Women run only 23 of the top 500 companies in the world, but CEOs like Melanie Perkins
prove that investors might want to reconsider their choices. Having come up with the idea
in college, the Canva co-founder has become one of the richest self-made women in tech
in 8 short years, with a net worth of $5.9 billion. Her strong belief in empowering the
world to design helped her overcome multiple rejections at the start and build Canva into
one of the biggest private tech firms in the world.But for Perkins that’s not enough.
She’s pledged her 30% stake of Canva to charity and aims to change the world by fighting
poverty.
In this video You'll find out how Canva started, how their business model works and how it’s
all thanks to Melanie Perkins. Let’s break down Canva’s business!
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In case you don’t know, Canva is a free to use online graphics design platform that
makes it easy for anyone to create all types of visual content ranging from social media
graphics to presentations, posters, documents, and more thanks to its extensive template
library and vast stock photography gallery. The platform generates revenue through its
paid subscriptions like Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise that give additional functionality.
Now, Perkins wasn’t new to the idea of establishing a business. Having grown up in Perth, at the
age of 14 she decided to start selling handmade scarves at shops and markets in her city.
Her entrepreneurial spirit didn’t slow down after high school, as during her time at the
University of Western Australia where she majored in communication, she also worked
as a private tutor for students who struggled with the various graphic design tools, sparking
the idea for Canva.
“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.”
She set out to establish a platform where you wouldn’t need any kind of technical
expertise to let your creativity run free. Perkins didn’t want to restrict her idea
to just yearbooks, but seeing how time-consuming the process of creating them was, she decided
that it was a good niche to test her concept. She was so committed that she actually dropped
out of university to found ‘Fusion Books’ with Obrecht who was her boyfriend at the
time.
‘Fusion Books’ allowed students and schools to create their own yearbooks with simple
drag and drop tools and a huge library of templates that one could customize with images,
fonts, and graphics. The company functioned out of Perkins’s mom’s lounge where they
printed the physical yearbooks, but the business was able to serve clients all over Australia.
In five years Fusion Books grew into the biggest platform of its kind in Australia, even expanding
into New Zealand and France. Amazingly, the company is still functioning successfully
to this day - proving that the idea solved a real-world problem.
But Perkins wanted to pursue her dream of setting up an entire design ecosystem where
people could create just about anything they could ever want. She kept pitching her idea
to potential investors but was rejected by over 100 of them.
Her big break came in 2010 at a startup competition in Perth where investor Bill Tai served as
a judge. Interestingly Perkins wasn’t competing in the event, but she still managed to secure
a meeting with Tai.
So, how did she do it? “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 brought out my paper pitch
deck of the future of publishing, and 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 he was actually introducing me to a few people.”
Tai even invited Perkins to MaiTai - his annual retreat for investors. The retreat heavily
featured kitesurfing so Perkins had to learn the sport really fast because she was committed
to impressing the investors around her. At the retreat, she did just that - not just
with her business idea, but also with her newly learnt kitesurfing skills.
Soon after Perkins started pitching to investors in Silicon Valley and assembling a technical
team. Lacking a tech advisor, Tai introduced them to the co-founder of Google Maps Lars
Rasmussen, who took on the role but due to the scale of the project took over a year
to find the right engineers for the job.
The patience paid off and eventually Cameron Adams and Dave Hearnden, both former Google
employees, came on board as their tech co-founder and tech developer.
In its seed funding round the company raised $1.6 million from top Australian and U.S.
investors including Matrix Partners, InterWest Partners and 500 Startups, as well as a $1.4
million grant from the Australian government to ensure that the business kept functioning
from within their country. With all of these organizations backing Canva up, the site finally
went live in 2013.
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Canva gathered about 50,000 sign-ups in the first month of its launch, and the number
only kept increasing, thanks in part to the popularity of social media among businesses
that used the platform to create their ads. By 2014, the company raised another $3 million
from Thiel’s Founders Fund and Shasta Ventures and had grown to about 600,000 users who had
made 3.5 million designs using the platform. Not too shabby for a site that had only been
live for a year!
In 2015 the company launched a premium version of its services at a price of $10 a month.
This service was specifically targeted to corporate businesses with high-quality design
features and the choice to choose from millions of royalty-free stock images for their ad
campaigns, making Canva a one-stop-shop for all things marketing and promotions.
As of 2021, Canva has over 60 million active users who have created more than 7 billion
designs. Canva’s operations span across 190 countries, and the company currently employs
2,000 people in its international offices.
Canva expects to exceed $1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the 2021 with more than
500,000 businesses paying for the product in some capacity. The company has some of
the world’s biggest companies on its special enterprise plan, including Salesforce, Marriott
International, PayPal, and American Airlines. This has helped Perkins establish one of the
very few ‘unicorn’ startups that are profitable.
In the latest seed round Canva received $200 million and is now valued at $40 billion making
it one of the most valuable private software companies out there.
And, of course, all of this has helped Perkins become a billionaire in the blink of an eye.
But you’ll be surprised to know that the idea behind Canva wasn’t to earn tons of
money for the founders, which is why she’s planning on giving it all away!
That’s right. According to Perkins, the goals that she set out with when she established
Canva were for it to become one of the biggest companies in the world and for her to be able
to give back to people as much as she could with the success of her company.
The couple has pledged to give a 30 percent stake - valued at $16 billion - in their company
to the Canva Foundation, their charity that works on eliminating poverty. Much like Canva,
the Canva Foundation is well on its way to becoming one of the largest charitable foundations
in the world - proving that no matter what Perkins sets her mind to, she makes sure to
give it all she’s got.
In just over a decade, Perkins has gone from building a successful yearbook design company
from her mother’s home to relentlessly pursuing the larger goal of starting a graphic design
platform that anyone could use. Despite being rejected by over 100 investors, her determination
and self-belief helped her gain access to a network of people that believed in her vision,
leading to Canva’s launch in 2013.
Thanks to identifying and solving a real-world issue, a concept Perkins is no stranger to,
Canva has grown to a market leader in 8 short years, allowing Perkins to dedicate the billions
of dollars she’s earned to solving issues close to her heart.
That’s a wrap of our breakdown of Canva’s story. What do you think of Perkins’ decision
to give away the majority of her fortune? Would you do the same? Let us know in the
comments below. If you enjoyed this video, consider giving it a share and a big thumbs
up. For similar stories, subscribe to our channel and hit the bell icon. See you next
time. Until then, bye!