The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins
November 2, 2025
AI Summary
5 min readMelanie Perkins, CEO and co-founder of Canva, describes her approach to building the company around "Column B thinking"—envisioning a dream future and working backwards through small, incremental steps, rather than incremental improvements from the present ("Column A"). She shares how this mindset drove Canva from early rejections and technical hurdles to a $42 billion valuation with $3.3 billion in annual revenue, emphasizing persistent execution tied to mission pillars like empowering everyone to design anything in every language on every device.
Column B Thinking and Crazy Big Goals
Perkins starts with imagining a desired future, such as a world in 2050 where basic human needs are met universally. She creates vision walls or decks outlining wild success and terrible failure over 10-year horizons. Crazy Big Goals, a core value, are set to feel inadequate at first, motivating sustained effort; examples include expanding from social graphics to spreadsheets, whiteboards, video, and AI tools. These goals ladder up from mission pillars, with annual targets pursued through compounding steps, even if timelines slip (e.g., six-month projects taking two years).
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What you'll learn
- 1 **[04:53] Column B Thinking: Dreaming Big vs. Incremental Bricks**
- 2 **[08:17] Building a Column B Company: Steps and Vision Exercises**
- 3 **[12:04] Chaos to Clarity Process for Projects**
- 4 **[15:08] Crazy Big Goals: Core Value and Mission Pillars**
- 5 **[22:35] Major Setbacks: Rewrite Hell and Investor Rejections**
- 6 **[31:11] Leadership Evolution and Authentic Scaling**
- 7 **[38:04] Product Process: Closing Loops and User Feedback**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
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
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Transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-making-of-canva
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My biggest takeaways (for paid newsletter subscribers): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/176082995/my-biggest-takeaways-from-this-conversation
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Where to find Melanie Perkins:
• X: https://x.com/melaniecanva
• LinkedIn: More from this podcast