Our New Newsletter Structure

We have experimenting with the format of newsletters for a while now. Thankfully most of the iterations worked and our open rates were significantly higher. A large number of you also sent us 1:1 notes asking for more.

That got us thinking about how might we carve out a set of readings without adding to your already overwhelming to-do list.

Taking from our our essay on newsletter burnout, we also want to be sensitive to your inbox so we will continue to send newsletters on alternate days. Further, we want to add an element of adventure to your newsletter reading experience by doing the following (once a week for each category):

1. Mondays:What we learned together this week

2. Wednesdays: 5 Smartest Articles of the week

3. Fridays: Vignettes (Long-form deep-dive career reflection of a massively interesting person)

4. Sundays: Long-form essay on mental models / career principles / lifestyle design

In between, we will surprise and delight you and look forward to your participation.

Starting with our first long-form vignette today, we did a deep-dive on leadership lessons from Canva’s CEO & co-founder Melanie Perkins.

Here are the first 250 words from a 1500 word long-form analysis -

Designer, introverted and ambitious.

Melanie Perkins is the CEO and co-founder of the multi-billion dollar online design company Canva.

Starting her entrepreneurial journey with the mission to make design accessible, Melanie co-founded Fusion Books in 2007. Instead of tacking the vast design ecosystem all at once with Fusion Books, Melanie with her co-founder Cliff, ventured into the niche high-school yearbook making industry. They created an online tool with which high schools could design their yearbooks using Fusion Books software for free and only pay for the printing of the books. Starting with 15 high schools in Australia by 2011 they were working with over 300 high schools across five countries. They used this period to understand their users, the product and the technical requirements needed to build easy to use online design tools.

In 2011 after a chance encounter with Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai at a conference she actively started working on the idea of Canva. With a three-month tourist visa Melanie engineered a trip to the Bay Area to ‘meet as many investors as possible’. Early in her visit, Tai introduced her to Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps. Tai told her that if she could hire a tech team that met Rasmussen's standards, he'd invest. After a year of looking for a technical co-founder (and finding Cameron Adams) and a few more months of fundraising in 2012 Canva raised $3M.

In 2013 Canva (French for canvas) was launched globally. Starting with 50,000 beta users it is now used by over 30 million active users per month.

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