The Unsinkable Melanie Perkins: After 100 Rejections, the Canva CEO Faces Her Greatest Threat Yet

In little more than a decade, the expectations placed on 36-year-old Melanie Perkins have gone from negligible to near impossible.

Perkins, CEO and co-founder of Canva, a rapidly-growing graphic design platform and one of tech’s most highly valued private companies, was a complete unknown from Perth, Australia, when she appeared on the Silicon Valley scene in 2013. Today, she’s talked about by investors and colleagues in almost mythic terms. “She has a desire for worldwide domination,” said podcaster and author Guy Kawasaki, who Perkins hired as Canva’s “chief evangelist.” “It can sound very negative, but you have to understand—the way I’m saying it, it’s a positive.”

“Our ambition with Canva is to empower the whole world to design,” Perkins told me. “But we quite literally mean that—we want to empower every single person to design anything they can possibly imagine in every language, on every device.”