# Canva rebuilt its practices instead of copying other companies

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/canva-rebuilt-its-practices-instead-of-copying-other/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Melanie Perkins](https://realalpha.app/builders/melanie-perkins/) · Melanie Perkins is CEO and co-founder of Canva. · Co-founded Canva and leads its mission to empower everyone to design, while steering its pledge to do good.
- Host: [Lenny Rachitsky](https://realalpha.app/people/lenny-rachitsky/) · Host, Lenny's Podcast · Spent seven years at Airbnb; his product newsletter has over 1M subscribers.
- Show: Lenny's Podcast
- Episode: [She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/), Nov 2, 2025
- Moment: 30:58 to 33:46 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/canva-rebuilt-its-practices-instead-of-copying-other/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1858

## Quote

> “trying to find things that are **authentic to us** and are authentic to everything that's come before it”
> — [Melanie Perkins](https://realalpha.app/builders/melanie-perkins/) at [31:36](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1896) · Lenny's Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Practices from larger companies did not always work at Canva.
2. Systems need to be reimagined as a company grows.
3. Leaders have to hand off roles as the team expands.

## About this segment

Melanie Perkins says Canva sometimes adopted practices from bigger companies and found they did not fit. She describes adapting systems to the company’s own culture and stage of scale.

From “She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins”, Nov 2, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[31:02](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1862) Melanie of today to Melanie of 12, 13 years ago when you were just starting Canva, what would you say is most different in terms of leadership? I don't really know. Probably if you asked other people around me, they'd probably be more observant. But it is funny because there's some things that I think that I need to change. And then I realized, like, you know, go and do it the same as some other company. And sometimes we even try that for a while. And then we try that out and we're like, that's, you know, it didn't really work for us. And it's kind of like building a house that you want every brick in the house to match. And if you go and try and take some bricks from someone else's house and stick it in your house, it's probably going to not look very matched.

[31:40](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1900) And so trying to find things that are authentic to us and are authentic to everything that's come before it is just that constant thing. And then each stage of scale of the company, rather than going and taking someone else's bricks and trying to stick that in your house, trying to build the thing that's authentic. So I think there's many things that are the same, but obviously the stage and scale and we're constantly having to give away hats.

[32:05](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1925) And so you kind of think about it in the very early days, where just a few of us, or just two of us in fusion, and then three of us in just a little tiny group. And you kind of wear 100 hats. And then you have to be able to give away those hats to other people that can then do that way better than yourself. And so I'm sure there's been a few skills, I guess, I would have had to have developed over the last decade to be able to give away those hats.

[32:27](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1947) But yeah, I think there's a lot of things that we've had to do and double down on that was more authentic to the way we did it in the early days, actually. I love that story. I think, again, if anyone working at a company that has gone through a lot of growth has experienced that when people from other companies come in and here's how we did it at this company, is there an example of some there that just like here's something that this company brought in and people from this company thought we should do and we tried and didn't work?

[32:54](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1974) I won't go into specific examples, but so many times over. and I think that I mean maybe that's probably in answer to your other question like not how we did things our way because that was the only way we knew and there was many many times over the years that we're like didn't have confidence in the way we were doing things and we were like oh they they've done it from a big company that's bigger than our company let's go do that and that hasn't always worked out so well for us and so yeah I think confidence in how we take what is authentic to us and do it at the next level of scale is a constant work in progress.

[33:29](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=2009) It feels like, as I was saying before, systems break and need to be reinvented, but also reimagined for that next layer of scale rather than going to try to get something off the shelf from another company. I imagine it also helped that you were in Australia, away from the Bay Area and where