20 BWA | JUL 2026 ally led to Cameron Adams joining as the third cofounder. Canva’s 2013 seed-round announcement later named backers including Matrix Partners, InterWest Partners, 500 Startups, Bill Tai, Lars Rasmussen, Ken Goldman and Paul Bassat. This part of the story matters because it shows Perkins doing one of the hardest things in startup building: taking an initially simple product insight and slowly constructing the team, capital base and technical credibility to support a much larger version of it. There is a common temptation to describe leaders like Perkins purely through valuation and wealth, but that misses what is most interesting about her career. The more useful leadership lens is that she has kept thinking in systems. Fusion Books was not just a yearbook company; it was a test case for design simplification. Canva was not just a design app; it was a platform for democratising visual communication. The newer Canva is not just a template library with AI add-ons; it is trying to become what the company itself now calls a Creative Operating System, where design, productivity,
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