Cliff Obrecht’s first empire had a peculiar frontier: the last page of the school yearbook. In the late 2000s, from Perth, he and Melanie Perkins built Fusion Books, software that let schools arrange photographs, captions and teenage memories without wrestling professional design programs into submission. Obrecht later described the pair as the king and queen of Australia’s yearbook market. It was, he conceded, a small kingdom. The joke is useful because it preserves the scale of the beginning. Canva did not arrive by thunderclap. It began with class photos, deadlines and a problem modest enough to solve.
Perkins supplied the original observation. While teaching design at university, she watched students spend months learning expensive, complicated tools. She imagined creation moving online, becoming collaborative and easy. Obrecht was studying to be a schoolteacher. His contribution was to put the large idea in a smaller box: try yearbooks first. He had seen coordinators struggle with them. Here was a real customer, a recurring job and a deadline that would not politely move because the software was awkward.
That instinct became one of Obrecht’s durable operating rules: start niche and go wide. Fusion Books grew across Australia, New Zealand and France. More revealingly, customers began using the software for newsletters and posters. The yearbook was not the destination. It was proof that ordinary people wanted to make visual things without first earning a minor degree in menus and toolbars.
Fusion Books starts with one unfashionably useful problem: school yearbooks.
Canva launches after years of pitching, recruiting and more than 100 investor rejections.
The platform launches in 100 languages and makes its global ambition literal.
Canva acquires Affinity and steps deeper into professional creative work.
Canva AI 2.0 arrives with editable, layered generation and agentic workflows.
The useful art of being from somewhere else
Perth was home and, to many investors, an objection. Obrecht has called it one of the world’s most isolated cities. There was little venture capital around them, and he and Perkins did not know the customs of startups because they barely knew the category existed. When the ambition outgrew yearbooks, the pair went looking for money where the money was. “Silicon Valley’s got heaps of money,” Obrecht remembers thinking. “Let’s go to Silicon Valley.”
The valley returned the enthusiasm in carefully itemised refusals. They were a couple. They lived in Perth. Neither was the technical founder investors expected. Design looked niche. Some financiers preferred startups close enough to visit by bicycle. More than 100 said no. Rejection is delightful only in retrospect; at the time, the pair still needed a product and a team.
“Unorthodox people in unorthodox places can and often do solve big problems because they have unique perspectives.”Cliff Obrecht
The response was not to pretend the objections were imaginary. Obrecht admits that lacking a technical co-founder was a genuine risk. They recruited Cameron Adams, a former Google designer who could write the early front-end code and, just as importantly, help make the proposition legible to investors and engineers. The trio then hired the technical leadership that gave Canva a foundation sturdy enough for what followed.
They also resisted advice to charge at the door. Canva launched with a freemium model and let useful output advertise the tool. Social-media marketers, people with a chronic appetite for fresh visual material, became an early audience. Obrecht cold-contacted Guy Kawasaki on Twitter. Kawasaki replied, an act Obrecht still recalls with affection for someone willing to notice an underdog without leverage. He later became Canva’s chief evangelist.
A negotiator raised in the bargain aisle
Obrecht’s public manner is unusually free of executive lacquer. He is direct, quick to laugh and willing to make thrift sound less like virtue than muscle memory. His mother was a teacher who haggled in Australian discount stores. As a child, he found this mortifying. As an adult, he credits her with an education in value: ask, be honest about what matters and do not pay merely because the label tells you to.
At Canva, that inheritance became a way of making deals. Obrecht puts the other party’s goals beside his own and looks for alignment. In acquisitions, he explains why Canva wants the company, what it values, what it does not and how that view translates into terms. His maxim is tidy enough to fit on a negotiation-room coaster: “I’d rather a fast no than a long no, but better is a fast yes.”
The method depends on trust, which Obrecht says he grants by default. Perkins begins at the other end, allowing trust to accumulate. The contrast has survived two companies and a marriage. Obrecht jokes that Canva’s CEO is also his boss, “definitely the worthy boss.” Their disagreements can be heated, and their attempts to outlaw work talk on evenings or weekends are imperfect. They have been together since university, married on Rottnest Island in 2021, and understand the peculiar apology of a founder unable to come to dinner because something needs shipping.
His leadership changed as the company did. Early Obrecht favoured example, hours and momentum. Later he came to value frank coaching and communication fitted to the person receiving it. High expectations were insufficient if nobody explained the gap. The adjustment is the sort of unglamorous maturity that scale demands: a company cannot run forever on two people knowing what the other means.
The price of enough
Canva made its founders extraordinarily wealthy on paper. Obrecht talks about that fact with discomfort and comic economy. He has said he still flies economy unless points produce an upgrade; a five-hour seat is a poor bargain at ten thousand dollars. He and Perkins would rather spend on experiences. They have ridden motorbikes through Bhutan, taken dirt bikes near the China-Vietnam border and gone zip-lining in Laos. At bedtime, after years of business books, he reaches for Jack Reacher. Even billionaires, it seems, occasionally want a plot with fewer board papers.
The humour sits beside a serious conviction. Obrecht and Perkins do not view nearly all their Canva wealth as money for private consumption or inheritance. They have committed the bulk of it to charitable purposes through the Canva Foundation. Obrecht describes themselves as custodians of capital and philanthropy as another field in which they began knowing very little. Start, learn, measure, improve: the method resembles a startup because it is the operating method they know.
- Build one of the world’s most valuable companies.
- Do the most good possible.
A central partnership is with GiveDirectly, which sends cash to people living in extreme poverty. The work began in Malawi and expanded. In 2025 Canva announced another US$100 million commitment, taking the planned total to US$150 million. Obrecht’s aspiration is broader than a cheque. He wants to improve the machinery connecting goodwill and capital with problems that can be solved. Intentions, in his view, are abundant. The bridge between intention and result is badly engineered.
“We’re custodians of that capital, and now it’s on us to figure out how to deploy it.”Cliff Obrecht
The canvas gets wider
Obrecht once described the COO role as “a bit of everything,” focused on finding the company’s path forward. The path now runs through professional design, enterprise work and artificial intelligence. Canva acquired Affinity in 2024, then made the professional suite free. In Qatar in 2026, Obrecht argued that powerful creative tools had been both complicated and expensive, and said Affinity received three million downloads in its first month under the new model.
His argument for AI follows the original Canva idea. Creativity should not be trapped inside a priesthood of difficult tools. He calls AI a compounding enhancer of human creativity, while insisting on guardrails against misuse. Canva AI 2.0, introduced in 2026, tries to preserve the user’s hand by generating layered, editable work rather than a sealed image. The promise is not that the machine completes creativity, but that it clears another obstacle between an idea and its expression.
There is a pleasing continuity here. Perkins saw that design tools were too hard. Obrecht saw a yearbook coordinator with a Tuesday problem. Fusion Books solved the small version; Canva kept removing walls around it. The company now speaks in the numerical language of hundreds of millions, billions in annual revenue and billions in private valuation. Those figures explain its reach, but not its character.
For that, return to the small kingdom. A narrow market taught the founders to listen. A distant city taught them to travel. Refusals taught them to recruit what they lacked. Obrecht’s mother taught him to ask whether the price made sense. None of these is a grand theory. Together they form an operator’s biography: large outcomes assembled from specific problems, plainly discussed. The yearbook’s last page turned out not to be an ending after all.