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.�
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