Melanie Perkins, then 22 and a university drop-out had flown all the way from her home in Perth, Australia, to Palo Alto, California, for the meeting with well-known technology investor Bill Tai.
Melanie had read that if you wanted to impress someone you should mimic their body language. So seeking backing for her graphic design website she decided to put the theory to the test. Melanie’s idea for the “future of publishing” is Canva, an online platform that aims to allow anyone to easily design everything from greetings cards to posters, and websites to calendars.
“It was pretty funny,” says Melanie, “He was sitting there with his arm behind his chair, eating his lunch.
“So I’m there with my arm behind my chair, trying to eat my lunch, while flipping the pages of my pitch… to sell him on the future of publishing.”
“I didn’t think he was liking my pitch at all because he was on his phone the whole time,” she says. Mr Tai was, however, impressed enough to introduce Melanie to a network of other Silicon Valley investors, engineers and developers. And he ultimately invested in Canva himself.
Today, more than 200 people work for Canva, which has headquarters in Sydney and Manila, and an office in San Francisco.In the financial year 2016-17 Canva’s revenues grew more than twofold from $6.8m to $23.5m
**Source: https://www.bbc.com/
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