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

Nov 2, 2025 1h 6m 16 insights Episode Page ↗
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.
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.