Somewhere in San Francisco in 2013, Melanie Perkins heard the same word again and again. No. More than 100 investors turned her and Cliff Obrecht down.
The reasons were as plain as they were unfair. They were from Australia, far from the money. They were a couple, which made some investors nervous. And neither was a trained engineer.
Hidden inside that decision is a fact that rarely gets told, because it came before Canva.
Perkins came from Perth. Her mother was an Australian-born teacher; her father a Malaysian engineer of Filipino and Sri Lankan heritage. At Sacred Heart College she trained seriously in figure skating and, almost as an aside, ran a small business selling handmade scarves. She started at the University of Western Australia, studying communications, psychology and commerce, and tutored other students in graphic design. That job taught her something she would build a company around: even people who needed design software could barely use it.
She left university at 19. Hidden inside that decision is a fact that rarely gets told, because it came before Canva. In 2007 she and Obrecht started Fusion Books, a web-based yearbook publisher with a drag-and-drop editor and template library. It grew across Australia and later into New Zealand and France. Canva, launched in August 2013, was essentially the yearbook idea turned loose on everything else.
The road to launch ran through those rejections. The founders needed a technical partner and an investor who would take the risk. Help came from Lars Rasmussen, the Google Maps co-creator, who advised them and introduced Cameron Adams. An investor suggested the team pick one leader, and Obrecht put forward Perkins.
Then the numbers moved. More than 750,000 people used Canva in its first year. By 2017 it was profitable with 294,000 paying customers. In January 2018 it raised A$40 million from Sequoia, Blackbird and Felicis at a A$1 billion valuation, and by 2021 it was valued at US$40 billion.
Success has had a price. A 2019 breach exposed data on about 139 million users. In 2026, with AI serving costs rising, Canva cut its growth outlook from 30% to 20%, and in November it laid off 1,271 people, about a fifth of its staff. It still counts more than 265 million monthly users and US$4 billion in recurring revenue.
What a founder can take from it is simple. Perkins heard the same no about three things, geography, partnership and background, and none of them was about the idea. She kept the idea, changed the audience, and went back.