Lenny Distilled

She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company

November 02, 2025

Featuring: Melanie Perkins (CEO and co-founder, Canva)

8 quotes · 7 insights

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Build redundancy before you need flexibility

We thought it would take about six months. It was really important because it was critical for cross-platform... and then it took two years and it was two years of not shipping any product, two years of a product company not being able to ship product.
Melanie PerkinsCEO and co-founder, Canva 00:23:17

Your first pitch needs work - use rejection as feedback

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... 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.
Melanie PerkinsCEO and co-founder, Canva 00:00:06

User testing reveals patterns with shocking consistency

It's amazing to me how you can find 10 random people on the internet and they can give such astute feedback that then is so representative for such a large number of people.
Melanie PerkinsCEO and co-founder, Canva 00:39:03

Vision must be tangible and visual, not abstract words

There's two ways of planning. You can dream of what is the perfect vision of the future, what future do you want to exist in, and then working from there, which is completely improbable, a completely crazy big dream. The alternate is you can look at the bricks around you and say, 'What can I do with these bricks?'
Melanie PerkinsCEO and co-founder, Canva 00:05:35
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.
Melanie PerkinsCEO and co-founder, Canva 00:00:35

Reference customers are your North Star

I think there's two parts to product. One is building the future and towards the mission and the mission pillars. And the other is actually listening to our community and building what they want.
Melanie PerkinsCEO and co-founder, Canva 00:39:03

The job evolves but the why remains constant

Step one, build one of the world's most valuable companies and step two, do the most good we can do. And in our early days I thought I'd do step one and then step two and realize that actually step one can fuel step two and step two can fuel step one.
Melanie PerkinsCEO and co-founder, Canva 00:40:50

Build for tomorrow's users, not today's complainers

I think it's better to solve a small number of people's problem really well than trying to solve a large number of people's problem not very well at all.
Melanie PerkinsCEO and co-founder, Canva 00:52:04

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