Melanie Perkins

BIO

Co-founder and CEO of Canva, an online platform built to help make graphic design easy for everyone, professionals and amateurs alike. Her story epitomizes the entrepreneurial journey using her passion, grit, and determination to overcome challenges and find success. At 19, Melanie was in college studying digital media and was frustrated by how much time it took to create simple graphic design elements such as marketing brochures. She was helping other students after class work their way through the current design tools and creating her own extensive instruction manuals to help her classmates. Melanie knew she wanted to create her own business, so she started by co-founding Fusion Books from her mother’s living room. Fusion Books is an online platform for school yearbook design which has now grown to become the largest school yearbook publisher in her home country of Australia. Fusion Books taught her how to sell, recruit and build a successful business. It was then she knew it was time to tackle the need in the marketplace for an online platform that could simplify the graphic design process. So she set out to create her own platform that would be created for graphic designers of all skill levels and most importantly, those with no prior graphic design experience. But as any entrepreneur knows, success doesn’t happen overnight. For Melanie and her team, it took 3 years from the time they met their first investor to the time they actually received their first investment. She could’ve been discouraged and given up. She could’ve lost her passion for the project. Yet she believed her work had huge global implications for the future of technology and graphic design. Fast forward a decade later and Canva is now valued as a billion dollar company! Famed Apple Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki absolutely loved the idea and jumped on board in the early stages serving as Chief Evangelist for Canva. A year after the company launch, Canva already had over 1 million users taking advantage of the platform. They now have over 10 millions users across 179 countries.