Melanie Perkins has always been ambitious.
All the way from my Year 2 assignments, I’ve always
been like, "I want to make this a good assignment."
As a teen, the Australian entrepreneur
and her boyfriend, Cliff Obrecht, dreamed
of taking on the Microsofts and Adobes of the world.
I guess our goal was to take the entire
design ecosystem, integrate it into one page,
and then make it accessible to the whole world.
No small feat!
It’s a vision that would see her travel to
Silicon Valley and pitch over 100 investors,
fake an interest in kitesurfing, and even
– she says - stalk future employees.
I took his photos from his Facebook profile,
and I created this hilarious fairytale that
told him about the amazing adventure he was
going to have if he was to join our company.
And her hard work has paid off.
Five years after starting the company in 2013, 
it was valued at $1 billion, making her one of the
world’s youngest female tech
unicorn founders at just 30.
Now aged 32, the company is worth $3.2 billion,
and she says she’s only just getting started.
Melanie is the co-founder and CEO of Canva,
a free-to-use online design platform, whose
celebrity backers include Hollywood actors
Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson.
She and Cliff started the company here in
Australia in 2013, in a bid to make design
accessible to all, be it for logos,
flyers or even presentations.
And in six short years, it's helped create
close to 2 billion designs in 190 countries.
Today, the couple is worth close to $900 million.
It was a market that hadn’t been touched
by new companies for a long time.
It was ruled by some big players like Adobe,
and Melanie had this vision to
take this market and change it.
The idea struck in 2006 while the couple
was studying at university in Perth.
Melanie would spend her spare time teaching
design programs to other students, but she
grew frustrated with the
unnecessarily complex process.
People would have to spend an entire
semester learning where the buttons were,
and that seemed completely ridiculous.
I thought that in the future it was all going
to be online and collaborative and much, much
simpler than these really hard tools.
So, the couple, who were just 19
at the time, set to work creating
a simple school yearbook design
tool to test out their idea.
My mum’s living room became my office, and
my boyfriend became my business partner.
We started enabling schools to create their
yearbooks really, really simply.
So the whole year could collaborate and
design their profile pages and articles.
And then we would actually physically print them
and deliver them to schools all around Australia.
The business was a success — and remains
active today — but they never lost sight
of what Melanie calls her “crazy, big dream”
for a one-stop-shop design site.
So she began chasing investors.
There was an investor called Bill Tai, who
was over from Silicon Valley in Perth,
and I met him after a conference.
I spoke to him for five minutes and
he said if I went to San Francisco,
he’d be happy to meet with me.
So I jumped on a plane to San Francisco
and, true to his word, he met with me.
I had brought this paper pitch deck - I didn’t
realize that, you know, that wasn’t cool
– but I pulled out my paper pitch
deck on the future of publishing.
At that point in time, I thought that
he didn’t really like what I had to say.
He was on his phone, and I thought
that meant he wasn’t really engaged.
But then I got home and realized that he
was actually introducing me to a few people.
That meeting set the wheels in motion.
The legendary venture capitalist invited Melanie
to Mai Tai, his unique retreat for investors
and kitesurfing enthusiasts.
I think the kind of person that’s drawn
to a start-up likes to believe that they can
control the forces of nature.
Bill hosted this kitesurfing and
entrepreneurship conference.
So every time he would say, ‘How was my
business going?,' he’d also be like, ‘How’s
your kitesurfing going?’
So I kind of needed to learn to kitesurf.
Oh wow! Never done it before.
I had not done it before.
And, to be honest, it’s not something
that I would normally, naturally try.
But yeah, decided to give it a go because
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.
It wasn’t long before the young couple was
pitching to scores of Silicon Valley investors.
And even personalizing their decks to win over
talent, like top tech engineers from Google.
If you search 'bizarre pitch deck' on Google,
we are the number one search result.
So you can see that pitch there.
Claim to fame.
But they still lacked one crucial
ingredient: A technical co-founder.
So Bill hooked them up with Lars
Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps,
to lend them a helping hand.
When I met with Lars, we had an incredible
conversation and we talked about the future
of publishing and the future of the world.
And he said he’d become our tech advisor.
But what that actually entailed was a
year of him rejecting every single person
that I brought him.
Sending him resumes, sending him LinkedIn
profiles, bringing him physical people,
and he was just like,
‘No, they’re not up to scratch.’
Which was incredibly frustrating at the
time because I just wanted to get started!
All that grit and patience paid off.
They eventually discovered a
co-founder in Cameron Adams
and a tech developer in Dave Hearnden,
who were both from Google.
Months later, at the close of their first funding
round, the company was oversubscribed.
That initial $1.5 million investment was
even matched by the Australian government
in a bid to keep the company on Australian shores.
I’m Rick Baker, I’m one of the partners
at Blackbird Ventures.
We’re a venture fund here in Australia
and one of the first investors in Canva.
We invested in it when it was just an idea
and now the largest investor in Canva.
I think, really, what attracted us to the
founders was this very clear vision
of what Canva was going to be.
Six years on, the company is now a
darling of Australia's start-up scene.
In October 2019, an $85 million funding round
led by Silicon Valley investor Mary Meeker
gave the company a valuation of $3.2 billion.
Valuation, as an investor, is of course important.
It means that our investment
is growing very nicely.
But I think, more importantly, it’s a recognition
by investors who really look into the company
closely and an indication of
how the company’s going.
What is amazing, really, is
the growing usage of Canva.
Their business is a wonderful, profitable
business, and that’s quite a rare thing.
If you look at a lot of the big tech companies,
the venture-backed SAAS companies in the U.S.,
a lot of them are burning millions of
dollars a month to drive their growth.
And the amazing thing Canva’s been able
to do is do that in a really profitable way.
The milestone also makes it one of the world’s
most valuable female-led tech start-ups.
Today, less than a third of tech and healthcare
start-ups have at least one female founder.
I know Melanie doesn’t like to play
the female angle, but it really is
an inspiration to women.
And it isn’t a responsibility
Melanie is taking on lightly.
She says she'll use the funding to continue
to prove her leadership prowess, expand her
team of 700 across Sydney, Beijing and
Manila, and build out new revenue streams
with the company’s paid services,
Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise.
That strategy will bring Melanie the 
closest she’s come yet to competing
with the professional design tools of
top tech giants like Microsoft and Adobe.
But with 85% of Fortune 500 companies
already using the platform, the young
founder says she’s up for the challenge.
I think I’ve always put a lot
of pressure on myself.
And I think that sort of internal locus
of control has been pretty strong.
So while the expectations around our company
and what we’re expected to do is sort of increasing,
that’s nothing on what I've got on myself!
