Perkins started working on what became Canva in 2007 from her mom’s living room in Perth. The daughter of an Australian-born teacher and a Malaysian engineer of Filipino and Sri Lankan heritage was enrolled at the University of Western Australia. There, while teaching fellow students basic computer design as part of her communications and commerce studies, she had an idea. The process of designing and printing a poster or a flyer—composing it in Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word, converting it to the right size and saving it as a PDF, and taking it to a store like Staples to print—seemed cumbersome in the age of the internet. Wouldn’t it be much better to do it all in one place with one online tool?

The company launched in August 2013 to a couple of reviews on tech blogs and few users. Adams and Canva’s engineers, who stayed up late in Sydney to handle the expected influx of sign-ups, went to sleep dejected. What no one knew yet was that Canva’s timing was perfect. The rise of Instagram and Twitter were changing how businesses reached customers. From schools to sheriff’s offices, skating rinks to self-published authors, everyone suddenly cared a lot about their online presence. Canva was an affordable way to look good. The trickle of sign-ups grew to 50,000 users in the first month; by 2014, when Canva raised another $3 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and Shasta Ventures, 600,000 users had made 3.5 million designs.

In China, historically a fool’s-errand market for Western software makers, Canva is a rare success. Obrecht—a tall, amiable presence who, as COO, often rallies the troops (or delivers bad news)—opened Canva’s first office outside of Sydney, in Manila, in 2014, then hired the former head of LinkedIn’s China unit to build an office in mainland China. Today, a local engineering team handles a China-first version of Canva built from the ground up with features like deep integrations with Chinese messaging apps and easy-to-create QR codes, which are popular there. McDonald’s China is a customer, as is a nationwide real-estate brokerage that offers the software to its 1,000 agents.

When it comes to serving big businesses, Canva is still a rookie. Its October launch of Canva for Enterprise came at a private event in New York. Perkins addressed staffers from about 100 companies, including Equinox, JPMorgan and HubSpot. A slow start for Canva’s enterprise business won’t sink the company. This December, the company matched more of Adobe’s own features by announcing a video-editing tool and an apps suite; it’s still working on improvements to its free alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint, which has already been used to make 80 million presentations. But Canva’s long-term growth prospects depend on whether corporations will progress from small pockets of fans to accounts reaching thousands of employees. After years of adding more features to Canva’s suite, Perkins is betting on the opposite approach for corporate America. By offering limited sets of templates and options, Canva hopes execs will trust more employees to create their own content.

Adobe isn’t sleeping while all this goes down. It has offered its own freemium, templates-driven app, called Adobe Spark, since 2016. While Canva claims that its tools are used at 50,000 universities and 25,000 nonprofits, Adobe says it’s given out 23 million free Spark accounts to students and teachers. In December 2017, Adobe reunited with Scott Belsky, the entrepreneur whose social media business Behance it acquired in 2012, to instill a scrappier ethos in its product teams. “They feel like they’re the underdog because they’re like, ‘We’re not the coolest startup” says Belsky, chief product officer of Adobe’s Creative Cloud unit.

Then there are the typical startup growing pains. Until two years ago, Canva’s tool for editing its core code was so clunky that only five engineers could work on it at a time. Much of the company’s focus last year was on a complete rewrite of the front-end interface of its app. “We’re growing so fast that things are breaking constantly,” Obrecht admits. And in May, Canva suffered its biggest test of customer trust to date. Days after Canva announced that Meeker’s investment had valued the company at $2.5 billion, a hacker in Europe breached its systems, downloading 139 million user names and email addresses before Canva could stop the attack.

Those close to Perkins are confident that she can handle the pressure. Guy Kawasaki started his career as a hype-man for Steve Jobs, traveling the world to tout all things Apple in the 1980s. The former Forbes columnist says he’s happy to end his career doing the same for Perkins, investing in Canva and joining the company as “chief evangelist” back in 2014. “More people can use the democratization of design than can use a Macintosh,” he says. “You don’t have to be in Silicon Valley—you don’t even need to be in America—to be successful. Holy cow.”

How A Young Australian Kitesurfer Built A $3.2 Billion (Profitable!) Startup Phenom (adapted from Forbes.com)

Q/Identify the macro and micro environmental factors found in the following case study.

Q/Conduct a SWOT analysis based on the factors identified. For instance, the company is under-strength (S). Use information from the article to justify the SWOT (referring to strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis).