The Key Decisions That Made Melanie Perkins Successful

Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of Canva, the design platform that has revolutionized how 240 million people create visual content.

What makes her story remarkable is not just that she built one of the most valuable startups in the world, but how she did it.

Melanie started with no technical background, no Silicon Valley connections, and a problem that most people had simply accepted as unsolvable.

Today, Canva is valued at $42 billion and has made Melanie one of the youngest female tech billionaires, with a personal net worth estimated at $5.8 billion.

Her journey from teaching frustrated design students in Perth, Australia to leading a company that competes with Adobe offers crucial lessons for anyone building a business.

Melanie represents a different kind of founder: one who chose patience over speed, simplicity over complexity, and values over wealth accumulation.​​

In 2006, Melanie was a 19-year-old university student working part-time as a design tutor at the University of Western Australia.

She spent hours watching students struggle with programs like Photoshop, InDesign, and Dreamweaver.

What struck her was that students would spend an entire semester just learning where the buttons were, which seemed completely ridiculous.

She realized the problem was not that people lacked design ability, but that the tools were built for professionals who had years to master complex interfaces.

The average person who just wanted to create a poster for a school event or a simple presentation was forced to use tools designed like a space shuttle when all they needed was a bicycle.​

What founders can learn: The biggest opportunities often hide in frustrations that everyone else has accepted as normal. Melanie saw a problem that millions of people experienced but that most had simply learned to tolerate. Instead of trying to build "Photoshop but easier," she started with the tiniest slice of the problem: school yearbooks. By starting impossibly small, she could prove every aspect of her thesis in a contained environment before scaling to the much bigger vision of democratizing design for everyone.​​

By 2010, Fusion Books was profitable and growing, but Melanie could not shake her bigger vision.

When she met legendary Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai at a startup competition in Perth, she had exactly five minutes to make an impression. She convinced him to meet with her in San Francisco, so she jumped on a plane.

For that crucial meeting, Melanie made an unconventional choice. Instead of creating a sleek digital presentation like every other entrepreneur, she created a paper pitch deck, printed it on her own printing presses, and tied it with beautiful ribbon.

She later admitted it was "incredibly dorky" but also unforgettable.​

The meeting did not result in immediate funding, but something more valuable happened.

Bill Tai took her seriously and invited her into his MaiTai Global network of athletes, conservationists, technologists, and investors.

This network gathered around extreme sports, particularly kitesurfing. Melanie, who had never kitesurfed and was terrified of the sport, decided to learn it anyway because that was where the access was.

What founders can learn: Sometimes the most important result of a pitch is not money but access to the right people who believe in your vision enough to help you make it real.​​

In 2012, Melanie faced a new challenge. She had some seed funding, but she needed a world-class technical co-founder.

Through advisor Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Maps, she was introduced to Cameron Adams, a Google engineer working on cutting-edge projects.

Cameron had job security, stock options, and the prestige of working for one of the world's most admired companies. Why would he leave all that for two Australians with a yearbook business and a crazy idea about making design simple?​​

Melanie went to Cameron's Facebook profile, downloaded his photos, and created a "hilarious fairytale" that told the story of the amazing adventure he would have if he joined Canva.

This could have backfired spectacularly, but it worked.

Cameron later said that when he met Melanie and Cliff, he could feel the jigsaw pieces coming together.

He joined as the third co-founder and Chief Product Officer in June 2012.

What founders can learn: Recruiting great people requires appealing to something deeper than salary or equity. People want to be part of a story larger than themselves, to feel their decision will be meaningful and transformative.​​

Between 2011 and 2012, Melanie faced more than 100 face-to-face rejections from investors.

She lived on her brother's apartment floor in San Francisco, waking up each morning to prepare for another round of pitches.

The rejections came in every flavor. Investors said the idea was too big, too early, too risky. They said Melanie was not technical enough, not American enough, not based in Silicon Valley. They told her Adobe's hold on design software was unbreakable and that her vision of democratizing design was naive.​​

What separated Melanie from founders who give up was how she treated rejection.

Instead of getting defensive, she got curious. Every no became data about what investors cared about, what objections she needed to address, and what parts of her pitch were unclear.

She refined her pitch deck after each meeting, incorporating feedback and improving her story.

Meanwhile, she continued learning to kitesurf despite being terrified, gaining access to Bill Tai's network of unconventional investors.

What founders can learn: Rejection is not failure. It is education. Every setback makes the eventual success more likely if you treat it as an opportunity to learn and improve.​​

By 2019, Canva was valued at over $3 billion, making Melanie one of the youngest female tech billionaires in history.

During a trip to Cappadocia, Turkey in July 2019, Cliff Obrecht proposed to Melanie with a $30 engagement ring.

For two people whose combined net worth was approaching $10 billion, this was a statement about values.

Melanie and Obrecht wanted their engagement to symbolize that despite their enormous wealth, money would not change their core values.​​

In 2021, they joined Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge, committing to donate at least half of their wealth to charitable causes during their lifetime. T

hey went further, pledging 30% of their Canva stake, worth about $12 billion at the time, to the Canva Foundation focused on alleviating global poverty through education.

Melanie explained that it has never felt like their money; they have always felt they are purely custodians of it.

What founders can learn: the most successful entrepreneurs often align their business strategy with their personal values. When your business is an expression of who you are rather than just what you do, you make different decisions that ultimately create deeper connections with customers, employees, and partners.​​

Melanie noticed that university students were spending entire semesters just learning where the buttons were in programs like Photoshop and InDesign.

She was working as a design tutor at the University of Western Australia in 2006 and watched students struggle with tools that were built for professional designers, not regular people who just wanted to create a poster or presentation.

Melanie realized the problem was not that people lacked design ability but that the software was unnecessarily complex.

She envisioned a future where design would be as simple as using Google Docs, completely online, collaborative, and accessible to everyone.​​

Melanie started small. At age 14, she launched her first business selling handmade scarves throughout Perth.

At 19, she dropped out of the University of Western Australia to co-found Fusion Books with her boyfriend Cliff Obrecht, after convincing her family to loan them $50,000.

Fusion Books was a web-based platform that allowed schools to create yearbooks using drag-and-drop tools and templates.

This was not just a side project. It was a deliberate strategy to prove her vision in the smallest possible market before tackling the much larger challenge of democratizing design for everyone.​​

Melanie was rejected by more than 100 investors before raising her first funding round.

The reasons were consistent and discouraging. Investors said the idea was too big, Melanie was too young, and nobody from Australia could build a global tech company.

They pointed out that Adobe had an unbreakable hold on design software. They worried about the physical distance, noting they needed to be able to ride their bicycles to her office from Silicon Valley.

Some rejected her because she and Cliff were in a relationship, which they saw as risky. Others said she lacked a technical co-founder or was not technical enough herself.

What separated Melanie from founders who give up was how she treated each rejection as education rather than failure.​​

Melanie created a paper pitch deck, printed it on her own printing presses, and tied it with ribbon before pitching to Silicon Valley investors.

She admitted it was "incredibly dorky" but it made her memorable in a world where everyone used digital presentations.

More remarkably, she learned to kitesurf despite being terrified of the sport because investor Bill Tai and his network gathered around extreme sports.

Melanie described kitesurfing in the cold, shark-infested waters of San Francisco as "far from enjoyable" but necessary to get Canva off the ground.

She lived on her brother's apartment floor while making pitch after pitch, refining her story with every meeting.

These choices were not random. They were strategic decisions to stand out and gain access to people who could help her.​​

Melanie is not your typical Silicon Valley founder. She is not male, not from the United States, and had no technical background when she started.

She married her co-founder Cliff Obrecht in January 2021 on Rottnest Island in a simple ceremony, and they got engaged with a $30 ring during a trip to Cappadocia, Turkey.

Despite being worth billions, Perkins and Obrecht have pledged to give away more than 80% of their Canva stake to the Canva Foundation, focused on alleviating global poverty through education.

By 2024, the foundation had distributed over $38 million to causes including literacy programs in Southern Africa and India, disaster relief, and humanitarian aid.

Melanie has repeatedly said that wealth is something they are merely custodians of, not something to accumulate.​​

As of 2025, Canva is valued at $42 billion following an employee stock sale in August 2025. The company has 240 million monthly active users and 27 million paid seats.

Canva generates approximately $3.3 billion in annual recurring revenue and has been profitable for eight consecutive years.

Users create an average of 38.5 million designs on Canva every day, with the total number of designs reaching 30 billion in December 2024.

Enterprise customers now represent 20% of revenue, and Canva competes directly with Adobe, Google, and Microsoft in the design and productivity software categories.​

Melanie believes in starting small and going wide.

Fusion Books allowed her to deeply understand customer problems and solve them well before scaling to Canva.

She structures the entire company around goals rather than traditional hierarchies, with each team focused on achieving specific objectives.

Melanie emphasizes solving real problems that people genuinely care about, offering a free tier that delivers significant value, and ensuring excellent onboarding so users get immediate value.

She uses extensive user testing, A/B testing, surveys, and data to refine every detail of the product.

Melanie says the whole company focuses on growth, but not in a short-term optimization sense. Teams work on either long-term growth initiatives like internationalization and new platforms, or shorter-term optimizations.​

Melanie encourages founders to concentrate on their goals rather than on obstacles they cannot control.

She believes that if something were easy, it probably would not be worth doing.

Each rejection Canva received taught them something valuable, so they persevered over the years.

Melanie learned from rejection by refining her pitch deck again and again with each investor meeting.

She advises finding believers in your vision, starting with a niche to gain traction, building credibility through competitions and awards, and creating genuine connections through shared interests.

Melanie is upfront about what she did not know when starting out, admitting she had no understanding of venture capital or how startup funding actually worked.​​

Melanie says the most important thing is to solve a real problem that people genuinely care about.

She recommends starting with the problem that needs fixing before finding the solution, rather than coming up with a unique idea first.

Melanie emphasizes the importance of determination and guts, noting it took her three years from meeting their first investor to landing the first investment.

She advises focusing on influencing one highly influential person rather than trying to meet hundreds of people. She also encourages entrepreneurs to embrace audacity in their vision and not be afraid to pursue bold ideas even if they contradict the norm.

She stresses that you do not need permission to start, and belief combined with persistence and action can turn dreams into reality.​

Melanie understood that the most sophisticated technology often appears the simplest to users. She recognized that building software that is easy to use is exponentially harder than building software that is complex to use.

Adobe's tools are complex because they expose all functionality directly to users, while Canva's tools feel simple because enormous technical complexity is hidden behind drag-and-drop interfaces.

Perkins did not try to match Adobe feature-for-feature.

Instead, she asked what 90% of people actually need to do, and then built the most elegant possible solution for those use cases.

This focus on ruthless simplicity became Canva's competitive advantage and the reason millions of non-designers could suddenly create professional-looking content.​​

Melanie wanted to democratize design for the entire world, so she started with high school yearbooks in Australia.

This was not just humble beginnings. It was strategic genius.

By starting with yearbooks, she could prove every aspect of her thesis in a contained environment.

Could she really make design collaborative? Yes, students, teachers, and parents successfully worked together to create yearbooks.

Could she make complex design tasks simple? Yes, people with zero design experience created professional-looking books.

Fusion Books was not just a stepping stone to Canva. It was a laboratory where Perkins learned everything she needed to know about user experience, online collaboration, and the technical challenges of design software.

When she finally launched Canva, she was not guessing about what users wanted. She knew.​​

Melanie consistently chose discomfort over comfort as a strategy.

She learned to kitesurf when terrified of the sport. She created Facebook fairytales when normal people would send professional emails. She pitched with paper decks when everyone else used slides. She lived on floors when she could have stayed in hotels.

These were not random acts of quirkiness. They were strategic decisions to stand out in crowded markets.

When every entrepreneur is trying to look polished and professional, being genuinely human and vulnerable becomes a superpower.

Choosing discomfort gave Melanie access to opportunities that comfort-seeking entrepreneurs miss, including the investors who loved kitesurfing, the co-founder charmed by unconventional recruiting, and the meetings that happened because she was willing to get on a plane with no guarantee of success.​​

One hundred rejections would crush most people's spirits, but Melanie treated each one as data.

Instead of asking why investors would not fund her, she asked what these rejections were teaching her about her business.

Every no made the eventual yes more likely because she was constantly improving her pitch, her business model, and her understanding of what investors wanted to see.

By the time she finally raised funding in 2012, she had the most polished pitch deck and business plan in the world because she had literally field-tested it 100 times.

This is not just positive thinking. It is a fundamental shift in how to view the fundraising process, treating it as market research rather than a series of personal failures.​​

Melanie understood that making things simple for users requires making things incredibly complex for engineers.

Adobe's tools are complex because they expose all functionality directly to users. Canva's tools feel simple because enormous technical complexity is hidden behind drag-and-drop interfaces.

This insight shaped everything about how Melanie built Canva. She did not try to match Adobe feature-for-feature. Instead, she asked what 90% of people actually need to do, and then built the most elegant possible solution for those use cases.

This focus on ruthless simplicity became Canva's competitive advantage and the reason millions of non-designers could suddenly create professional-looking content.​​

Melanie’s decisions have consistently aligned with her values, even when those values seemed economically irrational.

The $30 engagement ring, the Giving Pledge, and the focus on democratizing design rather than maximizing profit margins were not afterthoughts once she became successful.

They were core to how she thought about business from the beginning.

The same values that led her to want to help struggling design students also led her to give away billions to help struggling communities around the world.

This consistency between personal values and business strategy is what makes truly great entrepreneurs different from merely successful ones.​​

The story of Melanie and Canva reveals something fundamental about building transformative companies.

The biggest opportunities often hide in the smallest frustrations, in problems that everyone else has accepted as just the way things are.

Melanie did not have special advantages. She was not a programmer, not from Silicon Valley, and had no family money or prestigious connections. What she had was a willingness to see a problem differently and the persistence to do something about it.​​

What makes Melanie exceptional is not just that she built a $42 billion company, but how she did it.

She was willing to start small, to be uncomfortable, to be rejected, to learn constantly, and to stay true to her values even when it seemed economically irrational. These are not superhuman qualities. They are choices that any founder can make.​​

For entrepreneurs facing their own challenges, Melanie offers a clear message.

The next time you find yourself frustrated with how something works, ask what if this could be different, what would the simplest solution look like, and how could you test that idea in the smallest possible way.

The next time you face rejection or setbacks, ask what this is teaching you and how you can use the feedback to get better.

The next time you have to choose between comfort and growth, between the safe path and the meaningful path, remember that sometimes the most successful strategy is also the most generous one.