Real-life resilience - Canva

To get Canva off the ground, co-founder Melanie Perkins had to take up kite-surfing. Yes, really.

This is just one little piece of the incredible story that is the founding of Canva.

Imagine you’re in your early 20s, living in Perth, Australia, and you have an idea to take on Adobe and Microsoft and completely revolutionalize the design industry. You meet a venture capitalist visiting from Silicon Valley at an awards event and you manage to get 5 minutes of his time. You follow up a few weeks later with an email saying you’ll be “in the Bay area next week” and ask him to lunch. He accepts. You hop on a plane from Perth to San Francisco (over 9000 miles) to meet for that lunch. Luckily, you have a brother who lives in San Fran so you can stay with him for a while.

At lunch you pitch the idea with a printed-out deck. He’s interested in your idea but only if you recruit a specific Chief Technology Officer to build the business properly. You then spend the next 3 months in California meeting with dozens of potential CTOs, but none of them are approved by your potential investor. Simultaneously, you also meet over 100 other potential investors. You get rejected. Every. Single. Time.

100 rejections in less than 90 days. That’s more rejections than days you are in the USA.

You fly home to Australia because your tourist visa is about to expire. You are totally dejected. You return home with nothing except some vague interest in your idea….and a connection to one semi-serious investor.

Well, that semi-serious investor then invites you to attend an upcoming kite-surfing event that doubles as an investor conference. You immediately accept, even though you’ve never kite-surfed before in your life. Then you get to work learning how to kite surf so that you can hold your own at the event. A few months later, you and your business partner arrive in Maui to participate in the event. After you kite-surf, your investor-friend has arranged for you to pitch your idea to the attendees the following morning.

You stay up all night preparing for the pitch.

In the morning, you pitch the idea. You nail it! After all, you’ve been rejected over 100 times before, and each time was an opportunity to improve the presentation.

With that successful pitch, you manage to raise seed funding worth $3m.

Now, with that funding, you get to work building your idea.

12 months later, you launch Canva. The first review is bad, and you’re immediately concerned. However, the second and third reviews are positive and soon there is strong interest in the platform.

In the first year, you have 300,000 users. In the second year, you have a million! Then more funding comes in and Canva starts to explode!

Fast forward to 2024 and Canva now has over 125m users, 85% of the Fortune 500 countries use it, and you provide the platform for free to over 500,000 not for profits globally.

Oh, and it’s now valued at around $26b!

No risk, no glory. No failure, no story.

This tale of Canva’s founding is an incredible story of resilience - finding a way forward through adversity. The real idea lies in Perkins’ growth mindset. Here are two tools to take from it.

1. Every failure is a step towards success. Every rejection that Perkins got, she used it to tweak and improve her pitch. When a potential investor asked a question, she evolved the deck to address that question proactively for the next presentation. Business success requires attention and adjustment. We have to listen attentively and make note of what we hear. Every pain point is an opportunity to address and adjust.

2. Think outside of the box. Perkins didn’t wait around for an opportunity to meet with her investor. Instead, she got creative in finding a solution and decided to fly across the world to meet him. And when he invited her to the kite-surfing event, she didn’t hesitate. Even though she knew nothing about kite-surfing, she saw it as another chance at success.

So the next time someone presents a daunting task or a seemingly impossible challenge to us, we can think of Melanie Perkins and her approach to roadblocks. Let’s embrace failure and think outside the box.

I teach workplaces and individuals strategies to improve our resilience while also supporting mental health. These are preventative ideas and practical tools, so that we can thrive when obstacles come our way. Book a free discovery call today. 

Until next time friends, stay resilient!

Carre @ Resilient Marketing Minds