We Speak Entrepreneurs

Melanie Perkins Was Rejected by Investors More Than 100 Times. Canva’s Staff Just Sold Shares at a $42 Billion Value

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, at a Canva event. Photo by Melanie Perkins, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Before Canva was worth $42 billion, Melanie Perkins heard no more than a hundred times. The Perth teacher who kept watching her students struggle with professional design software spent years pitching a simpler way to design anything, and in August 2025 the company she refused to give up on priced its employee share sale at a valuation higher than its pandemic era peak.

Canva’s August 2025 employee share sale, led by Fidelity Management and Research with JPMorgan Asset Management joining as a new investor, valued the company at $42 billion, up from $26 billion in an April 2024 sale. Current and former employees were each able to sell up to $3 million of vested shares at $1,646.14 a share, and co-founder Cliff Obrecht said the sale was significantly oversubscribed. At the time, Canva reported annualized revenue above $3.3 billion, more than 240 million monthly users and more than 24 million paying subscribers. By December 2025 its annual recurring revenue had passed $4 billion.

Perkins co-founded Canva in Sydney in 2013 with Obrecht, now her husband and the company’s chief operating officer, and Cameron Adams. She still runs it as chief executive, and the founding pair remain the largest individual shareholders, with a combined net worth reported at $11.6 billion at the August 2025 sale.

The structure of the sale tells the founder’s story as clearly as the valuation does. Canva has not raised new primary capital since a $200 million round in September 2021. Instead of selling new shares to fund itself, the company has repeatedly opened windows for the people who built it, staff and early backers, to sell some of what they hold. A business that began as one teacher’s frustration in a Perth classroom now sets its own price, on its own schedule, and shares the outcome with the team that got it there.

We Speak Entrepreneurs

Lucy Guo Left Scale AI in 2018 and Kept Her Shares. At 30 She Became the Youngest Self Made Woman Billionaire While Building Passes

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

We Speak Media

Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI and founder and CEO of Passes. Photo by KBDBK, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The most valuable decision of Lucy Guo’s career was the one she made on her way out the door. When she left Scale AI in 2018, two years after co-founding it, she kept her stake. In April 2025 Forbes named her the youngest self made woman billionaire in the world, and she earned the title while running a completely different company.

Guo, a self taught coder who dropped out of Carnegie Mellon on a Thiel Fellowship, co-founded Scale AI in 2016 at 21 with Alexandr Wang, who was 19. She ran operations and product design before leaving in 2018, holding on to just under 5% of the company. As Scale’s value climbed, a 2025 tender offer at a $25 billion valuation, followed by Meta’s June 2025 investment at more than $29 billion, that stake carried her net worth to an estimated $1.25 billion at age 30, passing the mark Taylor Swift had set. Forbes counted her among just six self made women billionaires on the planet under 40.

Her working days, though, belong to her second company. Guo founded Passes in 2022, a Los Angeles based platform that lets creators sell subscriptions, chats and content directly to fans in a brand safe setting. Passes has raised about $50 million across three rounds from investors including Bond Capital and Menlo Ventures, at a reported $150 million valuation, and has signed names including gymnast Olivia Dunne and Shaquille O’Neal.

The pairing is the story business students will study. One founder, two companies: the first made her rich because she kept ownership even after she left the building, and the second is the one she is still in the building for, building the creator economy platform she wants to run for the long term.