The Power of Being Normal
Posted on June 02, 2021 by JM Pique, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
Melanie Perkins shows the power of a cool entrepreneur who can be the third wealthiest woman in Australia while still having her feet on the ground.
The story could be one more of those of youngsters pursuing their dream. She remembers pitching more than a hundred people in less than two months in San Francisco, far away from her home city, Perth, in Australia. She dreamt big and started small, as many do. She wanted to entirely change the desktop publishing industry when she was 19.
You’ve probably heard from her. Her name is Melanie Perkins. She created one of the tools that maybe you’re already using to make your presentations look fantastic. And Canva is today it’s a billion-dollar business (if you want to know more about her story explained by herself, you can listen to the podcast episode How I Built This where Guy Raz has a really nice conversation with her).
People with no design experience sometimes need to create something that looks professional. We don’t know where to turn to. Melanie thought about her mom, a teacher, who had to create student yearbooks, and started from this.
She and her boyfriend took a fifty thousand loan from F&F and hired some developers to get started with building web-based design software, although they didn’t know how to code whatsoever. And then, a Silicon Valley investor was at a conference in Perth in 2010, and serendipity happened. Perkins met him, and everything started to go big when she went to Palo Alto with everything she had put together for her most important pitch so far.
Fast-Forward, ten years after that meeting, to make a long story short. Today, the startup value is around six billion dollars, two times the valuation of less than a year ago. Its latest round of funding makes Canva the largest privately-owned company in Australia. The now Sydney-based company, with more than a thousand employees, operates across multiple countries. It has a “freemium” model that allows its users to access its software for free to design hundreds of products, including posters, websites, and business cards. Design creation and sharing on Canva have increased by 50% since the start of COVID-19. They are doubling its paid user base, which has reached over half a billion organizations and 1.5 million paid subscribers to the paid account type, Canva Pro.
Twenty designs are created in Canva every second. Perkins has become the third wealthiest woman in Australia and the youngest Aussie billionaire. Her personal wealth has been estimated to be around $1.3 billion.
All in all, behind the numbers, there’s always the person. In an interview, she recalls when she met Lars Rasmussen, who co-founded Google Maps, she thought he was “just” a nice normal person who worked really hard. At that moment, she felt empowered and changed her perspective on what was possible.
“When you think we’re on a planet with seven billion other people, it’s very easy to think that surely someone else has more experience, more knowledge, more power to help improve this world. But it’s a pretty frightening realisation that we are on this planet with seven billion other first timers.”
Melanie’s also generous with her time, penning a lengthy and technical post on Medium, answering 21 questions from the startup community on her startup’s journey until now, offers some lessons, details the ups and downs, and outlines how she deals with the pressure. The company is passionate about philanthropy and contributes significant donations to the causes the founders care about. Last December, Perkins announced that Canva would join the 1 percent movement, donating 1 percent of its equity, profit, and resources to “making the world a better place.”
“We believe the old adage ‘do no evil’ is no longer enough today and hope to live up to our value to ‘be a force for good’.”
She sounds humble; she looks authentically normal, grounded, balanced. In her early thirties, she’s still with that boyfriend who shared her dream a decade ago, and now they are named to be one of the most important “power couple” in Australia. She is proud to support 25,000 nonprofit organizations that use Canva for fundraising.
Honestly, it is refreshing to see someone up there and, at the same time, so down-to-earth. Hopefully, she could be a sort of role model for a whole generation of new entrepreneurs.
