n a steamy May morning in 2013, Canva CEO Melanie Perkins found herself adrift on a kiteboard in the channel between billionaire Richard Branson’s private Necker and Moskito islands.
Such perseverance has long been a necessity at Canva, which began as a modest yearbook-design business in the state capital of Perth on Australia’s west coast. From those remote origins, Canva has grown into a global juggernaut. Twenty-million-plus users from 190 countries use the company’s “freemium” Web-based app to design everything from splashy Pinterest graphics to elegant restaurant menus.
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.
Perkins and Obrecht were having worse luck in their visits to Silicon Valley’s venture capital gatekeepers on Sand Hill Road. Dozens of firms passed on the little-known, romantically linked cofounders from a startup dead zone. “I’m honestly, 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.
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Beautiful.... The app is exquisite