Melanie Perkins

On a September morning in 2022, Melanie Perkins stood outside a hair salon in Surry Hills, Sydney, peering through the double doors at women in highlight foils and black capes. A half-mannequin in a feather boa sat on top of a cabinet near the back wall. She pointed to it. That's where the computers used to be. A decade earlier, this storefront — Sterling, it's called now — had been the cramped, chaotic headquarters of Fusion Books, the yearbook publishing company Perkins and her then-boyfriend Cliff Obrecht had bootstrapped out of what she later described as "a rummage pile of everything." They'd cleaned it out, installed a bank of monitors, and spent nearly every waking hour there, printing and shipping yearbooks to Australian high schools while nurturing a vision so disproportionate to their surroundings that it would have seemed delusional to anyone who happened to wander in.

The vision was this: build the world's most valuable company.

Not "build a successful Australian startup." Not "create a nice design tool." The world's most valuable company. Perkins was twenty-five years old, without a technical background, without Silicon Valley connections, without a completed university degree, operating from the back of what would become a hair salon in a country whose tech ecosystem barely registered on the global map. She had been rejected by more than one hundred venture capitalists. She would be rejected by many more. And the company she would eventually build — Canva, a visual communications platform now valued at $32 billion, used by more than 220 million people monthly across 190 countries, generating $3 billion in annual revenue — would not launch for another year.

But the dream was already fully formed. It had been since she was nineteen.

There is a framework Perkins uses to explain how she thinks, and it is worth understanding because it illuminates nearly every decision she has ever made. She calls it "column B" thinking.

Column A, in her telling, is how most planning works: you look at the bricks you have — your resources, your experience, your existing constraints — and you try to stack them into something reasonable. Column B is the opposite. You start with the future you want to inhabit, the impossible thing, the outcome that sounds absurd when you say it aloud, and then you work backward, building a ladder to a destination that doesn't yet exist. "Most planning is often done by looking at the bricks and trying to stack them," she told Lenny Rachitsky in late 2025. "The column B thinking is thinking about what is that magical, wonderful future that you then want to invest years and decades of your life actually building."

This distinction matters because Canva's entire history is a story of column B thinking applied with a patience and granularity that most founders — most people — cannot sustain. The gap between the dream and the first step was not merely large. It was humiliating. "It feels a little embarrassing to be like, I want a future... and then to take such a microscopic step," Perkins admitted. The microscopic step was yearbooks. Australian high school yearbooks. The future was everything.

Born on May 13, 1987, in Perth — a city closer to Jakarta than to Sydney, separated from Australia's eastern seaboard by a vast stretch of desert and approximately 2,044 miles of geographic irrelevance — Perkins grew up in a household that was multicultural in the specific way that Perth sometimes is: her mother an Australian-born teacher, her father a Malaysian engineer of Filipino and Sri Lankan heritage. The family was supportive, middle-class, unremarkable in its circumstances but apparently extraordinary in its encouragement. Perkins woke at 4:30 a.m. as a child for figure skating training, a discipline that instilled the particular kind of goal-oriented stubbornness she would later deploy against venture capitalists. At fourteen, she started selling handmade scarves at Perth markets. "I never forgot the freedom and excitement of being able to build a business," she later said. It was, by any measure, a modest enterprise. But the psychological pattern was set.

She enrolled at the University of Western Australia to study a combined major in communications, psychology, marketing, and management. She would not graduate. What she would do, beginning around 2006, was tutor fellow students in graphic design programs — Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, the full suite of tools that the professional creative class took for granted — and discover that the experience of learning these programs was, for ordinary people, something close to torture.

"People would have to spend an entire semester learning where the buttons were, and that seemed completely ridiculous."

It was a simple observation. Almost banal. But Perkins held it in her mind and refused to let it dissolve into the background noise of accepted frustration. Facebook was taking off. People could jump in and use that. Why did design tools take years of training? The gap between the ease of consumer internet applications and the brutality of professional design software struck her not as an inconvenience but as an injustice — a failure of imagination by the companies that made these tools. Microsoft. Adobe. They had built for professionals, for people who already knew how to design. Nobody was building for everyone else.

She was nineteen. She had no coding skills, no capital, no relevant industry experience. By her own account, she lacked "any relevant experience." But she had column B. And column B said: the entire design ecosystem, integrated into one platform, accessible to the whole world.

The bricks she had were her boyfriend, her mother's living room, and an AUD 50,000 loan from friends and family.

The decision to start with yearbooks was not a compromise. It was strategy — though it looked, at the time, like a compromise to everyone who encountered it.

Perkins understood, with an intuition that belied her age, that she could not attack the full design market from Perth with no technology, no team, and no money. But she could prove the thesis. If she could build a simple, web-based tool that allowed people with no design training to create something beautiful and functional — and if she could demonstrate that people would pay for that — then the broader vision became defensible. Yearbooks were the proving ground because her mother, a teacher, had spent hundreds of hours wrestling with desktop publishing software to produce her school's yearbook each year. The pain was real, the market was tangible, and the stakes were low enough that failure wouldn't be fatal.

In 2007, Perkins and Obrecht launched Fusion Books. Cliff Obrecht — who had been studying at the same university, who would become her co-founder, business partner, husband, and the person with whom she would eventually sign the Giving Pledge — was, in those early days, simply the boyfriend who said yes. He is a quieter presence in the Canva narrative, less visible than Perkins but no less consequential: the operational counterweight to her visionary ambition, the person who would eventually serve as COO and manage the unglamorous machinery of scaling a company while Perkins sold the dream. They contracted a Perth software development firm called InDepth, run by a man named Greg Mitchell, to build their first platform.

Perkins's mother's living room became the office. The physical yearbooks were printed there. Perkins and Obrecht, wearing what they later described as "dorky suits," went around Perth selling the service to schools. Their first customer was a French school in Sydney. Fifteen schools in the first year. Thirty the second. Eighty the third. Within five years, Fusion Books was the largest yearbook company in Australia and had expanded into New Zealand and France. It remains active today.

But for Perkins, Fusion Books was always and only the first rung on the ladder. The yearbook business validated the core premise — that non-designers could create professional-quality work with the right tool — but it was, by design, a stepping stone. The "crazy, big dream" was Canva. And for Canva, she needed something Fusion Books could not provide: capital.

The mythology of the startup pivot — the chance encounter, the lucky break, the single meeting that changes everything — is, in Perkins's case, both true and misleading. True because there was, in fact, a pivotal encounter. Misleading because the encounter only mattered because of what preceded it: years of failure, refinement, and the kind of relentless persistence that borders on the pathological.

In 2010, at a conference in Perth, Perkins met Bill Tai. Tai — a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, prolific early-stage investor, and passionate kitesurfer whose investment retreats doubled as extreme sports vacations — was the first serious person from the world of startup capital to hear Perkins pitch. What happened next has been retold so often it has the quality of parable. Tai was on his phone during the pitch. Perkins thought he wasn't listening, that she'd blown it, that her brief window of access to Silicon Valley money had closed before it opened. But Tai wasn't ignoring her. He was texting her pitch to his contacts. Within hours, he was connecting her to people who could help.

Among them was Lars Rasmussen, the Danish-Australian technologist who had co-founded Google Maps — a man who understood, better than almost anyone, how to take a complex technological capability and make it accessible to ordinary users. Rasmussen became an advisor, then an investor, and his involvement lent Perkins the credibility she desperately needed.

But credibility was not capital. Over the next three years, Perkins pitched more than one hundred venture capitalists. The rejections were comprehensive and varied: she was too young, too Australian, too female, too non-technical, too far from Sand Hill Road, too ambitious, not ambitious enough in the right ways. She and Obrecht traveled repeatedly to Silicon Valley, two unknown founders from Perth — a place most American VCs couldn't locate on a map — pitching a design tool that would compete with Adobe and Microsoft. The idea sounded either naive or insane, depending on the investor's mood.

"When you don't have any connections, you don't have any network, you just kind of have to wedge your foot in the door and wiggle it all the way through," Perkins later told CNBC.

Tai, the kitesurfing VC, had one additional demand: if Perkins wanted to network at MaiTai, his exclusive investor retreat, she and Obrecht would need to learn to kitesurf. They did. It wasn't their thing. Perkins has been candid about this. But she did it anyway, because access is access, and when you're a nineteen-to-twenty-two-year-old from Perth trying to raise money in Silicon Valley, you take whatever path presents itself, even if that path is strapped to a board in high winds.

What the rejections did — and this is the part of the story that matters more than the eventual yes — was sharpen the pitch. "Every time we were rejected or had tricky questions we'd improve our pitch decks," Perkins has said. Each no was a data point. Each skeptical question revealed a gap in the argument. The pitch deck evolved, version by version, into something precise and devastating: a visual argument for why the entire design industry was broken and why a web-based, freemium platform could fix it. "Their feedback made us stronger and made our pitch deck stronger," she told Lenny Rachitsky. "It was like a really intense boot camp."

The breakthrough came in 2012. The missing piece had always been technology — Perkins and Obrecht could sell, could envision, could pitch, but they could not build the product themselves. They needed a technical co-founder. They found Cameron Adams.

Cameron Adams had spent years at Google, where he'd worked as a designer and developer — a rare hybrid who understood both the aesthetics and the architecture of software. He was Australian, based in Melbourne, and he was exactly the kind of person Perkins needed: someone who could translate her vision into code, who understood the technical complexity that lay beneath the deceptive simplicity she was proposing.

Adams didn't join immediately. He was skeptical. The idea was enormous. The team was tiny. The resources were thin. But Perkins, as she had done with investors and would continue to do for the rest of her career, simply would not stop. She pitched Adams the way she pitched VCs — with the column B future, the impossible dream, the conviction that bordered on unreasonable. Eventually, he said yes. He joined as co-founder and Chief Product Officer, and his arrival transformed Canva from a vision into a viable technology company.

With Adams on board, the team secured a $1.5 million seed round in early 2012, with contributions from Tai, Rasmussen, and others. An additional $1.6 million came from investors, supplemented by $1.4 million in matching funds from the Australian government. The total — approximately $3 million — was enough to begin building the product. A technical developer named Dave Hearnden joined the team. The company was incorporated in Sydney on January 1, 2013. They chose the name after a French engineer pointed out that "canvas" is pronounced "canva" in French — simpler, cleaner, more universal.

Canva launched later that year with a premise so straightforward it was almost disarming: drag and drop. Templates. A vast library of elements — photos, icons, fonts, illustrations — organized so that someone with no design training could produce professional-quality work in minutes. The thesis was not that Canva would replace Photoshop for professional designers. It was that Canva would serve the billions of people who were not professional designers but who increasingly needed to produce visual content — for social media, for school, for work, for life.

The timing was exact. The rise of social media had created an unprecedented demand for visual content. Every small business, every teacher, every student, every nonprofit, every person with an Instagram account suddenly needed to be a designer. And the existing tools — Adobe's Creative Cloud, Microsoft's PowerPoint — were either too expensive, too complex, or both.

Canva was neither.

The first million users arrived by April 2014, barely a year after launch. The speed was startling, even to Perkins. The product had struck something — not just a market opportunity but a latent frustration that millions of people hadn't been able to articulate until someone solved it. Word of mouth was the primary engine. Users made things, shared them, and other people asked: What did you make that with?

The freemium model was the second engine. Canva's basic version was free — genuinely, substantively free, not the kind of "free" that makes you feel poor. You could design a social media graphic, a poster, a presentation, a business card, without paying anything. The paid tiers — Canva Pro, Canva for Teams, eventually Canva Enterprise — offered more templates, more storage, more brand management tools, but the free version was good enough that people used it, loved it, and told their friends. This was not accidental. It was the deliberate architecture of a company that understood its core bet: if you make design accessible to everyone, a percentage of everyone will pay for more.

By 2017, Canva was profitable on a free-cash-flow basis. It has remained so every year since — eight consecutive years of profitability, a feat almost unheard of among venture-backed technology companies of its scale. The company had $700 million in cash on hand. When VC money was flush, Canva earned the backing of Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Founders Fund. When other startups were laying off workers, Canva was hiring. When valuations collapsed across the tech sector, Canva's revenue kept growing.

The numbers tell one story. The product decisions tell another.

There is a period in Canva's history that Perkins rarely discusses in detail, though she has acknowledged it exists. After the early growth, the company's technical infrastructure began to buckle. The original codebase — built fast, by a small team, to prove a concept — could not support the product Perkins wanted to build next. The decision was made to rewrite the entire codebase from scratch.

For two years, Canva could not ship a single new feature.

Consider what this means for a consumer technology company in a market moving at the speed of social media. Two years without new capabilities, without the kind of product launches that generate press coverage and sustain user excitement. Two years of watching competitors move while you are, externally, standing still. Internally, the team was working furiously — rebuilding the foundation of the product, making choices that would determine whether Canva could scale from millions of users to hundreds of millions. But externally, there was silence.

Perkins has described this as one of the most difficult periods in Canva's history. The discipline required — to invest in infrastructure rather than features, to accept short-term stagnation for long-term capability — is the kind of decision that destroys most startups. Growth-stage companies are addicted to momentum. Investors demand it. Users expect it. The market punishes anything that looks like stalling. Perkins made the call anyway.

When Canva emerged from the rewrite, it was a different product — faster, more stable, capable of supporting the ambitious expansion that would follow. The visual worksuite. Enterprise tools. AI integration. International expansion into more than 100 languages. None of it would have been possible on the old infrastructure. The two-year silence was, in retrospect, the most important strategic decision Perkins made after founding the company. It was also the most invisible.

"We had this in our pitch deck back in 2011," Perkins said in September 2022, standing onstage at Canva's first Create event. "This was the final pillar."

The pitch deck she was referencing — the one she'd refined through more than a hundred rejections — had always contained a slide showing Canva's ultimate ambition: not just a design tool, but a complete visual communications platform that would compete with Google Docs, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Adobe's entire Creative Cloud. For eleven years, that slide had been aspirational. Now it was a product launch.

The visual worksuite was Canva's declaration of war against the productivity giants. Canva Docs. Canva Presentations. Canva Whiteboards. Canva Websites. Tools that looked and felt like Canva — simple, template-driven, visually rich — but occupied the functional territory of products that billions of people used every day. The bet was audacious: that in a world where communication was becoming increasingly visual, the distinction between "design software" and "productivity software" was artificial and would eventually collapse. Why should a presentation look different depending on whether you made it in Canva or PowerPoint? Why shouldn't a document be beautiful by default?

The enterprise push that followed was methodical. Canva had always grown bottom-up — individuals discovering the tool, using it, loving it, and then bringing it into their workplaces. By 2019, the company had launched its first enterprise products. By 2024, it was actively courting CIOs and Fortune 500 companies with features like brand template management, auto-provisioning with SCIM, and direct publishing to platforms like Meta and Amazon. Enterprise customers included Workday, Expedia, and FedEx. At Workday alone, Perkins claimed Canva had saved 33,000 hours.

Bob Iger — the former Disney CEO, Canva investor, and a man who knows something about the power of visual storytelling — appeared onstage at Canva Create in 2024 in Los Angeles. "I think she's very capable of running a company that is much larger and more complex than the company she runs," Iger told Fortune. Coming from a man who had run the Walt Disney Company, this was not a casual compliment.

But the enterprise transition also revealed the tension at the heart of Canva's identity. The company had been built for individuals — for the teacher making a classroom poster, the small business owner designing a flyer, the student building a résumé. Enterprise clients want control, compliance, security, the kinds of features that make software feel less magical and more institutional. "You can be as locked down with a brand template as you want, or as unlocked as you want," Perkins told Fortune. "There's the protection side and the unlocking side." The question — still unresolved — is whether one platform can serve both masters without losing the simplicity that made it beloved in the first place.

When generative AI erupted into public consciousness in late 2022 and early 2023, it posed an existential question for every design company: if anyone can generate an image with a text prompt, why do they need a design platform?

Perkins's answer was swift, confident, and characteristically reframed. She was not worried. "There wasn't a moment of concern that this might be an existential threat," she told WIRED. "No, not at all."

This was either genuine conviction or masterful performance. Probably both. Canva had been investing in AI for years before the generative explosion — its Background Remover tool, powered by the acquisition of AI company Kaleido in 2021, was one of the platform's most popular features. When the generative wave hit, Canva was already positioned to ride it. In March 2023, the company launched its first suite of AI-powered tools. In October, it introduced Magic Studio — a comprehensive AI toolkit including text-to-image generation, AI-powered layout suggestions, and automated content creation. In 2024, it acquired Leonardo.ai, an Australian text-to-image generator, deepening its AI capabilities further.

The branding choice was deliberate. Canva did not call its tools "AI." It called them "magic." "We believe what our customers really want is magic, versus the tech ecosystem that talks a lot about..." Perkins trailed off in a Fortune interview, declining to finish the sentence. The implication was clear: AI is a buzzword for technologists. Magic is what users actually experience. The distinction was not merely semantic — it reflected Canva's core philosophy that technology should be invisible, that the user should never have to understand how something works, only that it does.

By 2025, Canva had launched Canva Code — an AI-powered coding platform that could prototype apps from text prompts — and Canva Sheets, a spreadsheet tool competing with Google Sheets but infused with Canva's visual DNA. Perkins was using Code herself to build internal prototypes. "I had an idea on the way home the other day, and I was able to turn it into a prototype and then get it user-tested within an hour," she told Fortune. "Which is just completely crazy."

There was, however, a darker note. Just before the Canva Code launch, the Australian Financial Review reported that Canva had laid off ten of twelve technical writers. "Every single person is going to have to be upskilling into this new era," Perkins acknowledged. The tension between democratizing creation and eliminating the humans who previously did the creating was not one she could resolve with branding. It is the tension of the age.

In September 2021, Canva raised $200 million at a valuation of $40 billion, making it one of the most valuable private software companies on Earth and the most valuable female-founded and female-led company in history. Perkins and Obrecht's combined 30% stake was worth approximately $12 billion at that valuation. They were, by any metric, spectacularly wealthy.

Perkins used the occasion to announce what she called the Two-Step Plan.

Step One: Build one of the world's most valuable companies.

Step Two: Do the most good you can.

The steps, she argued, were not sequential but symbiotic — each fueling the other. She and Obrecht pledged the majority of their Canva shares to the Canva Foundation, a nonprofit focused on alleviating global poverty. They signed the Giving Pledge. Approximately 30% of Canva's total value was dedicated to philanthropic purposes.

"It was a really easy decision," Perkins told TIME. "How can you do the most good you can do with billions of dollars?"

The Canva Foundation has since partnered with GiveDirectly, the direct cash transfer organization, committing more than $150 million to provide unconditional cash to families in extreme poverty in Malawi. More than 85,000 people received transfers from the initial $50 million commitment; a subsequent $100 million pledge in 2025 will reach another 185,000. "Each story is different," Perkins wrote on LinkedIn, "but all prove a simple truth: when people are trusted to decide what they need most, the impact is extraordinary."

The company also donated more than $1 billion worth of product through Canva for Education and Canva for Nonprofits — free subscriptions to schools and charitable organizations worldwide.

Is this genuine altruism, strategic philanthropy, or a sophisticated form of brand-building? The honest answer is probably all three, inseparable and mutually reinforcing in ways that resist clean categorization. Perkins has been transparent about the interconnection: the company's mission to "empower the world to design" and its commitment to doing good are, in her framework, the same project. Canva for Education creates future Canva users. The Giving Pledge generates goodwill that attracts talent and customers who care about purpose. The Two-Step Plan is a business strategy dressed as a moral commitment — or a moral commitment that happens to be excellent business strategy. The distinction may not matter.

Perkins is, for a person of her visibility, remarkably opaque. She and Obrecht welcomed their first child in 2022 and have declined to discuss the matter publicly. When talking to journalists about any topic — not just her personal life — she monitors her own words with a precision that suggests both discipline and anxiety. "Sorry, that's not a good quote for you," she sometimes tells reporters, mid-answer.

This self-editing instinct is unusual among founders of her generation. The dominant Silicon Valley archetype is the founder-as-personality: visible, outspoken, cultivating a personal brand that becomes inseparable from the company's. Perkins has done the opposite. She is present but restrained, visible but contained. She speaks at conferences and gives interviews, but each appearance feels carefully calibrated — the talking points polished, the vulnerabilities revealed only in doses that serve the narrative. She will tell you about being rejected by a hundred investors. She will not tell you what she thought about at 2 a.m. during the two-year code rewrite when nothing was shipping.

The privacy is partly cultural. Australia is not Silicon Valley. The ethos of Perth — quiet, understated, suspicious of self-promotion — runs deep in Perkins despite a decade of global success. She and Obrecht married privately. They live, by all accounts, modestly relative to their wealth. When a 2021 Forbes feature noted that they had not made any flashy purchases, Perkins deflected: "I always like to have enough money in the bank that if the lights turned off tomorrow and everything disappeared, we've got enough capital to keep us together for a long time."

Being headquartered in Sydney, thousands of miles from Sand Hill Road, has been — depending on the moment — Canva's greatest liability and its most powerful asset. The liability is obvious: distance from capital, from talent pools, from the self-reinforcing ecosystem of Silicon Valley dinners and deal flow. The asset is subtler. Operating from Sydney gave Perkins the freedom to ignore the fads, the herd mentality, the whatever-is-fashionable-this-quarter thinking that drives so much of the Valley's strategic conversation. "Being private enables us to continue to flesh out exactly who we are and what we're doing," she told Fortune in 2024, "and make that really apparent to the world."

The world has been waiting for Canva to go public for years. Perkins doesn't seem to be in any rush.

Canva's internal culture is organized around what Perkins calls "crazy big goals" — annual priorities so ambitious they sound, by her own admission, slightly absurd. One year the goal is to rewrite the codebase. Another year it's to launch in every language. Another it's to build AI. The goals are not aspirational in the polite corporate sense — they are the kind of targets that would make a reasonable person's palms sweat.

The company operates in what Perkins describes as "small startups" — teams of three to six people, each with their own goals and plans, designed to move as fast as a startup within the structure of a company that now employs more than 3,500 people. Decisions, according to several accounts, are radically decentralized. Teams ship features without management sign-off. Product choices that take competitors weeks of meetings happen in a single conversation. The philosophy is that control creates drag; clarity eliminates it.

"If a team could answer three specific criteria, they moved forward," as one account of Canva's internal process described it. "No manager loop required."

To celebrate achieving crazy big goals, Canva has thrown tomatoes in the style of La Tomatina. They have smashed plates. The celebrations are as deliberate as the goals themselves — ritualistic, communal, designed to mark the distance traveled. "If you're just trying to plod to the top of the mountain always and you never take a moment to pat yourself on the back," Perkins has said, "it can feel a little arduous."

The goals themselves — achieve them they do, though the timelines shift. "The time frame that we achieve them on has not always been reliable," Perkins admitted. "But over five years, they've really been coming into reality." This is column B thinking at organizational scale: the destination is fixed, the path is flexible, and the patience required is extraordinary.

In late 2025, Perkins sat for a BBC interview and was asked about the current moment — about AI, about the future of the internet, about what comes next. She was thirty-eight years old. She ran a company worth $32 billion. She had been doing this for nearly two decades, since she was a teenager selling scarves at Perth markets, since she was a university dropout teaching Photoshop in a multimedia lab, since she was a young woman on a kiteboard in high winds trying to impress a venture capitalist who wasn't even watching her ride.

"We have a crazy big dream," she had written on LinkedIn earlier that year, "that by the end of our lifetimes, everyone on this planet will have their basic human needs met. It's terribly sad that this is still considered a crazy big dream."

The interviewer asked about Canva's IPO. Perkins said it was "on the horizon" but there was "no news." The world was waiting. Perkins was building.

Somewhere in Surry Hills, the mannequin in the feather boa still sits on top of the cabinet where the computers used to be.