Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

How Canva was built on rejection

2 Nov 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:44

A first-person monologue describing how repeated investor rejections and critiques helped refine Canva’s pitch deck. The speaker recounts specific feedback (market-size skepticism, competitor comparisons), the iterative additions made to the deck, and reflects that the 2012 pitch deck became stronger and still accurately represents the company’s direction.

Chapters

It was really clear in my mind that it was the future. And I thought the investors were wrong. But investors also gave really helpful feedback and feedback, often in the form of rejection. 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. 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. While it was extraordinarily frustrating, their feedback made us stronger. And then through the copious amounts of rejection, the pitch deck got stronger and more refined. 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.