She realizes the future of design will be different - simple, online, and enabling anyone to create professional quality designs.

And her vision starts to take shape.

But she doesn’t go and start what we know as Canva today because she’s not a technical founder, doesn’t know anything about business, and doesn’t even know that venture capital exists yet.

So she launches a company called Fusion Books in her mother’s living room, with her boyfriend, Cliff Obrecht, to tackle one subset of the design problem - yearbooks.

In those days, both Cliff and I were studying full-time, and working a couple of part-time jobs to get some money together. We’d work on Fusion Books whenever we could—in the morning, the evening and on the weekends.

We got a loan to develop our first piece of software. We went to every software development company around Perth that would take a meeting with us.

Most people said it would be impossible or cost an astronomical amount. Eventually we found a great company called Indepth (now called Cirrena), led by an incredible guy, Greg Mitchell.

I drew detailed wireframes of what I wanted to create, and it felt like magic when we saw the first piece of software come to life.

I sent him a bunch of emails trying to set up a Skype chat that elicited no response, but then decided I was going to just go all in and say that I was going to visit San Francisco — trying to act somewhat cool by pretending I was just going to be in the hood rather than making a special trip to meet with him.

I was also learning to kitesurf, as I knew Bill ran a conference called MaiTai which was a gathering of entrepreneurs and kitesurfers.

Kitesurfing scares the hell out of me, and learning to kitesurf in the dreary, cold, shark-invested waters of San Francisco was far from enjoyable.

But I wanted to get Canva off the ground, so it was just a small inconvenience.

That two week trip to San Francisco, quickly turned into three months — the entire duration of my visa.

I attended every single engineering conference that I could. I reached out to people on LinkedIn. I cold-called people. I set up my “office” in the food court at the Nordstrom shopping center as I had a table, I felt safe, had space to work and a little portable WI-FI connection. Oh, and it was free!

We realised we needed to start to pull the round together. A few people said that they’d invest and finally after years of getting “advice” from Bill, we asked him directly if he’d invest. He said “yes” — we were ecstatic. We asked how much — $25k.

I thought that when Bill said the previous year, “I’d be excited to back you and team,” it meant that we’d have enough capital to build the whole thing. Well, we soon learned that unfortunately that ain’t how angel investors work.

After an hour long chat and my absolute best debating skills using every objection I had at my disposal, he generously raised his investment to $100k, but that still wasn’t quite enough funding to build out “the future of publishing.”

Why is dreaming so important? If you don’t dream about the future, you can’t make it happen.

Knowing where you’re headed can help you move a lot faster.

For me, if I have a really clear understanding of where I’m going I can make lots and lots of quick decisions, but if I don’t have a clear understanding of where I’m going, it makes decision-making way harder.