Bloss

🚨 Canva is firing people and giving them at least six months' pay, their MacBooks, a year of LinkedIn Premium and a $10,000 grant to start something of their own. People are calling it a masterclass in how to do layoffs. Maybe it is. But I read Melanie Perkins' memo, and the word "AI" isn't in it. 1,271 people are affected, 22% of the company. Not all of them are leaving. Some are getting new roles or being asked to move to hubs like Sydney. The memo puts it down to growth slowing for the first time in a decade and "new technology." Her August letter to shareholders was more specific. It said the average cost of serving an AI task was too high and Canva was "relying too heavily on frontier models," so it slowed the rollout to fix the costs and cut this year's growth forecast from 30% to 20%. Early backers Blackbird and Airtree marked Canva down from $42 billion to $34.9 billion. Canva ended 2025 with about 265 million monthly users. Roughly 31 million pay. By July, monthly users were down to about 208 million. That's a lot of free accounts to run expensive AI for, and ChatGPT and Gemini will now make the poster or the slide deck people used to open Canva for. In 2023 Canva said it had "no plans to do any lay-offs." In 2025 it cut 10 of its 12 technical writers. It's been cash-flow positive for nine years, but leaked numbers show revenue barely moved this year. This is what it looks like when AI squeezes a company rich enough to hand out MacBooks and $10,000 grants. Most software companies feeling that squeeze aren't.