At the age of fifteen, Perth teenager Melanie Perkins was a creative, resourceful entrepreneur, designing her own scarves and making them to sell to local boutiques.
“I’d get some fabric, cut it, make the ends curly, and then nervously call up women’s boutiques around Perth,” the iconic co-founder of Canva told audiences on Monday at SXSW Sydney.
“My mum would kindly take me to the shops to sell them on consignment, which was pretty cool.”
Perkins appeared in conversation with US investor and BOND General Partner Mary Meeker this week, recounting the early days of her entrepreneurial spirit.
During her time studying communications at the University of Western Australia, she tutored design to students using software which she describes as complicated and difficult to learn, including Dreamweaver and Flash, Photoshop and InDesign.
“It would take a whole semester for people just to learn where the buttons were,” she said. “Design shouldn’t be that hard.”
When she saw her own mother struggling for hundreds of hours to create and produce a high school yearbook, Perkins decided to create an easy-to-use online platform for users to design yearbooks.
In 2007, Fusion Books was born and soon picked up attention overseas. “We started Fusion Books in my mum’s living room,” Perkins reflected. “It was our printing press, paper delivery station, and office all rolled into one.”
“We always knew Fusion Books was just the start—we were testing an idea that could go global.” That idea grew into Canva — today a $26 billion dollar company she runs with her husband, Cliff Obrecht and fellow co-founder Cameron Adams.
But the birth of the company was not smooth. Perkins told audiences in Sydney that her first fundraising trip to San Francisco involved three months of rejection. Silicon Valley kept knocking back their idea.
“We went to Silicon Valley thinking it would be amazing, but we came back without a single investor,” Perkins said. “It was tough—there were so many points where people told us no, and it felt like it wasn’t going to happen.”
Perkins and her team never gave up. Instead, they refined their idea after each setback.
“Every time we were rejected by an investor we would go through and refine the pitch deck again,” Perkins noted. “We knew we had to keep going—we believed in what we were building. It was just a matter of finding people who believed in it, too.”
“It was really about persistence and learning from every meeting,” Perkins explained. “Every time someone said ‘no’, we tried to figure out what we could do better next time. Raising capital is like boot camp, you get questions from every angle.”
Eventually, they secured $3 million worth of backing from influential investors including Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman and the creator of Google Maps, Lars Rasmussen. Perkins credits Rasmussen for introducing her to their fellow co-founder, Cameron Adams, who had created a product called Fluent — one which Perkins described as “incredible” and “incredibly beautiful.”
“I was like, we would be so strong if we could join forces together,” she said. “He said no, actually. And then eventually, he said yes, and then joined us. So it was extraordinarily exciting to get to work with him.”
“We wanted to make it as simple as possible,” Perkins continued. “The goal was always to make design accessible to everyone, no matter their experience. From the very beginning, we thought—how can we remove every possible barrier and make it easy for anyone to create something beautiful?”
“One of our core values is to set crazy big goals and make them happen. It’s not just about dreaming—we strategise every step to make it a reality.”
Soon after, Canva secured a $2 million Seed investment from Commercialisation Australia, funding that was the true kick-starter for the company: “It wasn’t capital that needed to be repaid,” Perkins explained. “And it really meant that we were able to base ourselves here in Australia.”
Another early investor was US venture capitalist Bill Tai, whom invited Perkins (then aged 24) to MaiTai Maui, an exclusive venture capitalists networking retreat that has been dubbed the “golf course” of Sillicon Valley.
This was when Perkins picked up kitesurfing, because apparently, this is how venture capitalists rub shoulders with important (and wealthy) founders. She has previously described the sport as “terribly dangerous”, but justified her participation in it as such: “When you are from Perth and have no connections in Silicon Valley the door opens a tiny crack, you do what you can to wedge it open and walk through that door.”
Her engagement in the sport paid off, because Tai came on board as a lead seed investor. Canva launched in 2013, and the platform collected 600,000 users in its first twelve months.
In September this year, it recorded 190 million monthly active users across more than a hundred languages — almost two thirds of them from non-English speaking markets.
“Our mission is to empower the world to design,” Perkins explained on Monday. “We knew that meant being available in every language and accessible to every community.”
Perkins said that the key to the company’s success was its investment in market and industry demands rather than competition.
“We’ve got a two-step plan: to build one of the world’s most valuable companies and do the most good we can,” she said.
“We believe in competing with the world, not with each other. We believe in pushing out and expanding the pipe, versus trying to create some sort of structure. We launched with the goal of making design easy and collaborative, no matter where you are.”
“That’s been a critical part of our philosophy—everyone should be working to grow the pie, not just grab their slice. It’s amazing to see how people who never considered themselves creative now feel empowered to design.”
“It’s not just about growing a business—it’s about making a real impact. What’s really exciting is seeing Canva being used in classrooms all over the world. Teachers and students are using it to create everything from posters to presentations—things that would’ve taken hours or required expensive software are now simple and accessible to everyone.”
Perkins is also sensitive to the needs of her employees, who are urged to work from wherever they choose, despite being offered various offices around the world, including a new Sydney campus in Surry Hills which opened earlier this year.
She also shared a personal tool she uses to keep herself motivated.
“Letters to myself have been an essential tool,” she revealed. “During tough moments, I’d write pep talks to remind myself why I’m doing this and what’s possible.”
Perkins also meditates everyday using the Calm app, writes in her journal and frequently escapes the city to get her nature-time when she can.
“These may not work for everyone,” she admitted. “Everyone has their own ways. But I think having really important to have tools you can just reach to and catch and use when you need.”