I saw a thread this week about how there was not enough talk about @canva + @MelanieCanva...let's change that! Canva just announced they raised $200M (valued @ $40B)- a long way from starting w/no business experience + getting rejected by 100+ investors🧵

1/ Melanie Perkins was born in Perth, Australia & is one of the youngest CEOs of a $1B+ tech start-up. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she was of Malaysian + Filipino + Sri Lankan descent! #asianpride
2/ 2007: Melanie used to tutor her college students on how to use design programs such as Photoshop & InDesign but most of them struggled. That's when she realized the need for online + collaborative + easy-to-use design platform.
3/ From her mom's living room, Melanie + partner (now hubby!) Cliff Obrecht hired freelancers to build a Flash website for their idea, Fusion Books, where students could collaborate in designing their yearbooks.
4/ 2011: Melanie spotted an opportunity for venture funding when Bill Tai, who had backed TweetDeck and Zoom, came to Perth for kitesurfing. They ambushed Tai with a pitch for what they called the "Canvas Chef" in a dinner that he hosted but left without any capital.
5/ Melanie started learning to kitesurf and became a frequent visitor to MaiTai, Tai's unique retreat for investors. With the help of Google Maps co-founder, Lars Rasmussen, she met Cameron Adams, an ex-Googler who became their co-founder.
6/ They raised $3M seed including a matching grant from the Australian gov't to keep the company in their home country.
7/ Canva was first launched in August 2013 to select tech blogs and users. When it was made publicly available, it gained ~50,000 users in the 1st month.
8/ 2014: Canva raised another $3M from Thiel’s Founders Fund and Shasta Ventures. ~ 600,000 users & 3.5M designs made on their site.

2017: The company announced that it had already gained a $1.86M net profit after only launching five years earlier.
9/ In another round of funding in 2019, they raised $70M from General Catalyst and other investment companies and another $85M a few months later. Company's valuation rose to $2.5B.
10/ As of now, @canva has more than 60M monthly active users across 190 countries, expecting to exceed $1B in annualized revenue by the end of 2021 & double their workforce in the next year (females make up 42% of workforce). Go @MelanieCanva! #girlcrush

More from All

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

You May Also Like

#24hrstartup recap and analysis

What a weekend celebrating makers looks like.

A thread

👇Read on

Let's start with a crazy view of what @ProductHunt looked like on Sunday

Download image and upload

A top 7 with:
https://t.co/6gBjO6jXtB @Booligoosh
https://t.co/fwfKbQha57 @stephsmithio
https://t.co/LsSRNV9Jrf @anthilemoon
https://t.co/Fts7T8Un5M @J_Tabansi
Spotify Ctrl @shahroozme
https://t.co/37EoJAXEeG @kossnocorp
https://t.co/fMawYGlnro

If you want some top picks, see @deadcoder0904's thread,

We were going to have a go at doing this, but he nailed it.

It also comes with voting links 🖐so go do your


Over the following days the 24hr startup crew had more than their fair share of launches

Lots of variety: web, bots, extensions and even native apps

eg. @jordibruin with