WeTransfer Is Offering Ex-SoundCloud Employees $10,000 Each To Stop Looking For Jobs
“We desperately need innovation,” the file-sharing service’s president wrote in an open letter.
Panellists at the Digital Life Design women conference at Bavarian National Museum. June 30, 2011.
Photo by Sascha Baumann for Getty Images
In July, SoundCloud announced that 173 employees — approximately 40% of the streaming platform's workforce — would be laid off. On Wednesday, the founder of WeTransfer, Damian Bradfield, shared an open letter saying that he had emailed each of the former workers $10,000 if they stopped looking for new jobs.
The sum is " not as a loan or an investment but a gift," Bradfield writes, asking that they put the money towards creating the music industry's next big thing. "What we would like to see is a proposal for something you could design, build or manage that could be the new mail-order record club, SoundCloud or iTunes."
The "modest amount" of $10,000 is not intended to fund an entire project. "[W]e started small too, and it could act as a runway," the letter reads. "Or it could pay for the lights on a runway. Somehow, it could help you get off the ground.”
The idea came to Bradfield this year at the Tech Open Air Conference in Berlin, as he was speaking with a journalist. “It seems sacrilegious to just let [former SoundCloud employees] go out and get regular jobs," he writes. "We desperately need innovation. We need challengers.”
SoundCloud has pushed back against recent reports that the company is running out of funding.