‘Really fun’: Canva billionaires Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht become parents

Melanie Perkins has spoken publicly for the first time about becoming a parent, after she welcomed a baby with co-founder Cliff Obrecht amid one of the most challenging years in business.

Canva CEO Melanie Perkins. Source: Supplied.

Canva co-founder and chief executive Melanie Perkins has spoken publicly for the first time about becoming a parent, after she welcomed a baby with co-founder Cliff Obrecht amid what’s been one of the most challenging and turbulent periods for the Australian technology sector.

Ms Perkins, who married Canva’s chief operating officer and fellow technology billionaire Cliff Obrecht on Rottnest Island in 2021, welcomed their first child in early 2022, but until now have stayed quiet about their new arrival.

“It‘s been fun,” Ms Perkins said of parenthood in an interview with The Australian. “Really fun.”

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Ms Perkins and Mr Obrecht, who are worth an estimated combined $10bn and together lead what is now one of Australia’s largest technology companies, have both signed Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, and have each set aside most of their respective stakes in Canva to give away to the Canva Foundation, the company’s charitable arm.

“The billions upon billions of dollars is more than anyone needs in their entire lifetime by a longshot,” Ms Perkins told The Australian previously, while Mr Obrecht said that he hopes the pair’s wealth can be used to enact positive change. He said in another interview he doesn’t want to raise “incredibly wealthy little children that are little snots.”

Canva founders Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins. Source: Max Doyle

“I think with running such a large company with such a significant valuation now, it’s an obligation on us to use that to be a force for good and make the world a better place, rather than just hoard shit,” he said.

“There’s only so many beds you can sleep in on any one night, and only so many steak dinners you can have.”

Ms Perkins said the three focus areas for her charitable efforts are empowering children through quality education, empowering non-profits, and ending extreme poverty.

The executive meanwhile on Wednesday categorically ruled out Canva joining the likes of Atlassian, Meta and Amazon in making lay-offs, declaring that the company‘s large cash reserves and slow rate of hiring will save it from joining the worsening ’tech wreck’ tearing through the local sector.

Speaking ahead of a ‘Canva Create’ event in Sydney on Thursday, which the company is expecting more than 1.5m users globally to tune in to, Ms Perkins said that Canva is continuing to hire and won’t be shedding any of its 3500 global staff. It most recently reported $1bn cash in hand and has been profitable every year since 2017.

“We’re in a fortunate position, we’re not doing any lay-offs and we have no plans to whatsoever. We can categorically say we will not do lay-offs,” Ms Perkins said.

“We’ve been profitable for six years, we have a large cash balance, our growth is accelerating and we’re in a good position.

“A couple of years ago we had an internal mantra of ‘fewer things well’, which speaks to us being very intentional about the steps that we’re taking. Even though we are still hiring across the company and growing our team, we’re very intentional about that hiring and making sure that it’s gearing us up for the long term.”

Canva is currently raking in more than $1.4bn in annualised revenue, Ms Perkins said, and the company‘s online design and collaboration software has proven rampantly popular with users across the globe. While it took five years for the company to reach its first 10 million users, it added 10 million in just the last 30 days alone.

Canva co-founders Cameron Adams, Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins. Source: Supplied.

Investors have called it a “once in 100 years success story” for Australia but Canva‘s valuation has been cut multiple times over the past 12 months, with Australian firms including Blackbird, AirTree Ventures and Square Peg marking down their stakes by 36 per cent late last year amid the tech correction. Mr Obrecht said however that the company’s modest roots as a design tool for school yearbooks, which Ms Perkins first started in her mother’s living room in Western Australia, meant it was immune from the torrid macroeconomic conditions affecting other tech companies.

The company is expected to announced a raft of new user features at its ‘Create’ event which is being held this week at the same time as Adobe’s Summit event in Las Vegas, with the once-scrappy Australian software firm now competing with tech giants like Adobe, Microsoft and Google more closely than ever.

Ms Perkins said she isn’t fazed by the competition, however.

“We’ve been running our own race for a decade, and we’re going to continue to run our own race for the decades to come,” she said. “When we started out 10 years ago, there was this huge gap in the market, and people who wanted to design something really were stuck for choice, they had to learn very complicated tools.

“We saw that trend that a lot of people are going to need to design content, and we wanted to empower the whole organisation to be able to design and to be able to communicate visually. That’s what we set out to do a decade ago. We’ve been working very hard toward that‘s for the last decade, and taking out the friction between taking your idea and turning that into a design, and we’re gonna continue to do that for the next decade to come.”

The 2023 edition of The List – Australia’s Richest 250 is published on Friday in The Australian and online at richest250.com.au