The number everyone repeats about Melanie Perkins is a hundred. That is roughly how many investors turned down Canva before one of them wrote a cheque. It has hardened into the kind of statistic that gets read out at conferences as motivational filler — keep going, they said no to Canva too.

That reading gets it backwards. The rejections were not an obstacle Perkins pushed through on the way to building the product. They were the years in which the product got built.

The yearbook company nobody thinks about

Before Canva there was Fusion Books, a tool for designing school yearbooks that Perkins ran out of her mother’s living room in Perth with her co-founder Cliff Obrecht. It is the part of the story that gets skipped, and it is the part that matters.

Fusion Books was not a warm-up. It was a real business with real customers who had a very specific problem: ordinary people, with no design training and no software budget, needed to lay out a printed book that would not embarrass them. Perkins spent years watching exactly how those people failed — where they got stuck, what they gave up on, which parts of professional design tools were merely intimidating rather than genuinely necessary.

By the time she was pitching Canva, she was not proposing a hypothesis about what non-designers needed. She had already watched hundreds of them struggle in front of her.

Why the pitch kept failing anyway

The rejection years were roughly 2010 to 2012, and the market Perkins was describing did not obviously exist yet. Design software was a professional category. It was sold to professionals, priced for professionals, and everyone in the room had a mental model that said the total addressable market was the number of people who called themselves designers.

Perkins was arguing that the real market was everyone who had ever needed to make something look decent and had no idea how. That is a much larger number, but in 2011 it was an assertion, not a spreadsheet. Investors were not being stupid. They were being asked to fund a category that had no comparable, pitched by a first-time founder from Perth, which at the time was about as far from Sand Hill Road as it is possible to be and still be on a map.

What changed was not the pitch. It was that Perkins kept refining a product built on years of direct observation while the rest of the world slowly caught up to the premise.

The number today

Canva launched in 2013, co-founded with Obrecht and Cameron Adams. Private investors valued the company at $42 billion in August 2025, and it reports 240 million monthly active users and around six million paying teams. Forbes put Perkins’s own net worth at roughly $7.6 billion in early 2026 — a figure she has repeatedly said she intends to give most of away.

The 2026 acquisition run tells you where she thinks the next decade is: Canva bought the animation company Cavalry and the ad-performance startup MangoAI in February, then the AI workflow tool Simtheory and the marketing automation platform Ortto in April. That is not a design company buying design companies. It is a design company buying the surrounding workflow, on the bet that “make this look good” and “make this actually work” are converging into one job.

What founders should actually take from it

The useful lesson is not persistence. Persistence is cheap and most of the people practising it are wrong.

The lesson is what Perkins was persistent about. She did not spend a hundred pitches defending an idea. She spent them defending an observation she had already tested on paying customers in a market so unglamorous — school yearbooks — that nobody else was looking at it. When the rejections came, she had something to go back to that was more informative than the feedback.

A hundred noes is only a good story if the hundred-and-first yes was earned by something other than stubbornness.

This is an editorial profile assembled from public reporting and Canva’s own disclosures. Sources: Forbes, Canva Newsroom, Wikipedia — Canva.