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Melanie Perkins is an Australian technology entrepreneur. She is known as the CEO and co-founder of Canva, an online graphic design tool. The business was founded in 2012 in conjunction with her partner, Cliff Obrecht and ex-Google engineer, Cameron Adams. Canva’s headquarters are in Surry Hills, Sydney.

The business has raised more than $300 million from different stages of financing. Early venture capital investment came from investors such as Blackbird Ventures, Bond, General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures as well from individuals such as Google Maps co-founder  Lars Rasmussen and Yahoo! CFO Ken Goldman.In June 2020, the business was valued at $6 billion. This makes Melanie one of the youngest female CEO’s to be leading a tech start-up valued over a billion dollars. She is also the third richest women in Australia.

Early life

Melanie Perkins was born in Perth, Western Australia. She is the daughter of an Australian-born teacher and a Malaysian engineer of Filipino and Sri Lankan descent. She attended Sacred Heart College,a secondary school located in the northern Perth suburb of Sorrento. At high school, Perkins had aspirations of becoming a professional figure skater and would routinely wake up at 4:30 am to train.By the age of fourteen, she had started her first business, selling handmade scarves at shops and markets throughout Perth. She credits this experience with developing her entrepreneurial drive as ‘she never forgot the freedom and excitement from building a business.’

After high school, Perkins enrolled at the University of Western Australia, majoring in communications, psychology and commerce. At this time, Perkins was also a private tutor for students learning graphic design. She noticed the difficulties students had in learning design programs such as Adobe Photoshop, where it would often take students a semester at university to be introduced to basic features of these complex design programs. Perkins thought there was a business opportunity in making the design process easier. Her idea was to make a design platform where no technical experience was required. She dropped out of university at age 19 to pursue her first business with Obrecht, Fusion Books.

Career

Fusion Books

Fusion Books was founded in 2007 by Perkins and Obrecht. It allowed students to design their own school yearbooks by using a simple drag-and-drop tool equipped with a library of design templates that could be populated with photos, illustrations, and fonts. Originally, Perkins wanted to develop software that made the entire design process easier but due to the competition with large companies and her lack of resources, she concluded ‘it did not seem the logical thing to do’. Perkins’s mother was a teacher who would also co-ordinate the school yearbook. Perkins saw first-hand how much time was required to design a yearbook and thought the high level of consumer friction would make yearbooks a good niche to test the idea for Canva.

Fusion books started in the living room of Perkins’s mother. Obrecht would cold call schools in an attempt to get new clients and both their parents would often have to help with printing the yearbooks.[20] Over five years, Fusion books grew into the largest yearbook company in Australia and expanded into France and New Zealand.

Formation of Canva

Start-ups in Australia have historically been limited by the lack of venture capital funding in the country. In 2014, there was only $100 million in venture capital investment which made Australia 40^th in the world in terms of venture capital availability. The majority of this capital comes from Australia’s financial hubs, Sydney and Melbourne. All of Australia’s largest venture capital firms including Blackbird Ventures, AirTree Ventures, Square Peg Capital and Carthona Capital have offices in Sydney and/or Melbourne. Both Perkins and Obrecht were originally based in Perth, a remote city on Australia’s west coast. This made it difficult for Melanie to obtain initial funding for Canva where she claims she was rejected by over a hundred investors.

In 2011, prominent investor, Bill Tai visited Perth to judge a start-up competition. Perkins and Obrecht pitched Tai the initial idea for Canva over dinner. There were also other venture capitalists present including Rick Baker from Blackbird Ventures. They received no funding but became regular fixtures at gatherings hosted by Tai for investors and start-up founders. Some of these gatherings took place in Silicon Valley where Perkins and Obrecht met Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Maps. He expressed interest in the idea but told the founders to ‘put everything on hold’ until they found a tech team of the calibre required. Rasmussen then became the tech adviser to the business where he introduced Perkins and Obrecht to Cameron Adams, an ex-Google employee with the relevant technical expertise. Adams was initially not interested in joining the business as he was starting his own business called fluent.io, software attempting to disrupt email.Adams was in Silicon Valley trying to raise funds for his start-up when Perkins sent him another email asking if he wanted to join the business. After that email, he agreed to join Canva, becoming its third founder and chief product officer.

A few months later, in 2012, Canva received $1.5 million in seed funding which was then matched by the Australian government bringing the total funding to $3 million. Canva benefited from the Australian government’s national innovation funds, which saw $2 billion of extra funding for Australian start-ups. Notably, Rick Baker of Blackbird Ventures was an earlier investor who had first heard the idea pitched in Perth. Besides the founders, Blackbird Ventures owns the largest stake of Canva at 14%. The founders still retain 50% of the equity in the company.

Growth of Canva

Before Canva could be launched to the public, Perkins wanted to develop Canva’s engineering team. Lars Rasmussen introduced Perkins to David Hearnden who worked at Google. He was widely considered a top engineering talent and had received the university medal while studying a PhD in software engineering at the University of Queensland.To help persuade Hearnden to leave his job at Google, the Canva team made a slideshow of why he should join them. The slideshow went viral.It was successful and he  joined the company in 2013.

The company launched its design platform in 2013. It gained 50,000 users in the first month and by 2014, the company had 600,000 users. It’s growth has been attributed to its ‘freemium’ user model where the majority of users on the website can use the product for free.This attracted a sizeable initial user base. Another reason for this exponential growth was the mass adoption of social media advertising that began in 2013. This meant there was a significant increase in the amount of digital content created, especially from individual content creators. Canva filled a gap in the market as there was only expensive and technical enterprise software with no easy to use design platform for the mass market. Perkins's platform allowed for individuals to design digital content for social media without any design experience. In 2020, Canva had 30 million monthly active users with a total of 1 billion designs having been created on the website since its inception. The platform is available in 190 different countries with 100 different languages available.

Canva has used its latest round of funding to develop its premium features, Canva Pro and Canva Enterprise. As CEO, Perkins is seeking to expand the business to compete in the lucrative enterprise software market. As of 2019, the enterprise software market was valued at USD 477 billion. Historically, companies like Adobe dominated the enterprise design market with over USD 11 billion in revenue in 2019. In October 2019, Canva released its enterprise product so that organisations could use company branding templates across their organisation. According to Perkins the design enterprise market ‘has been disaggregated’ and she sees an opportunity for Canva to capture market share. As of October 2020, Canva’s enterprise product has secured 1,000 brands including American Airlines, Warner Music and Ingram.

Canva is a private company which means there is no legal obligation to release their financial statements. However, the business released their financial statements in 2017 where the business recorded a net profit of US $1.86 million. This makes Melanie Perkins the CEO of one of the few ‘unicorn’ start-ups that are already profitable.

Cyber Attack

In May 2019, Canva was subject to a cyber-attack that resulted in the data of 139 million users being stolen by infamous hacker, Gnosticplayers.Emails and usernames of customers were stolen. Passwords were also obtained but as they were in their encrypted form they could not be accessed by external third-parties. Canva’s technical response to the breach was largely commended but they faced backlash for their lack of transparency to customers. Information surrounding the breach was buried in an email that began with mostly marketing material. Canva promptly changed their email to remove the marketing material and lead with information alerting users to the attack. The cyber-attack and subsequent backlash came just weeks after Perkins had been in the media for raising $70 million in funding.

Women in Start-ups

Perkins is one of the few women who are CEO of a technology company valued over $1 billion. Other prominent female CEO’s who have obtained this status include Susan Wojcicki, Marissa Mayer, Meg Whitman and Safra Catz. There has been controversy surrounding the gender disparity in the tech industry as well as amongst start-ups. Only one in four start-ups have a female founder. In start-ups, if there is no female founder then there is only a 5% chance there will be a female CEO. A lot of research has examined why the rapidly increasing female labour participation rate has not been mirrored by an increase in female entrepreneurs. Evidence shows that despite the increase in female participation in the workforce, women still maintain the primary role for childcare. Many researchers attribute this as the largest barrier to increasing the percentage of women entrepreneurs relative to men. Perkins has acknowledged that she is amongst the 2% of female CEO’s of venture backed companies. However, when asked about gender in the media she has refrained from making comments saying she prefers to focus ‘on what she can control’. Although under Perkins’s leadership Canva has a 41% female representation which is significantly higher than the industry average of 28%.This is a result of policies implemented by the CEO to eliminate bias in the hiring process.

Personal life

Melanie Perkins took an interest in kite surfing when she discovered many prominent venture capitalists use this as a way to network with founders. She would regularly kite-surf with venture capitalist Bill Tai.Perkins has also travelled the world extensively and credits a trip to India as a life-changing experience. In 2019, Obrecht proposed to Perkins on a holiday in Turkey's backpacker-friendly Cappadocia region.The engagement ring was $30. The couple have been critical of materialism with Obrecht stating ‘what is the point of hoarding stuff’. They have expressed a desire to donate most of their fortune to charity.

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