Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins

November 2, 2025

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  • "Column B" thinking involves starting with an improbable, magical future vision and working backward with incremental steps, rather than just stacking the "bricks" (current constraints) available. 
  • Investor rejections, like the over 100 received by Melanie Perkins, can be leveraged as constructive feedback to strengthen the pitch deck by pre-answering objections and clarifying the market gap. 
  • Canva's success is driven by a goal-driven structure built around a core mission ("Empower the World to Design"), broken down into mission pillars and crazy big goals, which are celebrated upon achievement to maintain team motivation. 
  • Melanie Perkins actively uses a 2050 vision board, driven by a desire to steer humanity away from a perceived negative 'freight train' trajectory toward a future featuring basic human needs for all and universal education. 
  • The core belief driving Melanie's long-term vision is that imagination is the essential first step for any creation, emphasizing that everything great was first imagined, which directly informs Canva's strategic direction. 
  • A key life motto for Melanie is that 'happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony,' and she encourages listeners to actively create the world they want through their decisions, echoing Canva's 'two-step plan' for global impact. 

Segments

Iterating Pitch Deck from Rejection
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(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Investor rejections provided specific feedback (e.g., market size, competition) that Melanie Perkins directly addressed by adding new slides to strengthen the Canva pitch deck.
  • Summary: Melanie Perkins faced over 100 investor rejections, using each one as an opportunity to refine the pitch deck. Feedback regarding market size or competitive positioning led to the creation of new, clarifying slides. This iterative process strengthened the articulation of Canva’s vision, even though the core product vision remained consistent.
Column B Thinking Defined
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(00:05:32)
  • Key Takeaway: Column B thinking prioritizes defining the magical, improbable future vision first, then working backward with small steps, contrasting with Column A planning which only uses existing resources (“bricks”).
  • Summary: Column B thinking is about imagining the perfect future state and then building a ladder of incremental steps toward it, rather than being limited by current resources (Column A). For Canva, this meant imagining a future of online, collaborative, simple design, despite having no initial experience to build it. This vision-first approach is crucial for setting a direction that current reality cannot define.
Operationalizing Big Visions
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(00:08:11)
  • Key Takeaway: Ideas transition from ‘chaos to clarity’ through incremental steps, often starting with the ’embarrassing’ first step of simply writing the idea down or creating a preliminary pitch deck.
  • Summary: The process of moving an idea from chaos to clarity involves making the amorphous concept visible, such as by writing it down or creating a pitch deck, which allows others to see the thinking. This initial step can feel embarrassing because mastery is absent, but it is necessary to begin willing the vision into existence step-by-step.
Power of Crazy Big Goals
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(00:15:01)
  • Key Takeaway: Crazy big goals compel founders to work hard because they feel inadequate before them, and achieving them requires fun, distinct celebrations to break up the arduous journey.
  • Summary: Crazy big goals, like Canva’s mission to empower the world to design, are important because they motivate intense effort to will the improbable into existence. While the timing of achieving these goals is often inaccurate, the company sets successive, measurable goals toward the mission pillars (e.g., launching in more languages). Celebrating milestones with fun events, like smashing plates, provides necessary morale boosts.
Surviving Product Rewrite Setback
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(00:23:42)
  • Key Takeaway: Canva endured a two-year period without shipping new features during a critical codebase rewrite, managing team morale by gamifying the process with a board game featuring bath toys.
  • Summary: A necessary front-end rewrite, intended to take six months, extended to two years, halting all new product shipments, which is difficult for a product company. Internally, the team managed this distressing period by turning it into a game using a board and bath toys to track progress through stages. This difficult period was essential, as it enabled the current scale of engineering capacity.
Two-Step Plan for Impact
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(00:40:47)
  • Key Takeaway: Canva operates under a two-step plan: first, build one of the world’s most valuable companies, and second, use that success to do the most good possible, with both steps fueling each other.
  • Summary: The two-step plan involves building significant company value (Step 1) to enable maximum positive impact (Step 2), such as donating 30% of the founders’ equity through the Canva Foundation. This commitment is demonstrated by donating $50 million to Give Directly and pledging another $100 million to alleviate extreme poverty. Furthermore, Canva gives away $1.5 billion of product annually through its education and non-profit programs.
Biggest Launch Yet
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(00:45:11)
  • Key Takeaway: Canva’s largest launch centers on radically doubling down on video capabilities and embedding AI across the entire suite, including new email and forms products.
  • Summary: The major launch focuses on reducing friction between an idea and its design, heavily leveraging AI integration across the core editor and the elements tab. This includes generating video, code, and photos directly within the platform, alongside launching highly requested features like email design and forms. The goal is to fulfill the mission of enabling users to design anything and publish anywhere.
Wedge Strategy: Problem Focus
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(00:50:38)
  • Key Takeaway: Canva’s initial success came from ignoring competitors and focusing intensely on solving a specific, painful, unsolved problem for a niche group, like yearbook coordinators, before expanding.
  • Summary: The company prioritized identifying market gaps where people experienced significant pain points, rather than focusing on existing competitors. The initial wedge was solving the yearbook design problem for inexperienced coordinators very well, which led to organic expansion requests for other design needs like newsletters. Solving a small number of people’s problems exceptionally well is preferred over solving many people’s problems poorly.
AI Corner: Personal Use
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(00:54:02)
  • Key Takeaway: Melanie Perkins uses AI for initial idea exploration, leveraging Canva’s integrated AI for context-aware brainstorming, and for personal reflection via an ‘AI walk’ to filter thoughts.
  • Summary: For personal work, AI is the first stop to explore new ideas, often using Canva Docs to brain dump thoughts which are then summarized by the integrated AI. She also practices an ‘AI walk’ where she speaks her mind into a voice tool to gain macro perspective and filter actionable items from daily distractions. This practice helps maintain perspective outside of immediate operational tasks.
Melanie’s 2050 Vision Board
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(00:55:23)
  • Key Takeaway: Melanie Perkins created a 2050 vision board after feeling scared by the current trajectory of humanity, focusing on positive alternatives like global education as a basic human right.
  • Summary: The vision board serves as a daily anchor to guide small decisions toward a desired future, counteracting fear about societal issues like loneliness and lack of purpose. This vision explicitly contrasts the current world by prioritizing bountiful communities and deep, collective purpose achieved through bigger dreams. The process involves etching out how to get closer to this ideal future, even if the entire goal seems unattainable alone.
Collective Goal Setting
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(00:58:11)
  • Key Takeaway: Canva is encouraging community participation by asking people what one goal they want the world to achieve in their lifetime, framing this as a critical question of our time.
  • Summary: The act of writing down and sharing these collective goals is considered powerful for mobilizing action. Achieving these large aspirations requires figuring out how to turn the deeply desired reality into existence, starting with small, personal steps toward that bigger purpose. Working toward something bigger than oneself is identified as a key answer to combating loneliness.
Lightning Round Book Recommendations
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(01:00:26)
  • Key Takeaway: Melanie recommends ‘The Power of Moments’ and ‘Designing the Obvious’ as insightful books for others.
  • Summary: When asked for book recommendations, Melanie cited ‘The Power of Moments’ and ‘Designing the Obvious,’ which she found very insightful early in her journey. She also mentioned loving the app Calm for meditation and music due to its calming effect.
Future Funding and Life Motto
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(01:01:36)
  • Key Takeaway: Melanie is interested in funding global infrastructure that is truly empowering, believing that infrastructure currently exclusive to a few should be available to everyone to uplift society.
  • Summary: Her life motto is that happiness is achieved when thoughts, words, and actions are in harmony, which is a constant aspiration. She is obsessed with the idea that imagination is the first step of the creative process, stating that everything great was once imagined. She advocates for companies to adopt their own version of the ’two-step plan’ to actively build the world they want to live in.
Figure Skating Lessons
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(01:03:20)
  • Key Takeaway: The literal and metaphorical experience of falling down repeatedly and getting back up while figure skating directly applies to the perseverance required in building a company like Canva.
  • Summary: The discipline required for (4:30) a.m. figure skating practice instilled the importance of hard work and determination. The constant falling and trying again, which was literal in skating, translates metaphorically to the challenges faced during the company’s journey, such as the two-year codebase rewrite.
How Listeners Can Help Canva
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(01:04:12)
  • Key Takeaway: Listeners can support Canva by using the product, teaching others about it, attending events, and providing direct feedback via their dedicated channel.
  • Summary: Melanie directs people to find her on LinkedIn and encourages them to submit wishes and feedback through Canva’s official channel, assuring them that input is actively reviewed. She urges founders to adopt the two-step plan philosophy, ensuring every decision contributes positively to the desired world rather than reinforcing the undesirable ‘freight train.’