The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins

There's a very famous story about Canva. Early on you pitched over a hundred investors. And over a hundred investors said no to you. It was really clear in my mind that it was the future, and I thought the investors were wrong. Frankly. But investors Also gave really helpful feedback and feedback often in the form of rejection. They would say, Oh your market's not big enough. And I would say, it's gonna be huge. And I'd add a new page in my pitch deck that said how big the market I believe was. And then they'd say you're the same as some other company. And I would say, hey, now I've got a new slide in my pitch deck that shows all the players and the huge gap in the market that we believe we're gonna go. To fill. One of your values, crazy big goals. I love that as a value. The thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. You want to work really hard to will it into existence. I really like to start by just imagining what is the future that you actually want. 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 2050. one of your team members, Melissa Tan, that there's a deck like this. For every project you kick off, there's this big vision deck. So we have this concept of chaos to clarity. Every idea starts in the chaos side and then you have to work all the way to the other side, which is clarity. That very first step at the far end of chaos. It was quite a embarrassing step actually because you don't have mastery at that point. You don't have all the answers. A lot of people think of Canada as like a design graphics for, you know, social media and and marketing and things like that. But you also have spreadsheets, docs, whiteboards, charts, AI coding tool. Which was funny looking back from really old decks. We were trying to do AI before AI was actually a thing.

Today my guest is Melanie Perkins, CEO and co-founder of Canva. Melanie is on track to be the most successful female tech founder in history. And one of the most successful founders, period. Canvas currently valued at over forty two billion dollars. Making over three point three billion dollars in revenue a year.

They've been profitable for eight years straight. and are one of the hottest private tech companies in the world right now. But it wasn't always this way. Melanie was rejected by over 100 investors when she was trying to raise her first round. Their team spent two years rewriting their entire code base and were unable to ship any new features for over two years. Something I expected to just take six months. And they even went through a big pivot early on from a your book publishing platform to the Canva that you know today.

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