This week I'm getting into the woman behind the tool you probably used to make your last pitch deck. Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of Canva, and her story is one of the most interesting in tech right now. We get into how a frustrating Photoshop class at a Perth university became a design platform used by 170 million people, how democratizing design means that a freelancer in Lagos or a student in São Paulo now has access to the same professional tools as anyone in New York or London, and why she got rejected by over a hundred investors before anyone said yes.

This is the patch:

• from Perth to everywhere: how Melanie built a billion dollar company with no Bay Area network, no fancy connections, and over a hundred no's
• the yearbook company nobody talks about and why it built the foundation for everything Canva became
• 92% of business leaders now expect design skills from every employee, not just creatives. what that means for your career right now
• the grandmaster move: why chess grandmasters are making deliberately imperfect moves to beat AI, and what that means for anyone building a creative career

We close with the lifestyle segment: Melanie used to work seven days a week and has been open about how unsustainable that was. We get into her 100km walking habit, her AI walks with AirPods, and why the most ambitious women in tech are starting to talk about rest as seriously as they talk about results.

All views expressed are my own.