An excerpt from AP March 2020 Print Leaders Forum – by Canva CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins
Earlier this year, Canva was valued at US$3.2 billion, which was exciting but where I see this number at is US$3.2 billion in promises to our investors. The promise is that we’re going to be building a company that will last a long time to come, and that we’re going to continue to value for years.
It is also a promise to our community that we’re going to build a product to help them pave their goals out in the real world. It’s a promise for our team that we’re going to have a company that will last for a long time to come and that we live up to our values.
And it’s a huge promise to the world because we now have such an incredible opportunity and responsibility to show that we’re able to do such an incredible job with all the powers and opportunity that we have before us to live up to what we have in this world.
Our mission is to empower the world to design. In order to do that, we need to be able to empower everyone to design no matter what their requirements are and what size of a business they are in. We need to ensure that whatever device they are on, wherever in the world, they have access to design and they need to have all the high-quality designs that they need.
I want to share some of the magic behind Canva.
Design is not about learning really complicated tools. Design should not be something exclusive and reserved for only a small few. Design should not be very complicated where you take years to learn the skill.
Design is so much more than making something look pretty. We, at Canva, believe that design is communication, and more importantly that design should be for everyone. In fact, we have spent a long time doing just this.
Something that warms my heart is the power of design to help people achieve their goals. Wherever you are in the world, whatever your profession, we want to ensure that design is accessible to everyone.
After a year in operation, we had 1.3 million designs created on Canva. After two years, we had 5.8 million designs created every single month. And now, after six years, we’ve had over 130 million designs created per month.
It’s absolutely phenomenal and a huge testament to the work of everyone at Canva.
They say it takes a village to raise a child but I want to make a slight addition to that – it takes a village to build a company. Thank you to our team who have taken so much time and energy to build Canva.
As part of our village, we have people join us from all across the globe and across Australia. This includes our community, investors, and partners.
So much effort has been put into every detail, and there’s so much creativity and passion in everyone. It’s absolutely amazing to see how much we have achieved. It takes so much work to make complex things simple.
When you see Canva’s products, they’re certainly simple but there’s so much effort, time and energy that has gone into it. But it is not just our products that have this. Our people teams have put so much energy into creating an incredible place and turning our office into our wonderful home.
We’ve now got 784 people at Canva – it’s pretty phenomenal just how quickly we’ve grown. And it’s so amazing to have all their hearts, minds, time, energy and hard work go into Canva every single day to build such an incredible product.
This article was written prior to the impact of COVID-19. The digital version of AP March 2020 is available here.
And as part of AP’s 70 anniversary, we’re pulling together a list of 70 local industry pioneers – you can make your nominations here.
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