RECRUITMENT & RETENTION

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Adobe Stock

The minting of new millionaires is a well-known phenomenon among some startups with IPO ambitions. If an employee gets in on the ground floor of a new business and amasses equity grants in the company over time, they could come into an enormous amount of wealth quickly when said company debuts on the stock market.

This isn’t the case for all IPOs, but it certainly was when SpaceX went public earlier this year. When Anthropic has its IPO in mid-November, some 3,000 employees are set to become multimillionaires, according to an analysis cited by the Washington Post from Hill.com, a platform tracking private market transactions. Another 1,200 employees will likely become deca-millionaires, while 50 early employees could become centimillionaires (Anthropic has 5,300 employees total, per an S-1 filed ahead of its IPO).

“Depending upon when you joined an organization, you could be coming into life-changing wealth,” Lauren Tropeano, chief people officer at Docebo, an AI-enabled learning management system, explained.

What motivates employees to keep working after they become millionaires (or better) overnight? HR leaders, analysts, and consultants told us about the strategies they use to retain top talent amid an IPO, from offering additional compensation to new opportunities.

For more on how HR can retain workers who get rich off IPOs, keep reading here.—CV

      

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TOTAL REWARDS

Canva

The graphic design platform Canva recently announced a restructuring that will impact 1,271 people, or 22% of the workforce.

In a note to employees, Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins said the decision represented “without doubt the hardest moment in our thirteen-year history.” She alluded to “new technology” that’s “transforming what people can create, how they create it, and what they expect from the products they use.”

Canva missed its earnings guidance in Q2 2026, when Perkins wrote in a letter to shareholders that the company was “relying too heavily on frontier models,” i.e. routing traffic through third-party AI models, rather than launching their own AI products, according to the SaaS CFO, an industry newsletter.

Despite the hard news, some HR leaders praised Canva leadership for offering a severance package that’s generous by industry standards. The company is offering not only six months’ salary and career support to affected workers, but also more niche perks, like letting them keep their company laptops.

For more on how Canva’s severance package stacks up against industry standards, keep reading here.—CV

      

TECH

Shannon May, Photos: Unsplash, Adobe Stock

Michael Haske took the reins as CEO of HCM platform isolved in May. He was tasked with tackling the next phase of the software company’s growth amid the ongoing AI transformation, and grabbing what he sees as a real opportunity for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to harness the power of agentics.

HR Brew caught up with isolved at the HR Tech conference in Las Vegas earlier this month to see how the first few months of Haske’s tenure at the platform is going, talk about what’s next for isolved, and the HR of it all.

When he joined in May, Haske said “isolved was trying to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people, spreading itself too thin, so focusing on anything from one employee to 10,000 employees and everything in between.”

For more on what’s next for isolved under Haske’s leadership, keep reading here.—AD

      

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work perks

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Turnover of partners at the top 100 law firms by revenue in the country this year is on track to increase nearly 100% from a decade prior, as an explosion of moving talent rocks the profession, even leading to the closure of one 95-year-old firm. (the Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “I would comfortably say with less than a minute, you can clone somebody.”—Hany Farid, a computer science professor at Dartmouth College and chief science officer at cybersecurity firm GetReal Security, on the easy ability for bad actors creating deepfakes, like the ones that stole more than $129 million from various companies by posing as top executives and lawyers to employees (the New York Times)

Read: Abundant AI access is the new badge of prestige in the workplace. As companies look to trim budgets, teams deemed revenue generators, or high value, are granted abundant access to AI tools, while those considered cost centers face increasing usage restrictions. (Bloomberg)

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