Technology Entrepreneur biography
Melanie Perkins
The Canva co-founder whose ambition to simplify design grew from teaching complex software and building a school-yearbook business.
Photo: Melanie Perkins · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Cropped for display
The software was the problem
Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and chief executive of Canva. The company's origin is tied to her experience teaching design software at university. In co-founder Cameron Adams' account, Perkins was helping classmates use programs such as InDesign and Photoshop in 2007 and saw how much effort people needed before they could create anything. Her response was to question the complexity of the software itself. She imagined a platform that people could use without an extensive technical education or a large budget. This observation became a broader ambition to make visual communication accessible, but the first business built around it served a much more specific customer.
Yearbooks as a proving ground
Perkins and Cliff Obrecht developed Fusion Books to help schools design and print yearbooks. In her retrospective, she explains that teachers often had to manage those projects alongside full-time teaching, despite having little design experience. The narrower market gave the founders a place to learn about customer needs, software development and running a business. Perkins describes the company as initially bootstrapped because they did not yet understand the alternatives. Development consumed much of their available capital; she credits a research-and-development tax concession and a small-business bank loan with helping them continue. The yearbook business supplied practical experience for the much wider design platform they hoped to build.
Sources [2]
Finding complementary co-founders
Moving from a yearbook tool to a general design platform required more than a larger pitch. Perkins' account describes introductions to investor Bill Tai and Google Maps co-creator Lars Rasmussen, followed by the effort to find technical collaborators. Rasmussen introduced Perkins and Obrecht to Cameron Adams, whose work combined design and software development. Adams later recalled hearing their ambitious vision while they were still running Fusion Books. His involvement added another co-founder to the business. The story is useful because the resulting company was assembled through relationships and complementary skills over time, rather than emerging fully formed from Perkins' original observation about difficult software.
Keeping a growing company aligned
In her account of Canva's tenth anniversary, Perkins describes company-building as an ongoing cycle of refining products, finding people and solving problems. She attributes progress to the team, community, company culture and investors who supported the mission. That retrospective also explains Canva's working practices: flexible arrangements, asynchronous communication and shared materials to include colleagues across time zones. Perkins links the business to a two-step ambition: build a valuable company and use that position to do good. It is an expression of the founders' stated aims, rather than a measure of outcomes. Her continuing role as CEO places her at the intersection of the product's expanding scope and the organisation supporting it.
A few turning points
Career milestones
The evidence behind the account
Sources & further reading
The linked source material was checked on October 13, 2026. Roles and business relationships may change. Source numbers refer to the sections above.
- CanvaCanva co-founder Cameron Adams' biggest lessons
- Canva21 Questions from Aussie Startups: Part one
- Canva21 Questions from Canva's 10-year journey: Part two
- CanvaMelanie Perkins: author biography
