The two-step plan: the making of Melanie Perkins

On a stage at SXSW Sydney in October 2024, the American investor Mary Meeker, whose annual internet reports were once required reading in every venture firm in the world, asked Melanie Perkins to explain, simply, what Canva is for. Perkins did not reach for a market-sizing slide. She gave a sentence instead. "We've got a two-step plan," she said, "to build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can." The room laughed, then went quiet, because she plainly meant it.

It is the kind of line that sounds glib until you trace where it came from. The woman saying it had, by her own account, been told "no" by more than a hundred venture capitalists before a single one wrote a cheque. The plan is not bravado. It is the residue of a very long apprenticeship in being underestimated.

A living room in Perth

Perkins grew up in Perth, Western Australia, the middle child of an Australian mother and a Malaysian father, about as far from Silicon Valley's gravity as a founder can start. The idea that became Canva began not as a design platform but as a frustration. While teaching design to fellow university students in the late 2000s, she watched them spend a whole semester learning where the buttons were in clunky desktop software before they could lay out a single page. "Design shouldn't be that hard," she has said. The conviction never really left her.

Her first company tested it in the least glamorous corner imaginable: school yearbooks. With her then-boyfriend Cliff Obrecht, now her husband and Canva's chief operating officer, she launched Fusion Books from her mother's living room, building simple online tools so students could design their own yearbook pages without the usual professional bottleneck. It was unfashionable, fiddly, low-margin work, and it grew. At its peak Fusion Books was producing yearbooks for hundreds of Australian secondary schools, and it taught Perkins the thing a pitch deck cannot: that ordinary people, given the right tools, will design for themselves.

One hundred rejections, and a kite

Fusion Books was the proof of concept; Canva was the much larger bet. Founded in 2012 in Sydney with Obrecht and the ex-Google engineer Cameron Adams, it set out to put graphic design in the browser, free, for everyone. Investors did not bite. Perkins pitched, and pitched, and was refused, by her own count more than a hundred times, by funds who could not see how a young woman from Perth with a yearbook business was going to build the design tool for the world.

Rather than treat the rejections as verdicts, she treated them as edits. "Every time we were rejected by an investor we would go through and refine the pitch deck again," she has said. The discipline of revising after every no, rather than defending the original pitch out of pride, is one of the most durable habits in her story, and one of the most quietly instructive.

The breakthrough came from an unlikely angle. Perkins had met the Silicon Valley investor and kitesurfing evangelist Bill Tai, who ran an exclusive networking retreat called MaiTai that mixed venture capitalists with the kitesurfing community on a beach in Maui. The price of admission, effectively, was the sport. So Perkins taught herself to kitesurf, a pursuit she has cheerfully called peculiar and dangerous, in order to get into rooms that an ordinary pitch meeting would never have opened. It worked. The connections she made there helped seed Canva's earliest funding round and brought in early backers who had nothing to do with the usual venture circuit.

Step one: build the company

The first half of the plan is, by any measure, done. Canva grew from a free browser tool into a global design platform used by individuals, schools and enterprises, and along the way became one of the most valuable privately held technology companies in the world. Perkins built it, in her telling, deliberately rather than fast.

That deliberateness is the part the headlines tend to skip. She talks less about disruption than about laying things down carefully, course by course, about resisting the temptation to mistake motion for progress. The crazy goals are real, but they sit on top of a method.

"Every time someone said no, we tried to figure out what we could do better next time."

It is a remarkably un-heroic sentence for a founder of her scale, and that is exactly why it lands. The Perkins story is usually told as a tale of audacity, the hundred rejections, the kitesurfing gambit, the eye-watering valuations. But the engine underneath the audacity is something humbler: a refusal to stop iterating, and a willingness to let other people's "no" sharpen the work rather than end it.

Step two: do the most good

The second step is the one that distinguishes Perkins from most of her peers, and it is not rhetorical. She and Obrecht have committed to give away the vast majority of their equity in Canva, a stake worth, on paper, billions, through philanthropic channels including the Canva Foundation, directed at the kind of problems, such as global poverty, that sit a long way from page layouts and presentation templates.

It would be easy to file that under corporate generosity and move on. But read against the rest of her story it looks less like a gesture and more like the logical conclusion of the same instinct that built the company: set a goal large enough to seem absurd, then treat it as an engineering problem rather than a wish. "At Canva," she has said, "one of our core values is to set crazy big goals and make them happen." The pledge is simply that value pointed outward.

The lesson in the plan

What makes Perkins worth studying is not the valuation; it is the shape of the thinking. Most leaders who reach her altitude either chase scale and lose the plot, or talk about purpose and quietly never get around to it. Perkins put both halves in the same sentence and has spent more than a decade refusing to let go of either.

The two-step plan is, in the end, a discipline disguised as a slogan. Build something big enough that it can do real good; then actually do the good, rather than promising it. Between those two steps sits everything that is hard about leading at scale, and the woman who once redrafted her pitch after every rejection seems, more than most, to have made her peace with the work in the middle.