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While no one was looking, Melanie Perkins (@MelanieCanva) built Canva, an online graphic design business valued at $40 billion.

Canva is one of the world's most valuable private companies & the most valuable female-founded & female-led company.

This is Melanie's story 👇
Based in Australia, Canva CEO Perkins and her co-founder (and now- husband) Cliff Obrecht recently raised a whopping $200 million in venture funding from investors including T. Rowe Price with Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
With more than 2,000 employees, it's hard to believe that Canva started as a very, very small high school yearbook business.
When she was 19, Perkins and Obrecht were college students in Perth, Australia.

They were making a little income on the side by helping teach other students how to navigate complicated design programs offered by tech giants such as Microsoft and Adobe.
"People would have to spend an entire semester learning where the buttons were, and that seemed completely ridiculous,” Perkins said. “I thought that in the future it was all going to be online and collaborative and much, much simpler than these really hard tools.”
Perkins and Obrecht, who were dating at the time, decided to test their idea.

They created an online school yearbook design business that offered templates full of layouts, fonts, & elements for free.

They would then print the yearbooks & sell them to schools in Australia.
"Over five years, Cliff and I grew Fusion Books into the largest yearbook company in Australia, and expanded into France and New Zealand," she says. "But we knew all along that the technology we had built could be applied much more broadly, which is when Canva was born."
The business was a success, but Perkins saw a bigger, more immediate need to create a one-stop-shop for people who needed design services but didn't have design skills.
She began pitching small investors, and the idea for Canva became a reality in 2012 when the duo added a tech co-founder named Cameron Adams and a tech developer named Dave Hearnden.

Canva raised $1.5 million for its initial funding round to build a simple design tool.
Today, the company offers more than 800,000 templates and 100 million photos, illustrations, and fonts. It attracts more than 60 million monthly active users from 190 different countries.
It makes money via a freemium model that allows enterprises to pay for more designs and capabilities. As a result, more than 500,000 paying teams now use Canva, including companies like American Airlines, CBRE, Intel, Kimberly-Clark, and Zoom.
Another factor that separates Canva from its venture-backed peers is that the company has been long profitable and cash-flow positive.

The business continues to more than double in sales, which put it on pace to reach a $1 billion annualized revenue run-rate by December 2021.
From her humble beginnings to her billionaire status, Perkins has a plan for what to do with her wealth.

She has long talked about her "two-step plan for maximum impact," which involves “becom[ing] one of the most valuable companies in the world, and do the most good we can do”
She and Obrecht launched a foundation where they have pledged to give away 30% of Canva, which accounts for the “vast majority” of their stakes.

Their equity, valued at ~$12 billion, would put the young co-founders on track to create Australia's largest charitable foundation.
"It has felt strange when people refer to us as 'billionaires' as it has never felt like our money, we’ve always felt that we’re purely custodians of it," Perkins, who is only 34, wrote in a September blog post.
She added: "We have this wildly optimistic belief that there is enough money, goodwill, and good intentions in the world to solve most of the world’s problems, and we want to spend our lifetime working towards that."
Here's what we can learn about innovation, leadership, and philanthropy from Perkins, one of the most underrated founders and operators in the technology space today.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE 👇

theprofile.substack.com/p/melanie-perkins-the-billionaire-founder
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