The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins
Melanie Perkins, CEO and co-founder of Canva, discusses building a "Column B" company by envisioning a dream future and taking small steps to achieve it. She shares how Canva operationalizes "crazy big goals," leverages community feedback for product development, and integrates a "two-step plan" of profit and philanthropy.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Introduction to Melanie Perkins and Canva's Journey
Building a 'Column B' Company: Vision-First Approach
Operationalizing Big Visions: From Chaos to Clarity
The Power of Crazy Big Goals and Celebrations
Overcoming Major Setbacks: The Two-Year Codebase Rewrite
Leveraging Investor Rejection to Strengthen the Pitch
Leadership Evolution and Building Authentically
Canva's Goal-Driven Structure and Mission Alignment
Strategies for Work-Life Balance and Gaining Perspective
Community-Driven Product Development and Feedback Loops
Canva's 'Two-Step Plan' for Global Impact and Philanthropy
Canva's Biggest Product Launch Yet: Expanding Capabilities
Philosophy for Product Expansion and Market Wedge
Integrating AI to Enhance User Workflow
Melanie Perkins' Personal AI Use and 2050 Vision
Lightning Round and Final Thoughts
7 Key Concepts
Column B Thinking
This is a planning approach that involves dreaming of a perfect, improbable future and then working hard to turn that vision into reality. It contrasts with 'Column A' thinking, which focuses on what can be done with existing constraints and resources.
Chaos to Clarity
A process where every new idea, problem, or philosophy starts in a 'chaos' state and is incrementally refined through steps like writing it down, creating pitch decks, designing, and prototyping. Each step adds clarity, making the idea more tangible and visible to others.
Crazy Big Goals
These are incredibly ambitious and important goals that make one feel inadequate before them, driving intense effort over years or decades to achieve. While the timing of achievement may be unreliable, the goals themselves are often met due to persistent investment.
Authenticity in Company Building
This concept emphasizes building systems and processes that are true to a company's unique culture and philosophy, rather than adopting 'off-the-shelf' solutions from other companies. It involves reinventing and reimagining systems for each new stage of scale.
Goal-Driven Structure
A company operating model where a core mission is broken down into mission pillars, which are then further broken into specific, measurable goals. This structure ensures that daily work and strategic initiatives are directly aligned with and contribute to the overarching mission.
The Two-Step Plan
Canva's overarching mission, where step one is to build one of the world's most valuable companies, and step two is to do the most good possible. These two steps are designed to fuel each other, rather than being sequential, integrating positive impact directly into the company's growth.
Imagination as the First Step
This philosophy posits that everything good or great experienced in life was first imagined. It highlights the critical role of imagination in initiating the creative process and willing a desired future into existence.
7 Questions Answered
Canva is great at achieving crazy big goals, but the timeframe is often unreliable. The key is to persist, as even small steps towards an important goal are worthwhile, and the achievements compound over time.
She viewed rejections as helpful feedback, using each one to strengthen her pitch deck by adding slides addressing common concerns like market size or competitive differentiation, refining the articulation of the problem and solution.
Canva receives over a million community requests annually, which are tallied and delivered to product teams. They also heavily rely on user testing, observing how people interact with the product to identify pain points and areas for improvement.
She has developed healthy habits like not having work emails on her phone, allowing her to fully disengage when not working. This mental space helps her gain perspective and avoid burnout.
Canva takes its mission 'empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device' very literally, focusing on strategically important next steps to enable designing anything and publishing anywhere, using the latest technology.
AI is integrated where it genuinely helps users get work done and achieve their goals, reducing friction between an idea and a design. The focus is on practical utility and listening to community feedback for refinement.
She uses AI as a first step to explore ideas, leveraging Canva's integrated AI for design suggestions. She also does 'AI walks' where she dictates her thoughts into a voice note tool (like Apple Notes or Canva Docs) to filter ideas and gain perspective.
16 Actionable Insights
1. Envision Dream Future, Work Backwards
Practice “Column B” thinking by first imagining your ideal future (e.g., in 10-50 years) and then working backward to identify the small, incremental steps needed to achieve it. Dedicate time to visualize “wild success” and “terrible failure” to gain clarity and ensure every small action contributes to your grand vision.
2. Operationalize Ideas: Chaos to Clarity
Use the “Chaos to Clarity” process for every idea, starting by writing it down and then incrementally adding detail through pitch decks, designs, and prototypes. Embrace the initial “embarrassing” stage of an idea, as visual communication helps others see your thinking and makes the vision more real, driving you to work hard to manifest it.
3. Set Crazy Big Goals
Set “Crazy Big Goals” that make you feel inadequate, compelling you to work exceptionally hard to achieve them. Ensure these goals are deeply important to you, as their ambitious nature requires sustained effort and commitment, and break them down into annual objectives aligned with mission pillars.
4. Adopt Two-Step Plan: Profit & Good
Implement a “Two-Step Plan” where building a valuable company (Step 1) fuels doing good (Step 2), and vice-versa, making philanthropy integral to your mission. Consider taking the 1% pledge (time, money, equity, profitability) and integrating social impact, like free education products, to provide deeper meaning and positive global impact.
5. Integrate Community Feedback & Testing
Actively solicit and systematically process community feedback, tallying requests and closing the loop with product teams. Complement this with extensive user testing (e.g., using usertesting.com) to observe real-world interactions and identify pain points, ensuring product development is driven by both a grand vision and genuine user needs.
6. Solve Core Market Pain Points
Focus product development on identifying and solving core, unaddressed pain points in the market, rather than solely reacting to competitors or creating solutions without a clear problem. Prioritize solving a specific problem exceptionally well for a smaller group, ensuring users are willing to pay for the solution, which sets the foundation for broader success.
7. Prioritize Work-Life Balance
Prioritize work-life balance by actively scheduling time for sleep, walks, yoga, and journaling to maintain mental and physical health. Delineate work and non-work time by removing distractions like email from your phone, allowing you to be “all in” when working and “all out” when not, which helps gain perspective and avoid burnout.
8. Build Authentic Systems for Scale
Recognize that company growth breaks existing systems, requiring constant adaptation and reinvention of processes. Instead of adopting “off-the-shelf” solutions from other companies, focus on building authentic systems that align with your company’s unique culture and philosophies at each stage of scale.
9. Iterate Pitch with Rejection
Use rejection as feedback to iterate and strengthen your pitch. Don’t take rejection personally; instead, refine your pitch deck by addressing common objections and clarifying your vision, as this makes your presentation stronger and more easily understood.
10. Celebrate Crazy Big Goals
Couple “Crazy Big Goals” with fun, specific celebrations to mark their achievement. These moments of recognition are crucial for motivating teams, preventing burnout from continuous striving, and reinforcing what the company values and focuses on.
11. Integrate AI for User Goals
Integrate AI into your product only where it genuinely helps customers achieve their goals and get work done, rather than just for hype. Continuously listen to community feedback on AI features to refine their utility and ensure they naturally fit into the user workflow.
12. Delegate as You Scale
As a leader, continuously develop the skill of delegating responsibilities (“giving away hats”) to others who can perform those tasks better as the company scales. This allows you to focus on higher-level strategic work and empowers your team.
13. Find Purpose in Collective Goals
Find deep purpose and combat loneliness by working towards goals bigger than yourself, starting with small steps in your own life, family, and community. Encourage collective dreaming by asking people to write down and share global goals they want to achieve, then collaboratively strategize how to make them a reality.
14. Use AI for Idea Exploration
Use AI as a first step for exploring new ideas or for personal thought organization. Try an “AI walk” by dictating your thoughts into a tool like Apple Notes or Canva Docs, then use AI to summarize and filter these thoughts to identify actionable items and gain perspective.
15. Align Thoughts, Words, Actions
Strive for happiness by aligning your thoughts, words, and actions in harmony. Recognize that all great achievements begin with imagination, emphasizing the power of envisioning what you want to create before you can bring it into existence.
16. Embrace Failure, Build Resilience
Embrace repeated failure as a learning opportunity, akin to falling down in figure skating, and cultivate hard work and determination to get back up and try again. This resilience is crucial for overcoming challenges in building a company.
5 Key Quotes
The thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it.
Melanie Perkins
Their feedback made us stronger and made our pitch deck stronger.
Melanie Perkins
A product company not shipping product, it's not really a recipe for fun for two years.
Melanie Perkins
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Melanie Perkins
Everything good was once imagined.
Melanie Perkins
3 Protocols
Building a Column B Company
Melanie Perkins- Imagine the future you actually want to live in, such as a vision for the world in 2050 or wild success for a specific area in 10 years.
- Take small, incremental steps, like 'rungs on a ladder,' towards that desired future, no matter how microscopic or seemingly inconsequential the first step may be.
Celebrating Crazy Big Goals
Melanie Perkins- Attempt to make crazy big goals happen in a specific, definable moment in time.
- When a goal is achieved, hold a fun celebration (e.g., smashing plates, releasing doves, holding a festival) to acknowledge the huge achievement and motivate the team.
Melanie Perkins' AI Walk for Brainstorming
Melanie Perkins- Put in earbuds and go for a walk.
- Speak everything on your mind into a voice note tool (e.g., Apple Notes or Canva Docs).
- Use the recorded brain dump to filter thoughts, identify actions, and gain a more macro perspective on issues.