21 Questions from Canva’s 10-year journey: Part two

Key ideas

Perkins explains how Canva scaled by laddering goals to its mission, choosing which long-term seeds to plant, aligning teams with vision decks, and learning self-care late.

1. 1

   Let commitments carry you through hard stretches

   Asked how she kept going in the early days, Perkins says she is very bad at giving up, while granting this is not ideal when you should change direction. In the hardest moments, she says, commitments pushed them on: a loan to repay, customers' yearbooks to deliver and promises to themselves. On investor rejection she advises learning something from each no, refining the pitch and continuing until it eventually works.

2. 2

   Ladder goals up to the mission

   Perkins describes a mission and goals-driven company: the mission sets the long-run direction, it splits into pillars, and each year goals are picked within each pillar. Her example is the language pillar, which went from Spanish and 20 more languages to 100 languages in 2017, then right-to-left languages, local currencies and regional content. She says goals should ideally feed user growth, revenue and the mission together.

3. 3

   Decide which seeds to plant now

   Perkins frames prioritizing as asking what seeds to plant for future growth and what fruit to pick now, under a principle of doing fewer things well. Her example of a very challenging seed is two years spent rebuilding Canva's front end, when a product-led company shipped no new products or even incremental features, which she calls a long dark tunnel. She says it proved worthwhile because it set the foundations for simultaneous collaboration, right-to-left languages, every device and a far larger engineering team.

4. 4

   Align through vision decks and real values

   Perkins says that as a company scales, effort without shared direction makes no progress, so teams brainstorm what wild success and terrible failure would look like and build a standard-template vision deck to work backwards from. With more than 3,500 people, she says she cannot be across each decision, so the team must know the values and the kinds of decisions leadership will back. She argues values only count if you would give up revenue for them.

5. 5

   Look after yourself earlier than she did

   Asked about her biggest mistakes, Perkins says the only thing she would truly change is learning about meditating, journaling and her own well-being much earlier. She says she once thought it sustainable to work from waking until sleep with little weekend downtime, now calls that unhealthy, and describes finding balance as still a work in progress.

In Melanie’s words

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