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How I Built This · November 15, 2021 · 50m
Canva: Melanie Perkins
Melanie Perkins — 19 years old, from Perth, Australia — pitched 100+ Silicon Valley investors and was rejected by every one. She taught design software to university students, noticed how needlessly complex it was, and built Canva to fix it. Now worth $40B+.
This summary was generated from show notes and public descriptions, not from a full transcript review. Details may contain inaccuracies.
Canon
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Perkins: she couldn't control whether investors said yes. She could control whether the product was worth investing in. So she built Canva while being rejected, and eventually the product was undeniable.
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Perkins: with no mentors in Perth, she studied every founder biography she could find. She learned fundraising from books about Steve Jobs, product design from the Stripe founders' interviews, and perseverance from Dyson's 5,127 prototypes.
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