“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Melanie Perkins
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 PerkinsNov 2, 2025▶ 16:09She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
Opinion
Perkins: Most early investors knew nothing about design or Canva's market
“Most investors knew absolutely nothing about design or the industry that we're in.”
Melanie PerkinsNov 2, 2025▶ 27:42She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
AssertionSupported
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”
Melanie PerkinsNov 2, 2025▶ 44:49She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
“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…”
Melanie PerkinsNov 2, 2025▶ 18:51She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
Insight
Perkins: Internal systems break every time a company doubles in size
“Like every time the company doubles in size, pretty much all your systems break, all the things that were working don't work.”
Melanie PerkinsNov 2, 2025▶ 22:36She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
AssertionSupported
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 PerkinsNov 2, 2025▶ 23:42She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
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