When Melanie Perkins talks about how she built Canva, she keeps coming back to a deceptively simple idea she calls Column B thinking. Column A is where most ideas go to die too crowded, too early, not enough experience, too many reasons to wait. Column B is where you sketch the version that feels almost reckless, then ask how to make it real.

Before Canva became one of the most widely used design platforms on the planet now valued at over $40 billion Perkins and co-founder Cliff Obrecht were university students with a modest plan to help schools design yearbooks. That was Fusion Books, the quiet, practical starting point for a company that would eventually reshape how hundreds of millions of people create and communicate visually.

From Column A, Fusion Books looked like a ceiling. A niche product, student founders, a crowded software market. Column B asked a different question: what if design felt as effortless as writing an email? What if anyone, anywhere, could create something professional without training first?

That belief not resources, not connections is what pushed them forward.

The path wasn't easy. Perkins was rejected by investors more than 100 times. Every room she walked into, the idea sounded too broad, too ambitious, too early. But she treated each rejection as information rather than verdict, using it to sharpen the story and clarify the mission until the product could make the case for itself.

Eventually, it did. Canva launched in 2013, attracted hundreds of thousands of users in its first year, and turned what had been an argument in investor meetings into something people could open in a browser and try for themselves.

The lesson Perkins draws from the journey isn't about persistence in the conventional sense. It's about choosing which voice to listen to. Column A will always be louder it has logic and precedent and caution on its side. Column B is quieter, but it's where the things worth building begin.

In a world changing as fast as this one, the ability to hold a long-term, optimistic vision while doing the slow, unglamorous work that startup life demands may be the most underrated skill there is.