I had set my mind on winning the 1500-meter gold medal in Helsinki in 1952. ... And, it all came disastrously wrong when I came fourth instead of winning. ... Instead of retiring in order to devote myself to medicine, I decided to go on for another two years while I was still a student, working clinically in London, and I did that.

I had such failure for the first ten years in Silicon Valley. General Magic — over a billion dollars invested in 1990 dollars! Could you imagine what that is today? The best team in the world. We were told we were gonna topple Microsoft and all these companies.

To launch Canva, we needed investment and a tech team. Finding the right people for both took two years but there is always a lot of rejection for entrepreneurs in their early days. But every time we got a hard question or a reason why people wouldn't invest, we stayed focused on what we could change. I revised our pitch deck after every meeting, more than 100 times in one year, to answer the questions or fix the reason for rejection from the last time. You just have to keep going. The normal thing to do after your 100th, 80th or even 20th ‘no’ would be to stop, but you just have to persevere.

No, no. Well, you know, biology is such a complex system. It’s totally different from the engineering. We cannot design. Many people tried to find the therapy for cancer, but all failed. And myself, I never expected my research, working on the immune system, would lead to the cancer therapy. But, in a sense, I’m very fortunate that I also thought about it. You know, you have to try many things and if you’re lucky you can hit, but you have to pursue. That’s my feeling.