How Husband-Wife Team Built $12 Billion Fortune With A Startup

Canva users have created more than 7 billion designs, but Perkins wants it to become ubiquitous. That includes ultimately replacing PDF resumes with responsive web-based tools.

It all began with millennial angst at user-unfriendly software.

While teaching design programs part-time in 2008 when she was at university in Perth, Australia, Melanie Perkins grew frustrated with the clunky desktop-based tools she was helping her students understand.

"Facebook was taking off at the time - people could jump in and use that so easily and yet design tools took years of training to learn," Perkins recalled in a Medium post in 2018. "I wanted to make design software simple, online and collaborative."

It was a winning formula. A funding round last week valued their graphic design company, Canva, at $40 billion. That gave Perkins, 34, and her husband and co-founder Cliff Obrecht, 35, a fortune of $5.9 billion each, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.