How many companies get a chance to redefine themselves? WeTransfer did. After we settled some of our money issues, we knew we needed to focus on what was at the core of the company – here we were, lucky to be a transfer service that would last and be relevant as long as people needed to shift their ideas to another person.
We’d fostered a fan base with artists, the community that mattered most to us. We’d set out to become valuable to people who depended on the transfer of information, who built projects a step at a time, whose big ideas needed big files. If we played our cards right and truly made this community happy, they would never stop transferring. We had their loyalty. We had their trust. Now we wanted to help them produce.
There was a prolonged span of time when we were able to look around the cultural landscape and say: Wouldn’t it be cool if this existed, or that existed? (This could have been the result of getting a little money.) We were keen to start projects and conscious of setting a tone. Transfer meant things got built, ideas were broadcast. We’d made short films. Maybe it would make sense to start a radio station? We thought about the time-honoured ways that information and thought were transferred. We thought about the transfer of ideas from professor to student. Maybe down the road we could start a university? Someone’s got to start a university. Why not? Student debt was already getting out of hand. (We started one. More on that later.)
The way we viewed and treated the site changed. We had created a space for discovery, and in order to ensure it remained interesting and substantial we needed to curate it. The space needed great advertising to help keep the site alive, and beautiful visuals to help keep visitors engaged. It was around this time that we began to recognize a distinction between ‘great’ advertising and what else was out there. Some argued there could never be such a thing as great advertising. Advertising, they said, was always a scam. And yes, in some ways it is. But by that point, we’d seen our competitors destroy their bond of trust with their users. They’d decided to forego obvious advertising for the data mining model. We’d seen the reach of peak spam. We’d seen all the different and nasty ways advertising was cloaking itself. Advertising could be something different. Maybe not ‘great’, but better.
Many people referred to our ads as the ‘billboards of the web’. Why was that? We weren’t evangelical about the healing power of advertising. But we also knew it didn’t have to be a drag. We applied rules to the advertising we showcased. Less is more. Limit the amount of copy. Keep the messaging short and to the point, and attract people visually. If this advice sounds like a voice from the past, you’re right. These rules were lifted from the advertising greats.
Six words or less is ideal.
Get noticed. Don’t distract.
Billboards don’t do direct response.
Be smart.
Don’t say it. Show it.
Avoid repetition.
Keep it simple, stupid.
Convincing online advertisers to follow these simple rules was always a struggle. But convincing artists was easy. The more creative the individual or organization, the easier it was for them to understand why this was so important.
Throughout this process we had a feeling our approach was not bad business. Pivoting towards the outside world and working with artistic communities wasn’t going to sting us. If anything, this announcement of our values meant that users were often pleasantly surprised by what else we were up to. We weren’t putting our funds into surveillance. We weren’t putting our money and energy towards a kind of Ayn Randian zero sum view of the world. We weren’t looking to crush, co-opt or monopolize.
In our own small way, we wanted to change the larger definition of trust in the tech world. The focus was put on useful collaborations, rather than data mining and ploys to harvest more from users.
We kept interrogating the definition of sharing. Where had it come from? How could we define it for ourselves? If we asked others to share, shouldn’t that mean we could do the same? The transparency we believed in went both ways.
WeTransfer had become a service for the curious. We’d attracted millions of users. These people naturally embraced the idea of sharing ideas. We just helped the ideas along their journey. We did have a bit of luck, too. We were on the right side of history. Our business had changed and grown, but the context had changed too.
What else was happening with the other file sharing sites? Good question. It wasn’t a great scene out there. In the years following our birth, the file sharing world started to implode. MegaUpload, run by the king of all internet narcissists, Kim Dotcom, was shut down for promoting piracy and plagiarism. YouSendIt made the gross error of engaging an advertising agency and heeding their advice to change their name to Hightail. (What’s a hightail? Who would want to have a hightail?) RapidShare rapidly disappeared. The less said the better.
WeTransfer sailed on, promoting creativity and quality, at peace with the record industry instead of hunted by their lawyers. We had always fostered close ties with musicians and music industry employees. Our friends worked in the music business. The service was built for people like them. But the dream of partnering with triple A musicians to distribute music using our service seemed distant.
We were no longer in fight or flight mode. It was time to collaborate and put some of these ideas in motion, especially since we looked around at how the competition was embarking on larger projects.
In 2013, our friends across the water at BitTorrent had partnered with Vice and Madonna to release a short 17-minute film entitled secretprojectrevolution through their platform. We watched closely as attention spiked and waned. Their transparent move to purchase credibility was greeted with disdain by the creative community.
Like many larger companies, BitTorrent has over the years partnered with artists, film-makers and celebrities to help grow their business. We were envious they had managed to get buy-in to develop this strategy of big bets. Luckily for us, the strategy of big bets was typically short term. They tended to die off quickly. Instead of making big one-off bets, we stayed focused on setting a tone, piece by piece, artist by artist.
We didn’t have to ponder which direction to take. Serendipity stepped in. A certain god-like purple figure entered our world. We tried to form a relationship with Prince. Who wouldn’t want to form a relationship with that guy? It died out. And then, surprisingly, it was reborn.
In March 2015, and in his typically philanthropic state of mind, Prince tried to convince Live Nation to allow him to email their entire database a WeTransfer link to download the new album from Judith Hill, the 31-year-old daughter of a Japanese piano player and the star of 20 Feet from Stardom. Live Nation said no.
Regardless, Prince uploaded Judith’s album to WeTransfer and shared it via Twitter. This single action started a chain reaction of events. First, it demonstrated that people were able to copy and paste short links to hosted music files. This action prompted the music industry to use our service more than ever to distribute, not just to help create, the music. It revealed an altruistic side of the cut-throat music industry. It inspired others, including Moby, to share new tracks and entire back catalogues of music.
This was a direction we’d have to take. And here we were again, embracing a fusty old concept that had been left behind in the mad scramble to release pirated music. What was our problem? Did this go back to us being Dutch? Did we just have a terrible problem shaking this sense of ethics? We built a music relations team to help facilitate the legal distribution of music to our growing community. They were creative. They wanted to share. They believed this could be the right way – even though it resembled the way people had always shared. With permission.
Oh, and what was I talking about when it came to post-secondary education?
In 2016 we launched the University of the Underground, one of the world’s first completely free MA programmes, which featured degrees in experience design and design thinking.
The process was intuitive. The artist Nelly Ben Hayoun helped set up a list of what the university would offer. There would be a focus on what she called social dreaming, critical design, social actions, politics, theatrical practices, film, music and experiential practices. The university aimed to provide toolkits for members of the public to actively participate in revealing power structures within institutions.
The University of the Underground supports unconventional research and practices that challenge the formulation of culture, the manufacture and commodities of knowledge. And – importantly for us – it’s a form of education that goes across borders and beyond nation states.
Seventeen students joined in the first year. The ambition is to have multiple campuses, with a strong US presence, to counter the ridiculousness of tuition fees and the increasing uncertainty of job security.
Through Nelly’s work we could see that the transfer of ideas was important in the context of a one-to-one relationship.
‘The internet is a fantastic tool, and a platform,’ she told me recently, ‘but this will never replace one-to-one tutoring and mentoring. The internet is a good platform to showcase your work, but for me the best platform is experience. Experience the event.’
More and more, it was integral for us – a fledgling internet company – to work with thinkers like Nelly who were focused on what she called ‘beyond-internet’ – what happens after the screen.
‘The problem with the internet now is that a lot of it is [about] the monopoly of platform, like Instagram, Facebook and others,’ she told me. ‘I don’t think the next revolution will come from there.’
I tend to agree.
I’ve mentioned offline values a number of times. With Nelly at the University of the Underground stressing the importance of what happened outside the online world, I looked around at the companies that have provided guidance to me.
I’d often ask myself one of the most elemental questions: What is good business? What is its essence?
I’ve spent my life looking at different companies, weighing them up, assessing, so I’ll choose a deceptively easy target. Everybody loves Ben & Jerry’s. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would say something like: ‘I simply despise Ben & Jerry’s. I despise the salted caramel core. How could they body-shame monkeys into believing they’re chunky?’
From the beginning, in 1978, at a Vermont gas station, Ben & Jerry’s has embodied good business – so good that, in 2000, Unilever bought them for about $326 million in cash, or $43.60 a share. Unilever made the purchase but also agreed to something called the ‘social mission process’. This basically meant they had to continue to fulfil exactly Ben & Jerry’s stated mission. It’s good business. The key point was that Unilever agreed to commit 7.5 per cent of Ben & Jerry’s profits to a foundation. Unilever was compelled to refrain from cutting jobs. The ice cream wouldn’t get messed with.
It makes sense. People love them for it, and Phish Food still tastes good, even if the band it’s named after leaves a bad taste in your mouth after one of their twelve-minute guitar solos.
More importantly, the story reads well on any page, including this one. Ben & Jerry’s wanted to make ice cream, and then they told compelling stories around it. Some individual flavours were attached to specific causes, but their starting point was good dessert, period. They didn’t need an external idea, like B Corp, to enhance what was already there.
A while ago I was with the then CEO of Ben & Jerry’s, Jostein Solheim, in San Francisco. Nineteen years after the Unilever purchase, little has changed. The governance they set out when they sold the company still states something along the lines of: ‘You can’t touch the brands. You can’t change the way our ice cream is made. You can’t change the way we treat employees, and you can’t change stuff we do with our mission.’
They installed a governing body that does not report to the Unilever board. The CEO of Amnesty International was made responsible. That’s the kind of strong governance most companies, including my own, don’t have. I mean, I wish we did. The structure they put in place enforced the future of Ben & Jerry’s.
Somehow, even in the world we must live in, this ice cream company was able to make a compelling argument to keep doing what it set out to do. They built trust and then remained determined to keep it. That’s brilliant business. For me it’s the benchmark. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re not there yet. We haven’t fully Ben-&-Jerry’d, but it’s a good goal.
Often we hear of smaller companies subsumed into larger companies and irrevocably changed. They lose their aim and their ability to hold on to any original values. Ben & Jerry’s aren’t just a success. They are one of the healthiest businesses in the whole of Unilever. Ben & Jerry’s have been fundamentally changing the way Unilever has approached GM. They’ve forced their parent company to take a different approach to organic and fair trade products. They’ve helped a cumbersome, huge parent company pay attention to the zeitgeist. In response, Unilever has changed many of its other products.
It’s brilliant: these two little hippies who knew little about business somehow unleashed a wave of change. It’s built on a trust embedded in the company. They’re not faking it. It’s not a slogan on a bottle of Innocent. And look what’s just happened. It’s become a good story to tell and retell. There’s a tangible warmth.
Let’s switch over to tech. Feel the chill, especially if you consider Comcast and Verizon and Spectrum, the three companies that dominate internet business in the US. Around 380 million people have access to the internet via this trio. Does anyone feel warmth towards them? Does anyone like these companies? Does anybody out there profess love for them, or admire what they’ve been able to do, the changes they’ve been able to install, the values they embody? Is there any sort of value system that should be exported from these companies?
Does anyone drive down to Tupelo, Mississippi, to visit the former offices of a small cable operator known as American Cable – the company that would one day become the Comcast behemoth?
If a little ice cream operation like Ben & Jerry’s can touch the hearts and minds of so many people, why can’t these three? If you think about it, the opportunity that Verizon, Comcast and Spectrum have to positively influence our lives is huge. I cannot exist today without them.
You might be tethered to them too – or companies very much like them in other parts of the world.
Why don’t they? That may seem like a naive three-word question, but let’s press at it with a little more force. Why don’t they? Which tech company is fulfilling the role of a Ben & Jerry’s? Who engages on that sort of level? I’d argue you’d be hard pressed to find anyone. Facebook would love to be included in the same sentence as Ben & Jerry’s. People love certain elements about Facebook, but look at the wince on the faces of your friends when Facebook is dropped into the conversation.
Do people really want to make pilgrimages to Facebook’s HQ? Perhaps. Perhaps they’re looking to recover some of their hidden data.
No one yells out: ‘I love Facebook. I love spending all my time on it. I love that feeling I get when I know it’s doing something that will fundamentally enhance the world.’ Facebook has become, for most thinking people, a grudging chore. You must maintain connection with it. The world dictates you do so.
I know what you’re thinking. I’d like Facebook and Comcast a lot better if they came from the freezer and had pieces of cookie dough embedded in them. I was arguing this with their CEO in San Francisco: it’s difficult for a tech company to elicit the same sort of response or reaction, or interaction, without having a physical presence.
You go to the fridge, pull out a pint, imagine the taste, read the packaging, follow the story. The physical presence is associated with fun and pleasure and tasting good. Comcast has got nothing like that.
It could be viewed as a deficit. Actually, this sort of relationship is a possibility for the tech sector. But we haven’t managed to produce an experience that really does capture hearts. (I’m hesitant to use the phrase ‘hearts and minds’ with all its connotations of wars in Iraq and Vietnam, but the two terms do go together, kind of like Cherry and Garcia.) The tech world gets your mind.
It’s rare we get your heart, and even rarer that we keep it. I don’t mean slavish devotion here. I’m talking about a triple prong – transparency, a company wreathed in a good purpose, and also a pleasurable user experience. Ice cream is pretty much the greatest user experience. There are different, subtle strands of trust woven together here. It matters.
At the moment, I’d say the warmest tech company is Apple. Apple has managed to move into the physical world. But that’s because they have a physical presence. Apple set a benchmark in retail. Most people like going to the Apple store. It’s beautiful: they like the products laid out on those big, flat wooden tables. The experience is phenomenal in terms of retail and their generosity towards space.
The pleasure of going into the Apple store is there’s about ten things set out in front of you with lots of airy space. Free Wi-Fi. They offer up a strategic generosity. But is generosity trust?
Maybe that’s what it is. Trust is the gift I give to you. You can’t ask it of me. Generosity is the thing that you can give to me. You can be generous. You can’t just suddenly become trustworthy. With Apple, a generosity comes through. But have they gained and kept our trust?
Another interesting angle is confidence. Apple has shown a confidence that not many other companies have. I would argue we have a similar brand of confidence. We have a whole screen dedicated to the transfer. We only fill it with one thing. There aren’t a lot of other websites confident enough to do that. The goal of the web is usually to fill the screen up with shit. You don’t know what you want, so I’m going to give you tons of stuff to choose from. That’s not confidence.
And it’s certainly not trust.