LEADERSHIP
“ When you don’ t have any connections, you don’ t have any network, you just kind of have to wedge your foot in the door and wiggle it all the way through,” Perkins has said of that period.“ If you get your foot in the door just a tiny bit, you have to kind of wedge it all the way in.”
Early entrepreneurship to tech empire Canva wasn’ t Perkins’ s first brush with entrepreneurship. Selling handmade scarfs at markets and shops at age 14 gave her early exposure to product creation, sales and retail. While tutoring graphic design students at the University of Western Australia, she watched them lose hours to complex software like Adobe Photoshop that demanded a semester’ s study before anything usable could be made.“ People would have to spend an entire semester learning where the buttons were,” she has said,“ and that seemed completely ridiculous.” The question she asked – why couldn’ t design be simpler, online, collaborative – became the one she spent the next decade answering. The first answer was Fusion Books. Founded with Obrecht in 2007 and run from her mother’ s living room in Duncraig, Perth, the company let schools design and print their own yearbooks through a drag-and-drop editor. They borrowed AUD $ 50,000( US $ 35,420) from friends and family, found a developer willing to build the prototype and delivered finished yearbooks to schools across Australia by hand.
You just kind of have to wedge your foot in the door and wiggle it all the way through
Melanie Perkins Co-founder and CEO Canva
74 April 2026