She went by Mel, as she still does to everyone at Canva. Perkins and Obrecht met in Perth in Western Australia in 2005. “The question was, could it be us that could create that?” Perkins says now. Design was becoming a bigger part of modern communication-from early social media to work presentations-but the products that helped everyday users master the skill, like Adobe InDesign, were clunky and expensive. In 2007 Perkins was teaching design to fellow college students in her spare time when she grew frustrated with the tools available. “As soon as you stop dreaming big dreams, you become an old company.” “Every time we’ve been able to imagine a huge, crazy goal and then turn that into reality-each of those things equip us for the next stage,” she says. But Perkins, for herself at least, doesn’t need it. But is she the right person to lead the startup into its second decade and, eventually, through an IPO that could be the largest ever helmed by a female founder-CEO?įormer Disney CEO and current Canva investor Bob Iger says yes: “I think she’s very capable of running a company that is much larger and more complex than the company she runs.” A vote of confidence from one of corporate America’s most successful CEOs can’t hurt. The Perth native’s determination, ingenuity, and-interestingly enough-kitesurfing skills turned Fusion into Canva, and Canva into a unicorn 20 times over. Canva built its business on a “freemium” subscription model that could sustain a graphic design company-but is it enough to support the next Adobe? You could ask the same question about Perkins. #FREE MAGAZINE TEMPLATES FOR MICROSOFT WORD SOFTWARE#But that means taking on the incumbents of the $47 billion productivity management software market-giants in their own right-and whether Perkins’s startup can go toe-to-toe with them is unclear. #FREE MAGAZINE TEMPLATES FOR MICROSOFT WORD PROFESSIONAL#In the long run, analysts say, Canva must amass even more paying customers, making its push into professional tools even more urgent. Many investors cut its valuation substantially in July as the tech sector wobbled. At Canva’s peak valuation of $40 billion, the couple were worth an estimated $13 billion.Ĭanva’s next deck may be a tougher one to design. $7.8 billion Perkins and Obrecht’s net worth. “We had this in our pitch deck back in 2011,” Perkins says. It was the culmination of a long-held vision. More recently, as other startups were laying off workers and scaling back expansion plans, Canva held a flashy event in September to announce the launch of professional tools intended to challenge workplace mainstays Google, Microsoft, and Adobe. Unlike many other VC-backed darlings, Canva has turned a profit on a free-cash-flow basis every year since 2017, on what is now $1 billion in revenue it has $700 million in cash on hand. When VC money was flush, Canva earned the backing of Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Founders Fund. It has become essential for amateur designers and, increasingly, professionals. Ten years on, Canva is a towering force in the graphic design space, with 3,200 employees, 90 million users, and an easy-to-use web-based tool that lets users design social media graphics, build presentations for school or the office, and edit videos-and will soon help them do much more. The approach has spared Perkins from making mistakes common among startup founders who move too fast-overexpansion, buggy products, balance sheets in the red. “We’ve been able to build every brick conscientiously,” Perkins says. Without technical backgrounds or Silicon Valley resources, the pair first tackled an achievable market-Australian high-school yearbook publishing-before taking on the larger graphic design industry. Her vision has always been to “build the world’s most valuable company.” That Canva started from its predecessor Fusion’s run-down offices speaks to how diligently Perkins has pursued that goal over the past 10 years. The humble origins of Fusion mask the big ambitions Perkins had at the time. “We had to do a big cleanout to get the office into shape.” When Fusion moved in, “the whole place was just a rummage pile of everything,” Perkins recalls. See where the half mannequin in a feather boa now sits on top of a cabinet? That’s where they put a bank of computers, she says. Perkins, 35, points to the back of the salon.
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