Canva creates 1271 entrepreneurs
Layoffs are everywhere right now. Between the fear of AI and the efficiency AI creates there’s a battle going on in the workplace between employers, employees and the immediate future.
Usually companies are slammed when they do large layoffs. Either the CEO is some douchebag who has clearly never spoken to another human being before and chooses to fire people over a botched zoom call or one group thinks the layoffs are horrific for one reason or another.
But this week I think Canva got it right.
If you don’t know, Canva is a design tool built in Sydney, Australia that took the world by storm a few years ago. It allowed anyone to design anything with ease and social media content creators and everyone else flocked to it. Now, I’m not entirely sure 5800 people were doing pre-layoff at Canva and I have no idea what the remaining 4529 employees actually do but that’s not interesting to me.
What’s interesting to me is the severance package offered by Canva:
- At least six months' salary, wherever people are based.
- Twelve months of healthcare where Canva already provides it, plus a year of Canva Care, its employee support programme, which also covers their families.
- One-to-one coaching, CV reviews, interview prep and a year of LinkedIn Premium.
- Staff keep their MacBooks.
- The one-year vesting cliff is dropped for anyone who joined in the past year.
Oh, and one more thing:
Staff also get a $10,000 grant if they want to start their own business.
That’s a respectable move.
I love that the co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins has given leaving staff a shot at their own path. A chance to take control of how they earn money and that if they don’t want to, they don’t have to start looking for a job. Staff members can take their six months salary + $10 000 and build something.
This won’t appeal to everyone but I hope this is something other organisations will adopt. For people with high agency and experience, $10 000 is pretty meaningful.
I love this because it’s about empowerment through a difficult time. Yes being laid off sucks. Yes it would be great if everyone could keep their jobs and carry on as-is but that’s not how life works. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions and many people choose to make tough decisions badly. Melanie has shown the world that if you are considered, if you have a vision and if you plan things out then you don’t have to destroy people to pursue economic stability inside of organisations. There’s a sensible, human way to attempt change.
Let’s look at the potential of this move for the broader economy:
1271 people were offered a package of some kind, including the grant.
If 20% of people receive a grant that’s 254 businesses that will be attempted in the coming 12 months.
If 10% of these survive beyond 12 months that’s 25 businesses that would never have existed without the layoffs.
If 10 of those businesses go on to sustain the founders and hire people into the future then Canva has done a lot of good for the people involved and the people they hire and the economy more broadly.
I know it sucks to get laid off but sometimes the best things happen after the worst things and at least Canva is trying to spark something in the outgoing employees.
The more businesses that we can create, the more diverse the economy becomes and the less reliant we all are on the biggest businesses in the world to provide. Building a diversified income stream is an increasingly important requirement for everyone as AI eats the world and we don’t really know what’s going to happen in 6 months, never mind 6 years.
If you are worried about your employment then start a side business. If you are bored at work, start a side business. If you want to learn how to build things, start a side business. If you want to learn AI tools, then you guessed it… start a side business.
Photo: Eóin Noonan / Web Summit via Sportsfile / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.