The software was impossible. Students sat in computer labs, staring at Photoshop’s maze of toolbars, palettes, and nested menus, trying to design a simple yearbook page. It took them an entire semester just to learn where the buttons were. And this was supposed to be the easy part of their education.
Melanie Perkins watched this torture play out repeatedly as she taught design classes at the University of Western Australia in 2007. She was nineteen years old, and what she witnessed made no sense. Why should creating a basic layout require months of training and software that cost hundreds of dollars? Why was graphic design locked behind walls that only professionals with specialized training could scale?
That frustration became a business insight that would eventually be worth $42 billion.
Perth to Silicon Valley: Building the Prototype
Born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1987, Perkins showed entrepreneurial instincts early. At fourteen, she was already running a small business selling handmade scarves. But her real education began in those university computer labs where she watched students struggle with design software built for professionals, not normal people trying to communicate visually.
The idea was straightforward: create an online platform where anyone could produce professional-looking graphics through simple drag-and-drop tools and templates. No training required. No expensive software licenses. Just accessible design for everyone.
But Perkins and her boyfriend Cliff Obrecht, who would later become her husband and co-founder, weren’t naive. They knew launching a full design platform from Perth with no funding and no technical expertise was impossible. So they narrowed their focus to something achievable: yearbooks.
In 2007, they launched Fusion Books from her mother’s living room. The online yearbook design tool used drag-and-drop functionality and templates that schools could customize without technical knowledge. Perkins’ mother proofread pages. Obrecht’s mother handled accounts. It was a family operation solving a specific problem for a specific market.
Within five years, Fusion Books became Australia’s largest yearbook publisher, expanding into New Zealand and France. The business validated the core insight: people wanted simple design tools that didn’t require professional training.
But yearbooks were just the proof of concept. Perkins wanted to build the platform she had originally envisioned—one that would democratize design at global scale.
The Rejection Tour: One Hundred Reasons to Quit
To transform Fusion Books into a comprehensive design platform, Perkins and Obrecht needed capital and technical expertise they didn’t possess. In 2012, Perkins flew to San Francisco, crashed on her brother’s floor, and began pitching venture capitalists across the West Coast.
She heard no more than one hundred times.
The rejections varied in flavor but shared common themes: Who was this young woman from Perth with no technology background trying to compete against Adobe and Microsoft? The design software market was mature and dominated by established players with massive resources. Why would anyone bet on a yearbook company to disrupt that?
Every pitch ended the same way. Thank you for coming. We’ll pass.
Most entrepreneurs would have quit. Perkins refined her approach. She realized she was leading with technical solutions instead of emotional problems. She stopped talking about features and started telling stories about frustrated students, small business owners who couldn’t afford professional designers, and teams that needed to communicate visually but lacked the skills.
The shift was transformative. When investors could relate to the pain point—everyone had opened Photoshop and felt overwhelmed—they understood the market opportunity.
The Kitesurfing Investor: Unconventional Networking
The breakthrough came through Bill Tai, a prominent Silicon Valley investor known for hosting kitesurfing retreats called MaiTai that brought together entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Perkins met Tai at an event in Perth, and he invited her to pitch at one of his gatherings.
There was one problem: Perkins didn’t kitesurf. And frankly, she was terrified of deep water.
She learned anyway.
The risk calculation was simple: serious injury versus starting her company. For an entrepreneur, that wasn’t really a choice. She taught herself kitesurfing, showed up at MaiTai, and impressed Tai enough to secure introductions throughout Silicon Valley.
Through Tai, Perkins connected with Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Maps, who became an adviser. Rasmussen introduced her to Cameron Adams, a former Google designer based in Sydney. Adams joined as the third co-founder and chief product officer in 2012, bringing the technical expertise Perkins and Obrecht lacked.
The team raised $3 million in initial funding. Canva launched publicly on January 1, 2013.
Building the Empire: From Free Users to Fortune 500
Canva’s business model was deceptively simple: offer powerful design tools for free, then upsell premium features, templates, and enterprise capabilities to users who needed more functionality. The freemium approach allowed rapid user acquisition while building a paying customer base.
Within its first year, Canva had 750,000 users. By 2017, it reached profitability with 294,000 paying customers. That same year, Canva achieved something that validated its entire premise: it became one of the few profitable unicorns in the startup ecosystem.
The growth accelerated from there. Canva raised multiple funding rounds, with its valuation climbing from $1 billion in 2018 to $2.5 billion in 2019, then $40 billion by September 2021. Even as tech valuations corrected in 2022, Canva maintained a $26 billion valuation—still making it the most valuable startup founded and led by a woman.
In August 2025, Canva conducted an employee share sale that valued the company at $42 billion, with major investors including Fidelity and JPMorgan Chase participating. The company now serves 240 million monthly active users across 190 countries and generates $3.3 billion in annual recurring revenue.
More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Canva. That’s not just impressive adoption—it’s market dominance.
The Perkins Doctrine: Imagination First, Execution Second
Perkins operates from a philosophy she calls “Column B thinking”—focusing not on incremental improvements to existing solutions but on fundamentally reimagining what’s possible. That mindset drove Canva’s evolution from yearbooks to design platform to workplace collaboration suite.
Her 2050 vision is characteristically ambitious: use technology, including AI, to ensure every person’s basic human needs are met. It’s the kind of goal that sounds impossibly idealistic until you remember this is someone who turned a $3 million seed round into a $42 billion company in twelve years.
Lessons for Market Disruptors
Perkins’ success offers a playbook for taking on entrenched competitors. First, identify pain points that incumbents ignore because they’re optimizing for professional users, not mainstream adoption. Second, build proof of concept in a narrow market before tackling the broader opportunity. Third, treat rejection as market research—every no reveals an objection to address. Fourth, recruit co-founders whose skills complement yours rather than mirror them.
Most importantly, bet on simplicity. In a world where technology grows more complex daily, the companies that win are often those that make powerful capabilities accessible to everyone. That insight—born in a Perth computer lab watching students struggle with Photoshop—became the foundation of a design revolution.
At thirty-eight, Perkins shows no signs of slowing down. Analysts predict a Canva IPO could value the company between $75 billion and $200 billion, potentially making it the largest public offering ever led by a female founder-CEO. Whether that happens or Canva remains private, its impact is already undeniable.
For business leaders navigating AI disruption, platform competition, and shifting customer expectations, Perkins’ journey offers a clear message: the future belongs not to those with the most sophisticated technology, but to those who make sophisticated technology feel simple. In an era of overwhelming complexity, simplicity isn’t just good design.
It’s the ultimate competitive advantage.
