Canva’s Melanie Perkins on how she turned her ‘future of publishing’ idea into a unicorn
Melanie Perkins likes to set “crazy huge goals and make them happen”. She isn’t kidding! At 32, she is one of the world’s youngest female founders to run a billion-dollar venture-backed company, Canva.
Her story is more remarkable when you consider that she came up with her ‘future of publishing’ idea while attending university without any business experience or contacts in the VC world.
10 years ago, a 22-year-old Perkins flew from her home in Perth, Australia, to the Silicon Valley in the US to pitch her idea to Bill Tai, the famous technology investor. Initially, he didn’t pay much attention to the college dropout, but introduced her to other investors, engineers and developers. Ultimately, he himself invested in Canva.
Today, Canva, an online design start-up that allows anyone to design everything from greeting cards, PowerPoint presentations to posters, and websites to calendars, has become a household name, with people in 190 countries using the platform that offers services in over 100 languages. In May, Canva completed a fresh $US70 million funding round, valuing the company at $US2.5 billion. The funding came predominantly from two new investors, General Catalyst and Bond, with the latter being a brand new fund created by prominent investor and analyst Mary Meeker. Among its existing investors are Felicis Capital and Blackbird Ventures. Before this, Canva had made another big announcement: it had acquired free stock photography companies Pexels and Pixabay for an undisclosed sum.
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Esta historia es de la edición August - September 2019 de Entrepreneur magazine.
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