A young Filipino-Australian woman has been making international headlines as she was recently hailed as the third richest and youngest billionaire of the country.
32-year-old Melanie Perkins founded Canva, a free-to-use graphic design website, which is now valued at $2.5 billion (Php125 billion) together with her fiance Cliff Obrecht. The business has since been acknowledged to achieve the unicorn status, after their private start up coming of around 5 years to date has valued over a billion dollars.
Perkins recalls that she had humble beginnings back in 2010 when she started the digital graphic design website specific for school yearbooks in her mother’s living room.
“My mum’s living room became my office, and my boyfriend became my business partner, and we started enabling schools to create their yearbooks really, really simply,” said Perkins in an interview with CNBC.
Today she shares that the website is being used by millions of individuals around the world who have created billions of images to date.
“We have over 15 million people using it every month and that is 50,000 schools using it across the globe, 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies,” said Perkins during an interview with 60 Minutes Australia.
The Canva founder initially created an online platform but she found her stroke of luck when she connected and got an approval from Silicon Valley for her next project with American venture capitalist, Bill Tai.
From there she made valuable connections that eventually introduced her to her now tech co-founder Cameron Adams, and tech developer Dave Hearnden.
With her drive to help people of all skills create beautiful designs, Perkins states that it’s finding solutions for everyday problems that would inspire individuals to create platforms that will help propel themselves towards greater heights.
“I think that’s the most important thing because once you found a problem that you want to solve passionately, there’s gonna be so many barriers – every single barrier you can possibly imagine. But I think once you really got a crystal clear pitch of the problem you want to solve, that’s step one,” said Perkins.
