Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Perkins: Transformative building requires working backward from an ideal future

Melanie Perkins · She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins · Nov 2, 2025 · at 6:14

Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, introduces her 'Column B thinking' strategy framework in conversation with Lenny Rachitsky.

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“Most planning is often done by looking at the bricks and trying to stack them. 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.”

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Insight
Perkins: Realistic goals lead to giving up when roadblocks hit
“If you start with a Reasonable goal or a realistic goal, then you kind of get to get to when 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, o…”
Melanie Perkins Nov 2, 2025 ▶ 16:09 She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
Opinion
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“Most investors knew absolutely nothing about design or the industry that we're in.”
Melanie Perkins Nov 2, 2025 ▶ 27:42 She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
Assertion Supported
Perkins: Canva donates $1.5B worth of software annually
“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”
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Disclosure
Perkins: Canva achieves ambitious goals despite inaccurate delivery timing
“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 very reliable. We have certainly not been able to have pin dart. What's the, what's it? We have not been very acc…”
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Insight
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“Like every time the company doubles in size, pretty much all your systems break, all the things that were working don't work.”
Melanie Perkins Nov 2, 2025 ▶ 22:36 She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
Assertion Supported
Perkins: Canva spent two years without shipping product during codebase rewrite
“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 edito…”
Melanie Perkins Nov 2, 2025 ▶ 23:42 She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
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