How Melanie Perkins Built Canva After Every Investor Said No

Melanie Perkins was rejected by more than a hundred investors over three years. Almost none of them said no because of her product. This is the Canva founder story, and the specific things she did to get around a wall she could not argue with. She was nineteen, teaching Photoshop to other students at the University of Western Australia, when she noticed that they were not learning design at all — they were learning menus. Six years later that observation became a company. In between, she was told no by more than a hundred venture capital firms, in Perth, nine thousand miles from Sand Hill Road. The objections on record were about where she lived, who she was dating, and where she had gone to school. So she stopped pitching. What she did instead involved a profitable yearbook business run out of her mother's living room, a former Google designer, and — this part is not a metaphor — learning to kitesurf. Today Canva has two hundred and sixty-five million monthly users and around three and a half billion dollars in annual revenue. Adobe, the company whose software was the reason investors said it could not be done, now sells a browser-based competitor. Three walls, three completely different mechanisms. Not one of them was "keep going." 👇 Melanie's rejections were never about her product. They were about where she lived and who she was dating. What's the thing people judge your work by that has nothing to do with your work — and what are you doing about it? 🔔 Subscribe for the founder stories behind the brands you already know — one every week. Next up: how a man who was washing dishes ended up building Nvidia. Sources: Canva newsroom (seed round announcement, 20 March 2013) · Forbes · Inside Philanthropy · University of Western Australia · public company reporting.