Column B Thinking: How Melanie Perkins Built Canva by Starting From the Dream

Lenny Rachitsky opens by asking Melanie Perkins what she thinks most explains Canva's success, and she points to Column B thinking. She contrasts two ways of planning: you can imagine a perfect future and work to make it real, or you can look at the bricks around you and see how high you can stack them. She says most planning is the second kind, which caps what you can create.

For Canva, Column A would have been nothing, Perkins says, because as a university student with no company, product or software experience she had little to build from. So it was all Column B. She was convinced that design would move online and become collaborative and simple, even though she had no idea whether she could build it, and she first applied the idea to school yearbooks in Australia with Fusion Books before taking it much bigger with Canva. Lenny notes that this mirrors the way Brian Chesky thought during his time at Airbnb.

Perkins starts by picturing the world she wants, and she keeps a wall in her office with her vision for 2050. A recurring exercise at Canva asks what wild success looks like for a given area and what terrible failure looks like, over a ten-year horizon. Her own deepest wish is that everyone on the planet has their basic human needs met.

She then pairs the dream with action, using the image of a ladder to the moon with rungs you climb step by step. It doesn't matter how small the first step is as long as it heads toward the future you want. Many people fail, she says, because the two ends feel so far apart, because the first step feels embarrassingly microscopic, and because email and Slack constantly pull attention to the present.

Her advice is to deliberately make time for dreaming about ten years out, and then take the tiny first step, which compounds. For Canva it has been compounding for more than a decade toward the same mission.

Asked how she operationalizes this, Perkins describes Canva's chaos-to-clarity concept. Every idea, problem or belief starts in chaos, and you move it toward clarity with small steps: write it down, make a pitch deck, refine it into designs, then a prototype. Each step makes the idea more real and lets more people see it, which is why she says visual communication is so important, because an idea in your head cannot be willed into existence.

Lenny compares this to the "ugly baby" idea from Ed Catmull's Creativity, Inc., where new ideas are fragile and shouldn't be killed early. Perkins agrees that the first step at the chaos end is embarrassing because you have no mastery and likely none of the answers, only an idea so exciting that you want to work for years to realize it. She adds that a pitch deck lets others see your thinking and sharpens your own, citing a recent deck by Melissa Tan about the vision for her area.

Crazy big goals are one of Canva's values, and Perkins says the original one, putting all of design into one accessible platform for everyone, epitomized it. Above that sits a two-step plan to build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good. She loves that a crazy big goal makes you feel inadequate, because reasonable goals are abandoned when roadblocks appear, while a goal you care deeply about is worth the huge effort of willing it into existence.

Canva breaks its mission, empowering everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device, into pillars, and sets successive yearly goals within each. For "anything" they moved from social media to presentations, docs, websites, whiteboards and video. For language they went from English to Spanish to 20 languages to more than 100, including right-to-left scripts, and for devices from web to iPad, iPhone, Android and cross-platform parity.

Perkins admits Canva reliably achieves its goals but is poor at timing, with six-month estimates sometimes taking one or two years. Reviewing a 2021 vision deck about 2026, she found much had been delivered and more was still in flight. She says the team pairs goals with celebrations, such as smashing plates, releasing doves or holding a tomato festival, so the long climb has moments of pride at each rung.

Asked about setbacks, Perkins says the company is in constant evolution, and each time it doubles in size most systems break. Early all-hands goal presentations became unworkable as headcount grew, and even the popular "season openers" stretched to six hours. The challenge is keeping the same philosophies of deep context, goals and celebration while finding the right format at each scale.

The harder example was a front-end rewrite expected to take about six months that took two years, during which a product company shipped no product. The work was critical for cross-platform support and right-to-left languages, and the old code base allowed only five people to work in the editor at once. She calls it a dark tunnel with no visible end, but says it was necessary, and Canva now has about 2,500 engineers and features like simultaneous collaboration.

To keep morale up the team made it a game, with rubber-duck bath toys on a board representing each component through the stages from launch to an emergency lane. Weekly stand-ups moved the ducks along. Perkins says the period was part fun, part distressing because investors were asking questions, and bonding overall.

Perkins pitched more than a hundred investors, and she says she believed they were wrong, though she also treated rejections as feedback. When told the market was too small she added a slide on market size, and when told Canva resembled another company she added a landscape slide showing the gap. Because many investors knew little about design, she also added opening slides on today's lay of the land and the problem, so objections were answered in advance.

The vision stayed consistent, she says, but how it was articulated changed. She had once led with the solution and later moved to problem-first pages, since people can't care about a solution to a problem they don't understand. Her advice for struggling fundraisers is to turn rejection into things you control, such as the deck and the number of people you speak to, and to find your tribe, since some investors will never like you.

On her own growth as a leader, Perkins says the key lesson was to avoid grafting bricks from other people's houses. Canva repeatedly tried practices imported from bigger companies and they often did not work, so the team learned to reinvent what is authentic to it at each stage. She also describes the need to keep giving away hats: wearing a hundred in the early days, then handing them to people who can do them better.

She adds that being in Australia, away from the Bay Area, helped Canva do things its own way. Its goal-driven structure, in which the mission, pillars and goals actually determine how people spend their time, is one practice she calls deeply underloved, since many companies keep a mission on the wall that has nothing to do with how they make money.

Perkins used to work seven days a week, in the early days even printing yearbooks in her mother's house. She still works extremely hard but now sleeps, walks, does yoga and journals, since constant pace is not good for anyone's health. She keeps email off her phone, is fully in when working and fully out when not, and says stepping back gives perspective, since working harder can mean working on the wrong thing.

Product direction has two parts: building the future toward the mission pillars and listening to the community. Canva receives more than a million requests a year, has a team that tallies and routes them to product teams, and closed over 200 loops this year, from gradient text to the Sheets product. For example, it initially held back its AI writing tools from teachers because of their hesitancy, but unlocked them with safety controls after many teacher requests.

The other pillar is user testing. Perkins has personally run hundreds, if not thousands, of tests, usually online through UserTesting.com, because people are more frank when alone with their camera. She says ten random people can give astute feedback representative of a large audience.

Perkins describes the two-step plan as Canva's most macro crazy big goal. She once thought she would do step one and then step two, then realized each could fuel the other. Early on Canva took the 1% pledge, and she and co-founder Cliff, who owned a little over 30% of the company, decided to use that 30% to do the most good through the Canva Foundation.

The foundation has donated $50 million to GiveDirectly, which sends money directly to people in extreme poverty in Malawi, and has announced another $100 million over four years. Perkins says $550 does not buy much for her but is transformational there, and calls it the best money she could imagine spending. She adds that getting rich is not a goal in itself, and that Canva's education product, used by a hundred million people monthly, and its nonprofit program together give away about 1.5 billion dollars of product a year.

Lenny observes that for most companies philanthropy sits in a document, while at Canva it is part of how goals and missions are set. Perkins says she would not do Canva if it did not have a positive impact, and that the purpose gives much more meaning to work than "get rich".

Perkins previews a major launch built on the mission of empowering the world to design while minimizing friction between an idea and a finished design. Canva is doubling down on video, launching email design, forms, and embedding AI across the suite, so you can generate presentations, videos, emails and websites in the core editor. Users can generate video, code and photos in the elements tab, and can tag Canva in comments to ask for changes with full design context.

On what to build next, she says to take the mission literally: design anything, publish anywhere. Canva now prints in 50-some countries and delivers to the door, and is launching 3D. She places Canva in the middle of the creativity and productivity Venn diagram, so customers need not choose between suites, and notes that 100 million people make a presentation in Canva each month.

On the early wedge, she says Canva didn't worry about competitors and instead looked for a gap with a real pain point. With yearbooks, coordinators with no design experience were thrown into designing, so the team gave phone tutorials and collected feedback from every customer. When a school asked to use it for newsletters, they saw nothing else on the market doing that, and she argues it is better to solve a small group's problem really well than a large group's problem poorly.

On AI, Perkins says to integrate it only where it genuinely helps people achieve their goals, rather than putting it front and center because it is fashionable, and to listen to community feedback. She notes that Canva's 2012 deck was effectively trying to do AI before AI was a thing. Personally, she uses Canva's tagging for idea generation and takes "AI walks", speaking her thoughts aloud and summarizing them in Canva Docs.

Perkins explains that her 2050 wall began in recent months because she felt humanity was on a freight train that scared her. Instead of only fearing the outcome, she started imagining the alternative: basic needs met for all and education treated as a basic right. She starts the wall with quotes such as "Everything good was once imagined" and says the exercise shapes her small daily decisions.

She argues that loneliness and loss of purpose can be addressed by working toward something bigger than yourself, and Canva has been asking people at its keynote what one goal they would like the world to achieve in their lifetime. She says no one can achieve basic needs for all alone, but she wants to help change the way people think, starting with a tiny first step in your own family and community.

In the lightning round she recommends The Power of Moments and Designing the Obvious, and names the Calm app as a daily companion. She would back global infrastructure that helps everyone rise, and her motto is that happiness is when what you think, say and do are in harmony. She credits figure skating, with its early mornings and repeated falls, for her persistence, and asks listeners to use, teach and spread Canva and to consider the 1% pledge and their own two-step plan.