Designing Against All Odds
Melanie Perkins always thinks big. “If I don’t feel small and inadequate before it, it’s not big enough,” she says. “If it doesn’t simultaneously move me, scare me, excite me, and humble me, the goal probably isn’t big enough.”
That audacious mindset has been her guiding star from the very start of her entrepreneurial journey. In 2007, nineteen-year-old Perkins was teaching design programs like Adobe Photoshop to fellow university students when she discovered a fundamental problem: the software was unnecessarily complicated. Her students spent whole classes just learning where the buttons were. They grew so frustrated with the tools that they could barely focus on design.
Perkins, then a psychology and communications student at the University of Western Australia, saw how badly everyday people needed a simpler way to create graphics. Every tutoring session reinforced her conviction. The tools available were expensive and intimidating.
Guiding one struggling student after another, Perkins developed a vision for a simpler, more affordable solution. Why not make design software that anyone could use? It was a question that would change their lives. “The question was, could it be us that could create that?” Perkins later told Fortune.
“If I don’t feel small and inadequate before it, it’s not big enough. If it doesn’t simultaneously move me, scare me, excite me, and humble me, the goal probably isn’t big enough.”
Melanie Perkins
Perkins was no stranger to chasing entrepreneurial ideas. Growing up in Perth, at age 14 she had even launched a tiny business selling handmade scarves to friends and family. It wasn’t a high-tech startup, but crafting and marketing her own products taught her the thrill of building something from scratch and the grit it takes to follow through. That early taste of entrepreneurship gave her the confidence to believe she could tackle bigger problems.
With minimal resources, Melanie and her boyfriend (now husband and business partner) Cliff decided to test their idea on a manageable scale. They started Fusion Books, an online school yearbook design business. Neither of them realized that this small venture would be the first step toward building what would become Canva, a multi-billion-dollar design platform. As Perkins set out to simplify design, her headquarters was as humble as it gets. “My mum’s living room became my office, and my boyfriend became my business partner, and we started enabling schools to create their yearbooks really, really simply,” Perkins explained to CNBC.
Humble Beginnings
Rather than try to boil the ocean of graphic design all at once, the young founders focused on a slice of the market they understood well: Australian high school yearbooks. It was a problem close to home. Melanie’s mother was a high school teacher who spent countless late nights struggling with desktop publishing software to lay out the annual yearbook.
Perkins remembered watching her mom wrestle with Adobe InDesign for hundreds of hours just to create a single book. It seemed absurd that teachers with no design training and already busy with full-time jobs had to become makeshift graphic designers. That insight convinced Melanie and Cliff that yearbooks were the perfect place to start making design simpler.
Fusion Books launched in 2011 with a small contracted tech team. The web-based tool stripped away the complexity of traditional design software, allowing schools to collaboratively create beautiful yearbooks online. The business was immediately successful, eventually serving over 400 high schools at its peak. In the scrappy early days, Melanie and Cliff were the whole company. When a customer called asking to “speak to a manager,” Cliff would deepen his voice over the phone to impersonate an entire customer support department. Fusion Books ran successfully for years, proving the model worked. But for Perkins, its success was merely validation of a much grander vision: if teachers could design yearbooks, why couldn’t everyone design everything?
In their early twenties, not long after they met, the pair decided to go backpacking together on a shoestring budget — a trial by fire outside the business world. They saved up what little they had and spent months trekking through remote parts of India and Africa. “We went to places we had never even heard of, staying in the cheapest accommodation we could find,” Perkins recalls of that transformative trip. Growing up in the comfortable surrounds of Perth, “I thought that was the whole world,” she says. “Then you get to the outskirts of India and realize it is just a tiny speck on the map.”
Navigating chaotic bus stations, haggling for food in foreign languages, and finding safe places to sleep at night forced them to solve problems together under pressure. They discovered a shared lust for adventure and a talent for teamwork. “We learned that we quite liked spending time together, and we learned that we could take on challenges,” Perkins reflects. By the time they returned home, Melanie and Cliff knew they made a formidable pair in any circumstance — an insight that would carry them through the wild ride of building a company.
That deep bond became a secret weapon once they turned their focus to startups. Cliff readily acknowledges Melanie’s strengths. “She is the more capable one,” he often says — one reason he had no hesitation naming her CEO of their new company, Canva, while he took on a complementary role. As co-founders (and eventually as husband and wife), they established clear roles based on their talents. Melanie drove the product vision, brand, and overall strategy, and Cliff gravitated toward operations, finance, and cultivating the company’s culture.
They also cheer each other on relentlessly. After one hard-won early fundraising victory, Cliff sent Melanie an email that read: “You are the best businesswoman in the world, and I am so proud of you. Well done. You WILL SUCCEED. I HAVE NO DOUBT.” It’s this mix of unwavering mutual support and humility that helped propel Canva’s rise. Together, they weren’t just co-founders — they were partners in every sense, navigating the entrepreneurial journey side by side.
The Road to Silicon Valley
With Fusion Books proving that even novices could design given the right tool, Perkins set her sights on a far bigger canvas: a global online design platform that anyone could use. To build that, they would need mentorship, talent, and serious capital.
In 2012, Melanie flew to San Francisco with the bold goal of convincing Silicon Valley investors to back her vision. She crashed on her brother’s couch and embarked on what became a grueling three-month fundraising marathon.
The rejection count was staggering — more than 100 “no’s” from venture capitalists. Perkins heard every reason why her idea wouldn’t work: Investors weren’t comfortable backing co-founders who were in a relationship. They were wary of doing an overseas deal with an Australian startup far from the Valley. Some thought design software for non-designers was too niche; others simply weren’t convinced this young founder without a Stanford degree could crack the market. Each day seemed to bring a fresh no.
Instead of letting the refusals crush her spirit, Melanie treated them as feedback. Every time an investor dismissed her, she refined her pitch. If someone thought the market was too small, she dug up data to show how vast the pool of would-be designers really was. If they questioned her lack of a technical co-founder, she doubled down on finding the right person to add to the team. Question by question, no by no, her vision for Canva sharpened. In a way, those 100+ VC meetings became a free bootcamp in how to build an unassailable business plan.
Yet for all her hustle, by the end of her three-month U.S. visa, Melanie still hadn’t secured a single check. One chilly evening toward the end of that trip, Perkins sat alone in her brother’s sparse San Francisco apartment, the weight of uncertainty pressing down on her. Emotionally drained, she decided to do something unusual to keep her confidence up: she wrote herself a pep-talk letter.
“Mel, you’re extremely tired. You are in a challenging situation, though you can pull through. Nothing bad is really happening. You’re just feeling depressed because you are used to achieving things quickly. It’s a hard environment. There is no doubt you will succeed and you will find the team you need, get the investment you need and build the company you have always wanted. You have chosen to put yourself in a challenging situation. If it wasn’t challenging you wouldn’t feel as satisfied when you get to the end goal.”
Years later, in 2024, she would read this very letter aloud to an audience at the SXSW Conference — proof that her self-belief was not misplaced.
The Kitesurfing Gamble
With those encouraging words echoing in her mind, Perkins flew back to Australia empty-handed but unflinching. Her break came a few months later in 2012, via an unexpected invitation. Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai, whom she’d met briefly at a Perth conference, invited Melanie and Cliff to MaiTai, his exclusive gathering of tech investors and kitesurfing enthusiasts in Maui, Hawaii. The catch? Everyone there was an avid kitesurfer, and Melanie and Cliff had never so much as touched a kite. But they instantly knew this was the kind of opportunity you don’t pass up.
“I had not done [kitesurfing] before — and, to be honest, it’s not something that I would normally, naturally try,” Perkins said. “I decided to give it a go because when you don’t have any connections, you just kind of have to wedge your foot in the door and wiggle it all the way through.”
“I decided to give it a go because when you don’t have any connections, you just kind of have to wedge your foot in the door and wiggle it all the way through.”
Melanie Perkins
The founders spent months practicing the sport, learning to harness the wind and waves on weekends. It was wildly outside their comfort zone (more than a few crashes and face-plants into the water attested to that), but they approached it with the same determination they brought to their startup. By the time they arrived in Maui, they could at least stay upright on the board. They had also nearly emptied their bank account to be there – cashing out a large chunk of their modest business savings to afford flights and accommodations for what felt like a last shot at making their dream happen.
The scene at MaiTai was something out of a movie: venture capitalists and founders in wetsuits, talking term sheets between kite runs on crystal-blue Pacific waves. On those beaches, Melanie worked her way into conversations and made an impression.
She and Cliff met a fellow Australian, Rick Baker, who was in the process of launching a Sydney-based VC firm called Blackbird Ventures. One afternoon, they pitched him on what they envisioned as the next evolution of Fusion Books – a global online design platform initially codenamed “Canvas Chef,” where users could add graphics to templates as easily as a chef adds toppings to a pizza. They also met several angel investors during the retreat, carving out informal pitch sessions in between kite sessions and beachside BBQs. The intimate, adventurous setting turned out to be exactly the edge Melanie had hoped for.
Their Maui gamble paid off. Rick Baker and his partners became the first big believers. By early 2013, Canva secured a modest $3 million seed funding round – essentially a “party round” of about 30 different investors led by Blackbird Ventures. The Australian government also awarded Perkins an additional $2 million innovation grant, bringing their initial funding to roughly $5 million. More important than the dollars, that seed round finally gave Perkins something she had been missing: a technical co-founder.
Through connections made at MaiTai, Melanie was introduced to a talented ex-Google engineer named Cameron Adams, who was already something of a rockstar in tech circles. A designer-turned-engineer, Adams had co-founded an email app and worked on Google Wave, earning a reputation as a creative technologist.
Initially, Cameron was hesitant to join this fledgling startup when Melanie first pitched him on it. (“He said no, actually,” Melanie recounts with a laugh.) But Melanie’s passion was persuasive. After several more conversations – and perhaps seeing the unstoppable determination in Perkins’ eyes – Adams changed his mind. “It was extraordinarily exciting to get to work with him,” she remembers.
Just like that, the trio was complete: Melanie, the visionary designer-CEO; Cliff, the operational backbone and culture cultivator; and Cameron, the technical product genius who could architect their platform. Canva was officially born.
When Launch Day Almost Didn’t Happen
With funding in the bank and a team in place, Melanie and her co-founders raced to build the first version of Canva. What users would eventually experience as an effortless, playful design app was actually incredibly complex to create behind the scenes.
The team spent months perfecting an interface that felt simple. They insisted on getting every button and feature just right, even as some investors pushed them to launch quickly. Early user tests were rough — people hesitated to click anything, afraid they’d do something wrong. The feedback was clear: the software wasn’t the issue so much as the self-doubt it provoked in inexperienced users.
“We realized it wasn’t just the software that needed to be simple; we had to build people’s confidence. Every confusing button made users feel stupid. We had to get that foundation right,” Perkins said of those early days. So the Canva team doubled down to refine the product and make the experience as unintimidating as possible.
Then, just days before the big launch date (set for August 26, 2013), disaster nearly struck. Co-founder Cameron Adams was hit by a taxi while crossing the street. He ended up in the hospital with stitches and bruises. For a moment, Melanie feared their launch might be doomed — their technical lead was literally lying in a hospital bed on the eve of release. But Cameron was as resilient as the company he now helped build. He returned to work almost immediately, bandaged but determined to meet the deadline. His grit set the tone. Canva officially went live on time, and the team celebrated – briefly.
No startup launch is ever the finish line, and Canva’s was no exception. Shortly after going public, they noticed many new users still lacked confidence in their own design abilities. Watching screen recordings of first-timers, the team heard people muttering things like “I’m not creative” or “I don’t know how to design this.” It was dispiriting: the tool was working, but users’ mindsets were holding them back.
Melanie drew on her psychology background and some research she’d been reading about gamification. What if the product could gently coax users into feeling creative? In response, Canva introduced playful onboarding challenges to get people designing right away. As soon as someone signed up, the app would prompt them to perform tiny, delightfully simple tasks – like dragging a hat onto a cartoon monkey or changing the hat’s color to red. Instead of staring at a blank canvas feeling lost, new users were playing and creating within seconds.
It turned out to be exactly the nudge people needed. Those who had sworn “I’m not creative” found themselves laughing and completing their first design with ease. Confidence grew, and so did word of mouth.
Usage began to explode. An unexpected group drove a lot of Canva’s early growth: social media managers and small business owners who suddenly needed to churn out lots of visual content for Facebook, X (then Twitter), and blogs. These were people with zero formal design training – precisely the audience Melanie had envisioned – and Canva became their secret weapon. By solving the psychological hurdle as well as the technical one, the team set Canva up for the kind of viral growth most startups only dream of.
Scaling Canva
It took Canva only about two years from its launch to reach one million monthly active users by late 2015. The growth that followed was a startup fairy tale. One million became two, then four, then ten – each year doubling the last. By 2025 the company reported more than 240 million monthly active users.
In 2018, at age 31, Melanie Perkins became one of tech’s youngest female CEOs to lead a unicorn. That same year, HSG invested in Canva. Then known as Sequoia Capital China, HSG joined the cap table as Canva reached its first billion-dollar valuation. The partnership arrived as the company was evolving from a popular consumer tool into a versatile platform for teams and enterprises, and it aligned with Canva’s plan to expand its template library, collaboration features, and go-to-market in new regions.
Canva’s rise was built on deliberate strategic decisions made early, when Melanie, Cliff, and Cameron were laser-focused on translating their vision into reality. One counterintuitive bet they made in the beginning was to invest heavily in content before even launching. Canva’s founding team of 12 hired designers around the world to create a vast library of templates and design elements ahead of time. In fact, they amassed over one million licensed photos, illustrations, and layouts in the system before the first user ever signed up. It seemed reckless to outsiders – why spend so much effort on content with no guarantee people would come? – but it proved to be Canva’s secret weapon.
Whatever a user wanted to design, there was a template for that. “We started with a million templates and photos and illustrations,” Perkins shared. “With Canva, we now have 100 million.” In other words, they paved an on-ramp to creativity so wide and welcoming that nearly anyone could find a foothold.
From the outset, Canva also committed to listening intently to user feedback and iterating at lightning speed. “Right from those very early days, we’d speak to our customers, learn what they wanted, then iterate on it,” Perkins said. The product improved in response to real needs. The core model – a freemium software where the basic tools are free and extra features or content come with a paid subscription – remained intact and wildly effective. The free version of Canva was so robust and useful that people happily shared it with friends or colleagues, creating a viral loop. Over time, many of those users naturally upgraded to paid plans, not because they were forced to, but because the value was obvious.
“If people feel really confident in the free product, they’re happy to share it,” Melanie noted. “And if they feel the paid product is great value, they’re happy to share that too.” In short, Canva grew by empowerment, not by tricks – turning customers into its evangelists.
“Right from those very early days, we’d speak to our customers, learn what they wanted, then iterate on it.”
Melanie Perkins
That quiet, compounding growth strategy resonated deeply across industries. The rise of the social media age meant everyone needed visual content, from a boutique owner posting on Instagram to a Fortune 500 marketing team launching a global campaign. With Canva, anyone could create polished graphics in minutes, no design degree required. Teams spread it organically, emailing designs back and forth, discovering the app’s collaborative features to work together in real time. Canva jumped borders easily, since its library included templates for different cultures, languages, and uses. From Australia to the United States to Brazil to India, the platform caught on like wildfire almost from day one.
Culture and Leadership
“Set Crazy Big Goals and Make Them Happen” isn’t just inspirational wall art at Canva’s offices – it’s an operational philosophy. Melanie Perkins believes in rallying her team around audacious targets. Those ambitious goals, she says, create an “extraordinary superpower” for getting everyone aligned.
“It’s constantly just dreaming the next big dream and then figuring out how the hell you’re going to get there,” she said. In practice, that has meant pushing the limits of what Canva can become, whether expanding into new product areas or aiming to serve a billion users.
Internally, Canva’s culture is as unorthodox as its founding story. The three co-founders fostered an environment that prioritizes collaboration over competition. Office politics, ego battles, and internal rivalries were strongly discouraged; instead, the mantra was to “expand the pie” so that everyone benefits as the company grows.
In Canva’s early years, they famously operated with no traditional managers or hierarchy. New hires were often shocked to find a flat organization where even interns could directly pitch ideas to the CEO. Instead of managers, Canva used coaches and mentors to guide teams. This structure evolved as the headcount scaled into the thousands, but the spirit remained.
Co-founder Cameron Adams likes to tell employees to “give away your Legos” – meaning, don’t hoard responsibilities, but rather hand off tasks and team roles as soon as someone else can handle them, so you can move on to the next big thing. This philosophy kept the company nimble and prevented turf wars as it grew.
For Melanie and Cliff, building a healthy company also meant learning to balance their co-founder relationship and their marriage. They made it a priority to delineate their roles clearly to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.
From the beginning, Cliff gravitated towards the operational side of the house – making sure the finances were sound, scaling hiring, and maintaining the culture – while Melanie led on product strategy, brand, and overall company vision. By dividing and conquering, they minimized conflict and doubled their leadership bandwidth.
As Canva grew to over 5,500 employees, Perkins also emerged as a vocal advocate for founder well-being and mental health. An introvert by nature, she developed personal routines to cope with the rollercoaster of startup life – things like meditation, daily journaling, and carving out quiet time to recharge.
“I think it’s really important for everyone, regardless of what challenge they’re trying to tackle, the have a few tools at their fingertips that they can reach to when they’re feeling the huge variety of emotions that they feel when they’re trying to tackling a big goal,” she shared at a 2024 SXSW talk, encouraging other entrepreneurs to prioritize their mental resilience just as much as business KPIs. By openly discussing burnout and balance, she helped normalize those conversations in her company’s culture.
Even as Canva grew into a global giant, Perkins remained deeply involved in the human side of the enterprise. She personally led orientation sessions for new hires well past the point when most CEOs would have delegated that task. She would stand in front of fresh recruits, in her trademark casual attire and friendly smile, and recount the company’s founding story – taxi accidents, kitesurfing and all – to make sure everyone understood the mission and values from day one. The message was clear: Canva wasn’t just about hitting growth numbers; it was about empowering people to be creative, including the people inside the company.
Embracing the AI Frontier
As the tech world buzzed over new trends like artificial intelligence, Canva was not about to be left behind. In fact, while many companies only woke up to AI after the debut of ChatGPT in 2022, Canva had been quietly weaving AI into its platform for years by then.
Perkins saw AI not as a buzzword or a threat, but as a logical extension of Canva’s mission to eliminate friction between an idea and its execution. If an algorithm could help a user create something faster or better, Melanie wanted it in the toolset.
One of Canva’s earliest AI-powered hits was the Background Remover, launched in 2019. Removing the background from a photo – say, extracting a product image or a person’s portrait and making the rest transparent – used to require meticulous work in Photoshop. Canva turned it into a single click.
“With one click, you could do something that would often take people hours,” Perkins noted. The feature became wildly popular, allowing even total beginners to achieve a slick effect that previously took expert skills. It was so successful that Canva later acquired Kaleido.ai, the small Austrian startup that had developed the background removal technology, to further build out that capability.
By 2023, Canva’s suite of AI features had grown into an integrated offering called Magic Studio. The platform could auto-generate copywriting text, suggest design layouts, enhance or restore photos, and even create custom images from scratch based on a text prompt (using generative AI models under the hood). Rather than launch these as separate, complex tools, Canva baked them right into the familiar interface, keeping things simple for users. For example, a non-designer working on a presentation could click a “Magic Design” button, enter a description of what they needed, and let the AI draft a slide deck outline with matching graphics.
“It’s really about embedding AI across our entire product suite,” Perkins said. And unlike some legacy companies that struggled to adapt, Canva’s cloud-native, modern architecture made it relatively easy. “Being a digital native product, it’s been relatively easy for us,” she added, underscoring that Canva’s late-mover advantage (starting in the 2010s, not the 1990s) allowed it to adopt new tech swiftly. By embracing AI, Canva continued to deliver on its promise: making design (and now creativity in general) accessible to the masses, without the steep learning curve.
Designing the Future
Melanie Perkins’s journey from a teenager in Perth to the CEO of one of the world’s most influential design platforms is a case study in visionary grit. She had a grand dream – to democratize design – and she pursued it relentlessly through years of hard work, rejection, and refinement. That dream has since reshaped an entire industry.
Today, Canva serves more than 230 million users each month, from school students making science posters to Fortune 500 teams collaborating on marketing campaigns. The idea that anyone can be a designer has gone from audacious to almost obvious, in large part because Canva made it so.
Yet, ask Perkins and she’ll insist that Canva’s story is still just beginning. She’s far from finished. Her focus now is on what lies ahead: building more products, reaching more people, and breaking down whatever remaining barriers exist between a person’s imagination and their ability to create.
Importantly, even as her ambitions grow, Perkins hasn’t lost sight of the responsibility that comes with success. She and Cliff have signed The Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of their wealth to causes they care deeply about.
“There’s enough money, goodwill, and good intentions in the world to solve most problems,” Melanie says. “We want to spend our lifetime working towards that.” To her, business success is meaningful only if it can be translated into positive impact beyond the company’s walls.
Her next target? One billion users on Canva. “When we set that as a goal a number of years ago, it seemed completely ridiculous,” Perkins admits. “But over time, it’s becoming less ridiculous.”