Melanie Perkins: preference

Transcript context

…Okay. Speaking of investors, speaking of other hard times, there's a very famous story about Canva. Early on you pitched over a hundred investors and over a hundred investors said no to you when you were just starting Canva. I think that's important. The investors than any founder I've talked to actually tries to pitch. It's impressive you tried that hard and went for so many pitches and finally got someone to take a bet. Now you are something like a $40 billion company making 3.3 billion ARR. I think there's something like $240 million monthly active users, one of the hottest private companies in the world. Just how does this feel? I don't know. It was really clear in my mind that it was the future and I thought the investors were wrong, frankly. But investors also gave really helpful feedback and feedback often in the form of rejection. So they would say, "Oh, your market's not big enough." And I would say, "It's going to be huge. " And I'd add a new page in my pitch deck that said how big the market I believe was. And then they'd say, "You're the same as some other company," coupled with rejection, and I would say, "Hey, now I've got a new slide in my pitch deck that shows all the players and the huge gap in the market that we believe we're going to fill. " Or most investors just knew absolutely nothing about design or the industry that we're in. And so we then ended up with the first few slides saying, "Here's the lay of the land today. Here's the problem that we're going to solve." And so while it was extraordinarily frustrating, their feedback made us stronger and made our pitch deck stronger. And it was sort of from that chaos to clarity. At the start it was this idea and then through the copious amounts of rejection, the pitch deck got stronger and more refined. So then when people, the first time I remember I spoke to someone for hours and they eventually got it. They were really committed to understanding what we were trying to do, but then not everyone has six hours to understand a concept. And so being able to take all the gems of wisdom from that conversation and have that understood really clearly in a really short period of time and have all of the reasons that people were rejecting us pre-answered in that initial pitch deck was really important. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why when I look back at our 2012 pitch deck, it's so valid and really still captures what we're doing today. And so I think that rejection in some ways makes you stronger if you can persist through. Well, I think beyond that, I've never heard this part of the story. It's not just persisting, it's actually iterating and taking feedback that you're hearing to continue to evolve the pitch to a place where, "Okay, I finally get what you're doing." That is such a cool part of the story. How much of that vision and product changed throughout that journey versus just the way you pitched it and convinced people?…

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