She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins is CEO and co-founder of Canva, currently valued at over $42 billion, generating over $3 billion in annual revenue, with more than 240 million monthly active users and, incredibly, eight consecutive years of profitability. But the journey was far from smooth. Melanie was rejected by over 100 investors during her first fundraising round, her team spent two years without being able to ship a new feature during a technical rewrite, and the company pivoted early from a yearbook publishing platform to become the design powerhouse it is today. Through it all, she maintained what she calls “column B” thinking: building toward a dream future rather than just using the bricks around you. *We discuss:* 1. How “column B” thinking helped Melanie build Canva, by starting with an impossible vision rather than existing constraints 2. The power of setting “crazy big goals” 3. How Canva survived a painful two-year period without shipping any new features while rewriting their codebase 4. How Melanie pushed through 100 investor rejections, and how she used each rejection to strengthen her pitch 5. Canva’s “two-step plan”: build one of the world’s most valuable companies, then do the most good possible 6. Melanie’s vision for 2050 and why she believes imagination is the first step toward a better world *Brought to you by:* Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny Stripe—Helping companies of all sizes grow revenue: https://stripe.com/ Justworks—The all-in-one HR solution for managing your small business with confidence: https://www.justworks.com *Transcript:* ⁠https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-making-of-canva⁠⁠ *My biggest takeaways (for paid newsletter subscribers):* https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/176082995/my-biggest-takeaways-from-this-conversation *Where to find Melanie Perkins:* • X: https://x.com/melaniecanva • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieperkins/ *Where to find Lenny:* • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ *In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Introduction to Melanie Perkins and Canva (04:44) Building a “column B” company (06:36) Operationalizing big visions (13:13) Crazy big goals and celebrations (22:00) Challenges and setbacks in Canva’s journey (26:30) Fundraising and investor rejections (29:36) Leadership and growth lessons (34:38) Canva’s goal-driven structure (35:46) Balancing work and personal life (38:02) Community-driven product development (40:37) The two-step plan for global impact (45:04) Canva’s biggest launch yet (48:10) How Canva approaches product expansion (52:37) AI integration in Canva (53:56) AI corner (55:22) Melanie’s vision for 2050 and beyond (01:00:07) Lightning round and final thoughts *Referenced:* • Canva: https://www.canva.com/ • Brian Chesky’s new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach • Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-high-performing-teams-melissa • UserTesting: https://www.usertesting.com/ • Figma: https://www.figma.com/ • Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/ • Calm: https://www.calm.com/ • Gandhi’s quote about happiness: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/mahatma_gandhi_105593 • Help us improve Canva: https://www.canva.com/help/get-in-touch/general-feedback/ *Recommended books:* • Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration: https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Expanded-Overcoming-Inspiration/dp/0593594649/ • The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898/ • The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Moments-Certain-Experiences-Extraordinary/dp/1501147765 • Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Application Design: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Obvious-Common-Approach-Application/dp/0321749855 _Production and marketing by https://penname.co/._ _For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]._ Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's a very famous story about Canva. Early on, you pitched over 100 investors and over 100 investors said no to you.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  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. They would say, oh, your market's not big enough. And I would say, it's going to be huge. And I'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 other company. 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.

• 0:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  One of your values, crazy big goals. I love that as a value.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  The thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. You want to work really hard to will it into existence. I really like to start by just imagining what is the future that you actually want. Right now, I have a wall in my house, in my office, which is my vision for what I'd like the world to look like in 2050.

• 0:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  Heard from one of your team members, Melissa Tan, that there's a deck like this. For every project you kick off, there's this big vision deck.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  So we have this concept of chaos to clarity. Every idea starts in the chaos side and then you have to work all the way to the other side, which is clarity. That very first step at the far end of chaos was quite an embarrassing step, actually, because you don't have mastery at that point. You don't have all the answers.

• 1:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  A lot of people think of Canva as like a design graphics for, you know, social media and then marketing and things like that. But you also have spreadsheets, docs, whiteboards, charts, AI coding tool.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  It was funny looking back from really old decks. We were trying to do AI, but AI was actually a thing.

• 1:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Melanie Perkins, CEO and co-founder of Canva. Melanie is on track to be the most successful female tech founder in history and one of the most successful founders, period. Canva is currently valued at over $42 billion, making over $3.3 billion in revenue a year. They've been profitable for eight years straight and are one of the hottest private tech companies in the world right now. But it wasn't always this way. Melanie was rejected by over 100 investors when she was trying to raise her first round. Their team spent two years rewriting their entire codebase and were unable to ship any new features for over two years, something they expected to just take six months. And they even went Through a big pivot early on from a yearbook publishing platform to the Canva that you know today.

• 2:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Melanie does not do a lot of podcasts. She shares stories that I've never heard before and lessons that I'm still thinking about. This is a really rare opportunity to learn from a legendary founder. A huge thank you to Cameron Adams and Melissa Tan for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 17 incredible products, including Devon, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Innit, and Linear Superhuman Descriptus, Purple Gamma, Perplexity Warp, Granola Magic Pattern, Joycast, JPRD, and Mobbin. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Melanie Perkins after a short word from our sponsors.

• 2:55Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 3:40Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 3:50Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 4:32Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 4:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Melanie, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

• 4:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm even more excited. It's such an honor to have you here. I am such a fan of yours. I'm such a fan of the company that you've built. Also, just everyone I meet from Canva is just like so nice and so awesome and so smart. And so clearly you've built something really special. I'm really excited to use this hour to learn as much as I can from you about how you did that. And we were actually chatting ahead of this about what would make the best use of this hour. And I asked you what you believe has been the biggest factor in the success of Canva. And you described something called building a column B company and column B thinking. I've never heard of this before, so let us start there. What is, what is, what is building column B company? What does that mean?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Really great place to start. So I guess there's two ways of planning. The way that you can plan is you can dream of like, what is the perfect vision of the future? What, what future do you want to exist in? What would you like the world to look like? What would you like companies to look like? And then going from there, which is completely improbable, a completely crazy big dream, and then working hard to turn that into reality. And the alternative is, so you know, just imagine you, you're building a castle on the hill and you're like, what would be the most magical, wonderful, mythical experience? And the other thing you can do is you can look at the bricks around you and you can say, what can I do with these bricks? How high can I stack them? What can I do? And I think most planning is often done by looking at the bricks and trying to stack them.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And then you kind of, you know, you can create only so much. And so I guess the column B thinking is thinking about what is that magical, wonderful future that you then want to invest years and decades of your life actually building? And so that's column A and column B in a nutshell.

• 6:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  So column A is the traditional, just like work from today's world, column B is work from this dream reality and work backwards from how to achieve that.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Exactly that.

• 6:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  This is exactly the way actually Brian Chesky thought I worked at Airbnb for a long time. And it was always just like, think about the world, the dream, and then work backwards from that. So there's a lot clearly also worked out. So clearly this is an important lesson. In the example of Canva, just what is, what would have been column A for what Canva could have been? And what was the, how did you think about the column B approach of what Canva in a dream land could be?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  So column A would have been nothing, frankly, because, you know, the reality was when I was a university student with no company and no business or product or software experience, the reality would have been not, not very much. And so it was all column B. It was all thinking about the wild future that we wanted to create. You know, I imagined what would be publishing in the future? What would communications look like in the future? And it seemed really impossible that it would stay on, on the desktop, it would stay really complicated. And it just seemed so apparent to me that in the future, it was going to be like completely different. Could I build that future? I had absolutely no idea.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  But the idea seemed completely likely, completely improbable that it wouldn't be the case that in the future, design would be online and collaborative and really simple. And so starting from that, we then took that concept and applied it to the school yearbook market in Australia with our first company, Fuse Books. And then we applied it to Canva, where we want to take it much, much bigger.

• 8:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's talk about just how to actually go about building a column B company. Say a founder's listening to this and they're just like, okay, I want to do this. What do they do? What are the steps? Where do you start?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  I really like to start by just imagining what is the future that you actually want? What is the world that you want to live in? What is the future of transportation? What is the future of healthcare? What is the future that you want to live in and exist in? And for example, right now, I have a wall in my house, in my office, which is my vision for what I'd like the world to look like in twenty fifty. And so it's not necessarily that you can bring that into existence, or you can will that into existence, but just to start to get clearer on what you would like that world to be like. Would you like it to be more inclusive? Would you like it to, you know, for me, one of the things I desperately want is everyone on this planet to have their basic human needs met. You know, what are those things that you believe are so important that you would love to see exist in that future?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think an exercise we often do is like, what is wild success for X? Or what is wild success for Y? And then equally, what is terrible failure for those things? And you can apply that just to abstract thinking in different industries. You can do that, apply that for, um, we do that for the whole company, for different areas of the company. And I think just taking that very la- long timescale of ten years, um, and getting a really crisp idea of what you want or what you don't want, that's sort of the first step. And I think a lot of people don't spend quite enough time imagining that. And then the next part is, you don't want to have this crazy big dream, um, and then do nothing about turning it into reality. You kind of want to have a ladder that goes all the way up to the moon, which is your crazy wild vision.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  And then you want to have rungs that just like work its way up step by step. And so you want to get that really clear picture of the future that you would like, and then just take little step after little step after little step. And it doesn't matter how small that first step is, or how seemingly inconsequential. If it is working towards that future that you want to will into existence, then you'll keep on climbing up that ladder in the right direction.

• 10:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think a lot of people hearing this might feel like, I do this, yeah, I have a vision, I kind of, I know where I'm going, I have this big idea. What do you think they might be missing about just what this actually means and why they're probably not thinking big enough, they're not making the time to think like this?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  I think it is. Easy to be discouraged by the two, because they're completely two, complete odds, like they're completely different ends of the spectrum. So one is dreaming about the future, not that you think you can will into existence, just the future that you want. And then the next part is taking the tiny step that might be extremely microscopic. And it feels a little embarrassing to be like, I want a future that is, you know, whatever it might be, and then to take such a microscopic step. Because I think you often have the future in one side or don't spend much time thinking about that, you're just thinking about the bricks before you. And so I think it's also, you know, naturally, we all get distracted by day to day.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  You know, it's your, your email, your Slack, the things that are kind of in your face, you know, the reality that lives around you every day that kind of pulls you into this moment right now. And so I think actually just making time to spend thinking about that is probably one of the most critical pieces. Like just literally dreaming, like what is wild success in 10 years? What is terrible failure in 10 years? Um, is a really great place to start, is just like spending some time there. And then, like, even if that is so big and so vast and so wild, having that very first step is so important because then you've take that little tiny first step and then the next step. And then that compounds, you know, for us, it's been compounding over a decade as we continue to work towards that same mission and vision.

• 11:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to hear how you operationalize this. I heard from one of your team members, uh, Melissa Tan, that there's a deck like this for every project you kick off, there's this big vision deck that, talk about what that looks like, because I think that's where people are like, okay, how do I actually do this? Talk about that deck.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  So we have this concept of chaos to clarity. Um, and every idea starts in the chaos side and then you have to work all the way to the other side, which is clarity. And so chaos can be an idea, it can be a problem, it can be a philosophy or a belief. And um I've got a joke that I find funny, I'm not sure if you will, but how do you uh how do you go from chaos to clarity? You add clarity. And so the idea is that like each like little step from chaos to clarity is like the very first step might be literally writing it down. So rather than it being in your head, you've written it down. Then the next step might be um starting to create a pitch deck on on it. And the next step might be starting to refine that, turning it into some designs, turning it into a prototype.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  And then as it kind of goes from chaos to clarity, it starts to become more and more real and more and more people can see it. And so just like taking those little incremental steps that adds clarity with every single step then starts to help will it into existence, rather than it being something that's completely amorphous and just stays in your head. So I think that's why, you know, visual communication for us is so important is because otherwise, if it's just in your head, no one else can see it and you can't will it into existence.

• 13:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  This makes me think about this concept of an ugly baby from the book Creativity, Inc. by I think Ed Catmull, where he talks about how new ideas are this ugly baby that nobody wants to look at and deal with that. And like I think he says, they want to kill. Why you do that with an ugly baby? But there are these like very soft, subtle uh uh fragile things. And it's really important to not kill them early and give them a chance to survive. And it's kind of what I'm hearing here is like have this big vision that many people will be like, no way, this is completely absurd. And I love this idea, okay, but here's like one step we could take there to see if this could be a thing.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that's the thing is that the that very first step at the very like far end of chaos, it's very embarrassing because you're like, I have this idea that is so big and so wild. And how the hell would I do that? I have no idea. And so it's quite a embarrassing step, actually. Um because you don't have mastery at that point, you don't have all the answers. In fact, you have likely not none of the answers, but you just have the idea that you think would be cool. And ideally, you get the idea that would be so cool that you want to work really hard to will that into existence. And so I think one of the really key parts is not only just having the idea, but thinking it's so cool that you're going to work for years to will it into existence.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Actually, Melissa did a really amazing pitch deck recently about the vision of uh I won't go into the details right here, but the vision of her space. And I was really excited about it. Um and so I think that. That's the great thing about a pitch deck is that other people can see your thinking. And your thinking actually gets clarified as well as you go through that process.

• 14:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  I talked to Melissa, I talked to a bunch of other people that work at Canva that have worked at Canva. And something else I heard along these lines is this phrase crazy big goals. Which I think is one of your values, crazy big goals. I love that as a value. Why is that so important? How does that fit into this? And just talk about the power of having crazy big goals.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yes, so right from the start of Canva, it was truly a crazy big goal. We're like, we want to empower the world to design and take all these things that are super complicated. And put them into one platform and make it accessible to the whole world. And we want to, rather than it be super expensive and unaffordable, we want to empower everyone, everywhere in the world to design. So I mean, that was the epitome of a crazy big goal. And if we macro out even further, we've got this two-step plan. Build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can do. So again, a rather crazy big goal. And I think the thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. You know, another crazy big goal, we'd love to see everyone's basic human needs met on the planet.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Like completely crazy big, that truly shouldn't be. It's kind of absolutely absurd that that's the case, but we can go into that later. But I think with a crazy big goal, then you want to work really hard to will it into existence. And so if you start with a reasonable goal or a realistic goal, then you kind of get to it and you're like, oh, cool, whatever. Or more importantly, if something happens, you know, all the problems and roadblocks come along as they always do. Then you're like, okay, I won't bother with that. And then you can just like go and choose another course. And so a crazy big goal is both crazy big, but it's also something that you think is incredibly important.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  That you actually want to will into existence. Because it is so much work to will a crazy big goal into existence. So it had better be one that you want to actually achieve.

• 16:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there a crazy big goal that you set that comes to mind maybe as a good example of this is what I'm talking about? Maybe a product you launched or a feature back in the day?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so many things. So we have our mission empower the world to design and we break it down into mission pillars. So empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient, in every language, on every device. Obviously a mouthful. But then what we do is we take successive goals every year towards this mission. And so for designing anything, we started off with social media and your presentations and now and like docs and websites and whiteboards and video. And so every year we're just launching more and more things to fulfill that part of the mission of empowering everyone to design anything. And then equally, in every language, we started in English and then it was Spanish and then it was twenty languages and then a hundred languages and then hard languages, like Arabic and Hebrew and Urdu and you know, right to left languages.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  And now, you know, we're in a hundred plus languages now. And we're now really doubling down on the localization experience to make it feel truly local in every market around the world. And so you can see how having these very big, audacious goals that you then just like take a step after step um towards helps then will it into existence. Or on every device, we started off obviously just with a web platform and then we launched our iPad app and then iPhone and then Android. And then we spent years investing in cross-platforms, so we have the same feature set across every device. And so you can see how these like big amorphous things that seem very outlandish, you can then just will into existence after continual investment for a decade and it compounds over time.

• 18:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  I see how all this is starting to fade together. There's this big, crazy, ambitious vision and below there are the mission pillars that are feeding into this vision. And then the crazy big goals within each of those mission pillars to measure your progress towards all these uh components of the mission.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 18:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  Um, okay, so with all that in mind, there's also this kind of trade-off you have to make of just how ambitious you get. Because oftentimes, sometimes, maybe you never miss the goal, but most, many times people miss these very ambitious goals. How do you just find that balance between ambitious, crazy, but doable enough where people don't get discouraged?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  I think with a crazy big goal, the thing we have been really great at is achieving them. The timeframe that we achieve them on has not always been uh very reliable. We have certainly not been able to have uh ping dart, what's the, what's the accurate?

• 19:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bullseye.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  We have not been very accurate with timing. But it's really interesting. I looked back at a twenty twenty one, twenty twenty one vision deck that we made, obviously in twenty twenty one, but it was about twenty twenty six. And it was fascinating to see how much we'd actually been able to achieve from that vision deck. And how many things were currently still in flight. And so by having that, I thought in twenty twenty one, some of those things may have happened a little quicker. But over the, over the, you know, last five years, they've really been coming into reality. And so, you know, we might think things are gonna take six months and they take a year. We might think things are gonna take six months and they take two years, as has been the case. We might think something's actually gonna take our entire lifetime

• 19:48Speaker 01

  and some of those really truly crazy big goals. And in fact, I don't even know if we can ever achieve them, frankly. But they're such an important goal that even if you make a little step in their direction, they're worthwhile nonetheless.

• 20:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Whether you like him or not, Elon, this is similar to his, um, if you watch him, he has, sets these really ambitious goals and then often is far late on achieving them, but clearly it has worked out in achieving the crazy things that he's achieved. Something else I hear is you celebrate these goals in a really unique way. Talk about that.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  So when we have these crazy big goals, we also have, couple them with really fun celebrations. And so we attempt to make the crazy big goals happen in a moment in time. So then when we achieve them, we actually have a really fun moment. Um, because if you're just trying to plod towards the top of the mountain always and you never like, take a little moment to pat yourself on the back, it would feel a little arduous. And so, you know, over the years, we had all sorts of fun little celebrations where, you know, we have smashed great plates and released doves and had a little automatina festival and

• 20:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  You know, all sorts of fun things, just to take a moment with the team to celebrate that huge achievement. Um, and so I think that that's, you know, you wanna celebrate what you want to, um, really focus on and what you want everyone to take that moment. So when you achieve that crazy big goal, when we launch in Spanish, when we hit a hundred languages, you know, and then the so forth across the company, taking that moment to actually pat yourself on the back and pat the teams on the back and say, hey, we did this thing. Um, that thing that seemed really hard, we've now achieved. And, you know, the mission is often, you know, each of the different mission pillars, they're obviously a long. Area of investment that's going to take a long time to get to. But being able to celebrate each of the rungs on that on the way there, I think is extraordinarily important.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  And then it makes everyone, you know, everyone works extraordinarily hard to bring them to life. And then it gives everyone a little moment to to feel proud of themselves.

• 21:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  It'd be very motivating to get to just break a bunch of plates. I really like that.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  We need to bring that one back. We haven't done that one in a while.

• 21:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's a good one. I just love how concrete you're making this. So it's, you know, set these crazy big goals, find the components of the goals, set numbers there. And then figure out the kind of the steps you take to achieve these things. All feels very easy. Kind of on the flip side of that, this is a segue. People hear these stories, they hear your story, they see Canva over the years. And it's just this like up and to the right, huge success story, one of the most successful companies in history. I imagine there have been many periods where things weren't going so great. And when maybe things didn't look like they worked, it would work out. So let me just ask you this, over the, over the course of building Canva. Once it started to click and started to feel like it was going to be a thing. Was there a point where it started to again feel like, wow, maybe this may not work out. Maybe there's a huge setback that we may not get over.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  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. You know, a little example, in the early days, we'd stand up and everyone would present their, um, present their goals, what they're working on every day, 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 called season openers. And season openers were really fun, where we got the entire company together. We talked about the goals that we'd achieved. And it was so funny because ahead of season openers, everyone would launch everything because they wanted to do it ahead of the season opener. And then we'd also set the goals for the coming cycle, uh, for the coming season at that point in time.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  But then they started to become like six hours long because we had so many people and so many teams. And so like trying to find that right, uh, to 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. And so I think it's just like a constant work in progress. Or, you know, back to your earlier point about timing of things. We were doing a front end rewrite and. 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

• 23:59Speaker 01

  base was structured. And we thought it was gonna 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 feel happy and like we'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. And we didn't really know how long it was gonna take, because it had to take as long as the tunnel was gonna take. And it was, you know, a very hard time because, you know, other people would be launching

• 24:43Speaker 01

  this and that. And it was, 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 were able to deliver amazing things that would have just like been completely infeasible. But, 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.

• 25:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  For two years.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  For two years.

• 25:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  I feel like every builder listening to this knows exactly what you've been through and maybe not on that scale and those stakes, but you start on something, oh yeah, it'll be take a few weeks and then a year later, you're still working on it.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 25:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  Had it, just was the mood really, I don't know, sad internally? Just, that must have been, like, two years. That's a long time not to ship anything. Just, what was it like internally during that period?

• 25:39Speaker 01

  I think it was kind of everything internally. Like, we, we made it into a bit of a game. We had this game board and I bought these little, like, rubber ducky sort of bath toys. And we had this, so we had all the little, the components represented as a bath toy on this board. And there was like all these stages of like, home, it kind of went launched in product, there was an emergency lane, at the end of it was home and hosed. And we like 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 around investors were like, hey, you

• 26:22Speaker 01

  know, that thing. So I think it was, it was, it was both things at the same time. It was bonding, let's say.

• 26:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  Hmm. Okay. Speaking of investors, speaking of other hard times, there's a very famous story about Canva. Early on, you pitched over a hundred investors and over a hundred investors said no to you when you were just starting Canva. That's, I think that's more the investors than any founder I've talked to, like actually tries to pitch. It's, it's impressive. You tried that hard and went for so many pitches and finally got someone to take a bet. Now you're something like a $40 billion company making 3.3 billion ARR. I think there's something like 240 million monthly active users. One of the hottest private companies in the world. Just how does, how does this feel?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  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 gonna be huge. And I'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 other company. And I'd say, coupled with rejection. And I would say, hey, now I've got a new slide in my pitch deck that shows all the, 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

• 27:48Speaker 01

  saying, here's the, the lay of the land today. Here's the problem that we're going to solve. And so while it was extraordinarily frustrating, their feedback made us stronger and made our pitch deck stronger. And it was sort of like, you know, from that chaos to clarity. At the start, it was just like this idea. And then through the copious amounts of rejection, the pitch deck got stronger and more refined. So then when people, you know, 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, you know, 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.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Pre answered in that that initial pitch deck was really important. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why, you know, 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 rejection in some ways makes you stronger if you can persist through.

• 28:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Well, I think beyond that, I've never heard this part of the story. It's not just persisting, it's actually iterating and and taking feedback that you're hearing to continue to evolve the pitch. So a place where, okay, I finally get what you're doing. That is such a cool part of the story. Is there, how much of the product, like, how much of that vision and product changed throughout that journey versus just the way you pitched it and convince people?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  It was pretty consistent, but the way we articulated it changed greatly. And so, for example, I wouldn't, in the early days, articulate the problem very much. I spent into like, here's a cool solution. And so then the first few pages became very much more problem based. So 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, a lot of refinement on the way it was articulated. And but the actual vision itself, I think, was pretty consistent through.

• 29:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm guessing a lot of founders ask for your advice on raising money, getting started, having gone through so much rejection early on. What do you, what's your general advice to folks that are having a hard time fundraising?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  I mean, I can only go on my experience, but I think it's sort of like the dark tunnel analogy. Oh, chaos to clarity, let's go with that one. It's a slightly friendlier analogy. And I think just taking the rejection and turning 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 like 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 their, behind them when they were, when I was pitching them. And they were never going to like Canva because we were not the lean startup.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  That was not the way that we're 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 you're kind of finding your tribe, I think.

• 30:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think as an investor, this is really interesting to hear because it tells you there are companies like Canva out there that everyone's turning down. Hundred, a hundred investors passed on that you might still be able to invest in.

• 30:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Talking about your growth as a leader, say if you compared Melanie of today to Melanie of 12, 13 years ago, when you were just starting Canva, what would you say is most different in terms of leadership?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  I 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, like, you know, you go into it the same as some other company. And sometimes we even try that for a while. And then we try that out and we're like, that's, you know, 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. And 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 the, you know, everything that's come before it is just that constant, constant thing. And like then each scale of, each, you know, stage of scale of the company,

• 31:52Speaker 01

  rather than going, taking someone else's bricks and trying to stick that in your, 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. And so I, you kind of think about it in the very early days, we're just a few of us, or just two of us in Fusion, and then three of us, and it's 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, that would have had to have developed over the last decade to be able to give away those hats. But 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, way we did it in the early days, actually.

• 32:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that story. I think, again, if anyone working at a company that has gone through a lot of growth has experienced that, when people from other companies come in, and here's how we did it at this company. Is there, is there an example of some there that just like, here's something that this company brought in and people from this company thought we should do and we tried and didn't work?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I won't go into specific examples, but so many times over. And I think that, I mean, maybe that's probably in answer to your other question. Like not, we did things our way because that was the only way we knew. And there was many, many times over the years that we're like, didn't have confidence in the way we were doing things. And we'd be like, oh, they, 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. And so, 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.

• 33:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  I mentioned also the help that you're in Australia away from the Bay Area and where all these other, you know, big companies are at, just being able to do it your own way.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much so.

• 33:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Did you know that I have a whole team that helps me with my podcast and with my newsletter? I want everyone on that team to be super happy and thrive in their roles. Justworks knows that your employees are more than just your employees. They're your people. My team is spread out across Colorado, Australia, Nepal, West Africa, and San Francisco. My life would be so incredibly complicated to hire people internationally, to pay people on time and in their local currencies, and to answer their HR questions 24/7. But with Justworks, it's super easy. Whether you're setting up your own automated payroll, offering premium benefits, or hiring internationally, Justworks offers simple software and 24/7 human support from small business experts for you and your people.

• 34:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  They do your human resources right so that you can do right by your people. Justworks, for your people. Is there anything else that is a good example of how you did something pretty different from how other companies operate? Anything else that comes to mind as a fun example?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  The goal-driven structure, I think the things that we were 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 under-loved 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, you know, where people actually spend their time is in a very, very different direction from that original. 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 actually are helping to achieve that. And I think there's a real authenticity in that for customers as well.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Is that you're actually doing the thing that you promised you do. And it all ladders up together. Um, 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 there's a lot of authenticity with what you're saying you're doing, you're actually doing.

• 35:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to come back to that. That's a whole, uh, really cool process to have with closing the loop with customers. But something else I want to talk about while we're in this topic of growth over time. Uh, I saw you post something about how you had to realize they had to slow down and not just work, work, work like crazy. Talk about just that realization and why that ended up being so valuable.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  So in the early days, I would just work seven days a week, round the clock. You know, in our very first company, we actually had printing presses because we were printing the yearbooks in my mom's house. And then delivering them to school around Australia. And, you know, in the early days of Canva, we certainly, you know, were working all weekend, all hours of the day. It was just constant. Um, but when you've been doing this for a while, if you just keep working at that pace. You know, I don't think it's good for anyone's health, mental health or any, anything else. So I think finding ways to continue, like, you know, I still work extraordinarily hard. But to continue to have that balance in my day to day where I actually go to sleep.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  I, you know, I find time to do things like going for walks or doing yoga, um, journaling. I find extraordinarily helpful, um, to make sure that I can always bring my best to everything that I'm doing.

• 36:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's, uh, it's easy to say that kind of stuff. It must be really hard to actually make time for that thing. Is there anything for those sorts of things? Is there anything that you do that allows you to actually protect that time to actually do these things? Because as you said, there's a billion things that are just looking for your attention constantly.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  I 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 I, 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. You know, 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.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  I think being able to step away a little, just to be able to get perspective to be, is actually really beneficial.

• 38:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to come back to this closing the loop uh process, let's say, is that you have where you. Uh figure out what to build. A lot, a lot of your ideas come actually from the community. Talk about just that process and how many of your ideas actually came from your community.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Oh, it's 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, um 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 two hundred 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. And so 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, you know, in the early days with our AI products, we didn't release them to teachers because we knew there was a lot of hesitancy.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  For um teachers using AI in the classroom. And we got so many requests from teachers saying, can I please use this magic right in the classroom? And so then we um unlocked that and put on safety controls for teachers. And so it's just constant, actually. It's just part of that product process. I think there's two parts to product. One is building the future. Um 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. And so. I think that that's the two core pieces of product in my mind. And you know, 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.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  It's amazing to me how you can find ten random people on the internet. And they can give such a stute 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.

• 40:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, that must be really stressful for someone looking at a test of Canva, trying to try someone when you're in the room.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  It's actually, we do it all online, actually. We, I, I mean, the ones I've run are typically online. So people are so much more frank, I think, when they test. It's just them and their camera and they don't really, yeah, they, they tell you really how it is.

• 40:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there a tool or a kind of a process there that you find really helpful? I don't know if you want to name names of products or anything like that, but it's something that you find helpful or useful?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we use a lot of usertesting.com. I find that super, super valuable.

• 40:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  All right, go user testing. Okay, something else that I know is really important to you and also really unique to Canva is something that's called the two step plan. You mentioned this earlier, I want to definitely talk about this. What is the two step plan? Why is this so important to you?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when you were asking about crazy 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. And realize that actually step one can fuel step two and step two can fuel step one. And so that's been a really big part of Canva for some years now. You know, in the early days, we took the one percent pledge, which I think is an incredible program. Every single person, every single company should, should take that where you give one percent 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 Canva's equity was obviously going to be a really key part of it.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  So Cliff and I owned a little over thirty percent of Canva. And so we decided we were going to take thirty percent 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 fifty million dollars 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 healthcare, to start small businesses, to get a roof so they can sleep in without being wet. You know, just like real, truly basic human needs things. And we've just announced that we're going to be giving another hundred million dollars over the next four years to people in extreme poverty.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  And it's just like when you go and sit with people and you hear about how they're spending, you know, what's very microscopic amount of five hundred and fifty dollars is, you know, 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 know, 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 met. It's so completely insane that that isn't the case today. There's no specific reason why people don't have their basic human needs met on our planet. But we just haven't got to act together as humanity.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's incredible. It makes me think about, not to mention Elon again, but Elon's three-step strategy plan. And it's like build better cars versus this is like, okay, solve all the problems of the world and make the world a better place. What are better master plan?

• 43:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  And something else about this that I love is a lot of companies have this have something philanthropic going on with the company. And it's like sitting in a doc on some page as part of their mission. It's not actually that big of a deal to them. What I hear from folks at Canva is something you talk about all the time. This is like actually core part of how you work and think and how you set goals and set vision and missions.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  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. You know, it's completely, yeah, but they they're working just as hard, but they don't have the opportunity. And even our education product is now used by a hundred 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.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Giving, being able to help empower schools all around the world. And we're going to be doubling down and doubling down into that product to bring quality education to all. I think it's, it gives so much more meaning behind 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've, we're giving away 1.5 billion dollars 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.

• 45:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, so speaking of product, coming back to that, you guys are launching something, maybe you've already launched it by the time this comes out. What I heard described as the, the biggest launch in Canva's history. No big deal. That's a high bar considering all the things you guys have launched. What are you launching? Why is it such a big deal?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  So we are extraordinarily excited about what we are launching. We, I guess the whole mission of Canva is to empower the world to design. And so what has been enabled by new technology with all of A I. Has been just really profoundly enabled, enabling people to take their idea and turn it into design, a design and have as little friction between those two points. So we are doubling down radically on our video product and bring some incredible capabilities to our mobile and desktop platform. We are um launching email, which has been one of our most hotly requested features. Um from enterprise customers around the world and business customers around the world who want to be able to design. With Canva's drag and drop ease and to be able to create an email. We're launching forms, we are launching.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Probably one of the most exciting things is the way we're embedding A I across the entire product suite. And so you can actually um use A I to design a presentation, a video, a. Um email, a website, all of these things can actually now be done inside the core editor, inside the design tab. Um which is used by a hundred and seventy million, yeah, it's used a hundred and seventy million times a month. And then on our elements tab, which is used nine hundred million times a month. Um we are also embedding A I, so you can actually ju- generate a video, you can generate a um Canva code. And you can generate photos all directly inside that platform.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  And then we're also launching comments as you, lots of use our customers use Canva um to comment and collaborate. And now you can actually just tag at Canva and you can collaborate. Um you can just say, hey, like, can you make this title shorter? Can you do this? Can you do that? And it has all of the context of the design. So in Sichuan, you can actually just have a collaborator that can help get your work done. So we are pretty excited about all of this.

• 47:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. I have something I'm gonna just let people know. I don't know if people know all this. How many products you all have now? I think a lot of people think of Canva as like a design graphics for, you know, social media and then marketing, things like that. But you also have spreadsheets, docs, whiteboards, charts, uh code, A I coding tool, and now. Uh what I'm hearing is email, forms, there's probably a few other things I'm not.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, truly design anything. We're, we're literally living up to that. Like a hundred million people, I design a presentation in Canva each month now. And it's it's pretty fascinating to see that when you speak to, I saw a tweet some time ago that they were talking about how it's a generational thing, that a certain generation uses Microsoft, a certain generation uses Google, and then as Gen Z, like, presentations have become the way they design a presentation 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.

• 48:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  The email product, is that like an email client product, or it's a design emails that you can then send through your products?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  It is design emails. So you can design email, then you can take that code and you can pop it into any email platform that you use.

• 48:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  How do you think about products you're going to expand to? I know there's like trade secrets here, you don't want to tell everyone where you're going next, but just how do you approach, here's where we're going next?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  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, you know, we now print in, oh, fifty something countries around the world, and you can get it printed and delivered to your house, and we planted.

• 48:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  I actually did that.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Did you? Oh, awesome.

• 48:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's right, I wasn't planning this, but I had a print screen thing delivered to my house.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Oh, awesome, yeah, exactly.

• 49:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  We have to go to a print shop in this freaking graphic and then, well, you have a button, let's click that.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Exactly, you can just click print and it pops up beautifully packaged to your door.

• 49:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  I don't know how that works. Yeah, I don't know how you did that, but it worked. How cool.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  That is very cool. And so, yeah, I guess literally bring these things to life. Oh, we're like launching 3D as well. So like, 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 we'll continue to do that forevermore, using the latest technology to truly bring people's ideas to life.

• 49:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, so this is helpful. So if someone's like, oh, well, well, Canva come for my my space. It's, are there people designing things? That was design and also, what was it, publish?

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Publishing anywhere.

• 49:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, publishing and designing. Okay, so if you're doing any designing or publishing.

• 49:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  Watch out.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  From a macro perspective, there was creativity tools and productivity tools. And what Canva really does is we're literally smack bang in the middle of that Venn diagram of creativity and productivity, rather than making our customers have to make a choice between those two tools, two suites.

• 50:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  Something I wasn't planning on asking you about, but I think it's on everyone's minds. There's always this like Figma and Adobe and then there's Canva. And there's kind of a bunch of places we could go with this. One is just at the beginning of the journey, where a lot of founders try to figure out their wedge and their specific niche. Just how did you think about that? Like, here's how we might have a chance to, I know Figma wasn't even around back then, I don't think. Just like, how did you approach your early wedge of users?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 iterate 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, you know,

• 51:21Speaker 01

  they had all sorts of other things that they wanted to use it for. And we kind of looked around and we're like, oh, like, 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. And so it was, it was much more like, 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 they, 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.

• 51:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  So what I'm hearing there is you didn't overthink, here's my CPA, here's like the wedge and the strategy of how we expand into this large thing. It's like, here's people with a problem that hasn't been solved in years that we keep seeing, let's try to solve it.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Exactly that. And if you, if you take that problem centered approach that helps people to achieve something they actually want to do in real life, you're probably going to be in 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, not getting too, I think it's better to solve a small number of people's problems really well than trying to solve a large number of people's problems not very well at all.

• 52:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Something I can't not ask about is just how you think about AI in your product. You mentioned how you integrated all through the product. Just, you know, you guys are doing really good stuff with AI. A lot of companies are struggling to find something really that works great. Do you have, do you have just like a philosophy of here's how we integrate AI into Canva where it ends up being really helpful and people love it?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Your question is actually the answer at the same time. I think being able to integrate it into the product where it actually helps people to get their work done, where it genuinely helps them to achieve their goals. And then being really open to listening to your community and hearing what they're loving, what they're struggling with, and refining from there, I think is really, really important. Just because AI is all the rage and investors really like AI, doesn't necessarily mean it should be front and center. But if it can genuinely help your customers to achieve their goals. So, you know, the thing that I was mentioning before, enabling people to communicate their ideas and have little friction between those two points, AI is just kind of like, yeah, naturally a very critical part of that equation for us. In fact, it was funny looking back from

• 53:42Speaker 01

  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 now, 2012 deck, you can kind of imagine how AI very much fit into the equation because of exactly what we were trying to do.

• 53:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm going to keep us on the AI thread and take us to AI Corner, which is a recurring segment on this podcast. So here's the question, what's a way you've found in your personal life and work life to use AI where it ends up being really helpful, something really interesting that people might find useful?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  So many things. So A I is often the first, if I'm like having an idea, it will be the first place that I go and explore the idea. And now with Canva, and you can just tag Canva, I can say, give me more ideas of this. And it's like, shockingly great, because it has all of the context from the design is actually integrated deeply into your workflow. Uh, another really fun thing I do um is an A I walk. And it's when I just put my um ear pods in and then I go for a walk and I just say everything on my mind. And 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 the um from the things that might be

• 54:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  For the voice note tool, is there a tool that you find useful for that?

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I might use um Apple Notes or directly into Canva Docs. And then I actually just do the brain dump into Canva Docs and then just um do like summarize it. So, yeah.

• 55:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  Got it. And so you just use like native uh microphone.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 55:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  dictation sort of thing, nothing fancy.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I like it.

• 55:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  This reminded me of, you mentioned earlier in our conversation, you have this, you have this vision board that you said is like for twenty fifty, is that right?

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 55:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you share something from that vision board?

• 55:34Speaker 01

  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 fifty years or you do twenty fifty, 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 um for a whole host of reasons. And so I sat with that feeling for a little. And then I kind of got to work on my twenty fifty wall.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  And you know, back to the chaos to clarity, the first thing was writing my twenty fifty wall. And I've kind of really been loving, I've got a whole, on the twenty fifty wall, started with a lot of quotes. Um, everything good was uh once imagined. And many other quotes were 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? You know, basic human needs for all, um, you know, global education, being a basic human right that everyone experiences. Um, all the really important things that we want as humanity.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  And again, like using vision and using imagination and just dreaming about the future. And I find it really fascinating in my 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, I did some little brainstorm exercise with a number of other people. And starting to just like etch out, like, how do we get closer and closer to that? You know, on my vision of the future, it's community. It's the whole of humanity trying to dream bigger and to dream bigger goals.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  And then us actually rising to that occasion in the, in the world we don't want. I think loneliness is rife, uh, 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 bound to fall. We all have deep purpose. And that deep purpose springs from having bigger dreams that we collectively go out and achieve. Something that we're doing at our Canva 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 achieve in our lifetime?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  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?

• 58:54Speaker 01

  And I think that's where we'll get purpose from. And I think that is one of the key answers to loneliness, is actually working towards something bigger than yourself.

• 59:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. I really appreciate you sharing all that. I was thinking as you're talking, just considering how wildly successful Canva has been, and just how ambitious that was when you started, I would not be at all surprised that this actually happens and that you achieve this very difficult vision.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  It's not something that I alone can achieve. I think 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're 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?

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  It just literally makes no sense.

• 1:00:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  A column B world, you might say.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Melanie, this was incredible. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share, anything else you want to leave listeners with?

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  You have been extremely extensive. I don't think I've got anything of that, frankly.

• 1:00:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's the goal. That's the goal. With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Melanie, are you ready?

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Let's go.

• 1:00:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:00:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's all good.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Okay, two books, The Power of Moments. And one of the books early on I read was Designing the Obvious, which I found very insightful.

• 1:00:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Hmm, okay. I like that you shifted to fast mode. You don't have to go super fast, all good. What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Not Canva.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  I love the Calm app. It is my daily companion. I use it to meditate. I use it to listen to music. I just find it very calming.

• 1:01:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, third question. I usually ask about movies and TV shows. I hear you don't watch a lot because you're so busy and have so much going on. So I'm going to try a new question.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  I haven't asked before. I'm curious where this goes. So excluding Canva, what's a product you'd love to work on someday? Whether it's like an existing other company, like, oh, I wish I could work on that thing. Or just a new product you'd love to build, maybe after the Canva chapter?

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  I feel like my Canva chapter is going to go on for a long time. So I don't know that this, because we've got two step plans and we're pretty extensive.

• 1:01:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Maybe a company you'd love to fund. There we go.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  I feel like there is 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, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats, I think, is a thing that's just so, of such critical importance. And 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.

• 1:02:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Maybe along those lines, but maybe not. Is there a life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life?

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  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 step of that creative process. So, "Everything is good if it 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.

• 1:03:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, there's so much power to that. One thought nugget there is just, there's all these tools now that can make building so much easier. You can just build anything you want, just describe it. But so many people are just, like, I'm in the same boat, I'm just stuck. What do I want? I don't even, like, I don't know what I mean. What should I build? And that's exactly what you're talking about there. Okay, last question. So I saw it somewhere that you were an aspiring figure skater in your early years in high school. You had to wake up at 4:30 AM to practice. Is there something you learned from that period of your life that was helpful in building Canva?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Oh, 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, like, it was quite literal in my figure skating days. And maybe it's a little more metaphorical in today, but it is constant.

• 1:03:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  To your right. I wonder what that metaphor is for figure skating. I don't know. Anyway, Melanie, this was incredible. I am so thankful that you agreed to do this. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to maybe reach out, send you maybe feedback on Canva or join Canva? And how can listeners be useful to you?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Really great questions. So you can find me on LinkedIn, that's where I post the most. And you can go too, and I can get the URL to give us your wishes, and we want to hear them, and we literally listen to them. It doesn't just go into a suggestion box.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  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. And if 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

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  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 to the world that you want to live in? Or is it creating the freight train that none of us want to be on?

• 1:05:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  I have to ask before I let you go, are you going to have the rap dancers at the next kind of event?

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  You'll have to wait and see.

• 1:05:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. Melanie, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Lenny, for having me and your great, well-researched questions.

• 1:05:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you. Bye, everyone.

• 1:05:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.