YouSaid · the spoken record

Melanie Perkins

lines on the record: 75
first: 2025-11-02
most recent: 2025-11-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You are in a company starting a company, try and do the 1% pledge, try and figure out your own version of the two step plan, and try and build products. And in every decision that you make that actually makes the world that you want to live in, I think there's this kind of belief sometimes that the world is created by other people, but we all have a very active hand in the creating the world that we live in. And every decision that you make, for investors, every company that you fund, is that contributing the world to the world that you want to live in or is it creating the freight train that none of us want to be on?”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really great questions. So, you can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I post the most. And you can go to, and I can go at the URL to give us your wishes and we want to hear them. And we literally listen to them. It doesn't just go down to a suggestion box. And then how can they be helpful? Use Canva, spread Canva, teach Canva. We're doing a Canva world tour through October, which is probably going to be outdated when this is posted. Come to our events. We do events all around the world, and we'd love to see you and to hear from you.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many things are quite directly applicable falling down over and over again and getting up and trying again. The importance of hard work and determination. I think the falling down, it was quite literal in my figure skating days. And maybe it was a little more metaphorical in today. But it is constant.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a few. I love the quote happiness is when what you think what you say, and what you do are in harmony. I feel like that's a constant aspiration. And then I've just been so obsessed lately with the idea that everything is led by imagination, that imagination is the very first stuff of that creative process. So everything is good was once imagined is a quote you're going to be seeing from Canva all the time now because it is true that if you don't imagine it, you can't will it into existence. And in fact, everything great that we experience in life was first imagined.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like there's a lot of opportunity to create global infrastructure that is truly empowering. And so as I look at my 2050 wall, I think there's a lot of things that are currently only exclusively available to a small number of people that should be available to everyone. And so the more that we can do to uplift, the rising tide lifts all boats, I think, is a thing that's just so of such critical importance. I think there is this weird belief that you can be fine and everyone else can be not fine. And that's all cool. I don't think that's cool. I think everyone suffers in such a case. So I think more things that... Help everyone to rise”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love the car map. It is my daily companion. I use it to meditate. I use it to listen to music. I just find it very calming.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all good two books The Power of Moments. And one of the books early on I read was Designing the Obvious, which I found very insightful.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the books I love is The Power of Moments, and it talks about, am I supposed to be really fast and not tell you about it?”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not something that I alone can achieve. I think we it has to be obviously a global collective effort because there's zero chance I can go and achieve basic human needs for all. But I think that I'd like to change that. I'd like to help change the mood. I'd like to help change the way we're thinking about things. I genuinely think there's a little, we need to move course a little and decide not what are all the things that we kind of like, you know, what's the freight train we're currently on, but what is it that we actually want? What do we want our societies to look like? What do we want the world to look like? Is it good enough that there's people hundreds of millions of people that can't eat? Like what the hell? Like it just literally makes no sense.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that deep purpose springs from having bigger dreams that we collectively go out and achieve. Something that we're doing at our Canver World Tour keynote in two weeks time, which I think is going to be after this is released, we've been asking people, what is one goal you'd like to see the world achieved in our lifetime? And then people literally writing it down, I think is pretty powerful and then people sharing that with other people, I think is pretty powerful. And then us actually figuring out how the hell do we turn that reality that we all deeply desperately want into existence, I think is genuinely one of the biggest questions of our time. But then again, rather than trying to tackle that entire thing by yourself, how do you take that first tiny step that starts to see that in your own life, in your own family, in your own community? And I think that's where we'll get purpose from. And that's, you know, I think that is one of the key answers to loneliness is actually.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day to day by literally having it beside me as I work every day. The little tiny decisions that can kind of help to angle towards that future that we want and can I help will any of that into existence? I honestly don't know. But I feel like just by starting to write it down some little brainstorm exercise with a number of other people and starting to just like etch out how do we get closer and closer to that on my vision of the future it's community it's the whole of humanity trying to dream bigger and to dream bigger goals and then us actually rising to that occasion in the in the world we don't want i think loneliness is rife purpose purpose is gone what we teach people in schools is pointless and in my vision for 2050 it's none of those things communities are bountiful we all have deep purpose”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sat with that feeling for a little, and then I kind of got to work on my 2050 walls and back to the chaos to clarity. The first thing was riding my 2050 wall. And I've kind of really been loving, I've got a whole on the 2050 wall started with a lot of quotes. Everything good was once imagined. And many other quotes along those similar lines. And then rather than just being fearful of the things that I'm worried about for society and for humanity, I started to think like, what would the alternative be? What is that vision that I would love to see us have basic human needs for all, global education being a basic human right that everyone experiences, all the really important things that we want as humanity. And again, like using vision and using imagination and just dreaming about the future. And I find it really fascinating in my”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you why the vision board came about because it's only been in recent months. I did feel like as humanity we are on a bit of a freight train, and that freight training is, I think if we take a lot of visions for a lot of different companies and a lot of things that are happening and you just fast forward 50 years or to 2050 and you say, are we in a safer world? Is the world the place that we want our kids to grow up in? Is this the humanity that we want? I didn't feel that the train that we are headed on always feels great. In fact, it scared me quite greatly for a whole host of reasons”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I might use Apple Notes or directly into Canva Docs and then I actually just do the brain dump into Canva docs and then just summarize it. So yeah.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many things. So, AI is often the first if I'm like having an idea, it'll be a first place that I go and explore the idea. And now with Canva, and you can just tag Canva and say, give me more ideas of this. And it's like shockingly great because it has all of the context from the design. It's actually integrated deeply into your workflow. Another really fun thing I do is an AI walk. And when I just put my earpods in and then I go for a walk and I just say everything on my mind. I use that to then kind of filter out my thoughts and figure out what are the things I need to action. And it kind of helps again get out of the weeds and think about things from a more macro perspective rather than from the things that might be in my Slack messages or on my email. It just gives you that sort of helpful vantage point I find. So yeah, so many things.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your question is actually the answer at the same time. Naturally, a very critical part of that equation for us. In fact, it was funny looking back from really old decks, we were trying to do AI before AI was actually a thing because it really was critical to what we were trying to do. Even in our 2012 deck, you can kind of imagine how AI very much fit into the equation because of exactly what we were trying to do.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly that. And if you take that problem centered approach that helps people to achieve something they actually want to do in the real life, you're probably going to be at a reasonably good spot, especially if it maps to a larger market. That's a particularly great thing. If it only solves one person's problem, that might not be a great company going forward. But if a few people have that same problem. But I think that, again, like back to that big ladder and that first rung, getting too I think it's better to solve a small number of people's problem really well than trying to solve a large number of people's problem not very well at all”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it was much more where is the gap in the market that people are currently having a pain point? And if you can solve that pain point really well and solve it in such a way that people actually want to pay for it because it is truly solving a real pain point that they have, I think that kind of sets it up for success rather than be a problem or a solution looking for a problem.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the most important things that we did was we didn't really worry about competitors at all. We actually just saw where is there a gap in the market that we can uniquely fill and what can we solve a problem, a core problem that people currently have today. And so with our first company, that was yearbooks in Australia, and there wasn't great tools and these yearbook coordinators got thrown in to have to design something and they'd have no design experience. And we spoke to every single customer. We gave them an over-the-phone tutorial. We understood all of their pain points. We got continuous customer feedback and then we tried to reiterate and improve. And then when we were thinking about Canva, a few years into that, actually, one of the schools said, I love this product so much. Can I use it to design newsletters? And they had all sorts of other things that they wanted to use it for. And we kind of looked around and were like, oh, there's still nothing on the market. This was like a few years into it that actually does the thing that we're doing but for all these other things.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a macro perspective, there was creativity tools and productivity tools, and what Canva really does is we're literally snap bang in the middle of that Venn diagram of creativity and productivity rather than making customers have to make a choice between those two sweets.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is very cool. And so, yeah, I guess literally bring these things to life. Oh, we're like launching 3D as well. So all of these things we will be bringing to life literally and just picking off like what is the most strategically important next thing to enable everyone to design anything, to enable everyone to publish anywhere. And we have been doing that for a decade and will continue to do that forevermore using the latest technology to truly bring people's ideas to life.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our mission, Empower Design, Empower Everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device, and just take those things very literally. So to literally design anything, to literally publish anywhere. And so we now print in 50-something countries around the world, and you can get it printed delivered to your house. And we planted it.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is design emails. So you can design an email, then you can take that code and you can pop it into any email platform that you use.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Presentations have become the way they design a presentation is in Canva. But it's not just generational for those of other generational ilk. But it's been fascinating to see that come to life.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, truly design anything. We're literally living up to that. Like 100 million people design a presentation in Canva each month now. And it's pretty fascinating to see that when you speak to, I saw a tweet some time ago, they were talking about how it's a generational thing, that a certain generation uses Microsoft a certain generation used Google. And then it was Gen Z”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you do that? And it has all of the context of the design. So in situ, you can actually just have a collaborator that can help get your work done. So we are pretty excited about all of this.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we are extraordinarily excited about what we are launching. I guess the whole mission of Canva is to empower. Probably one of the most exciting things is the way we're embedding AI across the entire product suite. You can actually use AI to design a presentation, a video, a email, a website, all of these things can actually now be done inside the core editor, inside the design tab, which is used by 170 million times a month. And then on our elements tab, which is used 900 million times a month, we are also embedding AI so you can actually generate a video, you can generate a Canva code, and you can generate photos all directly inside that platform. And then we're also launching comments, lots of use, our customers use Canva to comment and collaborate. And now you can actually just tag at Canva and you can collaborate. You can just say, hey, can you make this title shorter? Can you do this?”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work, you know, we've also between our education product and our nonprofit program where we also give away our paid product for free. We're giving away $1.5 billion of product a year now. And so the impact that that can have and the ripple effect of that I think is pretty great. And I think for all of us, it gives a lot more meaning to our work than get rich.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm happy to hear that. I wouldn't do Canva if it wasn't going to have a positive impact on the world. Like for me, getting really rich is not a goal unto itself whatsoever. It's a means to an end. And I've been very blessed to be able to do some work. And that creates wealth that can then go and have people's basic human needs, Matt. It's completely, yeah. But they're working just as hard, but they don't have the opportunity. And even our education product is now used by 100 million people each month. And we are in most school districts and rolled out across countries. And being able to bring quality education tools to every, and we give that away for free as well, being able to help empower schools all around the world. We're going to be doubling down and doubling down into that product to bring quality education to all. I think it gives so much more meaning behind.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And why people don't have their basic human needs met on our planet, but we just haven't got our act together as humanity. And so that is a truly crazy big dream. But back to the two-step plan, step one, build one of the world's most valuable companies. And step two, do the most good we can do. And finding ways to do that at the same time, I think, is extraordinarily important.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To stop small businesses, to get a roof so they can sleep without being wet, just like real, truly basic human needs things. And we've just announced that we're going to be giving another $100 million over the next four years to people in extreme poverty. It's just like when you go and sit with people and you hear about how they're spending what's very microscopic amount at $550, it doesn't buy us that much, but it's a life-changing amount of money for people in extreme poverty. And it's truly transformational what it can do. And you meet people and you hear their stories and it's truly the best money I could ever imagine spending. And that crazy big dream I was mentioning earlier of everyone having basic human needs, Matt, it's so completely insane that that isn't the case today. There's no specific reason.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Realize that actually step one can feel step two and step two can feel step one. And so that's been a really big part of Canva for some years now. In the early days, we took the 1% pledge, which I think is an incredible program. Every single company should take that, where you give 1% of time, money, equity, and profitability. And I think that's a really easy thing to do in the early days that then can compound greatly over time. We also knew that Canvas equity was obviously going to be a really key part of it. So Cliff and I owned a little over 30% of Canva, and so we decided we were going to take 30% of Canva and use it to do the most good we can do. And we are doing that. So we're doing all of our donating through the Canva Foundation. We've just, over the last few years, we've donated $50 million to give directly where they give money directly to people in Malawi who are in extreme poverty. And then they can use that money on their family to go to school, to get help.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when you were asking about Crazy V Goals, I think this is our most macro, most crazy biggest goal. Step one, build one of the world's most valuable companies. And step two, do the most good we can do. And in our early days, I thought I'd do step one and then step two.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually, we do it all online, actually. I mean, the ones I've run are typically online. So people are so much more frank, I think, when they're just them on their camera and they don't really.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Controls for teachers. And so it's just constant actually. It's just part of our product process. I think there's two parts to product. One is building the future and towards the mission and the mission pillars, as I was saying before. And the other is actually listening to our community and building what they want. I think that that's the two core pieces of product in my mind. The closing the loop comes in so many different forms. There's the explicit asks and then the other thing that we double down on all the time is user testing and watching people use it and if people hesitate clicking a button or people don't quite understand how something works. It's amazing to me how you can find 10 random people on the internet and they can give such astute feedback that then is so representative for such a large number of people. So I've personally run hundreds if not thousands of user tests myself and it's been deeply embedded in our product teams also.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my favorite things. We've been doing it for years now. And so we get more than a million requests from our community every year. And we then, we've got a whole incredible team that then tallies them, breaks them down, and then delivers them to all of our product teams. And then those actually get closed. So this year we've closed more than 200 loops, but we know that each one of those things is going to be loved and needed by so many more people that don't bother to actually fill out the request form. So many things from gradient text, like little things like gradient text, to really big things like our sheets product. There's just been countless products in the early days with our AI products, we didn't release them to teachers because we knew there was a lot of hesitancy for teachers using AI in the classroom. And we got so many requests from teachers saying, could I please use this magic right in the classroom? And so with them we unlocked that and put on safety.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel like I've developed some healthy habits over the years. I don't have email Slack on my phone. And so when I shut my laptop, I actually tune out. And then if there's a real issue, I'll get an emergency call or page. But I think trying to delineate, I think is really important. So when I'm working, I'm all in. And then when I'm not working, I'm all out. And actually giving that mental space, I think is really important. I've spoken to a lot of founders that haven't quite found that and then do struggle with it. So when they're not, when they're working every weekend, it feels like the right thing, but then you're kind of missing. Sometimes you can miss the forest from the trees when you're just working harder and harder, but maybe you're actually working on the wrong thing. And so. Think being able to step away a little just to be.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in the early days, I would just work seven days a week round the clock. In our very first company, we actually had printing presses because we were printing the yearbooks in my mum's house and then delivering them to schools around Australia. And in the early days of Canva, we certainly were working all weekend, all hours of the day. It was just constant. But when you've been doing this for a while, if you just keep working at that pace, I don't think it's good for anyone's health, mental health, or anything else. So I think finding ways to I still work extraordinarily hard, but to continue to have that balance in my day to day where I actually go to sleep, I find time to do things like going for walks or doing yoga, journaling. I find extraordinarily helpful to make sure that I can always bring my best to everything that I'm doing.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The goal driven structure, I think the things that we're talking about before, so the mission actually breaking that down into the mission pillars, breaking those mission pillars down into the goals that we're then pursuing and then celebrating those goals when we do achieve them, I think is a deeply underloved way of building a company. Often people have a mission that's kind of on the wall somewhere and then what they're actually doing and the way they actually make money and the way that where people actually spend their time is in a very, very different direction from that original mission. And I think the magic is when you can bring those two things together. And so you can have your mission, you can have your mission pillars that are actually helping to achieve that. And I think there's a real authenticity in that for customers as well, is that you're actually doing the thing that you promised you do. And it all ladders up together. It's certainly not an easy way to run a company. But I think that when you do get that formula right, I think that”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we going to specific examples, but so many times over, and I think that maybe that's probably in answer your other question. We did things our way because that was the only way we knew. And there was many, many times over the years that were like didn't have confidence in the way we were doing things. And we were like, oh, they've done it from a big company that's bigger than our company. Let's go do that. And that hasn't always worked out so well for us. Yeah, I think confidence in how we take what is authentic to us and do it at the next level of scale is a constant work in progress. It feels like, you know, as I was saying before, systems break and need to be reinvented, but also reimagined for that next layer of scale rather than going to try to get something off the shelf from another company.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You kind of think about it in the very early days, which is just a few of us, or just two of us in Fusion, and then three of us and just a little tiny group. And you kind of wear 100 hats. And then you have to be able to give away those hats to other people that can then do that way better than yourself. And so I'm sure there's been a few skills I guess I would have had to have developed over the last decade to be able to give away those hats. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things that we've had to do and double down on that was more authentic to the way we did it in the early days actually.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't really know. Probably if you ask other people around me, they'd probably be more observant. But it is funny because there's some things that I think that I need to change. And then I realize you go into it the same as some other company. And sometimes I even try that for a while. And then we try that out and we're like, it didn't really work for us. And it's kind of like building a house that you want every brick in the house to match. If you go and try and take some bricks from someone else's house and stick it in your house, it's probably going to not look very matched. And so trying to find things that are authentic to us and are authentic to everything that's come before it is just that constant thing. And like then each scale of each stage of the company rather than going taking someone else's bricks and trying to stick that in your house, trying to build the thing that's authentic. So I think there's many things that are the same, but obviously the stage and scale and the, you know, we're constantly having to give away hats.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I can only go on my experience, but I think. Sort of like the dark tunnel analogy. Oh, Chaos to Clarity. Let's go read that one. It's a slightly friendlier analogy. And I think just taking the rejection and turning it into things that you can control. So I can control my pitch deck. I can control the number of people I'm speaking to. And I just spoke to literally everyone. And I think that continuing to use it to refine it rather than taking it as a personal rejection. I think it's really important to think like, how can I improve? How can I help someone to understand it? Some people are never going to understand it. I remember pitching an investor that had the Lean Startup book on behind them when I was pitching them. And they were never going to like Canva because we were not the lean startup. That was not the way that we were approaching it whatsoever. So there's some people that are just going to never like you. And that's okay. I think it's important to find some people that do like what you're trying to say and trying to do and kind of finding your tribe, I think.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was pretty consistent, but the way we articulated it changed greatly. For example, I wouldn't in the early days articulate the problem very much. I spent into like, here's the cool solution. And so then the first few pages became very much more problem-based. Because if people don't understand the problem, then they can't understand or care about your solution. And so there was a lot of refinement on the way it was articulated. But the actual vision itself, I think, was pretty consistent through.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of, like, from that chaos to clarity at the start, it was this like this idea, and then through the copious amounts of rejection, the pitch deck got stronger and more refined. So then when people, the first time I remember I spoke to someone for hours and they eventually got it. They were really committed to understanding what we were trying to do. But then not everyone has six hours to understand a concept. And so being able to take all the gems of wisdom from that conversation and have that understood really clearly in a really short period of time and have all of the reasons that people were rejecting us pre-answered in that initial pitch deck was really important. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why when I look back at our 2012 pitch deck, it's so valid and really still captures what we're doing today. And so I think that protection in some ways makes you stronger if you can persist through.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, it was really clear in my mind that it was the future, and I thought the investors were wrong, frankly. But investors also gave really helpful feedback and feedback often in the form of rejection. So they would say, oh, your market's not big enough. And I would say, it's going to be huge. And they'd add a new page in my pitch deck that said how big the market, I believe, was. And then they'd say, you're the same as some of the company. And I'd say, and coupled with rejection. And I would say, hey, now I've got a new slide in my pitch deck that shows all the players and the huge gap in the market that we believe we're going to fill. Or most investors knew absolutely nothing about design or the industry that we're in. And so we then ended up with the first few slides saying, here's the layer of the land today. Here's the problem that we're going to solve. And so while I was extraordinarily frustrating, their feedback made us stronger and made our pitch deck stronger.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I was kind of everything internally. We made it into a bit of a game. We had this game board and I bought these little rubber ducky sort of bath toys and we had this components represented as a bath toy on this board and there was like all these stages of like kind of went launched in product was an emergency lane at the end of it was home and hosed and we did these weekly stand-ups where everyone would come in and talk where their bath toy was at and kind of just like we tried to make it fun and for the team so it was partly fun and it was partly distressing as all our investors were like hey you know that thing so i think it was it was it was both things at the same time it was bonding let's say”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happy and like you've got momentum, and it just felt like we're in a dark, dark tunnel that we could hardly see the end of the tunnel. We didn't really know how long it was going to take because it just had to take as long as the tunnel was going to take. And it was a very hard time because other people would be launching this and that. We weren't eventually we got out of that tunnel and it was extremely important that we did that work. We've now got two and a half thousand engineers and we're able to deliver amazing things that would have just like been completely infeasible. And simultaneous collaboration was all like so many things were baked into this. But yeah, it was not a fun period of time. A product company not shipping product is not really a recipe for fun.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the same philosophies of deep context for everyone, with the same philosophies of the celebrations and the goals, and like trying to find that right flavor at every stage of scale is definitely hard. I think it's just like a constant work in progress. Or back to your earlier point about timing of things, we were doing a front-end rewrite. We thought it would take about six months. It was really important because it was critical for cross-platform. It was critical for right to left. It was critical because we could only have five people working in our editor at any point in time because of the way the code base was structured. And we thought it was going to take six months. And then it took two years. And it was two years of not shipping any product, two years of a product company not being able to ship product. And like that is such a core motivation for our team. He's like, shipping something, seeing great customer feedback. And then that kind of makes everyone.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's just a constant evolution. Like every time the company doubles in size, pretty much all your systems break, all the things that were working don't work. A little example in the early days we'd stand up and everyone would present their goals, what they're working on every day or every week, and then it kind of moved every month. And then it was just like, it was just taking too long because we've got so many people. And then it was sort of like we started doing these things because.”
2025-11-02 · Lenny's Podcast · The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source