DECEMBER 31, 20 19the phones cold-calling prospects. When schools
asked to speak to a manager, Obrecht simply low-
ered his voice. The business eventually reached
400 schools, with licensees as far off as France. It
was a start. But Perkins couldn’t go much farther
without venture funding, then virtually impossi-
ble to fi nd in Perth, a city built on mining and pet-
rochemicals.
Perkins spotted—and seized—the narrowest
of opportunities in 2011 when a longtime Silicon
Valley venture capitalist named Bill Tai came to
Perth to judge a startup competition. A skilled
kitesurfer who had backed TweetDeck and
Zoom, Tai was in town mainly to play in Perth’skiller waves. Perkins and Obrecht sniff ed out a
dinner Tai was hosting and ambushed attendees
with a pitch for something called Canvas Chef: a
metaphorical pizza, with design elements as the
toppings and document types—fl yer, business
card, restaurant menu—as the dough. “It wasn’t
the most stylish analogy,” says Rick Baker, an in-
vestor who saw the pitch that night.
The founders left without any capital—but
with a newfound enthusiasm for extreme water
sports. They became fi xtures at Tai’s subsequent
kitesurfi ng gatherings, which featured prom-
inent tech executives looking to invest in new
startups. In Maui, after a friend of Peter Thiel’s
told them they needed a single leader, Perkins
became sole CEO.
Perkins and Obrecht were having worse luck
in their visits to Silicon Valley’s venture capital
gatekeepers on Sand Hill Road. Dozens of fi rms
passed on the little-known, romantically linked
cofounders from a startup dead zone. “I’m hon-
estly, and unfortunately, not comfortable doing
a deal in Australia,” wrote one. “I am not sure it’s
going to make sense just yet,” another said.
In the end, the wave-chasing connections paid
off. Through the group they met Cameron Ad-
ams, 40, an ex-Googler who had founded a start-
up based in Sydney. Expecting to meet with themas an advisor in March 2012, Adams would sign
on as third cofounder the following June. Now
that they had a technical leader, the founders
broke through: Canva raised $3 million in seed
funding in two tranches in 2012 and early 2013,
including a crucial matching grant from the Aus-
tralian government.
The company launched in August 2013 to a
couple of reviews on tech blogs and few users.
Adams and Canva’s engineers, who stayed up late
in Sydney (the company relocated there in Feb-
ruary 2012) to handle the expected infl ux of sign-
ups, went to sleep dejected. What no one knew
yet was that Canva’s timing was perfect. The rise
of Instagram and Twit-
ter were changing how
businesses reached cus-
tomers. From schools to
sheriff ’s offi ces, skating
rinks to self-published
authors, everyone sud-
denly cared a lot about
their online presence.
Canva was an aff ordable
way to look good. The
trickle of sign-ups grew
to 50,000 users in the
fi rst month; by 2014,
when Canva raised an-
other $3 million from
Thiel’s Founders Fund and Shasta Ventures,
600,000 users had made 3.5 million designs.
In China, historically a fool’s-errand market
for Western software makers, Canva is a rare suc-
cess. Obrecht—a tall, amiable presence who, as
COO, often rallies the troops (or delivers bad
news)—opened Canva’s fi rst offi ce outside of
Sydney, in Manila, in 2014, then hired the former
head of LinkedIn’s China unit to build an offi ce
in mainland China. Today, a local engineering
team handles a China-fi rst version of Canva built
from the ground up with features like deep inte-
grations with Chinese messaging apps and easy-
to-create QR codes, which are popular there. Mc-
Donald’s China is a customer, as is a nationwide
real-estate brokerage that off ers the software to
its 1,000 agents.W
hen it comes to serving big
businesses, Canva is still a
rookie. Its October launch
of Canva for Enterprise
came at a private event in
New York. Perkins addressed staff ers from about
100 companies, including Equinox, JPMorgan
and HubSpot.
A slow start for Canva’s enterprise business
won’t sink the company. This December, theFORBES.COM74
PROFILE—MELANIEPERKINSDestination: Design
Users have made
2 billion designs in
Canva to date, one
billion in the past
year alone. Up next:
Canva Apps, seen
here on Canva’s
website, a new
service that embeds
publishing tools
from popular apps
like Instagram and
Pinterest into Canva.