Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing | Melanie Perkins
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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 going to be huge. And I'd add a new page in my pitch deck that said how big the market I believed was. And then they'd say, you're the same as some of the 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 going to fill. One of your values, crazy big goals. I love that as 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. I heard from 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. And 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 bar end of chaos was quite an 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 cannabis like a design graphics for social media and marketing and things like that. But you also have spreadsheets, docs, whiteboards, charts, AI coding tool. Just funny looking back from really old decks. We were trying to do AI, but 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. Canva is currently valued at over $42 billion, making over $3.3 billion in revenue a year. They've been profitable for eight years straight and are one of the hottest private tech companies
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