|
Cameron Adams barely knew Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht before the three decided to build Canva together. In a recent conversation, Adams shared how he knew it was the right choice, how SEO and localization unlocked massive growth, and more. In March 2012, Cameron Adams returned to Sydney from San Francisco at an uncertain moment. The Google alum had just come back from a fundraising trip for Fluent, the email startup he’d co-founded, without securing the backing he’d hoped for. He also had a newborn at home. “We spent two months traipsing up and down Sand Hill Road and all over the Bay Area. We thought we would come back with a novelty-sized check of $2 million. Didn’t pan out that way." He’d left his role as a user interface designer at Google to give the startup his full attention — a decision that left him taking stock of what came next. That’s when Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps and Adams’s former boss at Google, came to him with a serendipitous suggestion, encouraging Adams to meet a young entrepreneur he’d recently been introduced to: Melanie Perkins. Perkins, with her partner Cliff Obrecht, had built an online yearbook business called Fusion Books, which was pulling in $2-3 million a year. But they had their eyes on a much bigger prize. If students could easily create and publish their own yearbooks online with zero design skills, it stood to reason that with the right tools, anyone should be able to design anything…
|
