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

Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, attributes the company’s success to a set of core principles centered on long-term vision, audacious goals, and authentic, mission-driven execution.

The Philosophy of “Column B” Thinking

The foundational concept behind Canva’s strategy is what Perkins calls “Column B thinking.” She contrasts two ways of planning:

• Column A: Looking at the “bricks around you” and figuring out what you can build with existing resources and constraints.
• Column B: Imagining a “magical wonderful future” and then working backward to make that improbable dream a reality.

For Canva, Column A would have meant doing nothing, as Perkins was a university student with no business or software experience. Instead, she started with a Column B vision: a future where design would be “online and collaborative and really simple.” This vision seemed inevitable to her, and the first step was applying it to a niche market with her first company, Fusion Books, which focused on school yearbooks in Australia.

To operationalize this, Canva uses a “chaos to clarity” process for every new idea. An idea starts as an amorphous concept (“chaos”) and is progressively refined through steps like writing it down, creating a pitch deck, designing mockups, and building prototypes. Each step adds clarity, making the vision more tangible and shareable, which is essential for willing it into existence.

Setting and Achieving “Crazy Big Goals”

One of Canva’s core values is setting “crazy big goals.” Perkins believes a goal should be so ambitious that “you feel completely inadequate before it,” motivating you to work tirelessly to achieve it. This approach prevents complacency and ensures that even when roadblocks appear, the importance of the goal provides the drive to persevere.

Canva’s mission—“empower the world to design”—is broken down into mission pillars that serve as long-term, crazy big goals:

• Design Anything: Expanding from social media graphics to presentations, docs, websites, whiteboards, video, and now email and forms.
• Every Language: Growing from English to over 100 languages, including complex right-to-left scripts, and now focusing on deep localization.
• Every Device: Evolving from a web-only platform to full cross-platform parity on iPad, iPhone, and Android.

While the timelines for these goals can be unpredictable, the vision provides a consistent direction. To maintain morale during these long journeys, the team couples goals with fun celebrations, like smashing Greek plates or releasing doves, to acknowledge achievements and appreciate the hard work.

Navigating Adversity and Setbacks

Canva’s journey was marked by significant challenges that tested the team’s resilience.

• Over 100 Investor Rejections: During early fundraising, Perkins was rejected by over 100 investors. However, she treated each “no” as a source of feedback. Rejections weren’t taken personally but were used to iteratively strengthen the pitch deck. When an investor said the market wasn’t big enough, she added a slide detailing its potential. When they said Canva was too similar to another company, she added a competitive analysis slide highlighting the gap in the market. This process of refinement, born from rejection, created a pitch deck so robust that its core tenets still hold true today.

• The Two-Year Rewrite: The team undertook a critical front-end rewrite that was expected to take six months but ended up taking two years. During this period, “a product company not being able to ship product,” the team couldn’t release any new features. This was a “dark, dark tunnel” but was essential for enabling future scale, cross-platform functionality, and allowing thousands of engineers to work on the codebase. To manage morale, they gamified the process with a physical board and rubber duckies representing project components, turning a distressing period into a bonding experience.

The “Two-Step Plan”: Philanthropy as a Core Driver

Canva operates on a “two-step plan”:

1. Build one of the world’s most valuable companies.
2. Do the most good we can do.

Initially envisioned as sequential steps, Perkins realized they could be pursued in parallel, with each step fueling the other. She and her co-founder have committed their 30% stake in Canva to philanthropic efforts through the Canva Foundation. A major focus is donating to GiveDirectly, which provides cash transfers to people in extreme poverty in Malawi. This mission provides a deep sense of purpose that transcends financial success. For Perkins, wealth is not a goal in itself but a “means to an end” to address global inequities, such as ensuring everyone’s basic human needs are met.

Product Strategy and AI Integration

Canva’s product expansion is a literal interpretation of its mission pillars. The goal is to allow users to “design anything” and “publish anywhere.” This has driven the company to move from creativity tools into productivity, sitting at the intersection of the two.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence is seen as a natural extension of the core mission to reduce the friction between an idea and a finished design. Rather than being a bolt-on feature, AI is woven into the user’s workflow. It helps generate designs, videos, and photos directly within the editor and acts as a collaborative partner through features like @Canva in comments, which can execute design tasks based on natural language prompts. Perkins notes that the concepts behind AI were present in their 2012 pitch deck, as it was always critical to their vision of simplifying design.

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• Startups
• Fundraising
• Leadership
• Company Culture
• Product Strategy
• Canva
• Vision