DECEMBER 31, 20 19least using the favored startup metric of adjusted
EBITDA, which strips out stock-option expens-
es, fi nancing and tax costs—since 2017. “We have
been really conscientious about not taking on too
much capital because we’ve been profi table for
the last two years,” Perkins says.
It all starts with Perkins, who onboards every
new employee (now 700 in total) with a thor-
ough rundown of Canva’s most sensitive fi nancial
numbers and past investor pitch decks. Other
unicorn founders boast. Perkins keeps receipts.
And as Canva grows she’s trying to prove you can
build a global tech giant from anywhere. “Mel-
anie is a rare breed of entrepreneur, the likes of
which you don’t fi nd often anywhere,” says Mary
Meeker, a seasoned internet investor whose new
fi rm, Bond Capital, made Canva its fi rst offi cial
investment in May.
Perkins’ family jokes that she has a 100-point
plan for changing the world. First, Canva has a
much more straightforward challenge: win over
big business. Like Atlassian, Slack and Zoom be-
fore it, Canva faces a classic dilemma: a freemi-
um model can make you viral, but most users will
never pay a dime. And though Canva says it has
users inside almost every large corporation today,
they’re typically rogue individuals or small teams,
not offi cial corporate accounts. Moving upmar-
ket means increasingly brushing up against Ado-
be, the $149 billion (market cap) graphics giant
that took in $1.65 billion in revenue last quarter
from its design-focused unit alone. Then there
are a host of high-fl ying startups like Figma and
Sketch that cater to pros but could easily moveinto the consumer space. And that’s not even
considering Canva’s ambitions in new mediums
like video and presentations, which could pit it
against everything from small Instagram video-
making apps to Microsoft, maker of the block-
buster PowerPoint.
It’s daunting, to say the least, but for Perkins,
who has already turned doubting Silicon Valley
players into eager supporters and mastered the
Chinese market—and has built a $200 million-
plus bank account—it’s all according to plan. “I feel
like we’ve done an incredible job, but we’ve done
very little compared to what we want to do. We’ve
done 1% of what I think is possible,” Perkins says.
“Our company mission is to empower the world to
design. And we really mean the whole world.”P
erkins started working on what
became Canva in 2007 from her
mom’s living room in Perth. The
daughter of an Australian-born
teacher and a Malaysian engi-
neer of Filipino and Sri Lankan heritage, Per-
kins had wanted to be a professional fi gure skat-
er, enduring an adolescence of 4:30 a.m. wake-
up calls before enrolling at the University of
Western Australia. There, while teaching fellow
students basic computer design as part of her
communications and commerce studies, she had
an idea. The process of designing and printing
a poster or a fl yer—composing it in Adobe Pho-
toshop or Microsoft Word, converting it to the
right size and saving it as a PDF, and taking it
to a store like Staples to print—seemed cumber-
some in the age of the internet.
Wouldn’t it be much better to
do it all in one place with one
online tool?
“The idea of making de-
sign really simple was the fi rst
idea,” she says.
The problem felt so obvi-
ous that Perkins feared some-
one else would build a solution
fi rst if she delayed. So she hired
freelancers to build a Flash
website to target one niche she
identifi ed as steady and under-
served: school yearbooks, typ-
ically the responsibility of stu-
dent volunteers. Obrecht and
Perkins’ startup, Fusion Books,
found a market immediately.
And with one semester of col-
lege left, Perkins put her stud-
ies on pause. In peak season,
Perkins’ mom fed the printers
ink overnight. Obrecht workedFORBES.COM72
PROFILE—MELANIEPERKINSPerfect Fit
“The three of us had
no idea how to run
a company,” says
Cameron Adams
(left ), with cofounders
Melanie Perkins
and Cliff Obrecht
at Canva’s former
Sydney headquarters.
“When I met Mel and
Cliff , I could feel the
jigsaw pieces coming
together.”