Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins is CEO and co-founder of Canva. At the time of her Lenny’s Podcast appearance, Canva had a $42B valuation, $3.3B ARR, 240M monthly active users (including 100M in education), and had been profitable for eight consecutive years — built from Fremantle, Western Australia after more than 100 investor rejections.

She was a competitive figure skater (4:30am training sessions) before co-founding Canva with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams. Together with Obrecht she has donated over $50M to GiveDirectly with an additional $100M pledged.

Key ideas

• Column B thinking: start from the dream (what you want), not from Column A (what you have). Plan backwards from the desired end state, then reintroduce feasibility constraints.
• Crazy Big Goals: goals large enough to make you feel completely inadequate produce the growth that competence-level goals cannot.
• Chaos to Clarity: every idea begins in chaos; the first step is always embarrassing; the path to clarity is sequential and unavoidable.
• Rejection as iteration data: over 100 investor rejections, each treated as structured feedback to improve the pitch deck. The deck became a compounding asset.
• The two-step plan: (1) build one of the world’s most valuable companies; (2) do the most good in the world. The sequencing matters.

Wiki appearances

• Melanie Perkins on Canva, Column B Thinking, and Crazy Big Goals — primary episode
• Column B Thinking — concept page for the planning philosophy she describes