The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 28 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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.”
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”
Perkins: Transformative building requires working backward from an ideal future
“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 inv…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Perkins: Copying organizational playbooks from other companies rarely fits your company's foundation
“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 …”
Perkins: Most companies' daily execution diverges from their stated mission
“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, the way people actually spend their time is in a very, very different direction from that or…”
Perkins does not keep work email on her phone
“I don't have emails like 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.”
Perkins: Testing 10 random online users yields representative product feedback
“It's amazing to me how you can find 10 random people on the internet and they can give such astute feedback. That then is so representative for such a large number of people.”
Perkins: Co-founders pledged 30% Canva equity to philanthropy
“Cliff and I owned a little over 30% of Canva, and so we decided we were going to take 30% of Canva and use it to do the most good we can do.”
Perkins: Canva pledges $100M over four years to fight extreme poverty
“Announce that we're going to be giving another hundred million dollars over the next four years to people in extreme poverty.”
Perkins: Canva's free education product reaches 100M monthly users
“Education product is now used by a hundred million people each month.”
Perkins: 100 million people design presentations in Canva monthly
“Like a hundred million people, I design a presentation in Canva for each month now.”
Perkins: Canva sits directly between creativity and productivity suites
“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 a Customers have to make a choice between…”
Perkins: AI shouldn't be front-and-center just for investor hype
“Just because AI is all the rage and investors really like AI, doesn't necessarily mean it should be front and center
in, but if it can genuinely help your customers to achieve their goals, so, you know, the thing that I was mentioning before, enabling people…”
Perkins maintains a vision wall in her home office targeting 2050
“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.”
Perkins: Canva plans by defining wild success and failure over 10-year horizons
“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 we…”
Perkins: Canva operates on a two-step plan to maximize value and philanthropy
“We've got this two-step plan, build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can do.”
Perkins: Canva employs 2,500 engineers
“We've now got, you know, two and a half thousand engineers, and we're able to deliver amazing things that would have just, like, been completely infeasible.”
Perkins: Canva's 2012 pitch deck still captures its current work
“When I look back at our 2012 pitch deck, it's so valid and really still captures what we're doing today.”
Perkins: Canva receives over one million community requests per year
“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 breaks them down, And then deliver them to all of our product teams, and then those actually get closed. So this year we've…”
Perkins has personally run hundreds or thousands of user tests
“I've personally run hundreds, if not thousands of user tests myself, and it's been deeply embedded in our product teams also.”
Perkins: Canva Foundation donated $50M to GiveDirectly in Malawi
“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 bu…”
Perkins: Canva Elements tab sees 900 million monthly uses
“Inside the Design tab which is used by a 170 million, 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”