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Is Canva profitable? Europe airport cyber-attack and introducing 'workslop'

Plus: Click this link, I dare you

Author

Cam Wilson
September 23, 2025

Edition 2424

This is a really good edition so I thought I’d blast it out to everyone. As always, you can sign up for the newsletter here. It’s honestly embarrassingly cheap, like 1.5 (now 1.25 in Sydney) coffees a month.

The News

Is Canva profitable or losing hundreds of millions of dollars? Accountants say ‘depends’

Newly filed Canva financial documents that show a less-than-rosy picture of its finances — on paper, at least (AFR, $). Over the weekend, the tech Australian unicorn filed accounts for 2021 and 2022 which revealed that Canva has recorded five straight years of on-paper losses. In 2022, it reported a $222 million loss despite a 60% revenue increase to $962 million. Despite this, Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht says the company is “cash flow positive”, and a company spokesperson said that “statutory financials” will show losses because of things like “stock-based compensation”.

The Sizzle: Is Canva secretly a stinker? Until it IPOs — supposedly next year — we won’t know heaps but these financials don’t necessarily contradict Canva’s “profitable” claim. The point of difference is what the nerds call “non-cash expenses”, specifically the stock that it pays to its employees. When Canva, or Atlassian, or whoever, pays an employee with stock, there’s no money comes out of its bank accounts. But, as Capital Brief’s Bronwen Clune writes ($) Australian corporate law requires that this still needs to be recorded as a cost on the company balance sheet.

“When engineers accept equity over higher salaries, accounting rules mandate recording this as an expense, even though the company keeps the cash for growth investments.”

Bronwen Clune

So does that mean you should ignore the Australian financials? Are stock payouts essentially free money for companies? Not quite. Every share you hand out dilutes the other shares, meaning that existing shareholders are losing money. Plus, ignoring the stock payouts means that you’re undercounting exactly how much it costs to pay your staff (who have artificially low salaries on paper if you don’t include the equity).

So, the answer of whether you should pay attention to the financials that show Canva cash-flow positive or losing hundreds of millions of dollars is … probably both?

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

European airport ransomware attack continues

The delays across European airports continue into the week as officials reveal that it was the result of a ransomware attack affecting the check-in and boarding software (Bleeping Computer). Heathrow, Brussels Airport, and a number of others in Ireland and Berlin were brought to a standstill over the weekend after Collins Aerospace’s “Multi-User System Environment” was the subject of a cyberattack (Guardian). There’s no information yet as to who is behind the attack.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Let me introduce you to your new favourite term: ‘workslop’

Academics trying to square the rise in use of generative AI in workplaces with early reporting suggesting that many companies aren’t seeing material benefits from the technology have coined a new term: workslop (Harvard Business Review)

Workslop is AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.

HBR

The team makes the case that workslop is hurting productivity because people are using AI to do work that is good enough to pass on, but ultimately ends up being “unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand.” They say they see examples of this in coding, research and just general communication.

The Sizzle: I don’t want to be only negative about AI. In fact, in a future edition I’d like to share some of the ways that I am experimenting with AI (do you have some good uses? email me). Like most tools, I think it can be useful when used in the right situation (obligatory mention of IP, environment and corporate consolidation issues).

But as I was reading this article, I was thinking one thing: EXACTLYYYYYYY.

Everyone now knows exactly what it’s like when they’re handed a piece of workslop. It’s not just in workplaces either — people taking in open source projects or other collaborative efforts have to deal with this too. This sentence particularly resonated with me:

The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.

HBR

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Click this link, I dare you

This one has been shared a few times in the Slack (thank you mvyrmnd and Timo!) but it’s too good not to share widely.

Phishyurl dot com will take any link and make it look like, well, a phishy URL. Even better, it even lets you choose the phish theme (my personal favourite is adult content, naturally) and its link.

If you’d like to give it a whirl, here’s a link: https://cam-xxx.live/etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/protocol/var/log/ppp/logging/etc/firewalld/ipsets/library/etc/xdg/menus/hash/var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin/class/usr/share/zoneinfo/posix/recursion/etc/selinux/config/list/etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/repository/etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/exception/usr/lib/kernel/install.d/terminal/etc/apparmor.d/cache/firewall/etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/package/etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/latency/var/log/apt/history.log.d/throughput/adware_dropper_tool.exe?attachment=malware&cache=hijacked&cachecontrol=poison&certificate=tamper&cookie=forge&cookiejar=poison&dns=hijack&endpoint=bypass&firewall=spoof&form=inject&header=bypass&host=redirect&id=c5ef316efeae137fe6758954a5a25a709251da987a62aba2579d2411&payload=%28function%28%29%7B+return+true%3B+%7D%29%28%29%3B&port=flood&portscan=exploit&redirecturi=overwrite&script=inject&subdomain=redirect&token=replay&url=redirect

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electronics & electricals

Computing

Mobile

The End

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