Melanie Perkins: evaluation

Transcript context

…That's a good one. I just love how concrete you're making this. So it's set these Crazy Big Goals, confine the component of the goals, set numbers there and then figure out the kind of steps you take to achieve these things. All fail is very easy. On the flip side of that, this is a segue. People hear these stories, they hear your story, they see Canva over the years and it's just this up into the right huge success story, one of the most successful companies in history. I imagine there have been many periods where things weren't going so great and when maybe things didn't look like they would work out. So let me just ask you this over the course of building Canva, once it started to click and started to feel like it was going to be a thing, was there a point where it started to again feel like, "Wow, maybe this may not work out. Maybe there's a huge setback that we may not get over?" I think it's just a constant evolution. Every time the company doubles in size, pretty much all your systems break, all the things that were working don't work. A little example, in the early days we'd stand up and everyone would present their goals, what they're working on every day, every week. And then it kind of moved every month and then it was just taking too long because we've got so many people. And then it was sort of like we'd started doing these things called season openers and season openers were really fun where we got the entire company together, we talked about the goals that we'd achieved. And it was so funny because ahead of season openers, everyone would launch everything because they wanted to do it ahead of the season opener. And then we'd also set the goals for the coming cycle for the coming season at that point in time. But then they started to become six hours long because we had so many people and so many teams. And so trying to find that right with the same philosophies of deep context for everyone with the same philosophies of the celebrations and the goals and trying to find that right flavor at every stage of scale is definitely hard. And so I think it's just a constant work in progress. Or back to your earlier point about timing of things, we were doing a front-end rewrite and we thought it would take about six months. It was really important because it was critical for cross-platform. It was critical for right to left. It was critical because we could only have five people working in our editor at any point in time because of the way the code base was structured and we thought it was going to take six months and then it took two years and it was two years of not shipping any product, two years of a product company not being able to ship product. And that is such a core motivation for our team. He's shipping something, seeing great customer feedback and that kind of makes everyone feel happy and you've got momentum and it just felt like we're in a dark, dark tunnel that we could hardly see the end of the tunnel. And we didn't really know how long it was going to take because it just had to take as long as the tunnel was going to take. And it was a very hard time because other people would be launching this and that. And it was eventually we got out of that tunnel and it was extremely important that we did that work. We've now got two and a half thousand engineers and we're able to deliver amazing things that would've just been completely infeasible and simultaneous collaboration, so many things were baked into this. But yeah, it was not a fun period of time. A product company not shipping product is not really a recipe for fun. For two years.…

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