Melanie Perkins: 100 Rejections and a $26 Billion Company 100 Rejections

The living room

The first serious meeting about what would eventually become Canva happened in a living room in Perth, Western Australia. The year was 2007. Melanie Perkins was nineteen, studying communications and commerce at the University of Western Australia, and tutoring other students in Adobe InDesign and Photoshop on the side. Her boyfriend, Cliff Obrecht, sat across from her. Her mother's couch was the third chair in the room.

The conversation was not about design software. It was about yearbooks.

Perkins had noticed something teaching those tutoring sessions. Students would arrive at the end of a semester still unable to lay out a simple page. The software was not the problem exactly. The problem was that an entire category of creative work had been built around tools designed for professionals, priced for professionals, and shaped like professional workflows. If you weren't one, you lost a weekend trying to center a text box.

She had the bigger idea already. She wanted to rebuild design software from scratch, in a browser, with templates and drag-and-drop and real-time collaboration, for anyone who had ever needed to make a flyer or a presentation and quietly given up. But she was nineteen, in Perth, with no capital and no connections. Nobody was going to let her compete with Adobe.

So she picked the smallest version of the idea she could ship. Schools printed yearbooks every year. The design work was almost always done by one exhausted teacher wrestling with desktop publishing software late at night. If Perkins and Obrecht could build a simple browser tool that let students lay out their own yearbooks, they would have a real business and, more importantly, a working prototype of the bigger thesis.

That was the meeting. The company that came out of it was called Fusion Yearbooks.

Five years on the wedge

Fusion ran for five years before anyone in Silicon Valley knew Perkins existed. The two of them printed and shipped yearbooks out of her mother's house. They did the sales calls themselves, cold-calling school principals across Australia. They built the software at night. The margins were thin and the work was unglamorous.

But the economics worked. Fusion grew into one of the largest yearbook companies in Australia and expanded into New Zealand and France. By the time Perkins was ready to raise capital for the broader platform, she had something most first-time founders never bring into an investor meeting: a profitable, operating business with years of retention data proving that non-designers could and would use her software if you built it correctly.

She also had a thesis she could articulate without hedging. Design was not a scarce professional skill that needed to be defended. It was a universal need that had been locked behind bad tools. The question was not whether a mass-market design platform could exist. The question was who would build it first.

In 2010 she and Obrecht started flying to Silicon Valley to find out.

The marathon

What followed is the part of the story everyone has heard a version of. Over the next three years Perkins pitched more than a hundred investors. All of them said no.

It is worth sitting with what that actually looked like. She was not doing a glamorous roadshow. She was sleeping on couches, working out of her brother's small apartment in San Francisco, flying back to Perth to run Fusion between trips, and showing up to meetings where the room had already decided before she opened the deck. The feedback was consistent. She was too young. She was in the wrong country. The team was unknown. The category was owned by Adobe. The product was too ambitious for a seed round and too raw for a Series A. Several investors told her, politely, that she should go home.

Most founders would have gone home.

What Perkins did instead is the most instructive part of the story and the part that gets glossed over in the valuation headlines. After every meeting, she sat down and rewrote the deck. Not the branding. The argument. If an investor had asked a question she couldn't answer, that question went into the next version. If an objection landed, she either addressed it or sharpened the slide that invited it. By meeting fifty, the pitch had been stress-tested against the full menu of reasons a design platform wouldn't work. By meeting a hundred, there were almost no new objections left.

She was also doing something less visible. She was building relationships that did not look like fundraising. One of them was with Bill Tai, a Silicon Valley investor who ran an invitation-only retreat called MaiTai, built around kitesurfing. The retreat drew founders and investors into a setting where pitches happened on beaches between sessions on the water. Perkins learned to kitesurf partly so she could get into the room. She crashed into the water a lot. She also made it into the room.

It was through that circle that she eventually met Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps, who became an advocate inside her network and helped unlock the first institutional check.

The seed round closed in 2012. The amount, three million dollars, was small by Silicon Valley standards. By any honest measure of what Perkins had spent three years earning, it was enormous.

The platform

Canva launched publicly in August 2013. In its first year it signed up 150,000 users. The product did what the deck had been promising for three years: it put design on the web, in a browser, with templates and drag-and-drop, and it did not ask you to learn anything before you could ship a first draft.

The growth from there is the part that becomes easy to narrate in a sentence and almost impossible to feel. Canva passed 10 million users in 2017. It passed 60 million in 2021. By 2026 it serves more than 240 million monthly active users across 190 countries. Its annual recurring revenue is above US$3 billion. Its most recent secondary tender valued the company at around US$42 billion, which makes it the most valuable private software company in Australia's history and one of the most valuable in the world.

Perkins is still the CEO. Obrecht is still the COO. They are married. They have signed The Giving Pledge, committing the vast majority of their equity to the Canva Foundation and charitable work. When Perkins is asked in interviews what metric she pays attention to, she almost always answers in users, not dollars.

What the story actually teaches

The easy reading of the Canva story is that persistence pays. One hundred nos, one yes, forty billion dollars. That reading flattens the thing that actually happened.

The more honest reading is three-part.

The first part is the wedge. Perkins did not raise money to attack Adobe. She raised money after five years of running a profitable adjacent business that proved her underlying thesis. The yearbook company was not a side project or a stepping stone. It was the demo. By the time she walked into the hundredth investor meeting, she was not asking anyone to believe in her idea on faith. She was asking them to look at a real business and extrapolate.

The second part is what she did between the nos. One hundred rejections is not a vigil. It is a hundred free product-feedback sessions with some of the most informed people in the market. Perkins treated each one as data. By the end of the marathon, the pitch had been refined against the entire objection surface. That is why the hundred-and-first meeting converted. Not because the universe owed her one, but because the pitch had become unobjectionable.

The third part is relational. The round did not close because of a cold deck. It closed because Perkins spent a year and a half showing up in person, in a country she did not live in, in a sport she did not know, listening to people before asking them for anything. The investors who eventually funded Canva were not persuaded by a slide. They were persuaded by a founder they had watched behave the same way across many different rooms.

None of this is a shortcut. All of it took time Perkins did not know she had when she started. The useful thing to take from her story is not that one hundred rejections means you should keep pitching the same deck. It is that one hundred rejections, used correctly, is the research phase of the round that eventually closes.

The living room, again

It is worth going back to the first meeting. Perth, 2007. The living room. Two people and a mother's couch.

The idea Perkins had that day is almost identical to the one Canva is executing on now. Design should be for everyone. The tools should live in the browser. Templates should do the hard part. Collaboration should be native. Nothing about the thesis changed over the next sixteen years. What changed was the amount of evidence she was able to put on the table.

That is probably the single most underrated thing about her story. The idea was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck was earning the right to be heard about it. She spent five years earning it on yearbooks, three years earning it in investor meetings, and more than a decade earning it in product. The living room was always the starting point. The marathon was the price.