don't you introduce for us, uh, the entrepreneur, the innovator that we're going to study, we're going to learn from today?
Yeah, so I think it's only fitting having two Aussies. Uh, CO's the show today to profile an Australian entrepreneur and we have a fantastic female co-founder of. Pretty pretty successful tech company, Melanie Perkins from Canva and her story and her co-founders story. Uh, she co-founded, uh, her, her first company with, with a guy named cliff Albrecht.
I think it's a really great origin story and just lesson and how to bootstrap a company to success, kind of in spite of yourself and, and, and, and, and struggles along the way. Yeah, I, she, she brings, um, without doubt, a big theme we've seen on the show, tenacity really focused on customer problems. And she's got this abundant positivity about her.
She's she's really special. I know Brendan you've spent some time you were interviewing one of our co-founders just last week when we were together. You're so familiar with this company. What's your sense? What's your views on, on, on Melanie and, and, and what she does best. Well, I think when someone is trying to solve a very large problem, uh, they can get a little focused on how do I solve this big problem.
And what I love about Melanie is her ability to actually divide that down into a series of smaller problems. And every day she's just going to work and solving the smaller problems, but with the bigger goal at mind, Yeah. And, um, she's what I think a great example. ING is somebody who has been pretty fearless in seeing that their dreams come true.
So something that started in her mom's lounge room, uh, many, many years ago, as a different company, in fact, has now reached 10 million active users. Literally more than 400 designs have been used on their graphical platform. And I think what makes the timing of this show so special is that they recently raised actually a small amount of capital, but it did take their total valuation to over $1 billion, which means that they are in the unicorn club and they are the second.
Startup from Australia. Who's made that, that list and all from a young lady who has just, uh, overcome a ton of challenges. So it's a remarkable story of determination. Isn't it? Yeah, look, not only did Melanie come from the, the small country of Australia, she came from the city of Perth. Now Perth would be Australia's fifth, largest city.
So it's only got a population of about a 1.8 million. It's reasonably small. And to do that from a Perth is way over on the West coast of Australia. Like there's not much over there and not many people. So, um, I'll just add that to the mix that she's done that from really a very, very small place. Yeah.
Now, now talking about Canva, this graphical tool that helps you make, you know, social media, post presentations, uh, Chad, have you had a chance to see canvas action? It's, it's sort of a tool that could easily replace the likes of Adobe illustrator and Photoshop. Maybe even Microsoft PowerPoint. What, when you, when you hear about tools like this, are you excited?
Do you think there's room for it? And what are you, what's your feeling about, uh, a product like Canva? My first exposure was essentially. Getting lost in the product for about two hours. I mean, it's that engaging and cool and interesting, I think precisely because it sits at this intersection of a lot of entrenched older products and it just re-imagined it, and it's all in a browser, which I think no other company has, has done to date, you know, put all of these features into a product that.
Is is completely inside the browser, which to me is, you know, why it is so highly valued, what, you know, why it is set up for success. Yeah. I mean, that's where the really big disruption came. Uh, we, we were finally free of these massive gigabyte installs from Adobe, and we could get a very lightweight product that could quickly produce content for a social era.
And I feel that sets us up, Chad too. To really kind of take our first dive into the clips. What have we got to lead things off? Oh, just a nice little intro here to the canvas story and Melanie's story. So here we are hearing about the beginnings of canvas. A young Sydney woman has achieved what millions only dream of.
She has turned her idea for a web based design company into a billion dollar business based in Surrey Hills. The company Canva ran a loss last year, but it is now a global player with big backers and huge ambitions that on a quirk when to meet the woman behind the phenomenon. They're the tech companies so valuable.
They're almost mythical. Unicorn was a term coined a couple of years ago over in Silicon Valley and it means the company that's worth a billion dollars. Michael's startup Canva has become just the second Australian company to join the likes of Apple, Google, and Uber in the exclusive club, dubbed unicorns.
It's the brain child of Melanie Perkins. Who's built Canada up to be one of the world's most successful graphic design side. And we've had a crazy number of designs created. We have a 300, 400 million designs being created now across the globe. One of those happy clients is Yvonne Hills who credits CAMBA with her business success.
So just being able to get in there, do presentation proposals, uh, you know, change an image that I want to put on my website. Within an instant, I can get it done. It's been a 10 year journey to get Canva where it is today. One that couldn't have been made possible without investors like Rick Baker, as well as major investor.
So queer capital and some other big names. We've been very fortunate to have some incredible investors. For example, Lars Rasmussen, who co-founded Google maps was one of our earliest investors, um, alongside a few celebrities that you might've heard of. Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson. But it hasn't been without its hurdles recording a $3.3 million loss only a year ago.
The company is now hot on the heels of Australia's only other unicorn company at LaSeon whose worth is now estimated at more than $11 billion. Yeah. So what's so interesting there, they're just launching, launching into the stage right now and everyone's hearing about them, but, but Brendan, what's interesting.
This has been a 10 year journey for Melanie and the canvas team. Hasn't it? Yeah. It's another one of those overnight successes, you know, look, I'm not a big fan of the term unicorn. I think a lot of startup founders get. Uh, sort of, they talk about it and they're kind of obsessed by it, but what it does do for Canva, and it was mentioned in that clip is it does give them a lot of attention and does put them on the world stage.
And, you know, I was in Singapore last week and people were like, Oh, you're from Australia. Do you know the guys from canvas? So it definitely has given them a lot of exposure. Do you, do you feel that, um, a lot of innovators or young entrepreneurs, uh, say who are starting on their journey, how many people do you really think are prepared, uh, for a 10 year the marathon?
You know, if you look at all of the great successes, I mean, I think Instagram is the only real upset exception where it was a very quick exit. Most. You know, even just getting to the hundred million dollar, uh, point, uh, has been, you know, eight to 10 year journey. If you look at all the VC funds, they all run generally on 10 year cycles.
So I think people watch movies like the social network, or they hear the Instagram story and they just think, Oh, I can just do this. I have this great idea. That's so unique. Um, but it's, uh, it's a long journey and it's also a roller coaster. It's a roller coaster, you know, month to month, week to week, some days even hour to hour.
And that's a, it's a roller coaster both financially and also emotionally. Yeah, the, the most interesting part of this story for me, it was the beginning and how Melanie started a company that you can see the seed of the idea of Canva, but it really was a much, uh, kind of simpler and more niched sort of company.
But here is the story of the, the founding and beginnings of fusion book, hers and her co-founder Cliff's first startup venture. When I was teaching, um, graphic design programs, I would write a lot of instruction manuals on how to use the programs and you'd have so many steps. So it was like, step one, click this button, step two, click this button, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
For like 22 steps to do one simple action. And that just seemed completely insane. Why do people have to learn the software that software should learn people in a more plot line? She's like, this is shit. Like why, why are these, these tools still exist in her head? There was just like, he was just super obvious.
There's gotta be a better way of doing this. Like, I can be the person that can do this
in the very early stages. We had like eight different concepts of different ways. People could communicate their ideas, whether it's. Psych three photo books or through all sorts of different other things. It was very sort of conceptual and I really didn't think it would go anywhere, but then Mel started getting really serious and like drawing up like product plans and doing real work behind it.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll see where this goes. Hello. So today is the 11th of July and this is our minute Wednesday. We always go from very quickly from like, this is an idea to. This is the thing that's going to happen. And we are in a fun position at the moment. We're actually starting to really get a lot of traction.
So rather than trying to take on the entire world of design, we decided to take on school year books in Australia. Fusion books was an online system that made it easy for school teachers to create yearbooks. We had our entire family sitting there, stuffing envelopes to send to every single school in Australia.
We had, like, my mum would be like licking the stickers and his dad would be sealing the envelopes and we'd have someone folding them. I didn't want to just send these books out to schools that weren't any chance of like a lead. I started by calling him and say, Hey, can I complete it? The name of the yearbook coordinator?
And there'll be like, no. I would end up like out sassing the secretaries. That wouldn't be something that I would endorse. I very like the truth. I'd be like, ah, yeah. Yep. I've got a book here and I really need to send it to the yearbook coordinator. They've registered for this book, but I don't have a name to adjust it to and they'd be like, Oh, send it to the office.
I'm like, I can't send it to the office. I'll just not send it. I don't really care. It doesn't bother me either way. And she was like, Oh, hang on. Let me find out who the, who, the, who the person is. Um, and I'd get straight through it the year it'd be like printing around the clubs. It was my, in my mom's living room.
And so she'd babysit printers. You'd hear the printers in the background and you constantly listening to them. It's cheap, it's cheap. And you'd be like, I think the printer stopped because if the printer stops, then you're losing money very fast. Not that we had on you print it. It exploded everywhere. The cartridge hadn't been put in correctly and say our entire room ended up in cartridges.
Oh, my gosh. Now they may have been in Perth, uh, Brendan, but they had some New York hassle about them. With that. What I take from that clip is these guys were bringing the family that were printing in the living room. They were prepared to do anything. It took to make this business a success. Yeah. And you know, it's really important.
I think if you're a founder that you have that, that drive and that ability just to work again, you know, these startups, we look at this glamorous world of startups, but as it turns out, it isn't so glamorous and it's just sometimes just really, really hard work. Yeah. And the other thing that strikes me about the start of that clip is I remember in 1994, having Photoshop installed on my windows, Pentium four, eight, six enhanced PC, and I have used Photoshop and illustrator ever since.
And I faced this problem, particularly with the Adobe suite where you're launching a new program. You're like, ah, this is too much for me to learn. Like it's literally going to take weeks of YouTube videos and whatever to learn. So I don't use the tool. So I faced that same problem, but what's really powerful is that Melanie had this.
Well, there's gotta be an easier way now, Chad, we've seen entrepreneurs before. We've seen them having this same. Aha. Like, hang on this. Shouldn't be this hard. Yeah, I'm sure. Now for those of us, you know, Above a certain age. You know, we remember the like 1200 page books, you know, that you would spend like $60 for the game.
Of course, came with a little CD on how to learn these programs. Yeah. She was, I'm sure sitting there kind of in a stack of these being like, there's gotta be a better and easier way here. I think my favorite kind of solving your own problems story, of course, is Richard Branson in the Caribbean, you know, stuck.
Stuck on an Island trying to get to his girlfriend. And he just there's a plane, you know, puts up a chalkboard and it was like, all right, you know, flies to Puerto Rico, you know? I think it was $39 and, uh, the next day he was on the phone to Boeing to, to see about leasing, you know, extra inventory. I it's, it's so interesting to me that, you know, like you were saying Brennan, it's like, yeah, it's one of those overnight successes.
But if he did behind the scenes, it took 10 years. Yeah. The other unique thing about what they did in generally with, with computer software and with anything, you know, the more you're always between two forces, is it powerful or is it easy to use? You can make something super powerful. Let's say like Adobe Photoshop when we first came across it, but it was not that easy to use and I'm sure I've got a, you know, Photoshop for dummies book somewhere in the house, but then also you can make something super easy to use, not very powerful or flexible.
And some are Melanie was able to figure out that there must be a better way to achieve that. And with Canva, it was basically delivering these high quality templates that were very customizable so that anyone, without any design skills could actually make something look fantastic. Yeah, and I have the designer community behind it as well to continue to post the good designs and for everyone, that was also my favorite thing.
When I was exploring the product is you can see everyone else's published work and take the inspiration from that and incorporate it into your own. And I think that the, the, where that was so powerful is that, did she find that problem that we were talking about? It's really that moment when you open up a complex graph vehicle or video or audio piece of software, and you're just like, Oh my gosh, this looks so hard.
And you just have that, that moment of dread, this is going to take me so long even to get the most simple things done. But what I think was really powerful is that. Uh, by moving to the browser, she was able to really change the game because delivering it all through the browser was a far cry from those, those huge CDs and the books.
You mean Chad, those huge books that you needed to get through them. And this is this idea of really solving a problem and being pretty relentless. And going out there and solving a real pain point and, and we've got like the brands and ask thing of being, having on your radar, where the problems are and challenging the status quo there.
But then the next thing that Melanie and the canvas team do is. They really go about solving this problem and in doing so, I think they create a huge opportunity because Photoshop and illustrator it's for the few it's for the serious graphical designer, but for the rest of us, the other 99% of us, there's this huge problem of wanting to create beautiful things.
So let's now take a listen to Melanie talking about how they go about solving a problem. I think there's a lot more emphasis for raising capital than there necessarily needs to be. So when you're starting out, it's so important to be solving a problem, having building a product that is a solution for a group of users who really care about it.
I think that sometimes if you read the media and you see people with these big flashy numbers, it becomes the goal and raising money becomes the goal as opposed to actually building a company that people is solving a problem that people care about. And so, firstly, I don't think that every company should be raising capital.
And I think for us, it was actually a huge advantage, not raising capital early on in the piece. So we had five years of being organically funded, where we got to learn all sorts of things that, you know, building a product internationalizing solving a problem, um, becoming profitable, which is a really unheard of thing in spring Valley.
Um, and a whole bunch of other things. So if we've went straight from being students to bring on a large amount of capital, it would have meant that we wouldn't have known exactly how to spend it or how to execute. And also raising money could be a time bomb. So unless your tots. Oh, looking like crazy.
Good. Um, you don't want to be having to pivot when you are in a, a, you know, building up the headcount, burning up the bed. So when you raise a couple, you really want to be able to hit the ground running and start flying literally as a company immediately. So definitely if you're thinking that raising capital is the first goal of your company, you might want to reassess things because ideally what you'd be able to do is figure out a problem that you really think should be solved in the future.
Find customers who passionately believe in this. As well, make sure that's a big group of people and then make sure that the product that you create is actually solving the problem. It's, it's fascinating to me to hear her kind of speak to the ILS or the, uh, the pitfalls of raising capital too early in the process.
I think five years in, you know, in Silicon Valley terms is like a lifetime. Uh, to not raise funds, but her, her metaphor of funding as a ticking time bomb, I think is a really, really powerful one. And one that, that people out there should, should think about because. You know, it could, it could be a double-edged sword.
You look, I just love that. Clip it. Um, one of the things she talks about there is that it's easy to get pulled off by reading about somebody else's flashy numbers. I mean, so often you'll see a start-up article. It'll say, you know, two guys in Seattle just raise a hundred million dollars in an idea. And you read that and you're like, well, I've got an idea.
Like where's my a hundred million dollars. However, when you dig into this story, it's never actually the case. Like, you know, they, you know, there's an option to raise more money. Or the founding team had like $3 billion Higgs. It's like, it's never as simple as that. And, um, there was a great quote or an interview that I saw with Paul Hogan, the Australian actor.
And he was asked, what is Hollywood life? And he said, it's a really strange place. He said, it's like a mining town. But at any one time, only about 5% of the people are going down the mine and getting the gold. And the other 95% are up on top of the ground, talking about who's going down and getting the gold and sometimes start up world can be a little bit like that, where we're all talking about, who's raising and who's doing what, and we're actually not out there solving a problem.
Yeah, that's such a great analogy and it, and it's love it. I love it. Yeah. We're too busy talking about who's going down and we're not actually solving customers. I don't say to startup founders. Hey, you know, maybe just unsubscribed from tech crunch for a month. You know, or just don't get too obsessed.
Like what Uber did last week is definitely not having it has nothing to do with your IOT startups. So I think we can spend too much time looking at what others are doing and which means we're not focused on what we're doing. Yeah. Yeah. I, I wanted to dig in a little bit on this one, which is, she's basically framing this idea that capital can be a misunderstood thing.
And it can be a huge constraint. And I think for our listeners, it's really good. We take a moment here to get into what we've seen happen and why actually there's a, it's sort of a double-edged sword. So, so here's what I would propose it, particularly in my time in San Francisco, what I saw was a lot of raising of capital.
Uh, from founders who didn't understand the whole premise that someone invests in your company is based upon the fact that they want to put money in and then they want to get money out. Now, the way the money comes out, if they invest in your company is through a liquidation moment. It's a moment where you either.
A board, you go IPO, you are an accurate hire. There's all these different models, essentially the selling of the company or a part of the company. Now, in order to sell the company, you need to hit a series of metrics, a series of very measurable things in order to create this liquidation moment. And sometimes those things run contrary to the ambition.
Of a founder and you get this almighty tension that the investor group, uh, we want, we want our money and the founders alive, but we need more money to do what we really want to do. And all of a sudden you have this conflict, uh, where expectations are no longer aligned, but in the end of the day, those who put the money in often.
Call the shots. Is, has that been what you've seen? Brendan? Yeah, look. Absolutely. I think founders that rise early, what they don't realize until I actually take them, honey, is that they've actually added another layer of pressure onto what they're doing. There's enough pressure already to try and get a product out the door to get private, find some sort of product market fit or traction now that, but a shareholder and a board potential and board members as well, that are.
Hitting on them every month saying, where are you at? What the other applying a lot of pressure. And it's just another thing that the founder has to worry about. And, you know, I think at that early stage, you know, keeping things as simple as possible, uh, is, is a really good thing. And, you know, I think. No. I went down the path of an IPO many years ago, and I realized that I didn't want to do that because I'd started my company because I wanted to be behind boss, not because I wanted a hundred million dollars.
So, you know, I didn't go down that path when I started to realize, Oh my God, there's all this pressure. I've got lawyers to answer to and accountants and audits and all these layers. It just, it can be just overwhelming. Now, certain founders can, can tope with that. Um, but you know, if you do it too early, it can just be really distracting, I think as well.
So Chad, have you seen startups raise capital at a good time? And, and is there something we can maybe learn from Canva, from what you're hearing, when thinking about raising capital? I think the companies that have best used their capital are the ones that take funding, uh, or, you know, take series funding like a series a after they've found some semblance of product market fit or some real traction.
Now I, I understand that, you know, there are some exceptions to these kinds of rules in generalizations, but for me, it's, it's having found that product market fit. Like I just don't see. If you're spending someone else's money to find how to solve your customer's problem, you're you're doing something wrong, like really wrong.
Yeah. In, in my mind. So I think what you're saying is, um, the best time to raise money seems to be more when it's a growth story, rather than a maybe story. Yeah, I, I personally think it's the entrepreneur's job to do themselves with their own resources and, and, and capital that they can accrue kind of amongst themselves and family and friends, it's their job to find the product market fit.
And I think that's what smart VCs do is they, they wait until the company has found. That, that product market fit. And then they can add in those resources, but th the market can get frothy. It can, it can be somewhat of a bubble maybe, and people are just kind of throwing money around Willy nilly. What we've seen here is like a clear story of bootstrapping, which, uh, which really means to us using limp very limited.
Funding being very scrappy, just making it happen on the smell of an oily rag has benefited Canva massively. There's obviously the fact that they run a lean business, which is just good practice. And from a more strategic point of view, I'm sure they've not had to dilute their equity as founders as much because they waited so long.
They had such a good story. I mean, fusion books. Uh, it was a profitable company. Well, before they raised, so this sets them up for great success now. But Chad you've mentioned product market fit and the great news from a founder like Melanie at Canva. We've actually got, uh, the opportunity to listen to her thoughts about how you actually find product market fit, how you make sure that the thing that you're making serves to relieve the pains of your customers and to create gains for them.
So let's now take a listen to Melanie Perkins, talking about product market fit. The best way to position your company for future success, I think is that if you imagine an industry in 10 or 20 years time, and then you make sure that your company is in the direction of the waves, then you're going to be well positioned.
So, and then on the same note, what you want to do is address a customer's problem really succinctly. So there's a certain group of people that really have this problem. And if you can address that as your first port of call, that means that you're going to have a ready market. So rather than just trying to think of.
And like of under the sun, there's like certain crossroads. So I think that's going to inevitably happen. So for example, when I was thinking about the world of design, it became very apparent that it was going to be online. Like everything was moving online. It was not even something that you could contest, I think, and then everything is going to become collaborative.
People are working together in when they're trying to design a project or a product. Um, and so they actually need to have that friction removed. So if you can kind of see, get along some really important trends and, um, It means you're going to be well positioned going forward. The, the key for me about product market fit is to use a tool called the value proposition canvas, which is a, which is a tool that's out of the, the lean canvas.
And it makes you sit down and say, what are the pains that my customer experiences. What are the gains they're looking for? And can I answer those? And this is traditionally where we find the real discussion about whether you've got a thriving, a huge opportunity, or whether you're sort of solving.
Sometimes the classic thing is solving a problem. That's too small, uh, solving a problem that people don't care about it enough, or just solving a problem that people will just not pay for. So the, the great opportunity. Uh, that we can take from this is that it's all about. It's all about understanding the pains and gains of your customers and, and meeting those.
And the key to meeting those is what we call validation. Don't just assume that you are meeting the needs of your customer, serving their pains and gains, but you actually have to validate it. And, and Chad, you know, my favorite one it's prototyping, right. You know, get in there and actually create the experience face-to-face with the customer and see how they use it.
See how they actually explore and go through the product. And actually, this is the greatest source of validation. Obviously you can use surveys and you can look at metrics. But once you have that, you can then position it on what Melanie was really talking about is tailwinds. She saw a huge migration to online and, um, she was like, well, hang on.
I have a feeling here that this is, um, this is going to be huge. And we certainly know at the time Adobe wasn't thinking about doing it they've since, uh, you know, uh, started a bit of a catch-up game, uh, with. Uh, our friends at Canva, but I really, I really liked the idea you solve the problem. You meet the pains.
Yeah. And against every customer and position within these tailwinds of things that are coming down the track. This to me is a great learning on, uh, how Canva has now got itself on a huge wave of opportunity. So, so, so Chad, when you think about a product fit, it sounds like there's a few learnings there.
Do you think you've got now a couple of key things about when you know, you have it, you know, you asking like when do you know you've got it. Uh, do you think that solicitor, is there anything else you think you can add to the, the signs of product market fit? I don't know that I have anything personally to add, but this is a question actually, that I would love to take into our future episodes, uh, as we, you know, unpack learnings from, from other other founders, because it's not something we've strangely, it's not something we we've talked much about up until now, but I think that the story of canvas is so interesting in that.
Of course, it's one of those stories where it's like, yeah, of course design is moving online and of course design is becoming collaborative. It's just, she and her team knew that a little before us and committed to making that happen. And then that's why this, you know, she's riding the waves, as she says, Uh, of, of that, of that trend.
Yeah. And, and if you actually look at what we've already learned, uh, it's a 10 year story in the making. It's not overnight. They bootstrap like crazy with exploding printer cartridges in their lounge rooms. Uh, that was a family affair. She was highly focused on solving a problem and she got this product market fit.
She got a momentum, she rode the tailwinds and. They were already, and it was very nice that they were serving almost a micro-niche of just school year books. Um, but that enabled them to go so deep now that they can just expand with all that learning into multiple, multiple different practices. I know they've got.
They're covering use cases around weddings, corporate presentations, whatever visual merchandise she might need there, they seem to, they seem to have an answer. So what are action packed? First half of the show. And, um, it's important to remember. We've got a lot of other things coming and in particular, How they build a team, how they manage talent at Canva and some of the big future opportunities for them down the track.
But, um, before we get into all of that, I feel that Chad, you you've, you've got a little bit of a documentary that you want to chat about. So why don't you, uh, why don't you set up instead of a book recommendation? We've got an innovation documentary from Chad. Yeah, some really awesome filmmakers from Portland actually made a documentary called the new hustle and it profiles three Australian companies.
So for all you Australian listeners, this is a much a must watch for all of you. They profile of course, Canva and Melanie Perkins story, but also two other companies, uh, that I hadn't. Been familiar with Vino mofo that, uh, is I'm guessing probably the largest or one of the largest online, uh, wine retailers in the us region.
And then safety culture, an interesting company that. Is harnessing the power of digital checklists to just make, uh, work, uh, safer and better, uh, across, I think it's, you know, at least 10 or 20 million teams all across the globe. And it was just fascinating for me to hear. Both a uniquely Australian perspective, but also learn how that's, it's not unique.
You know, it's just, you know, Australian entrepreneurs have the same problems in face, the strength, the same struggles that we all do. Um, but there's some really interesting in one of the clips, the. The fusion books clip came from from that documentary. Um, so you get some really interesting and personal stories, uh, from the, from the documentary.
And so while I wasn't familiar with these companies, I'm sure that, that you Mike or Brendan have at least heard of these companies. We should, we should let Brendan do this because you know, a little bit of background on Brendan. Uh, not only does he. Run all of the community development across Asia Pacific for SendGrid.
He's also run one of the biggest accelerators. Uh, the Quantus Avro accelerator. He's uh, the Sydney director of startup grind. He's a mentor at mirror D I mean, this guy was even at CompuServe, wait for this chat. 1991, Brendan was there. So, uh, if anyone knows the startup scene here in Australia is definitely Brendan.
So I think Brendan, you're rather familiar with it, these guys. Yeah. So I'm the CEO and co-founder of Vinomofo Andre is, was my best friend going through high school. Uh, and I spent a lot of time, um, watching some of these fabulous failures, um, watching then the pain that, that did that. That that, that bestowed on his wife and family, um, about of course now, you know, they, they, they just, they honestly, they just kept changing it until they finally hit something that worked.
So, uh, I think probably one of the most interesting parts of this documentary is that it actually interviewed some of the partners, uh, the founders and just what the family goes through when they have to ride this. Yeah, this roller coaster journey of a startup, our safety culture, and other great Australian success came out of the tiny town of Townsville in far North Queensland.
So, you know, how do you think you can do a startup from anywhere? I think safety culture probably proves that you can so a great documentary, not too long, not too long. I can highly recommend it. Fantastic. I mean, it's so great to see Chubb that whether we're in Europe, whether we're in San Fran or New York or Sydney, Australia, there's this whole movement of people.
Who've now got tools to make their dreams come true, to go out, solve customer problems. It's a super exciting time and we've got five more lessons to come from. Melanie Perkins. Now we're going to pivot across more into. How they build teams, how they recruit talent, how they do a whole bunch of stuff. So there's plenty more to come for everybody listening.
And I want to remind everyone. If you want to get more info on this particular show or any of the others, just go to moonshots.io and you'll find all the information in the world. So you can always go there. It's like a repository of all the goodies, but now it's time to, to throw ourselves into this, uh, second, uh, installment of the show.
What's next for us? Chad is we continue into a journey on Canva and Melanie Perkins. One of the more interesting stories from the documentary, the new hustle was her early struggles to build a product team and a, and a tech team. She and her, her co-founders found, you know, Hey, we can pay Indian developers, one fifth or one sixth.
You know what? We're paying developers here. We can get five times as much work done. And what happened was they ended up with. A front end, that looked kind of pretty, but the back end was so broken that they literally took screenshots of the yearbooks that their customers had created and recreated it in Photoshop because their backend of the product was so broken.
And so this is kind of a lesson of a hard lesson learned about finding the right talent, but here's actually a clip from Melanie in her own words, talking about finding talent. And he said that if I could find a technical team and co-founder, he'd be happy to invest. And so that set off this crazy whirlwind of learning about entrepreneurship and startups and venture capital, because even though we'd had a company for a few years, we never heard about startups.
And so everything was like it just another piece of budgeted on another whole world. So he was not spending three months. There was meeting a whole bunch of people learning as reading as much as I possibly could. And, um, during that time actually was introduced to. Well, as Western Sydney found a Google maps and Google weight, and he, um, has been absolutely instrumental for us because he said, um, it was, it didn't seem instrumental at the time.
It was very annoying because he kept rejecting all the people that I brought to him to be on our technical team. Um, and that went on for a full year before we found the right people. But in the end, we've ended up with the most amazing technical team. It was because of that slightly frustrating experience and it turned out so well.
I think we've got the most amazing team here now. Wait. So when we're hiring our team members, firstly, we have an extremely high technical bar because we need the best of the best work on our product because she has such a big reach. Like we've now got 4 million users who have created over 30 million designs, which is completely crazy.
And so having the people that can actually realize that dream envision technically is really important, but then also people need to be passionate and motivated by what we're trying to achieve here. They need to be go get it. So people that, you know, if there's a barrier, it just means you need to Cairo Brita.
So however way you need to go, you just to get through it. Um, it's really important that people are not the sort of person that wants to sit back and let things happen because if you do that, things never happen. So it's really important that people are motivated and determined and passionate. Finding talent at one of the old time, greatest challenges, not only for startups, I have to say all the fortune 500 companies I worked for, uh, you know, looking at digitization and innovation thinking, Oh my gosh.
I mean, we face a huge talent deficit in those areas. So I think it's not only startups that face it, but I think all companies, particularly in such times of great. Change. I, Brendan, I want to ask you, where do you see, uh, the talent challenge for the companies that you've met? The companies you've been part of?
Where, where is it getting? Where's the greatest talent challenge. I mean, you often hear the technical founder one that Melanie spoke to that's often one, but what else do you see as being the great talent challenges and. What do you see the ones that do it? Well, what are they doing? What can we learn?
Well, I mean, the, the first problem that Melanie talks about there is that found a team. And I think that obviously has to be right from the very beginning. Um, and I imagine that when cliff and Melanie met with Cameron who became their CTO and is now the chief product officer and third co founder, they would have had to really sell him on the vision in a similar way that they sell to customers.
So they would have had to be able to communicate very succinctly. Where they were going, what their big goal was and how they were going to do it again in a similar way that they do to investors. So I think for Canberra, they got that founding team, right? I mean, Cameron had worked with last Rasmussen on Google wave.
I assume that was where the connection came from. Google wave, obviously this mythical kind of Google products and Slack of the future that didn't quite take off. But Cameron was very technically sound more of a front end developer than a backend developer. But on weekends he used to do designs. And like sell them at the markets and sell them online.
So we had this great thing where you had this great sort of user interface skill was his day job, but on the weekends he loved playing with design. So we had that great interest in the product as well, which made him a perfect fit for the team. You know, I, uh, when I founded shop.com, I had a co-founder that lasted about a week.
And what I did was I hired someone exactly like me, you know, if you go to a barbecue. That's, you know, we want to invite some to barbecue show or invite some people like yourself. If you want to start a company, invite people that have the opposite or complimentary skillsets to yourself. And that was where I got it wrong.
And I think what cliff and Melanie and Cameron have in, in their founding team is a really fantastic complimentary skillsets. Um, I would also say Chad, that, um, when you look at the role of finding co-founders, I mean, apart from solving a big problem and being pretty passionate about it, I think finding co-founders.
Has to be one of the most, you know, important things a CEO or founder can have it. And I just look at the success of lots of the different entrepreneurs that we've looked at. And there's very, very often there's a team of people around them, even the mythical Steve jobs, it was revealed on our show, had a whole crew of people around him.
Some we know like Jonathan ive somewhere, we still do not know of, but the reality is like, Finding talent and recruiting a co-founder are essential, aren't they? Yeah. And I don't know that I have heard of anyone that has gotten this right from the beginning, uh, which is why it's so nice to hear the failure that Melanie and cliff had, but like it's, it's, it has a happy ending.
They found Cameron and you know, the product speaks for itself now, but. I'm even struggling and I'm sure many of the listeners are struggling with this right now. Who, who am I best meant to work with? Who am I best meant to manage? Who, you know, there's all it's so there's so many different levels to it.
Um, I feel like this is something that I personally just, uh, struggle with on a daily basis and, uh, The people that, that fit right into what I do and who can do great work with me. You know, those are people that, you know, I'm never gonna get rid of if I, if I don't have to. Um, but you know, there, there, there have been stories where, you know, maybe I was working with someone for too long and didn't realize that it was a bad fit until, until maybe it was a little, you know, it was a little too late.
Brendan didn't have that challenge. He may have picked, uh, somebody. I'm very envious of the online, uh, trial period. Like I wish I wish it was that. And w what, what, uh, Brendan, if we think out loud here, uh, I I've got like a little writing checklist. Like you, you, you fundamentally want to, co-found something like, I think about co-founding moonshots for Chad.
I just like chat. I like hanging out with Chad. I've worked with Chad for years and years and years. It felt so easy for us to get together. So I think you got to, you don't have to be like besties, but you've got to really like the person you got to like the idea of sitting there and having a coffee and just hanging out with them.
Is a joy, the idea of going to the pub, having a beer, it's a, it's a, it's a joy. Don't have to be besties, but I think you've got to like them. And I think the other thing is, uh, that comes to my mind. And then Brendan, I need you to help me on this. I think absolute clarity on expectations where I see co-founders working really well together is that, Oh, you like each other?
My gosh, are they explicitly clear? On their expectations of. The entrepreneurial vehicle of the business, are we trying to get rich? Are we doing it because we love it? Are we doing, because we need to pay the mortgage. It doesn't matter what that is, but the fact that everybody's on the same page. So when things get hard, everybody's still fighting for the same, a little bit.
I'll throw another word there. That's sort of similar to clarity, uh, which is honesty. I think it's important to be super honest, not only with your co-founder and your founding team, but actually honest with yourself. So that, you know, you know what I know I'm really good at this stuff. I'm really good at big picture strategy, but you know what, I'm really bad with the money and the detail.
So, you know what, I'm going to be really honest when they cofounder and say, look, I've got this bit toddler, but I think you could help me out with these feet. You have that attention to detail that perhaps I lacked or the other way around. So I think that clarity of what you, why you're in it, but also that honesty about your own skillsets, I think is.
It is crucial. Otherwise I don't see you can work. Yeah. I'm going to even expand on that and say like, Honesty and candor, just like the willingness to talk about those things, because there's a lot of kind of deception by just simply not saying anything. And, you know, there's a lot of things that can go on set in, in a partnership.
And so I think that that, that candor is also also important as well. Right. I, I think, um, one of the things we learned in the Amsterdam live show, Chad was, do you remember just, um, I don't remember which of the entrepreneurs it was, but we talked about, uh, never, uh, skipping the weekly leadership or management meeting because you need time and space just to be open and.
Uh, management teams often neglect these things because they are too busy for the management meeting. But if you're just not talking, if you have not in the ritual of talking openly and creating space for conversation, this is the beginning of the, sort of the, the, the infection, because you can't have alignment if you're not talking as well.
Yeah. Are we talking about startups here? Are we talking about marriages? Yeah, it's kind of the same thing. And you often hear, Hey, it's very similar to a man marriage. We've got a job to do that might be raising kids, but with what there's money involved and there's emotional layers, we've got to communicate.
We've got to make sure we're on the same page. Like it's, you know, I think if we go back and listen to the last 30 seconds, what was saying, we really could have been talking about marriages. Yeah. And, and so to give you an idea, my two co-founding partners, uh, in quality assurance, the three of us had have three conference calls are awake with just the three of us talking through.
Different aspects of the, of, of the business in an effort to create high synchronization. Cause it's busy. We're an all different continents of the world. We have over 200 staff running around, like there's a lot going on. And you know, sometimes you start those calls and go, I wonder what we're going to talk about.
And then before, you know, the hours gone and it feels like there's 10 things that didn't even. Get talked about, which is still on. Absolutely. And then the other thing guys is I also spent five years working with this little Australian rock band called NXS. Now in excess we're five guys from the Northern beaches of Sydney who were just mucking around playing gigs at their friend's birthday parties.
And then they decided, are we going to do this properly or not? And they decided that they wanted to be the biggest band in the world. And they achieved that. Uh, when, you know, I think it's about 25 years ago now that I played to a hundred thousand people at Wembley stadium. Now, Hey, out with these guys was super interesting because there was effectively six co-founders in this group.
And even though there was three brothers in that band and you'd never pick them from. Personality or looks or anything. They all had their different roles. You know, they had the front man that had the sales guy, they had the creative guy, they had the mediator, they had the Larry kin and they had the guy that just reminded that we're living their dream.
They all had these different roles to fill and somehow they made it work. What a great, what a great analogy we've taken. Co founding, uh, a company to marriage, to rock bands and, and, and frankly, there's another thing around talent and co-founders is, is that a lot of the success of ban is, is formed in the early years when they often live in tour and work together almost.
You know is 24 seven, but this creates this essential understanding and connection that will power the band over the future. And that's again, very similar to great startups where you see founders coming together in a very intense way in those, those early years. And. One of the things that's coming back about.
Melanie is this is a long road. It's taken them, uh, over 10 years to get to where they are now. They started in her mom's mom's house in Perth, Australia. And what's so important is if you're gonna last. And be successful over those 10 years, you have to have resilience. And, um, Melanie has a lot of wisdom, uh, to share around this idea of not giving up.
You know, when you face a hurdle, don't give up and when things go wrong, don't be dejected. Just keep on going. So let's have a listen now to Melanie Perkins from Canva, talking about rejection. Being able to start to deal with rejection and failure. And that is something that I don't naturally deal with very well, because I just keep trying until it works, which I guess is how I deal with rejection and failure.
And so I think that you need to somewhat change your model. So a lot of people, if they're rejected, once they'll be like, I shouldn't do that because I was rejected. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't successful. But I think it's really important to realize that rejection is actually just a step towards success.
And so, I mean, literally if you get a piece of paper and you drew a hundred cycles and then every time you're rejected, you're across in one of those circles and it's not until you get to the hundredth circle that maybe you should change. Tact is like, you just have to keep trying and trying and trying.
And sometimes it will take years to literally get that to that final circle where something works. And it's so important because I think that any startup. Danny is going to take a lot of time. It's going to take a lot of rejections and say the world isn't made to people to succeed in stubs because the world sort of is going along in its own pace, doing its own thing.
And you're trying to go exactly against the grain against every company that already exists against you. You know, what is the standard traditional path? And so it's so important to be able to build up that sense of self-confidence and to realize that rejection is just a part of the journey. And every time you fail, it means that you are just getting closer to it as eventual.
Yes. I love the hundred circles and Melanie is going out in search of rejections so that she can, she can make Mark the exes. Um, again, I think that is possibly a uniquely entrepreneurial trait. I think that's a frame of mind that really only entrepreneurs and good entrepreneurs have is the reframe of failure or rejection into.
Nope. That's a learning it's on my way to the promised land. Yeah. That resilience just seems as sensual. When you, when your dreams are big, when you're going out in the world with a radical new way of doing it, something that maybe people don't understand there's resistance from the status quo, all of that sort of stuff.
I mean, rejection is just getting you closer to success. Do you see, uh, how do you see young, uh, founders dealing with this Brendan, DC? That resilience is something that is, is it's by nature, or do you think it's something that they can learn? And maybe it's more of a nurture thing as well? Uh, it's a great question.
Look, resilience is probably my favorite word in startup world. If I had to. N like Pope put one word on a wall in a co-work space for startups that would be resilience. Not everyone has it these days, you know, particularly the millennials are kind of grown up in, you know, a different world where they're getting medals for participation and everyone's a winner and Hey, you know, you can be whatever you want to be.
I mean, I wanted to be a professional golfer when I was a kid and I got to a pretty good level, but I had to actually at a point in time go, you know what? I'm just not good enough to be a professional golfer. When I launched shop free in 1999, it had been young about a month. I felt it was going well.
We're getting that thousand users signing up a day and someone went to the contact form and they wrote, I don't know why you're bothering shop three sucks. And I was like, wow. And I thought I was perhaps a little bit more resilient than the average, perhaps millennial founder, that. Can be a very resilient days.
Days at really hurt, really, really hurt other. Why would someone go to the effort to tell me my product sucks? And I wrote this long-winded reply to a non-existent Hotmail address felt like I got it off my chest, but you know what? That actually grew another, a little layer of resilience. And I think it happened, it happened again over the years, but it's been a bit like each time it happened.
I put on another coat and allows, I realized that I still believed in what I was doing. That enough people were liking it and coming back and sending me more nice emails and shop free, sucks emails. You know what? I just had to go with that. But, um, yeah, resilience, it's a really important thing. Um, it'll, it'll get to you sometimes, right?
The most resilient founder will occasionally have a moment in the fetal position on the office floor when things don't go right. But that's the journey of a startup founder, but you know what? Over time you get more and more resilient. And hopefully success and some traction brings some confidence and breeds resilience as well.
Gosh, I mean, I can check Q imagine we've, we've not had a Brendan, uh, um, moment where someone has written to us and told us that the show sucks. I don't know why you're bothering, but, uh, how do you, how do you kind of process this idea of resilience? How do you look to turn it around and use it for yourself and in your everyday challenges?
It's hard. It's hard. Yeah. Cause it can cut deep. Like you said, Brennan, is it the criticism or, or failures? Abject failures can really hurt. You know, it can hurt the business financially. You can, uh, lose trust of customers and. You know, I mean, look at what, what Facebook's going through right now is Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, testifying to Congress.
Like that was a huge breach of trust by him. And my hope is that he doesn't put on this face to try and make everything seem hunky Dory at Facebook. I actually hope that he and the team really look and see how they can fix the product. To make it better and win back the trust of, of customers. So for, for me, and this is a practice that I've just recently started, that I picked up actually from Ray Daleo the founder of Bridgewater, the hedge fund.
He has this amazing book called life and work principles, but one of his big things is, you know, after a failure. Or a setback objectively, take a look at it and then sort of create a rule for yourself that incorporates that learning. That's like, when this happens, I will do this. And it's really just as simple as that for me, that kind of codifies the learning of the failures.
So that as entrepreneurs and startups, we always talk about increasing the rate of learning. I think if we don't document it and write it down where we're not going to kind of keep. Keep that and learn from that. And so that's just something that I've done very recently that I think is helping me build that resiliency muscle to be better after each and every setback.
What about you, Brandon? I mean, you have this insane travel schedule. You have a family you were involved in. So many different activities, adventures. What do you do when you face adversity and, and you're looking to get through it. What are some of the things that you do incredibly reflective person? So I'm always thinking, you know, this week, how did I do you know, the conference I attended in Singapore last week?
Did I do a good job? Did I network well, did I meet the right people? So I'm always sort of reflective in a very honest way. I'm never very public about it, but yeah. Just internally. I think I'm always very reflective. I mean, as a startup founder, you know, you have to wear a lot of hats, especially in the early days, you know, some days you're designing an interface and other days you might be looking at some code or you're writing a press release and you can't be good at all of those things.
Now, you know, you're going to have failures, not the, of the moms, Zuckerberg, recent kind of failure to deal with. And it's interesting to see how he goes because he's had a pretty sort of rosy run the date, but he gonna have small failures. Are you going to go? I wrote this press release on it. Kind of stopped and didn't really no one, no one ran ran with it all.
You're going to have those little failures as well. They're not going to be big. Oh my God, biggest client, we just lost the lead data kind of fat, but there'll be little ones along the way. And I think it's important to take as much learnings from those little ones as you do the big ones. There seems to be a thing.
Whether you look at Ray Dalio and we'll put a link to him in the show notes for our listeners on moonshots.io, but, um, I, I go back to a show. We did Chad on FedEx, Fred Smith, and he, he had a lot of time in the military before he founded, uh, FedEx. But he talked about, you sort of come to grips with a problem or a crisis.
You kind of stoically go through it. But then you sort of get over it, put it in a box and move on. And he had a, I think this is a shared thing. You look at Ray daily or you look at Fred Smith. It's, it's, it's really about put once you've admitted. There's a problem. Once you've embraced the problem, it puts you in a position where you can.
Get over it, put it in a box and the moving on and asking yourself, what have I learned and what would I do different? And I love what you said, Chad, you, you talked about developing habits that that does trigger. When you face a challenge, you know, you kick in with a series of things. And I love those, those little habits.
One of the things that I do, whether it's for resilience or just wellbeing is whenever I work outside. Uh, from being inside, I always take three large breaths just to like send to myself, you know, like suck it in. And it's just one of these things that I was taught, um, in San Francisco, there's a way of just clearing your mind and getting ready for sort of this, this next chapter.
I love the sort of practices and it's something that. So many great innovators have these little hacks that help them transition between challenge and then moving back into going forward and, and an opportunity. Yeah. And I think Fred Smith was talking about it in. In the frame of learning from history, you know, the perspective that all of this has happened before, uh, either outside my company or inside my company.
And what can I learn from that? Which I feel like is a very stoic philosophy. And it's also echoed by, by Ray Daleo in his book. Um, and again, it's, it's just, it's great for me to hear from all of these founders, but yeah. I dunno, I, I had a particular affinity for Melanie and her story because I think we're probably exactly the same age.
And, you know, I fell so much in love with the product to hear that. That her struggles are very similar in the same as someone like Fred Smith or a Richard Branson tells me no that you and I are kind of onto something in decoding all of the learnings from these entrepreneurs and innovators that we've been profiling here on the moonshots podcast.
Yeah. And, and I, I wanted to, to call out the fact that we've seen this. This very stoic, uh, theme of, you know, the obstacle is the way, you know, if you're experiencing hardship, then you know, you're doing the right thing and, and I'm just so blown away Bryn. And that, that, that theme, if you encapsulate it in one word is resilience, and this is just something that you see as the one word for all startups.
How, how do you, um, How do you best advise or coach people when you, when you see people who don't have enough resilience, uh, what do you do bring in like, how do you help them? You know, I don't come across that as much. Um, look, the people that aren't resilient the first time they hit a bump, they're kind of gone, right.
They just it's too hard. I couldn't raise any money. That was my problem. You know, you'd hear that. Right. They, they generally don't hang around too long. I do see sometimes the other one, the other way, where people sort of confused resilience with sort of blind, bold stupidity, you know, going off into the darkness when you like, dude, no one wants to, well, no one's prepared to pay for it.
The data is telling you it doesn't work, right. It's not working. And you're paying a hundred bucks for every customer. That's. You're making five bucks from like it's not working. So I think it's important for founders not to confuse those two things. New Zealand's means you're just yourself. After you get up, you look for a solution to solve a problem.
You don't sort of just sit there and cry and go. It's all too hard. It's not blindly going into the darkness when. Everyone, when everything else is telling you that it's not going to work, you know? So, Hey look, occasionally we get found as they go off in the darkness and they come out the other side and we go, wow, well, John, didn't see that coming, but you know, there's a difference between resilience and just that, that blonde, bold stupidity.
Yeah. And I think if you, if, if you, as, as we talked about earlier, you stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details, the, how you get there, right? Um, this, this is, is, is a great path. And I think to bring us to our, to our last clip of the show, Chad, I think that all that resilience, determination, all that problem solving that Melanie Perkins has showed is setting Canberra for a big future.
Right? Yeah. I mean, they are calling out Microsoft and, and PowerPoint as something that they want to, to eliminate or kill or get rid of or make obsolete. So here's, here's the Mel in her own words, Melanie's plans, uh, for Canva versus PowerPoint. Um, Oh, and one really fun thing that we're going to double down on.
And we think that, uh, Microsoft PowerPoint is so old school and, um, it was built before the days of the internet. We're so excited to see what we can do by completely. Re-imagining the way PowerPoint, uh, the way presentations should be done, um, and bringing it up to what should be happening today, making it interactive, making it collaborative.
For me, the, the fact that PowerPoint was created before the internet and it hasn't been reinvented since is, is kind of a crying shame, but that's why a founder like Melanie and a company like canvas so exciting and why it's getting so much traction and, and you know, what. Who hasn't had an awful PowerPoint experience yet once again, she's sensing problems.
Uh, she want to make, she wants to make design democratic and something that everyone can do. Um, not groovy turtleneck wearing, uh, dudes. Um, and again, she's one step ahead. Cause you're like, you hear that and you go, Oh, like even Google slides is so much better than PowerPoint, but. Still not perfect. And the fact that she's already suggesting that this is the next thing, I wonder, like Brendan, if you were to re-imagine PowerPoint, I mean, what, what could they be?
Well, I mean, you know, while I like Google slides of a PowerPoint, it still doesn't handle audio at all. Uh, you have to, if you want to drop a video in, it has to be a YouTube video, nothing else. So they kind of, you know, they've had to play the safe route. And what I love about Canva coming in is I can just take a.
A blank canvas to use it. And, and just start from the beginning and say, how would you do this? If you invented it today? Which to me is the definition of disruption. It's not incremental things. It's like, okay, how would you do this? If there was nothing else out there already, how would you do this? And that for me is the way the true disruptors think.
Yeah. I mean, it almost sets us up for some sort of, uh, you know, kiosk based rich media carousel, like extravaganza that is as free of, you know, the Microsoft templates that we were shackled in our early careers by, um, yeah, just such an exciting company. And it's just really. Great to see that she's brought us some new clarity.
I think Chad, with this whole product marketing fit. I mean, she's really called that out as a key part of their success. But, you know, I got a level that bootstrapping, that, you know, solving a problem for the customer relentless in, in, in seeking the right people, every rejection is, is a, you know, a step towards success.
She really had once again, it's another entrepreneur who, when you dig in there, there are so many lessons for us, right. Yeah. I, I, again, I think that the ten-year bootstrap story is, is my favorite. You know, I've been running my business for 10 years and I feel like just now I'm finally achieving. Uh, the success, uh, you know, that I had hoped for so many years ago and just being encouraged that they knew that if they built a product that people, uh, really wanted to use, that they wouldn't have to take funding and they didn't for five years.
And you know, here they are after 10 years as, as a billion dollar company. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's a great. It's a great story. What, what Brandon, what's got you the most excited about canvas, future? I know some friends that have invested in Canva and I questioned the billion dollar valuation based on revenues recently, a late-night over some pizza and red wine, and they just kept coming back to me saying, you've got to meet the team.
You've got to meet the team. So, you know, getting that founding team right. And, you know, um, plus, you know, at a good dose of resilience and I think it's easy. Mm. Hmm. I think what's really clear is that they are pointing to a future that is, they're not looking to Adobe and Microsoft to, to acquire them.
They look like they're doing the classic, not we're going solar. Well, I interviewed Cameron Adams last week in Sydney. I asked him that question, uh, and he said, no, everyone's on board for the complete vision. Um, we're not looking to sell out on Adobe and Microsoft. Wow. Wow. I have no idea what a Microsoft or Adobe would do with them.
I mean, they kind of epitomizes the opposite of open and collaborative, which is what canvas is going for. Well, that's a very, that's so sharp. I mean, culturally, that's why it would be such a tough proposition from a publicly listed company point of view, particularly on the Adobe side, they run the very big risk of being the Kings of design brackets.
Old-school professional and canvas could be the democratize, our video, much like YouTube has done to the television industry. I think. I think this is on the cards. So you could see them thinking about just, I mean, they're obviously they have their own competitive products, but culturally, will they ever be able to nurture products like that when they do, as you quite rightly said, they come from a totally different world.
Don't they. Yeah. Well, when these acquisitions happen, obviously innovation tends to stop. Um, but this situation of Canva reminds me a little bit of a Yahoo when they rejected the sorry, a Facebook, when they rejected the billion dollar offer from Yahoo, you know, quite a few people left at that point in time, thinking that was crazy.
We should have taken that off. And he said everyone that was left, they were into the full vision. And I think maybe canvas feels like they're in a similar position now. Yes, actually. That's right, Chad, isn't it. We heard that when we did the Zuckerberg show, he spoke about that being one of the, one of the toughest moments.
Prob probably he's going through another one of those right now, but that was one of the toughest moments because he said there was a huge, like a talent drain, like tons of people left. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think, uh, for, for Canva, the, the fact that Melanie and the team knew very early on that it was about bringing design to the masses and everything they've done both in the product and how they've run the company has, has been towards that, that aim and that goal.
Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there you go so much to learn from bootstrapping right through to just. Democratizing design. It's all there from Melanie Perkins and the canvas team. Brendan, you've done your first moonshots podcasts. Thank you so much for coming on the show. How was it decoding, such a familiar entrepreneur and company?
What was that like for you? Look, there's a heap of fun. I mean, obviously I'm a big fan of Australian startups going into global markets, so yeah. Dissect. This one was just a great fun. And thanks for having me guys. Hopefully you'll have me again. One time in the future of, of course we, we will this, what is the triggering moment, Chad?
Do you think it will be the third unicorn that we bring a Brendan yell as a return guests? No, no. We'll bring them back sooner than that, but I can't let you go, uh, Brendan without soliciting some suggestions from you on who you think innovators, entrepreneurs, and companies that Mike and I should profile going forward.
We've got a Yvon Chouinard from Patagonia. Uh, coming up, but, um, who else do you think would be a useful for us to, to unpack and decode and learn from? Look, I think, um, there'd be a number of ones out there to be honest. I'm just, I'm quite a big fan of Gary Vaynerchuk. I know he's a different kind of entrepreneur and founder in his own.
Right. But, you know, I think he's journey is an interesting one, especially when it comes to resilience. He does have that, obviously that. Or New York and New Jersey hustle, I think is a, uh, a very interesting character. Um, and yeah, I would say you see what you yeah. Dissect Gary. That would be fun. Cool. He's not on our list, so I'll have to add.
Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so. Uh, a big call out to, to all our listeners around the world, from Minneapolis to Amsterdam, to Bucharest. Uh, we, we just love all of your feedback. We love your suggestions. Um, you can get everything you need about the show from moonshots.io. Obviously we're, uh, slipping into your favorite podcatcher whether it's on iTunes.
Or one of those other groovy applications on your smartphone, but remember you can go check us out on the website. You can grab all our content as well on Facebook. We're sort of omni-channel as they say in the groovy marketing world, but we really do need your suggestions, your feedback to keep coming in.
And, uh, we, we really do. Look forward to the next couple of shows. We're going to look at the founder of Patagonia. Sounds like we're doing Gary Vander, Chuck. Uh, thanks to, to Brendan yell. So, so much to look forward to. So Chad, Brendan, thank you guys so much for another great show. Our Ozzy theme show. I think it would only be appropriate that as we sign off, we, uh, put a bit of bread in the toaster, get out the Vegemite.
And celebrate all that good entrepreneurial energy coming from down under the land of Australia. So, uh, on that note, uh, Chad, thank you. Did you enjoy the show? Yeah, is it, is it too much for me to say good day, mate? My E I tell you what if you're not half Romanian. You're definitely half Australian with a good day, mate, yelly.
So good to finally get you on the show. It's so great to be back in Australia and seeing all the magic that you're doing. Thank you ever so much, mate. Did you have a bit of a blast? Hey, that's a, that was a heap of fun. Hey, and if there are any startup founders that are coming down to Sydney, I'll put some snags on the barbecue for you.
There you go. So on that note, I'm going to sign off, get my Vegemite toast, going thorough shrimp on the Barbie and have a schooner to you. All our listeners. Thanks very much. That's it. From the moonshots podcast, that's a wrap.