Melanie Perkins: belief

Transcript context

…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 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. We were actually chatting ahead of this about what would make the best use of this hour. I asked you what you believe has been the biggest factor in the success of Canva. 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 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 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 just imagine you are 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 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 work from today's world. Column B is work from this dream reality and work backwards from how to achieve that.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.