Lenny's Podcast• Nov 2, 2025• 1:06:09Interview

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

From Lenny's Podcast

Melanie Perkins•CEO and co-founder of Canva

Executive Summary

Canva, valued at over $42 billion and profitable for eight consecutive years, has scaled to over $3.3 billion in annual revenue and 240 million monthly active users.
CEO Melanie Perkins attributes Canva's success to "Column B Thinking"—a strategy of envisioning a perfect future state and working backward, rather than making incremental improvements from the present.
The company's journey was marked by early resilience, overcoming rejections from over 100 investors by using the feedback to iteratively refine their pitch and value proposition.
Canva operates on a "two-step plan": first, build one of the world's most valuable companies, and second, use that value for social good, exemplified by the founders committing their 30% equity stake to philanthropic causes.

12 quotes

Concerns Raised

Overcoming initial investor skepticism and a high volume of rejections
Managing significant technical debt and major refactoring projects, such as the two-year front-end rewrite

Opportunities Identified

Expansion into a comprehensive productivity and collaboration suite to compete with incumbents
Leveraging AI to further simplify the design process and introduce new creative capabilities
Continued global growth and localization to serve a worldwide user base
Deepening enterprise adoption with a broader set of business-focused tools

Key Themes

Vision-Led Strategy ("Column B Thinking")

The core strategic philosophy discussed is "Column B Thinking," which involves defining an ideal, ambitious future and then systematically working backward to make it a reality. This contrasts with "Column A Thinking," which focuses on incremental improvements based on current resources and constraints.

This approach encourages breakthrough innovation and long-term planning over short-term optimization, providing a framework for founders aiming to create truly disruptive companies rather than just iterating on existing solutions.

Resilience and Iterative Pitching

A central narrative is Canva's early struggle, facing rejection from over 100 investors. Instead of giving up, the founders treated each rejection as a source of feedback, adding new slides to their pitch deck to pre-emptively address concerns about market size, competition, and the core problem.

This provides a powerful lesson for entrepreneurs on the importance of persistence and, more critically, on how to transform negative feedback into a tool for strengthening their narrative and business case.

Mission-Driven Philanthropy

Canva is built on a "two-step plan" that integrates massive commercial success with large-scale philanthropy. The founders have pledged their 30% equity stake to the Canva Foundation, which has already made significant donations to causes like direct cash transfers for people in poverty.

This model showcases how companies can embed social impact into their fundamental purpose, serving as a powerful tool for attracting talent, building brand loyalty, and demonstrating a commitment beyond shareholder value.

Product Expansion and Platform Ambition

Canva has evolved far beyond its initial identity as a simple graphic design tool. The platform now includes a full suite of productivity tools like documents, spreadsheets, whiteboards, and AI-powered features, positioning itself as a comprehensive visual communication platform.

This highlights a successful strategy of expanding a product's surface area from a strong initial use case to capture a larger share of the user's workflow, directly competing with established productivity suites from Microsoft and Google.

Authentic Scaling and Culture

Melanie Perkins emphasizes the importance of developing processes and a culture that are authentic to Canva, rather than simply importing playbooks from other large tech companies. She uses the analogy of not using "bricks from someone else's house" to build your own.

This is a key insight for leaders of scaling companies, highlighting the risk of adopting generic 'best practices' that may conflict with a company's unique culture and strengths, and the importance of evolving systems organically.

Get started free

Topics

Canva Melanie Perkins Founder Story Venture Capital Fundraising Pitching Investor Rejection Product Strategy Vision-Led Development Corporate Culture Company Values Scaling Philanthropy Social Impact SaaS Design Tech Productivity Software AI in Design

Processed Apr 3, 2026 yt-dlp + mlx-whisper + Gemini