Canva's Fusion Books Origins

A story about how Canva started as a yearbook design company called Fusion Books before becoming a $40B design software company.

"Canva is basically a product that lets you design things like marketing brochures, infographics, ads, banners, emails without being a designer. You don't have to have design skills - they have enough templates and it's easy enough to just change photos, colors and text that you'll get a good looking output without being a designer.

They just raised at a $40 billion valuation, which is insane - it's one of the most valuable companies to come out of Australia. The founder Melanie Perkins was a design teacher at a school for design and art. They started with a product called Fusion Books, trying to solve the problem of laying out yearbooks and photo books. They funded it with money from their tax return and part-time jobs.

What's interesting is those early years - there's a photo of her at some trade show with her Fusion Books yearbook thing, standing there behind the table with no people at her booth. She admits the booth was a huge waste of money because there were more exhibitors than attendees. They didn't know how to code, didn't know how to find a technical person - it was just her and her boyfriend trying to do this. They managed to convince one part-time engineer to help them."