When Melanie Perkins talks about building Canva, she often comes back to one simple idea she calls Column B thinking. It’s a way of choosing optimism over limitation – focusing on what could exist instead of being trapped by what exists today.
Seeing beyond the starting point
Column A is the world of brakes and barriers. It’s where ideas go to be “realistic” – not enough money, not enough experience, too many competitors. Too many reasons to wait, shrink the ambition, or never start at all.
Column B, however, lives somewhere else entirely. It’s where you sketch the impossible first – the version that feels slightly ridiculous, maybe even naive – and only then ask the practical questions.
How could this work? Who would it help? What would need to change for this to be real?
According to Perkins, Canva exists because she chose to ignore the noise in Column A and kept building from Column B.
The origin of the design platform
Before Canva became one of the world’s most widely used design platforms – now valued at over $40 billion and used by hundreds of millions of people each month – Perkins and her co-founder Cliff Obrecht were university students with a small, practical plan to build an online tool to help schools design yearbooks.
That modest idea became Fusion Books, the unlikely starting point for a company that would go on to reshape how the world creates and communicates visually.
From a Column A perspective, however, that might have been the end of the road. A niche product, built by students, in a crowded software world.
But Column B asked much different questions: What if design were as easy as using a document? What if anyone, anywhere, could create professional visuals without training?
That belief – not resources, not experience – is what pushed them forward.
When rejection becomes part of the process
Column B thinking doesn’t ignore reality, it just refuses to let reality shrink the vision.
Perkins was rejected by investors more than 100 times. Each rejection could have reinforced Column A thinking: Maybe this isn’t good enough. Maybe we’re not the right people.
Instead, she treated rejection as information, not judgment. Every “no” helped refine the story, clarify the mission, and strengthen the belief that the idea itself mattered – even if the timing or delivery needed work.
Column B doesn’t say “this will be easy.” It says “this is worth doing anyway.”
Channelling your own ‘Column B’ thinking
Canva’s story isn’t just about design software. It’s about a way of thinking that applies to founders, creators, and anyone building something new.
Column A will always be loud. It lists the reasons you should wait, stay small, or aim lower. Column B is quieter, but more powerful. It asks you to imagine the outcome first, then patiently work through the gaps.
In a world changing as fast as this one, the ability to hold a long-term, optimistic vision while doing the hard, unglamorous work startup life demands may be one of the most valuable skills there is.
