YouSaid · the spoken record

Damian Bradfield

lines on the record: 40
first: 2022-01-03
most recent: 2022-01-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And as long as we transfer continue to do well financially, we can really start to make an impact, and particularly because of COVID, an awful lot of the industry got badly cut.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's solid. And in the beginning, we were doing projects and giving away money and media, but it would always come out of marketing. And if a company spending money on investing in those sort of initiatives through marketing, marketing is always the first thing that gets cut. So I'm really proud that we set up this foundation and it's supported with 1% of revenue from WeTransfer. At a certain point, a company becomes so big that it becomes a bit more of a corporation and lots of other people that join the company are very fixed on making sure that it delivers financially. I love having the foundation as a hook because I'm equally motivated that it works financially because I can really do something good with that money. And in 2022, we will start our first grants program. We're supporting young artists through Europe. We've just closed a massive six-month research project really trying to find out who needs it most, you know, which sectors, which areas of Europe really need the money most. And next year we will start handing out grants and an awards program.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we transfer is famous for doing one thing really well, as is Google. But like Google, it has many different things that we're up to. So we transfer is a historically famous tool that everyone used for file sharing, but we also have Collect, which is a mobile app for rich media mood boards. Paste is a beautiful presentation tool, very sexy equivalent of Keynote. Paper is number one drawing app most downloaded drawing app on the App Store. So if your kids may be getting near the age where they'd be able to doodle and sketch, paper is a beautiful tool. And with WeTransfer, we've recently been building out a multitude of different features that will take it from just being about file sharing into more of the collaboration space. And then, of course, as we've discussed already, we have WePresent. But the most exciting thing for me in all honesty is the foundation. So we started a foundation last year. I'm really proud that the work that we've been doing has really begun to become something substantial.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And today we had three million readers that turn up every month to dive into the stuff that we're doing. Like I said, we've done some amazing work. And what I think is the most special about we present is it's back 100% by WeTransfer. So there's no advertising major play. You don't get bothered by ads or banners or anything else. And we have a separate team managing it that means it's not a corporate blog or an extension of we transfer. It's intended to be there with an ambition to compete with the Atlantic, not to compete with Adobe's internal blog or Dropbox's culture platform or something. It's really something that we felt needed to exist and we had this again phenomenal opportunity because so many of the world's most amazing creators used our platform and there weren't that many places for their projects to be told or showcased.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So really early on, we did loads of projects and we commissioned a load of films called, we had a production company in London. So we made films called One Minute Wonders and there were 60 second films featuring a whole host of different individuals from Damon Orban to Erica Badu and all sorts of people. That then extended into the creative class, which was an exploration based on Mike Davies City of Quartz book about this new breed of creative thinkers that were arising. And we featured people in London and Cuba and all over the place. And what we found was that we had all this content floating around the internet, but it was everywhere and no one could find it. And we thought it was great, but no one else could actually find it unless we were driving them to it. So we present actually started as a platform called We Transfer Culture. It then morphed into a site called This Works and then finally became We Present only in 2018, I think. It was really intended to be a house, you know, where we would put all the stuff that we'd been making under one roof so that people could find”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thousands that no one really understood, and today it's exactly the same thing happening in Web 3.0. It all looks and feels like BitTorrent, which people didn't understand. So I think there's a phenomenal opportunity coming up for companies, people, individuals to come in and help make this more accessible. To break it down so that Naral, my partner, who was in the business in the beginning, always said that it was built for his mum and dad. And they could use it and they needed no manual to describe how you needed to send something through wetransfer. It was just dead easy.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, it was a design driven business. And from the get-go, there were beautiful big images in the background. And in the very early days, all the images in the background clicked out to the artist's website themselves. So it was even more altruistic than it is today. It was generally about you discovering somebody and then going and finding out more about them. And we would give it away or sell it to those individuals. But yeah, in 2009, again, when the website first launched, you've got to remember Minecraft had pretty much just launched. Gmail was in beta. Michael Jackson had just died. Obama had just come into power. It was really a different space. And what I think is really interesting, particularly looking at the NFT space right now, we came in and our biggest competitors were a lot of the companies that were really busy doing piracy rapid share mega upload. And then there was BitTorrent. And BitTorrent was the crypto kid of the early 20s.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think there are so many reasons for it, but I think it's in all honesty. The people that loved us from the beginning and the people that still love us today, I think love us for the simplicity of the platform and its non-obtrusiveness. We really try very hard to be human. So you don't get spammed with a thousand emails from WeTransfer unless you're sending files up and down all day long. But that's your own fault. But in general, from us, we try to treat it, as I said earlier on, like a conversation or a relationship. So, you know, we're there when you need us. We try to make the experiences beautiful as we possibly can when you're there. And then I think there's nothing nicer in life than a surprise. And I don't mean surprise me with a gift on my birthday because every company knows your birthday. And of course, they're going to send you that stupid email on your birthday offering you 10% of something. But to genuinely give you a surprise when you turn up and you lose a service and you say, oh my God, is that JavaS Cocker on We Transfer? That's funny. And then you go off.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Visibility. There literally isn't another one. Even the Sunday Times, your front sheet of the Sunday Times is made up of lots of blocks and lots of text. We transfer is one visual and it fills up the whole screen and it belongs to somebody else. It's totally unique.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I mean, we get huge satisfaction. If I think of it personally, I mean, we've worked with some of the greatest artists in the world. You mentioned a few, but Bernardine Everesto, Jarvis Cocker, Rez Ahmed, Maria Bromovich, I mean, we've done some amazing work. And this year in particular has been a really exciting year. We did a fantastic project with Marina Abramovich. Honestly, one of the greatest living legends in the art world, but also really nice person, you know, really interesting, fascinating, still energized individual. And I think it's amazing that we have built a platform that on the face of it is a file share in business, but at its core is so much more than that, and that these artists actually recognize that and want to work with us to get exposure, working with someone like Riz or with Marina or John Legend, they come to us because there is no other platform on the planet that has the same sort of real estate that we have, that we can gift to an artist or a project to give it.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything moved. I mean, unfortunately, there were too many of us on this planet. I'm not saying that we should remove any. But if everybody suddenly switches from regular milk to soya, it creates another problem. If everybody moves from the highways to being behind a super high retina display, it creates another problem. So unfortunately, you know, with so many of us, we just have to be much more moderate in everything that we do and be very cognizant of what it is that we're doing. Because to suddenly have a household of four people working and studying from home or sitting behind screens, of course it's going to do something to the servers, but most people are not conscious, I think, of the impact of the internet or computers, yeah.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Provide us with as much insight as they possibly can. And our goal for next year is to really make sure that we're telling our users exactly what their usage looks like. So we're building a carbon calculator, they'll be able to see exactly what it means to upload a file, what you're using in terms of how many grams of CO2 you're emitting and what you can do about it. Because the most interesting thing around the digital carbon emission space is that most people are not even thinking about it. You talk about climate change, we're thinking cars, planes, perhaps we're thinking about diesel motors and engineering, but the idea that you sitting behind a Netflix show on a 60-inch TV in HD is emitting 500 grams of carbon an hour. It's not on anyone's radar at all. And I don't want to ruin anyone's fun. But if you understood that the difference between watching something in SD and HD is half the carbon emissions, you wouldn't even notice the difference on your TV.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, as a B Corp, we have to make sure that we're hitting different goals. For those people that don't know, you have to recertify every three years to become a B Corp again. And basically they move the goalposts. So it gets tougher every three years. We have to be on our toes with regards to making sure that our partners are our B Corps and the service that we run is as clean as climate friendly as it possibly can be. This year we became climate neutral. We're certainly on the way. Our biggest challenge is, of course, the servers, the power we transfer. Our service is powered by AWS. So Amazon runs the back end of WeTransfer. They have servers all over the world. Everybody wants fast, so we have to have servers in different countries. Different countries have different policy and some of them are greener than others. And our mission really is to work with AWS constantly. And it's a constant conversation to lobby them, to provide us with as much green energy as they possibly can, to”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very honestly about how they knew that semi-automatic weapons were a terrible thing and launched this film, took all the advertising off we transfer and just focus on gun reform with a whole load of other projects that we commissioned. And the film was shown at the Washington March. And we spent a lot of time worrying that we were going to alienate a lot of people. That was not the case in the slightest. We found that companies that were daring to make that sort of statement, I think, were so well respected and certainly for our community it was a no-brainer. Absolutely everybody was behind it. Obviously a few people complained, but you're always going to annoy a couple of people even when you're doing amazing stuff that you think no one's going to have a problem with. It's amazing who can find a problem with something.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, not in the slightest. On the contrary. I mean, it wasn't something we went into lightly, but I was living in the US at the time off the Parkland shootings with both my kids in school. And, you know, we were already struggling with the idea that an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old had to have lockdown drills. I'd never experienced anything like that in my life. And I really despised actually the idea that my kids would have to even understand what that was. So when the Parkland shootings happened, we just felt like we should do something. And again, going back to our audience and the media that we have, we have huge reach and we just felt that at that moment we had to really do something with it. So some serendipity happened. A friend of mine was working on the march for the lives. They were going to Washington. Another friend of ours was talking to a producer who wanted to put on a film with veterans talking about their belief that semi-automatic weapons should be banned. So we sort of threw ourselves into this project, produced the film that was featuring veterans really just talking.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need to think about your partners, the employee base that you have, and really it's anything to do with being a good citizen.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So a B corp is basically an organic food label for companies, really. If I was to have a vision as to where B corps would be ultimately in the future, B Corps wouldn't exist. They would have done their job. The organic food label would have been removed from the packaging and you just know that it's good and everyone's sort of up to speed. For now, the job is really about education and trying to get companies to think about being responsible. So for us, it wasn't a huge leap because from day one, we gave away 30% of our media to support up and coming artists and projects. We'd spent a lot of time with Martha Lane Fox, where she had an organization then called.everyone that was really trying to lead with regards to responsible technology. We were already doing a lot around transparency and governance and trying to make sure that we were acting responsibly. But any business that wants to get into becoming a B Corp, you need to think about diversity, you need to think about sustainability.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd love to see the gentrification happen in Web 2.0, but it's quite likely that, as with most cityscapes, we'd only gentrify in the old once we've already erected the new. So we'll probably all rush towards Web 3.0, start building and scaling there, and then go back and look at Web 2.0 and see what we're going to do with that. But I do think it's so much healthier than it was five years ago, that's for sure.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that used to be the case. If you look at the US now, Tim Wu is now advising. So I think it's changed. And I would like to think if you have, if they understood and understand that they need to have somebody like Tim Wu in place, I can't imagine for a second that they're not already thinking about Web 3.0 and what the impact will be on society. And this is always a difficult question, right? I think can you intervene without killing it? And I do think there's a real healthiness to the development of a new space. I think it needs to exist.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the fascinating thing right now is if I look at the Web 3.0 space and NFTs, the exact same thing is happening as happened 25 years ago with the internet. So the goalpost just moved again. That's where I think it's really interesting. Probably by the time government and legislation have got Web 2.0 fixed, everyone basically will be prospecting and mining Web 3.0 and government is going to have to get their head around that blockchain, cryptocurrencies, the death of fiat currency, whatever the topics are that they're going to have to try and deal with. In a decentralized, incredibly private and encrypted space, I think it's going to be a real challenge.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“worries me that this is potentially how it's being used. So the book really was just an exploration of how data is being used, you know, what companies are doing with it. I didn't have the answers. I don't have the answers, but my sort of plea was for people to be aware of what's happening, for individuals to make sensible choices, for companies to make sure they're being responsible with their data. And for legislators to get involved. And I'm very pleased to say, I think we've seen a ton of legislators getting involved in the last two years. There is finally some serious, sensible conversations having in governments across the world, not just in Germany and the UK, but everywhere, restricting the use of big data or the amount of monopolies controlling information. And I think most importantly, there's been a wake-up call for you and me, the man on the street, understanding, or the cost of convenience is. And that's ultimately what it comes down to.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were fascinated by how much insight they could extract from my kids' behavior, what they were reading, the pace of their reading, their skills in math, their ability to be able to focus, their attention span, and all of this data was basically being amassed. And the company that was amassing it was eventually bought by Google. And what I didn't like and made me really wary was where the internet was going, where this data was going, and how it was potentially even being misused, I think, for and potentially affecting the future of a kid that's eight years old. And what I mean by that is I think there would be enough AI and enough data around an eight-year-old's career educational development and a nine-year-old's and a 10-year-olds, that by the age of 13 or 14, probably a computer is able to determine whether or not you're going to get into Harvard without having to do the exam. And I just thought, okay, I think I need to write something about this.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I mean, in hindsight, I don't know if it was the smartest idea or use of my time ever. And by the time I'd actually got the book published, a lot of what I'd written I felt was already very commonplace and well understood. But in 2015, when I started it, that was Cambridge Analytica. And I was deeply disillusioned with the state of the internet, something that, you know, I really believed when I first got into the internet was going to be amazingly exciting. Tim Berners-Lee had been a pioneer. There were prospectors all over this place, but yet there was still great hope for companies to be able to push through and create something that people had never seen before. And what happened was that it was very quickly becoming a space that was owned and managed and controlled by very few. It became a very elitist space. And my kids at the time were eight and ten. And we were in a school in America where big data was talked about all the time.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow, back in 2015, that's when I started it. I mean, you probably know this too. The publishing world is not very fast moving.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Left the agency world in about 2018 once we fully committed to just focusing on we transfer. I still think I sort of play an agency role even in the business we have today. We have a ton of creative”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could be a filmmaker, and the sort of exclusivity that an agency had on creativity was definitely disappearing. Again, not all negative. It just was a big change. So my path took me to setting up another venture studio, which at the time was relatively novel, but today there must be a gazillion venture studios out there. And what we wanted to do was basically create different tools and products that we thought would be relevant to the creative community. One of them was called Artists and Algorists, which was a very early NFT play. Way too early. No one was interested. The idea of having digital art was back then just not something that people were concerned about. But we transferred definitely was. And we transfer this started by two friends and I joined them nine months later to, you know, work on something that we bootstrapped. So we had to keep doing consultancy work and advertising agency work on the side to pay the bills. So I only really...”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, well, I mean, it's a squiggly line. It's definitely not a straight path, let's put it that way. I'm a generalist, so I studied at London School of Economics. While I was studying there, I had a job working for Stella McCartney. It took me to setting up a fly posting business and a leaflet business in London as I chose the most expensive city on earth to study. And that eventually took me into advertising, which I did for, I don't know, 10 years or something like that. No regrets. I mean, I think the advertising industry gets a bit of a bad rep sometimes. But I still think that the training that working in a good advertising agency gives you in strategic thinking, in the analyzing and distilling an idea is really critical to any business. But by 2005, I was pretty much done with being in an agency. And certainly the market had shifted so much that everybody believed that they could be creative, you know, tooling was beginning to come into place where you could be a photographer if you wanted to be.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the West. And I think to some degree, again, technology has got something to do with that. I think we as companies, as individuals have become slightly more risk-averse as we look at data, historic data to tell us what everything in the future is going to look like. And my belief is that that leads to less creativity because it forces people to be less risk takers. And the research was pretty clearly showing that isn't the case in Latin America where they seem to be still far more willing to go with their gut and to go out on a limb on an idea, which is super important for creativity.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't think that's new news to be honest. So unfortunately, some of the results that we found, which were a little bit depressing for me, were exactly the same issues in the creative industry as I experienced 20 years ago. So there was a belief in the United Kingdom and the US that they were the epicenter of everything amazingly creative for a lot of Americans and Brits, I think that's still the case. Whereas if you would in reality go to any of the award shows, you'd see a ton of awards being gifted to Latin America. you know, Brazilian agencies, Indian creatives and designers, it's a bit of a myth really that it's all been coming from the West for the last 20 years. This has already been happening. What was also, though, interesting in the report was that it identified risk takers. And again, this probably doesn't come as any major surprise. But what was evident was that our Mexican colleagues and Latin American friends were far, far more willing to take creative risks than the majority of creative.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Demand, and I say demand because I really think it is an absolute mandate that as a company you need to be talking about these things, being transparent about them. And perhaps that's something else that is a big stimulus for us with the ideas report is there is a real demand for transparency today. Companies, individuals are required almost to be as transparent as possible. And I think the Ideas report goes some way towards trying to show what's happening on our platform and that compounded with us becoming a B corporation and sharing as much insight as we possibly can. I think it's, again, our attempt to answer this demand that I think exists from younger employees.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody is asking for companies to step up. So the Ideas report is one piece of research that we've recently done. The materiality report is another piece of research we've just concluded. And that was between our employees and shareholders and our partners. And it's across the board, climate change, sustainability is the number one thing that they demand us as a company to be responsible for and to try and find solutions for. And diversity and equality is the second. This is something that the tech industry has not been particularly good at in embracing a diverse working culture. I'm quite proud to say that we're pretty much 50-50 female male across the organization and certainly through we present, we try very hard to make sure that our work, the partnerships, projects we do is very much representative of every continent on the planet throughout the year of every sexuality. That's the second biggest.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or sold more t shirts on my Squarespace site, I could earn more money than I'm doing right now. What on earth am I doing? I don't think it's a surprise in the slightest that there are mental health concerns and mental health issues greater than we've ever seen before. And I think if you understand depression, the number one driver of depression is a lack of control. And I think that has been never more pertinent for any of us to be frank, but particularly for a younger generation that somewhat are not to blame for the issue, right?”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, again, it's unsurprising, unfortunately, and it's all been exacerbated, particularly the last couple of years. If I was going through COVID and being locked down and earning £16,500 as I did when I first started out, sitting on the end of my bed every day locked up at home, I would have also had some mental health issues. I can't say that I would have dealt with it particularly well. So I don't think it's particularly surprising. I also think, again, this is where the research that we did compounded with other research that's happening and at the moment I'm referencing a Morgan Stanley document and a project we've been talking to Ruby Wax about was understanding that there is suddenly a definitive conclusion that climate change is real. That felt like in the last year it was definitive and understanding that if you're 20 and there's little that you can do on your own about it and then being locked up in your room and then doing a job that you wish that you were perhaps not doing or thinking if I only sold more NFF”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two or three years around cryptocurrencies and NFTs, e commerce platforms that you can create yourself where you can earn income on the side, I think is also a major contributor to it because my first job I earned $16,500 a year as a crappy account manager and advertising agency. If I could have supplemented that income by selling, trading some NFTs and building a website and selling t-shirts on the side, I would have absolutely have done it. And it would have helped me massively. I mean, you're paying off student debts and student loans and stuff. I think that is what we're seeing today, that employers need to understand that flexibility that's required by somebody that's a Gen Z and embrace it as opposed to trying to control and almost smother young employees into the”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flexibility. So I think the number one word that any corporation needs to understand and really embrace today's flexibility. And we've seen that our user base was particularly motivated by, I think, by change and by flexibility, by being able to move and have different stimulus. And it's hardly unusual, is it? I don't know if your kids are very young, but minor teenagers. And their attention span is very short. They are fed information, an incredible pace. And all the technology and media that they're absorbing today is at such a pace that they are consuming so much that their attention spans, I think, are shorter than mine or our generation. If that's the case with regards to social media and the way that they absorb media and talk to their friends, then surely it will probably be the same when it comes to work. And the stimulus that they require from a job. And I also think that the market that's being created, particularly over the last”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We share it can add weight to another piece of research that somebody else might be gathering at the same time, and those compounded really can help us identify some of the bigger sociological issues that I think are facing us right now.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On trying to make it look decent, that's something that we transfer is always spend a lot of time and money against. But the thing I love about it is that it's that information that we have a right to and an access to information that is really powerful in the hands of many, as I said previously. So, you know, what I'm really excited about is if I take some of the insights, particularly around Gen Z, which I've struggled with personally to try to understand. I'm not Gen Z clearly. I'm a different generation, but I think if I look at some of the issues that we have within the company and I hear from friends and other people with a strong Gen Z workforce, I found it quite difficult to understand what it was that they were looking for, what's motivating them in the workplace and why have we been talking about for some time this great resignation, which I'm sure everyone is sick and tired of hearing about. But what is it at the root cause that's making people feel as if they have to move or want to move or don't want to stick around in one place? And I really think that some of the work that we did in the Ideas report,”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's honestly an intrinsic belief within the company that it isn't ours. Our bread and butter is in basically an advertising business and a subscription business. And everything else around that is really an added benefit or almost a luxury. We feel really, really honored that we've had 10 years building up this audience space and working with that audience. And I think we have a relationship with our audience that is really built on trust. And I think if you understand what a trusting relationship feels like, maybe some people are asking those questions may not understand what a trusting relationship is, but it's one where there's a certain degree of honesty and unconditional giving or mutual respect. And I feel really proud that that's the culture that the company has adopted over time. And I really believe that our user base really respects us for it. It's their insight at the end of the day. And all we do really is package it up and present it back. The design, you know, we spend a long time.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We think it is only really powerful if it's actually in the hands of people that can benefit from it and do something with it. So it's been a long project. I mean, in 2018, it felt quite surface level 2021, 2020 was obviously nearly all about COVID. Unfortunately, we're not quite through that phase yet, but in 2021, we tried to avoid it. We tried to talk around the issues that have perhaps been exacerbated by COVID and that are now facing the creative industry. And there's a ton of very interesting insight that I think came out of it that again is only useful in the hands of many. It's not useful if it's just within the walls of we transfer.”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this is the fourth year of the ideas report. So it started in 2018 and we are in a privileged position really that we have an incredible user base, so 80 million plus users that turn up every month to use our services. And fortunately, again, we have a pretty good relationship with them. So if we ask them to take part in something, we get a pretty good response better than I think a lot of other companies might. And over the years, we would ask them what they were feeling or what they were experiencing and what work was exciting or what was really motivating them. And we obviously used it for our own good, but it felt like we had a bigger responsibility. And it felt like if we were to really try to dig in, we could perhaps extrapolate some bigger trends or some bigger movements or identify some things that could help others. And, you know, we've been asked previously why we would share this information. It's not our information. I mean, it's information that our users have. And it's information that”
2022-01-03 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Damian Bradfield, Co-founder of WeTransfer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT