Amidst all of our new projects and collaborations, WeTransfer transformed again. We decided to go international.
I agreed to move to the US. I wasn’t banished from the kingdom. (I don’t think.) Rather, I went to set up an office on the west coast while the board started looking for a new CEO in Amsterdam.
We had reconfigured the business, begun collaborative relationships all over the world, and it felt like the right time for more simplicity. We were one entity, WeTransfer, instead of three, and money was no longer a pressing issue. This gave us the chance to step back and survey what we’d become. We got to consider where we’d been and, in a slightly more disconcerting continuation, we had to figure out what was next.
Just as British musicians have always aspired to follow in the footsteps of the Beatles and crack the US charts, almost every European start-up has dreamed of conquering America. We’ve always been particularly obsessed with the place. Success in the US isn’t always possible, easy or worthwhile. But try telling that to ambitious Europeans.
Whatever you think of the current government, the US is the real deal: the country with the most Nobel laureates; the largest number of Olympians and VCs; the country where people either make it or break it. We’d reached 20 per cent penetration of the Dutch market, and now recognized that achievement as the point where we needed to cross the ocean.
We were – if I do say so myself – the darlings of the European creative industry. We were profitable. And once in a while, in moments of outrageous confidence, we thought to ourselves: Imagine if we could reach 20 per cent of the US market. Imagine if we could go there without changing our fundamental values.
That’s the other point that doesn’t get stressed enough. It’s easy to announce you’re heading to the US. It’s not always easy to choose the right place – to find the staging ground to continue with the same purpose and ethical drive. We could easily have set up in San Francisco within the crowd of tech companies fighting for column inches in TechCrunch. We too could have enjoyed unlimited investor meet-ups, company dry-cleaning services and in-office three-star Michelin chefs. But, increasingly, moving to the US doesn’t mean California. And moving to California doesn’t necessarily mean San Francisco. We’d had a taste of Silicon Valley VC culture, and it wasn’t right for us.
San Francisco is an amazing environment. Coming from Europe, the climate alone is both very attractive and weirdly European. The bay’s microclimate offers expats the chance to moan about the weather every day. Vineyards lie within arm’s reach. Mountains rise, forests sprawl, and in between are lakes and hiking trails. If it seems like a perfect holiday destination, maybe it’s best left for the holidays.
But from a work perspective things get complex: Commercial space is around $34 per sq/ft and project managers don’t come cheap, with salaries of around $100,000 per year. Developers get $300,000 per year, sometimes more. Housing is on average 45 per cent more expensive than nearby Los Angeles. It is the most expensive city in the US – and probably the most screwed up, as it becomes richer and richer and more unequal.
‘All this is changing the character of what was once a great city of refuge for dissidents, queers, pacifists and experimentalists,’ Rebecca Solnit wrote in the London Review of Books. ‘Like so many cities that flourished in the post-industrial era, it has become increasingly unaffordable over the past quarter-century, but still has a host of writers, artists, activists, environmentalists, eccentrics and others who don’t work sixty-hour weeks for corporations – though we may be a relic population.’
If we wanted to export our kind of thinking to the US, we wanted some distance from where all that usual thinking was taking place. We didn’t want to be part of the problem in San Francisco. And so, we went to the home of deep critical thinking and boundless community engagement.
Just kidding: we went to LA.
But hold on, LA is also more complicated than mere stereotypes. It’s easy to laugh at Los Angeles, but look closer and there’s something interesting happening within those city limits. Los Angeles was our landing spot. We could have done something completely out of the blue and set up in Missouri, but LA seemed radical enough.
Los Angeles still feels like it’s on the cusp. When we arrived, unemployment was dropping. House prices were on the rise. Average wages were increasing. Areas such as Downtown Los Angeles were undergoing redevelopment. The architecture – I noticed this as a European on my first reconnaissance mission – is more varied than most cities. The city is diverse, and so big that twelve major US cities will fit snugly within its city limits.
We wouldn’t be alone. Snapchat, Headspace, Dollar Shave Club, The Honest Company, TrueCar and 496 other tech start-ups were now all housed somewhere between Venice, Culver City and Marina Del Rey. Like a strange admission of surgical augmentation, this area had become known, perhaps stupidly, as Silicon Beach.
All of that worked in our favour (except the name). But it felt like there was a huge ethical customs check waiting for us. Could we export our Dutch values?
I had been visiting LA for a few years now and still found it a difficult city to pin down. It isn’t the city that never sleeps, nor is it the cultural capital, nor is it the windy city, nor the motor city.
After a while in California, I began to see why it could be good for a company like WeTransfer. LA is the forgiving city. It’s the city of reincarnation. We were still looking to bring about change in some small way. Our projects and collaborations were leading us in that direction. Nelly had given me a reading list from the University. It was full of writers who wanted change, who could foresee change. LA is the city most accepting of change. It’s a good place to fail – in the best possible way. Here, people fail every day. Actors have shaped this city and, week in and week out, they have to audition. Ninety per cent of auditions end in failure. So it’s fine. Failure’s not personal. It’s business. A city that understands the positive elements of failure is a great place for a start-up. Or for a company that is starting up afresh.
Just as important as room for experiments and failure was a feeling that being here helped us realize the growing importance of responsible tech. Suddenly we were surrounded by a cacophony of voices and opinions, expressed by all sorts of people, including those who found ways to deny the importance of responsible tech, or scoff, or loudly celebrate and justify the model of data extraction. In the US, the competing voices are piercing, clear, compelling and seductive.
‘How can this be wrong when we’re all doing it?’ one might ask, while justifying her own data extraction attempts.
‘How can this be bad when it’s so exciting?’
‘If the possibility is here, shouldn’t we try?’
‘Do not stand in the way,’ ominous drop in tone, ‘of the Internet of Things.’
The idea of responsible tech stands out when you move to a place where the latest tech trend cannot be wrong and the direction the Big Tech companies have set out for themselves is not only inevitable but always correct.
But we were heartened by a few responses in our new home. One was evident in our hiring process. We started to see millennials prioritizing the moral bearings of the company. Millennials: they actually care about whether or not the company is doing evil, being evil, and they’re willing to adjust their priorities accordingly. This isn’t just anecdotal. There’s a growing slice of the workforce that does not want to work on dubious projects – somehow the appeal of designing, for instance, censorship tools for the Chinese government or tracking devices or the ability to listen in on private lives doesn’t make their souls sing. Maybe it’s a California thing, but change towards responsible tech is going to come from entrepreneurs. It will be driven by pressure from the people they hire – who might be wise to data extraction practices by now, who might have read some of the growing body of literature, who might actually be rebels, unlike the ones who just dress like rebels in Silicon Valley.
And they might want to look for meaning, both in terms of form and company purpose. This idea helped us in our thinking about where we would stand in relation to the user. I’d become interested in Sir Ken Robinson’s ideas about ‘flow’. I was immediately attracted to the ramifications for the business, so the concept became one of the most important pillars of WeTransfer.
The move to California helped clarify what flow meant, and how it could migrate from being a mere catchphrase to a company stance.
At its core, flow implies assistance rather than surveillance. WeTransfer could continue to collaborate. We needed to collaborate, but flow would help us define what role we played in the act of collaboration. Flow meant that we could maintain, and even celebrate, our lack of intrusion – because that particular lack, on all levels, was becoming more and more important to us.
This trait also fitted in with our exportable Dutch attributes. We aren’t ever intrusive. Unlike apps and services that speak the language of flow and collaboration, but secretly monitor and record, our goal is to get and keep people in their flow, to leave them to themselves.
This way of positioning ourselves was becoming more and more important in the hiring process. Large tech companies can throw money at new hires, but these companies begin to contort and speak in opaque terms when new hires question them on data extraction and, generally, what they’re using surveillance techniques for. We didn’t have to twist ourselves to cover up our secret purposes. We didn’t have to pretend to love and value the questionable practice of stalking individuals as they went about their online lives. The hiring process got easier.
And so did the product. By removing so many of the barriers, irritations and interruptions of the web, we created a tool that allows people to carry on doing what they do best.
With luck, this is just the start of a development process, enabling creativity without disrupting it. Developing products that genuinely aid and fuel ideation. Actually, I hate the word ‘ideation’. Let’s just say: We’ll help you create.
Change was all around us. Our arrival date in LA was 1 August 2016, so we were in for geographical change, political change, and there was also an inevitable change in how we were perceived. There were some new lines in conversation we heard from our new American friends, sometimes repeatedly.
‘Oh, so you’re like YouSendIt!’
‘Aren’t you just like Dropbox but then with advertising?’
‘So, you’re a sort of Vice meets email?’
(Can you imagine such a thing? Shane Smith barking out: ‘Hey, bro, you’ve got mail! But I’ve got more mail!’ Gavin McInnes barking out … well, let’s not imagine what he’d be barking out these days.)
There were some distinctions to make to our new American friends: We aren’t Dropbox’s cousin, nephew or niece. We don’t act like them, talk like them or think like them. Don’t get me wrong, we have huge respect for Drew Houston, but we have heard the ‘funky Dutch cousin’ statement many, many times and it makes us sound like a terrible house DJ.
Have you met Funky Dutch Cousin?
He will spin from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m.
And then there were the bigger questions about beliefs and company purpose. Maybe it was the horizons. Maybe it was all the time I spent in my car on those long drives in LA. Things started to become clearer when it came to who we were and where we were going. As someone from an advertising background, I was aware of the exposure we’d offered, giving away our full-screen visuals.
It never felt like a bad deal to give them away. Visuals weren’t finite. By giving away our ad space it never felt, to me, like we were missing out or squandering some precious resource. We displayed the work of the best. Since 2009 we’ve given away more than 15 billion ad impressions to support artists and photographers. If you took our average price for this media, it would be roughly $22 per CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
When you look at it this way, we’ve given away over $330 million since our inception in 2009. A sceptic might say that we would never have been able to sell it all at that price, so let’s halve it: $165 million to support the arts is still pretty good.
Last year alone we gifted 5 billion ad impressions. So we weren’t doing nothing. We could always tell people we were doing our best.
The move to the US also meant we had faced another choice. Was it time for us to engage? What would that engagement look like in a world of responsible tech? Would it look stupid? Was it best to just keep our heads down?
In some ways, supporting artists was the easy choice, even artists who brought a political agenda to their work. Take the work of Giles Duley, a British portrait and documentary photographer who is known for his work documenting the impact of war. After losing both his legs and an arm after stepping on an IED in Afghanistan, Duley went on to document crisis and war, in time zones all over the world. He has worked with the UNHCR to document the ongoing refugee crisis. His work is formally beautiful and integral to our understanding of the world today. We helped Giles both design and build his platform Legacy of War and then helped him reach his Kickstarter goals and raise awareness.
You’d have to be heartless not to support Giles in his journey. It wasn’t difficult for us. The photos were already done. We were just helping Giles on his way.
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The next step for us would be getting involved in the making – introducing work, rather than just transferring it into the world. Companies were now intent on producing their own content. I was reminded of that each time I fired up Netflix. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the movement of the company. How does a company advance forward? We were definitely in motion, growing – and being led, in some cases, by the expectations of our younger staff.
Our decision to refrain from grabbing users’ data and to build a business model that did not stress intrusion had become, increasingly, a political act. We were already making a statement by adhering to a lean data policy. People weren’t hate-using our site. We had them, even for a moment. We were flowing with them, so to speak. (So Californian, I know.)
What could we do with this attention? It was as if we were, finally, conscious of our own growth. We were not just growing out of a panicky survival instinct. We weren’t just plunging forward. There was increasingly something special, to me, about our transformation. From the act of transfer to – possibly – the act of creation.
Now, from the sunny shores of the Pacific, what were we going to create?