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She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins
Melanie Perkins says founders should build from a bold future vision, then take small steps toward it—and use company growth to do the most good.
Lenny's Podcast · Lenny Rachitsky
- Melanie Perkins is CEO and co-founder of Canva.
The best minutes
- 8:03Build from the future you want, then work backward6 min
- 23:43Canva spent two years rewriting its editor without shippingPro pick 3 min
- 26:20Investor rejections helped sharpen Canva’s pitch5 min
Also worth watching
- 40:33Canva ties company growth to doing the most good5 min
- 37:59Canva turns more than a million yearly requests into product work3 min
- 50:16Canva expanded by following unmet customer needs2 min
- 16:46Canva turns mission goals into milestones the team can celebrate5 min
- 30:58Canva rebuilt its practices instead of copying other companies3 min
Skip the opening introduction and sponsor reads, the product-launch and expansion rundown, and the AI corner and lightning round.
Full analysis · 6 min read
Real Alpha · Nov 8
Lenny cites 100+ noes, Perkins says feedback sharpened Canva’s pitch
- Lenny says Perkins pitched more than 100 investors, and she says their feedback sharpened her pitch.
- That supports iteration, not the idea that rejection proves a market exists.
- Pair long-term ambition with user evidence, delivery checkpoints and honest timing.
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A distant vision becomes useful through visible steps
Perkins calls this column B thinking. It starts from the future she wants, not the resources already on hand.
She traces Canva’s premise to a future where design was online, collaborative and simple. The team first applied that idea to Australian school yearbooks through Fuge Books, then carried it into Canva.
Her process adds an operating layer. Write an idea down, build a deck, refine designs, then make a prototype. Rachitsky says Melissa Tan told him Canva makes a vision deck for each project.
For example, Perkins’s 2050 wall captures a destination, while a prototype makes a nearer step inspectable. A deck is not customer evidence. It makes assumptions clear enough for colleagues and users to test.
Aaron Epstein on Lightcone in October 2026 makes a loosely related point about product communication. Startup sites should state the user, problem and value.
“a ladder that goes all the way up to the moon”
Our read
Vision can widen the search. A named user problem keeps the next step falsifiable.
Rejections sharpened the pitch, not the market proof
Rachitsky introduces the count, saying Perkins pitched more than 100 investors and heard no. Perkins says those rejections often carried useful feedback.
Investors questioned the market size or said Canva resembled another company. Perkins added market-size evidence, competitor context and the gap she believed Canva could fill.
For example, she says early pitches started with the solution. Revised opening pages explained the problem first, because investors could not care about an answer before understanding the need.
This is fundraising iteration, not proof that customers would adopt or pay. Perkins is recounting a successful origin story as Canva’s CEO. The episode gives no objection-by-objection record or independent test of each market assumption.
Our read
Founders can borrow the feedback loop without confusing investor comprehension with product demand.
Mission pillars make huge goals operational
Canva’s mission becomes operational when Perkins breaks it into pillars and successive goals. She frames them around designing anything, with every ingredient, in every language and on every device.
Products expanded from social media and presentations to docs, websites, whiteboards and video. Languages moved from English to more than 100. The sequence creates visible milestones within a goal too large to finish in one cycle.
Perkins says Canva has been good at achieving these goals, but timing has not been reliable. She gives examples of estimates stretching from six months to two years. The company celebrates milestones along the way, including Spanish and reaching 100 languages.
A milestone list can sustain effort, but it also needs owners and measures to guide tradeoffs. Jesse Zhang on Grit in September 2026 says Decagon added late-stage culture interviews after growing from about 50 to 500 people. That is a hiring example, but it shows why systems may need to change as companies scale.
Our read
Mission pillars turn aspiration into work teams can track. The episode gives less detail on how leaders choose between goals.
The rewrite made a capability bet and stopped shipping
Canva’s front-end rewrite is the hardest test of the vision-first method. Perkins says a project expected to take six months took two years, with no product shipping during the rewrite.
She says the work was critical for cross-platform use and right-to-left languages. The old codebase also limited simultaneous work in the editor to five people.
Perkins says Canva now has 2,500 engineers and credits the rewrite with enabling work that would otherwise have been infeasible. But the episode gives no quantified customer outcome or alternative path for the rewrite.
Two years without shipping carries costs the interview does not measure, including whether users waited or teams lost momentum. This is one retrospective from a successful company, not evidence that any two-year rewrite pays off.
Our read
The rewrite may have unlocked important capabilities, but the account does not measure its full cost or customer return.
Customer requests add evidence but not a complete roadmap
Perkins describes a demand signal larger than anecdote. Canva receives more than a million community requests a year. A team tallies them and routes them to product groups.
She says Canva closed more than 200 loops that year. Requests surfaced small features like gradient text and larger products like Sheets. Teacher requests also changed access to AI tools, paired with safety controls.
That process treats feedback as a portfolio, not simply a feature queue. Yet the million requests are submissions, not a representative user sample. The episode does not say what share became shipped work or improved retention.
For example, Perkins says user testing can reveal hesitation around a button. Yinon Costica on Sabrina Halper Show in October 2026 describes Wiz following repeated cloud-security pain, not its original networking idea. Both examples favor recurring user needs over founder attachment.
- YCYinon Costica · Sabrina Halper Show · Oct 7Wiz followed customer pain instead of its original idea
Our read
Community feedback can expose overlooked needs. Teams still need usage, payment or task-completion checks before prioritizing.
Canva began with a narrow user problem
Canva’s entry point was narrower than its eventual mission. Perkins says Fuge Books began with Australian school yearbooks, where coordinators lacked easy design tools.
The founders spoke with each customer and gave them an over-the-phone tutorial. One school later asked to use the product for newsletters, helping reveal adjacent needs.
The expansion followed observed uses, not a declared plan to compete everywhere. Start where repeated pain and a real user are visible, then test adjacent jobs.
Bridgit Mendler on Sourcery in August 2026 says Northwood Space pursued revenue from immediate ground-system needs before taking on larger problems. That is a different business, but it makes the commercial test explicit. The Canva account gives no early customer counts or time to payback.
Our read
Founders can copy the sequence of inquiry, not assume a similar wedge will scale.
Canva ties company value to a second goal
Perkins’s two-step plan pairs building one of the world’s most valuable companies with doing the most good. She says the two aims can reinforce each other.
Perkins says she and cofounder Cliff decided to direct 30% of Canva toward doing the most good. She says Canva has donated $50 million over several years through GiveDirectly to people in Malawi.
She says Canva announced another $100 million over four years for people in extreme poverty. The education product, she says, reaches 100 million people monthly and is given away free.
This goes beyond a purpose statement because it names a company asset, giving commitments and a distribution channel. But the episode is Perkins’s account, not an independent impact evaluation. It does not quantify outcomes per dollar or tradeoffs against reinvestment.
Our read
The plan has operational force because it couples growth with allocation. Its credibility depends on transparent giving and impact measures.
What it means for you
- Map one future rung. Write down a ten-year success picture, then choose one near-term deliverable that makes it testable. Review progress without treating the original timeline as certain.
- Separate pitch from proof. Log investor objections and the deck changes they prompt. Track customer evidence separately, especially repeated use or willingness to pay.
- Set rewrite checkpoints. For major infrastructure work, define intermediate capability milestones and customer-facing measures. Revisit the investment before a long no-ship stretch becomes the default.
- Measure request closure. Track which repeated requests become shipped work, then check whether people use the result. Request volume alone does not show customer impact.
What to watch
- Whether Canva’s product expansions turn repeated requests into sustained usage, not just more launches.
- Whether AI features help users complete real tasks in testing, rather than simply appearing across the product suite.
- Whether Canva reports outcomes alongside its announced $100 million commitment.
Send this to a founder balancing a bold roadmap with near-term shipping.
Watch the 3 minutes where Lenny gives the rejection count and Melanie explains how she used it
Written by Real Alpha from the episode's transcript and the other moments it links, then checked against the transcript. Quotes are the speaker's exact words.
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Read it with Pro, 7 days free- 5:14Build from the future you want
Perkins contrasts planning from the resources at hand with imagining a desired future and working backward from it. She says Canva began with the belief that design would become online, collaborative and simple, first applied to Australian school yearbooks and later expanded into Canva.
- 8:12Turn vision into visible steps
Perkins recommends picturing the world or company you want in 10 years, then taking small steps toward it. At Canva, ideas move from chaos to clarity as teams write them down, make decks, refine designs and build prototypes, so others can understand and develop the idea.
- 14:45Set goals that feel daunting
Perkins says Canva's mission is to empower the world to design, with goals across products, languages and devices. She says the company often reaches its goals later than planned, but uses milestones such as launching in new languages to mark progress and celebrate the teams.
- 22:27A rewrite can stall shipping
Perkins says Canva's systems and routines had to change as the company grew. A front-end rewrite expected to take six months lasted two years, during which the team shipped no product; she says the work was essential to cross-platform features and supported capabilities that later became feasible with 2,500 engineers.
- 26:30Rejections sharpened the pitch
Perkins says more than 100 investors rejected Canva, but their feedback helped her improve the deck. She added evidence about the market, competitors and the problem, while keeping the underlying vision largely consistent. Her fundraising advice is to refine what you can control, speak to many investors and find people who understand the idea.
- 30:58Build systems that fit the company
Perkins says attempts to copy practices from larger companies often did not work for Canva, so its systems need to fit its own culture and stage of growth. She also describes moving from wearing many hats to delegating, and says Canva connects its mission to pillars, goals and the work teams actually do.
- 35:51Protect time away from work
Perkins says working constantly was unsustainable, so she makes room for sleep, walks, yoga and journaling. She keeps email off her phone and tries to be fully focused while working, then switch off when she closes her laptop, except for genuine emergencies.
- 37:59Listen to users at scale
Perkins says Canva receives more than a million community requests each year and closed more than 200 feedback loops that year. She points to requests behind features such as gradient text and Sheets, and says teacher requests led Canva to add safety controls to its classroom AI tools. She also says she has run hundreds or thousands of user tests.
- 40:45Pair company growth with giving
Perkins describes Canva's two-step plan: build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good possible. She says she and Cliff decided to use 30% of Canva for good, including $50 million donated over recent years and another $100 million planned over four years for people in extreme poverty. Canva also gives education and nonprofit products away, with $1.5 billion in product distributed annually.
- 45:18Canva is expanding its product suite
Perkins says Canva's major launch includes expanded video tools, email design, forms and AI features across the product suite. Customers can also tag Canva in comments to request edits with the design's context available. She says the aim is to help people move from an idea to a design with less friction.
- 48:23Follow customer problems into new products
Perkins says Canva expands by taking its mission to design anything and publish anywhere literally, including printing in more than 50 countries and developing 3D tools. She says the company looks for problems customers have, as it did with yearbooks, and prefers solving a smaller group's problem well over serving a larger group poorly.
- 52:52Put AI inside useful workflows
Perkins says AI should help customers get work done rather than take center stage just because it is popular. She uses Canva's AI to explore ideas and work with designs, and describes taking an AI walk to talk through her thoughts before summarizing them in Canva Docs or Apple Notes.
- 55:29Imagine the world you want in 2050
Perkins says concern about humanity's direction led her to create a 2050 vision board. She wants a future where everyone has basic needs, education is a human right, communities are strong and people have purpose. She argues that imagining a better future and taking small steps toward it can help people work beyond their individual concerns.
- 1:00:18Make imagination the first step
In the closing questions, Perkins says imagination comes first in the creative process and that figure skating taught her to keep trying after falling. She also points to the importance of building global infrastructure that benefits more people.
Published Nov 2, 2025.
Transcript · 59 min read
Lenny's Podcast, hosted by Lenny Rachitsky, with Melanie Perkins.
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
There's a very famous story about Canva. Early on, you pitched over 100 investors and over 100 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 believe 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 a 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. 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 far end of chaos was quite a 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 Canva as like a design graphics for social media and marketing and things like that. But you also have spreadsheets, docs, whiteboards, charts, AI coding tool. It was 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 in the world right now. But it wasn't always this way. Melanie was rejected by over 100 investors when she was trying to raise her first round. Their team spent two years rewriting their entire code base and were unable to ship any new features for over two years, something they expected to just take six months.
Read the whole transcript
And they even went through a big pivot early on from a yearbook publishing platform to the Canva that you know today. Melanie does not do a lot of podcasts. She shares stories that I've never heard before and lessons that I'm still thinking about. This is a really rare opportunity to learn from a legendary founder. A huge thank you to Cameron Adams and Melissa Tan for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 17 incredible products, including Devon, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Innate, and Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Joycast, JetPRD, and Mobbin.
Head on over to Lenny's Newsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Melanie Perkins after a short word from our sponsors. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry-leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable.
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being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm even more excited. It's such an honor to have you here. I am such a fan of yours. I'm such a fan of the company that you've built. Also, just everyone I meet from Canva is just like so nice and so awesome and so smart. And so clearly you've built something really special. I'm really excited to use this hour to learn as much as I can from you about how you did that. And we were actually chatting ahead of this about what would make the best use of this hour. And I asked you what you believe has been the biggest factor in the success of Canva. And you described something called building a column B company and column B thinking. I've never heard of this before. So let us start there. What is building a column B company? What does that mean? Really great place to start.
So I guess there's two ways of planning. The way that you can plan is you can dream of like, what is the perfect vision of the future? What future do you want to exist in? What would you like the world to look like? What would you like companies to look like? And then going from there, which is completely improbable, a completely crazy big dream, and then working hard to turn that into reality. And the alternate is, so, you know, just imagine you're building a castle on the hill and you're like, what would be the most magical, wonderful, mythical experience? And the other thing you can do is you can look at the bricks around you and you can say, what can I do with these bricks?
How high can I stack them? What can I do? And I think most planning is often done by looking at the bricks and trying to stack them. And then you kind of, you know, you can create only so much. And so I guess the column B thinking is thinking about what is that magical, wonderful future that you then want to invest years and decades of your life actually building. And so that's column A and column B in a nutshell. So column A is the traditional, just like work from today's world. Column B is work from this dream reality and work backwards from how to achieve that. Exactly that. This is exactly the way actually Brian Chesky thought.
I worked at Airbnb for a long time and it was always just like, think about the world, the dream, and then work backwards from that. So there's a lot clearly also worked out. So clearly this is an important lesson. In the example of Canva, just what would have been column A for what Canva could have been? And how did you think about the column B approach of what Canva in a dreamland could be? So column A would have been nothing, frankly, because the reality was when I was a university student with no company and no business or product or software experience, the reality would have been not very much.
And so it was all column B. It was all thinking about the wild future that we wanted to create. I imagined what would be publishing in the future? What would communications look like in the future? and it seemed really impossible that it would stay on the desktop, it would stay really complicated and it just seemed so apparent to me that in the future it was going to be completely different. Could I build that future? I had absolutely no idea but the idea seemed completely likely, completely improbable that it wouldn't be the case, that in the future design would be online and collaborative and really simple.
And so starting from that we then took that concept and applied it to the school yearbook market in Australia with our first company, Fuge Books. And then we applied it to Canva, where we wanted to take it much, much bigger.
“You kind of want to have a ladder that goes all the way up to the moon, which is your crazy wild vision.”
And so I think one of the really key parts is not only just having the idea, but thinking it's so cool that you're going to work for years to will it into existence.
Actually, Melissa did a really amazing pitch deck recently about the vision of, I won't go into the details right here, but the vision of her space. And I was really excited about it. And so I think that that's the great thing about a pitch deck is that other people can see your thinking and your thinking actually gets clarified as well as you go through that process. I talked to Melissa, I talked to a bunch of other people that work at Canva that have worked at Canva. And something else I heard along these lines is this phrase, crazy big goals, which I think is one of your values, crazy big goals. I love that as a value. Why is that so important? How does that fit into this? And just talk about the power of having crazy big goals.
Yes. So right from the start of Canva, it was truly a crazy big goal. We're like, we want to empower the world to design and take all these things that are super complicated and put them into one platform and make it accessible to the whole world. And we want to, rather than it be super expensive and unaffordable, we want to empower everyone, everywhere in the world to design. So, I mean, that was the epitome of a crazy big goal. And if we macro out even further, we've got this two-step plan, build one of the world's most valuable companies and do the most good we can do. So again, a rather crazy big goal. And I think the thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. You know, another crazy big goal, we'd love to see everyone's basic human needs met on the planet, like completely crazy big.
That truly shouldn't be. It's kind of absolutely absurd that that's the case, but we can go into that later. But I think with a crazy big goal, then you want to work really hard to will it into existence. And so if you start with a reasonable goal or a realistic goal, then you kind of get to get to and you're like, oh, cool, whatever. Or more importantly, if something happens, you know, all the problems and roadblocks come along as they always do, then you're like, okay, I won't bother with that. And then you can just like go and choose another course. And so a crazy big goal is both crazy big, but it's also something that you think is incredibly important that you actually want to will into existence because it is so much work to will a crazy big goal into existence. So it better be one that you want to actually achieve. Is there a crazy big goal that you set that comes to mind maybe as a good example of this is what I'm talking about,
“So when we have these crazy big goals, we also have coupled them with really fun celebrations.”
goals find the components of the goals set numbers there and then figure out the kind of the steps you take to achieve these things all feels very easy kind of on the flip side of that this is a segue uh people hear these stories they hear your story they see canva over the years and it's just this like up and to the right huge success story one of the most successful companies in history i imagine there have been many periods where things weren't going so great and when maybe things didn't look like they would work out.
So let me just ask you this. Over the course of building Canva, once it started to click and started to feel like it was going to be a thing, was there a point where it started to again feel like, wow, maybe this may not work out. Maybe there's a huge setback that we may not get over. I think it's just a constant evolution. Like every time the company doubles in size, pretty much all your systems break. All the things that were working don't work. You know, a little example. in the early days we'd stand up and everyone would present their um present their goals what they're working on every day every week and then it kind of moved every month and then it was just like it was just taking too long because we've got so many people and then it was sort of like we started doing these things called season openers and season openers were really fun where we got the entire company together we talked about the goals that we'd achieved and it was so funny because ahead of season openers everyone would launch everything because they wanted to do it ahead of the season opener. And then we'd also set the goals for the coming cycle, for the coming season at that point in time. But then they started to become like six hours long
because we had so many people and so many teams. And so like trying to find that right, with the same philosophies of deep context for everyone, with the same philosophies of the celebrations and the goals, I'm like trying to find that right flavor at every stage of scale is definitely hard. And so I think it's just like a constant work in progress or, you know, back to your earlier point about timing of things, we were doing a front end rewrite and
“two years of not shipping any product, two years of a product company not being able to ship product”
“their feedback made us stronger and made our pitch deck stronger”
you might still be able to invest in. Talking about your growth as a leader, say if you compare
“trying to find things that are authentic to us and are authentic to everything that's come before it”
all these other big companies are at, just being able to do it your own way. Yeah, very much so. Did you know that I have a whole team that helps me with my podcast and with my newsletter? I want everyone on that team to be super happy and thrive in their roles. JustWorks knows that your employees are more than just your employees.
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JustWorks for your people. Is there anything else that is a good example of how you did something pretty different from how other companies operate? Anything else that comes to mind as a fun example? The goal-driven structures, I think the things that we're talking about before, So the mission, actually breaking that down into the mission pillars, breaking those mission pillars down to the goals that we're then pursuing and then celebrating those goals when we do achieve them, I think is a deeply underloved way of building a company. Often people have a mission that's kind of on the wall somewhere and then what they're actually doing and the way they actually make money and the way that, you know, the way people actually spend their time is in a very, very different direction from that original, that original mission.
And I think the magic is when you can bring those two things together. And so you can have your mission, you can have your mission pillars that actually are helping to achieve that. And I think there's a real authenticity in that for customers as well, is that you're actually doing the thing that you promised you do. And it all ladders up together. It's certainly not an easy way to run a company. But I think that when you do get that formula right, I think that there's a lot of authenticity with what you're saying you're doing, you're actually doing. I want to come back to that. That's a whole really cool process you have with closing the loop with customers.
But something else I want to talk about while we're in this topic of growth over time. I saw you post something about how you had to realize they had to slow down and not just work, work, work like crazy. Talk about just that realization and why that ended up being so valuable. So in the early days, I would just work seven days a week around the clock. in our very first company, we actually had printing presses because we were printing the yearbooks in my mum's house and then delivering them to school around Australia. And in the early days of Canva, we certainly were working all weekend, all hours of the day.
It was just constant. But when you've been doing this for a while, if you just keep working at that pace, I don't think it's good for anyone's health, mental health or anything else. So I think finding ways to continue, like, you know, I still work extraordinarily hard, but to continue to have that balance in my day to day where I actually go to sleep. I, you know, I find time to do things like going for walks or doing yoga, journaling. I find extraordinarily helpful to make sure that I can always bring my best to everything that I'm doing. It's easy to say that kind of stuff. It must be really hard to actually make time for that thing.
Is there anything for those sorts of things? Is there anything that you do that allows you to actually protect that time to actually do these things? Because as you said, there's a billion things that are just looking for your attention constantly. I feel like I've developed some healthy habits over the years. I don't have emails like on my phone. And so when I shut my laptop, I actually tune out. And then if there's a real issue, I'll get an emergency call or page. But I think trying to delineate, I think, is really important. So when I'm working, I'm all in. And then when I'm not working, I'm all out.
And actually giving that mental space, I think, is really important. I've spoken to a lot of founders that haven't quite found that and then do struggle with it. So when they're working every weekend, it feels like the right thing, but then you're kind of missing, sometimes you can miss the forest from the trees when you're just working harder and harder, but maybe you're actually working on the wrong thing. And so I think being able to step away a little just to be able to get perspective is actually really beneficial.
“we get more than a million requests from our community every year.”
“we've donated $50 million to give directly, where they give money directly to people in Malawi who are in extreme poverty.”
Okay, so speaking of product, coming back to that, you guys are launching something. Maybe you've already launched it by the time this comes out. What I heard described as the biggest launch in Canva's history. No big deal. That's a high bar considering all things you guys have launched. What are you launching? Why is it such a big deal?
So we are extraordinarily excited about what we are launching. I guess the whole mission of Canva is to empower the world to design. And so what has been enabled by new technology with all of AI has been just really profound, enabling people to take their idea and turn it into a design and have as little friction between those two points. So we are doubling down radically on our video product and bring some incredible capabilities to our mobile and desktop platform. We are launching email, which has been one of our most hotly requested features from enterprise customers around the world and business customers around the world who want to be able to design with Canva's drag and drop ease and to be able to create an email.
We're launching forms. We are launching probably one of the most exciting things is the way we're embedding AI across the entire product suite. And so you can actually use AI to design a presentation, a video, a email, a website. All of these things can actually now be done inside the core editor, inside the design tab, which is used by 170 million times a month. And then on our elements tab, which is used 900 million times a month, we are also embedding AI. So you can actually generate a video, you can generate a Canva code, and you can generate photos all directly inside that platform. And then we're also launching comments as lots of our customers use Canva to comment and collaborate.
And now you can actually just tag at Canva and you can collaborate. You can just say, hey, can you make this title shorter? Can you do this? Can you do that? And it has all of the context of the design. So in situ, you can actually just have a collaborator that can help get your work done. So we are pretty excited about all of this. Amazing. Something I'm going to just let people know. I don't know if people know all this. How many products you all have now? I think a lot of people think of Canva as like a design graphics for social media and marketing and things like that. But you also have spreadsheets, docs, whiteboards, charts, AI coding tool.
And now what I'm hearing is email, forums. There's probably a few other things I'm not thinking about. Yeah, truly design anything. We're literally living up to that. Like 100 million people design a presentation in Canva each month now. And it's pretty fascinating to see that when you speak to – I saw a tweet some time ago that was talking about how it's a generational thing, that a certain generation uses Microsoft, a certain generation uses Google. And then Gen Z, like presentations have become – the way they design a presentation is in Canva. But it's not just generational for those of other generational ilk.
But it's been fascinating to see that come to life. The email product, is that like an email client product or it's a design emails that you can then send through your products? It is design emails. So you can design email, then you can take that code and you can pop it into any email platform that you use. How do you think about products you're going to expand to? I know there's like trade secrets here. You don't want to tell everyone where you're going next, but just how do you approach? Here's where we're going next. So our mission, empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device and just take those things very literally.
So to literally design anything, to literally publish anywhere. And so, you know, we now print in 50-something countries around the world and you can get it printed, delivered to your house and we planted it. I actually did that while you were around here. Oh, awesome. I wasn't planning this, but I had a print delivered to my house. Oh, awesome. Yeah, exactly. We have to go to a print shop in this freaking graphic and then we'll get this button. Exactly. You just click print and it pops up beautifully packaged to your door. I don't know how that works. Yeah. I don't know how you did that, but it worked.
How cool. That is very cool. And so, yeah, I guess literally bring these things to life. Oh, we're like launching 3D as well. So like all of these things we will be bringing to life literally and just picking off like what is the most strategically important next thing to enable everyone to design anything, to enable everyone to publish anywhere. And we have been doing that for a decade and will continue to do that forevermore using the latest technology to truly bring people's ideas to life. Okay, so this is helpful. So if someone's like, oh, well, will Canva come for my space? Are there people designing things?
That was design and also what was it, publish? Publishing anywhere. Okay, publishing and designing. Okay, so if you're doing any designing or publishing, watch out. From a macro perspective, there was creativity tools and productivity tools. And what Canva really does is we're literally smack bang in the middle of that Venn diagram of creativity and productivity rather than making our customers have to make a choice between those two suites. Something I wasn't planning on asking about, but I think it's on everyone's minds. There's always this like Figma and Adobe and then there's Canva. And there's kind of a bunch of places we could go with this.
“we spoke to every single customer. We gave them an over-the-phone tutorial.”
Something I can't not ask about is just how you think about AI in your product. You mentioned how you integrated or all through the product. Just, you know, you guys are doing really good stuff with AI, a lot of companies are struggling to find something really that works great.
Do you have just like a philosophy of here's how we integrate AI into Canva, where it ends up being really helpful and people love it? Your question is actually the answer at the same time. I think being able to integrate it into the product where it actually helps people to get their work done, where it genuinely helps them to achieve their goals, and then being really open to listening to your community and hearing what they're loving, what they're struggling with, and refining from there, I think is really, really important. Just because AI is all the rage and investors really like AI doesn't necessarily mean it should be front and center.
But if it can genuinely help your customers to achieve their goals. So, you know, the thing that I was mentioning before, enabling people to communicate their ideas and have a little friction between those two points. AI is just kind of like naturally a very critical part of that equation for us. In fact, it was funny looking back from really old decks. We were trying to do AI before AI was actually a thing because it really was critical to what we were trying to do. Even in our 2012 deck, you can kind of imagine how AI very much fit into the equation because of exactly what we were trying to do.
I'm going to keep us on the AI thread and take us to AI Corner, which is a recurring segment on this podcast. So here's the question. What's a way you found in your personal life and work life to use AI where it ends up being really helpful, something really interesting that people might find useful? So many things. so ai is often the first if i'm like having an idea it'll be the first place that i go and explore the idea and now with canva and you can just tag canva i can say give me more ideas of this and it's like shockingly great because it has all of the context from the design it's actually integrated deeply into your workflow another really fun thing i do is an ai walk and it's when i just put my um earpods in and then i go for a walk and i just say everything on my mind and I use that to then kind of filter out my thoughts and figure out what are the things I need to action and it kind of helps, again, get out of the weeds and think about things from a more macro perspective rather than from the things that might be in my Slack messages or in my email.
It just gives you that sort of helpful vantage point, I find. So, yeah, so many things. For the voice note tool, is there a tool that you find useful for that? Yeah, I might use Apple Notes or directly into Canva Docs And then I actually just do the brain dump into Canva Docs and then just like summarize it. So, yes. Got it. And so you just use like native microphone dictation sort of thing. Nothing fancy. Yeah. Yeah, I like it. This is reminding me of you mentioned earlier in our conversation, you have this vision board that you said is like for 2050. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Can you share something from that vision board?
I'll tell you why the vision board came about because it's only been in recent months. I did feel like as humanity, we are on a bit of a freight train. And that freight training is, I think if we take a lot of visions for a lot of different companies and a lot of things that are happening and you just fast forward 50 years or usually 2050 and you say, are we in a safer world? Is the world the place that we want our kids to grow up in? Is this the humanity that we want? I didn't feel that the train that we are headed on always feels great. In fact, it scared me quite greatly for a whole host of reasons.
And so I sat with that feeling for a little and then I kind of got to work on my 2050 walls. And, you know, back to the chaos to clarity, the first thing was writing my 2050 wall. And I've kind of really been loving, I've got a whole, on the 2050 wall started with a lot of quotes. Everything good was once imagined and many other quotes are along those similar lines. And then rather than just being fearful of the things that I'm worried about for society and for humanity, I started to think, like, what would the alternative be? What is that vision that I would love to see us have? Basic human needs for all.
Global education, being a basic human right that everyone experiences. All the really important things that we want as humanity. and again like using vision and using imagination and just dreaming about the future and I find it really fascinating in my day-to-day by literally having it beside me as I work every day the little tiny decisions that can kind of help to angle towards that future that we want and can I help will any of that into existence I honestly don't know but I feel like just by starting to write it down, I've done a little brainstorm exercise with a number of other people and starting to just like etch out, like how do we get closer and closer to that? On my vision of the future, it's community, it's the whole of humanity trying to dream bigger and to dream bigger goals. And then us actually rising to that occasion in the world we don't want. I think loneliness is rife. Purpose is gone.
And what we teach people in schools is pointless. And in my vision for 2050, it's none of those things. Communities are bountiful. We all have deep purpose. And that deep purpose springs from having bigger dreams that we collectively go out and achieve. With something that we're doing at our Canva World Tour keynote in two weeks' time, which I think is going to be after this is released, We've been asking people, what is one goal you'd like to see the world achieved in our lifetime? And then people literally writing it down, I think is pretty powerful. And then people sharing that with other people, I think is pretty powerful.
And then us actually figuring out how the hell do we turn that reality that we all deeply, desperately want into existence, I think is genuinely one of the biggest questions of our time. But then again, rather than trying to tackle that entire thing by yourself, how do you take that first tiny step that starts to see that in your own life, in your own family, in your own community. And I think that's where we'll get purpose from. And I think that is one of the key answers to loneliness is actually working towards something bigger than yourself. Wow. I really appreciate you sharing all that. I was thinking as you're talking, just considering how wildly successful Canva has been and just how ambitious that was when you started, I would not be at all surprised that this actually happens and that you achieve this very difficult vision? It's not something that I alone can achieve. I think it has to be, obviously, a global collective effort because there's zero chance I can go and achieve basic human needs for all. But I think that I'd like to change that. I'd like to help change the mood.
I'd like to help change the way we're thinking about things. I genuinely think there's a little, We need to move course a little and decide not what are all the things that we kind of like, you know, what's the freight train we're currently on? But what is it that we actually want? What do we want our societies to look like? What do we want the world to look like? Is it good enough that there's people, hundreds of millions of people that can't eat? Like, what the hell? Like, it just literally makes no sense. A column B world, you might say. Absolutely. Melanie, this was incredible. before we get to our very exciting lightning round is there anything else that you wanted to share anything else you want to leave listeners with oh you've been extremely extensive i don't think i've got anything else that's the goal that's the goal with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round melanie are you ready let's go first question what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people one of the books i love is the power of moments and it talks about am i supposed to be really fast and not tell you about I don't.
It's all good. Okay, two books, The Power of Moments. And one of the books early on I read was Designing the Obvious, which I found very insightful. Okay. I like that you shifted to fast mode. You don't have to go super fast. All good. What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Not Canva. I love the Calm app. It is my daily companion. I use it to meditate. I use it to listen to music. I just find it very calming. Okay, first question. And I usually ask about movies and TV shows. I hear you don't watch a lot because you're so busy and have so much going on. So I'm going to try a new question I haven't asked before.
I'm curious where this goes. So excluding Canva, what's a product you'd love to work on someday, whether it's like an existing other company, like, oh, I wish I could work on that thing, or just a new product you'd love to build maybe after the Canva chapter? I feel like my Canva chapter is going to go on for a long time. So I don't know that because we've got two-step plans and we're pretty extensive. Maybe a company you'd love to fund. There we go. I feel like there is a lot of opportunity to create global infrastructure that is truly empowering. And so as I look at my 2050 wall, I think there's a lot of things that are currently only exclusively available to a small number of people that should be available to everyone.
And so the more that we can do to uplift the rising tide lifts all boats, I think, is a thing that's just of such critical importance. and I think there is this weird belief that you can be fine and everyone else can be not fine and that's all cool. I don't think that's cool. I think everyone suffers in such a case. So I think more things that help everyone to rise. Maybe along those lines but maybe not. Is there a life motto that you find yourself coming back to and work your own life? There's a few. I love the quote happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony. I feel like that's a a constant aspiration. And then I've just been so obsessed lately with the idea that everything is led by imagination, that imagination is the very first step of that creative process. So everything is good was once imagined, as a quote you're going to be seeing from Canva all the time now, because it is true that if you don't imagine it, you can't will it into existence. And in fact, everything great that we experience in life was first imagined.
Wow, there's so much power to that. One thought nugget there is just, there's all these tools now that can make building so much easier. You can just build anything you want. Just describe it. But so many people are just like, I'm in the same boat. I'm just stuck. What do I want? I don't even, like, I don't know what I mean. What should I build? And that's exactly what you're talking about there. Okay, last question. So I saw somewhere that you were an aspiring figure skater in your early years in high school. you had to wake up at 4 30 a.m to practice uh is there something you learned from that period of your life that was helpful in building canva oh so many things are quite directly applicable falling down over and over again and getting off and trying again um the importance of hard work and determination i think the falling down like it was quite literal in in my figure skating in days and maybe it's a little more metaphorical in in today but it is constant That's who you rewrite. I wonder what that metaphor is for figure skating. I don't know.
Anyway, Melanie, this was incredible. I am so thankful that you agreed to do this. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to maybe reach out, send you maybe feedback on Canva or join Canva? And how can listeners be useful to you? Really great questions. So you can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I post the most. And you can go to, and I can get the URL to give us your wishes and we want to hear them. And we literally listen to them it doesn't just go into a suggestion box um and then how can they be helpful um use canva spread canva teach canva um we're doing a canva world tour in through october which is probably gonna be outdated and this is posted come to our events we do events all around the world um and we'd love to see you and to hear from you and if you are in a company starting a company, try and do the 1% pledge, try and figure out your own version of the two-step plan and try and build products and in every decision that you make that actually makes the world that you want to live in. I think there's this kind of belief sometimes that the world is created by other people, but we all have a very active hand in creating the world that we live in. And every
decision that you make, for investors, every company that you fund, is that contributing to the world that you want to live in? Or is it creating the freight train that none of us want to be on? I have to ask before I let you go, are you going to have the rap dancers at the next Canva event? You'll have to wait and see. I'm sorry. Melanie, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, Lenny, for having me and your great, well-researched questions. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
