Co-founder and chief executive of Canva
Recorded · Irish Tech News
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.
Public & community service
Emergency & first-response work
Calm, triage, trust, recovery, recurring system failures, and the invisible work between crises.
12 questions, 184 quoted from what public figures said elsewhere, each with its source. Every question is asked in FLAPSS wording — nobody answers as anybody else.
Worth reading
How has a setback or failure set you up for later success?
Choreographer, dancer and author
Recorded · Academy of Achievement (achievement.org) · 1993
You called it vision, I call it analyzing what my strengths were.
Atmospheric chemist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1995
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2007
At first the research did not seem to be particularly interesting – I carried out a systematic search for processes that might destroy the CFCs in the lower atmosphere, but nothing appeared…
Every question in this questionnaire
- What does staying calm require when other people are frightened or in danger? —
- How do you make a defensible choice when several urgent needs cannot all come first? —
- What are you best at that nobody watching would notice? 26
- What helps the public trust instructions during an emergency? —
- What is the biggest professional obstacle you have faced? 24
- What helps you return to ordinary life after a difficult shift or incident? —
- When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? 23
- When you need counsel, who is the first person you call? 12
- Which emergencies recur because a preventable system failure remains unfixed? —
- How has a setback or failure set you up for later success? 69
- What are you unwilling to optimise? 30
- What does the public most misunderstand about the work between emergencies? —
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General
The general questionnaire
Twelve questions in FLAPSS wording — taste, daily life, craft, failure, and who formed you. The place to start if you have no idea where to start.