They are young, smart, rich.
Meet two of Australia’s richest women in tech who are now included in The Financial Review’s illustrious Young Rich List of 2017.
The list charts the country’s most talented entrepreneurs in different sectors and not surprisingly, two of them are from the tech industry: Cyan Ta’eed and Melanie Perkins.
Cyan Ta’eed – 11 years to build Online Success
Note that there’s no such thing as an “overnight success.” In the world of business, even the experienced entrepreneur faces the toughest challenges, and that’s what Envato’s co-founder Cyan Ta’eed experienced.
Meet Australia’s Richest Women in Tech 2017Cyan Ta’eed, together with her husband and co-founder Collis Ta’eed, have a shared wealth of $216 million. Their business, Envato, an online creative marketplace, is one of the most profitable startups in the Australian technology scene.
The husband and wife tandem together with their friend Jun Rung and established their firm in 2006. What they learned from the years of ups and downs was to test before you invest.
“What we like to do these days is we like to take quite a lean, iterative approach, so we launch leanly, we test, we get some customers, we learn everything we can from them, and we sort of pivot the product as we need to.” said Cyan Ta’eed.
Aside from Envato, Cyan Ta’eed has a stake in online grocery delivery startup YourGrocer and helped New Day Box, a charity that supports women in crisis.
Ta’eed won the 2015’s Telstra Victorian Business Woman of the Year award.
Melanie Perkins – Design is the new language
She predicted the future…then she created it. This is why Canva’s success skyrocketed. Perkin’s wealth this year is $128 million.
Meet Australia’s Richest Women in Tech 2017At a young age of 19, Melanie Perkins grew frustrated with the lengthy time it took to do some simple graphic design tasks.
“I was giving other students lessons in these programs outside of class and found myself writing long instruction manuals to do the simplest things. It seemed insane to me that it took 22 clicks to export a high quality document,” says Perkins, Canva founder and CEO.
Fast forward a decade, Perkins along with her co-founder Cliff Obrecht, established Canva, an easy-to-use online graphic design tool. The Sydney-based company is now fully off the ground and has doubled its valuation in less than a year.
With over 10 million users all around the globe, Canva caters to people of any skill set to create designs that are compelling.
According to Perkins, design has been constantly changing over the years and people today are becoming more design aware. “Every single industry needs design and everyone needs design not just the designers.”
“Sales, marketing or even social media experts have turned to graphics. In fact, even startups used to have a long-winded business plan and now every startup is expected to have a pitch deck that communicates visually,” she says with a smile.
Canva is 10 years in the making and the young CEO says she never believes in overnight success. Any businesses faces ups and downs and it takes resilience to keep moving forward and win, she said.
To check the other richest Australian entrepreneurs, visit The Financial Review site.
