Damian Bradfield, Chief Creative Officer & Co-Founder, WeTransfer: Creating Simple Solutions with Artistic Principals
Mar 7, 2022
Damian Bradfield is the Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer at WeTransfer, the leading cloud-based content-sharing platform that is in the business of making tools to shape and move ideas for creatives globally. While best known as a service to easily transfer large files to colleagues and loved ones, WeTransfer is a powerful storytelling company on a mission to make the internet more open and democratic. In my chat with Damian, we discuss how WeTransfer came to be, how it is creating impact through its editorial platform WePresent, and how a tech company builds and sustains critical trust at a time when others struggle.
This episode of Lead With We was produced and edited by Goal 17 Media and is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Audible. You can also watch episodes on YouTube at WeFirstTV.
Guest Bio
Damian Bradfield:
Damian Bradfield is the company’s Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder. He joined WeTransfer in 2010 as Chief Strategy Officer, before setting up the company’s US offices and creating WePresent. He was the co-founder of digital design studio, Present Plus, which was acquired by WeTransfer in 2016. Damian started his career at Stella McCartney before joining ad agencies AMV and later, J Walter Thompson. Damian is a published author of The Trust Manifesto, which debates online privacy, trust, and big data. He holds a degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Transcription
Simon Mainwaring:
From We First and Goal 17 Media, welcome to Lead With We. I’m Simon Mainwaring. And today I’m joined by Ryan Moor who started printing t-shirts for his punk rock band, and now is founder and CEO of Ryonet and Allmade Apparel, a socially conscious, eco-friendlier apparel line that he’s with a group of pioneering printers committed to better serving the planet and ending the cycle of poverty in apparel supply chains. And we’ll discuss how to identify a marketplace need and stand out in a crowded space like apparel, and how to leverage partnerships to scale your business without compromising your integrity, and how to disrupt an industry so that rising market forces build your business for you. Damian, welcome to Lead With We.
Damian Bradfield:
Thank you very much for having me.
Simon Mainwaring:
Now, Damian, before I dive into WeTransfer, which I’m fascinated by because you’re truly a technology company that’s doing things very differently and very effectively, I know you started your career in advertising. So give us a little background…
Damian Bradfield:
That’s just me.
Simon Mainwaring:
I know, right? Well, we will forgive you. But why were you attracted to advertising in the first place? What was the appeal of it?
Damian Bradfield:
If there’s anybody listening that’s under the age of 18, there’d probably be no appeal to it whatsoever today, but when I was a kid, advertising had quite a lot of kudos and there really were some fantastic ads being made. We didn’t have the internet. We didn’t have a lot of the media that exists today. So we are really talking about fundamental TV, cinema, radio, print, billboards. That was it.
Damian Bradfield:
And the idea of being able to convey a message in as few words as possible that really hit home, made you laugh, made you cry, made you want to learn more, find out more, was really intelligent. I was attracted to an appeal, to the intelligence of advertising that sadly you don’t see very much of today. There is not a lot of great advertising happening, but this is back in 1998, 2000.
Damian Bradfield:
There were some really amazing brands doing some phenomenal work, and there were some really intelligent people that were highly regarded in the world of communications. They still do exist, there are just less of them today, I think.
Simon Mainwaring:
Right. And I remember those days. As an Australian, I made the pilgrimage to Saatchi & Saatchi and Charlotte Street in London. We had those spray mount closets where you’d create an ad and you’d spray mount it and put it on some foamcore and you’d have artists retouching the ads, literally with paint brushes back in the day. It’s moved on from there. And what inspired you to evolve from advertising and to think about really launching a technology company? How did that transition happen?
Damian Bradfield:
It hasn’t really, the same fundamental applies to advertising as it does to WeTransfer or to be frank, anything that we tried to do and we failed at many things on the way. But my partners and I all came from advertising media design, we were all sending files all over the place. Some of it was still done by motorbike courier. Some of it was done by bike courier and some of it was done through FTP. And FTP was, and still is pretty complicated. It wasn’t a very nice interface. It wasn’t particularly easy to access. And what WeTransferred did, or what was trying to do in the earlier was really just break it down to the simplest technology, the simplest methodology that you could utilize to get something from A to B. And that’s really what WeTransferred did really well was just break it down so that your mom or my mom, or just Joe Public without any explanation could really easily access.
Simon Mainwaring:
And I think one of the things that people notice about WeTransfer because we all use it so often we take it for granted today, is that you’ve got a very interesting advertising model to your point. I mean, those big wallpapers that you have, which are engaging in their own right, that’s probably 24 banner ads that have otherwise could be used by a typical tech company that wants to throw advertising all over everything. So there you were, you saw the need in terms of file transferring, but you had a very different advertising model coming out of the gate. Was that just a light bulb moment that you had at its inception? Or is this something developed over time? Because today it’s very disruptive, especially how you’ve maintained it, but where did it come from?
Damian Bradfield:
So I’ll take zero credit for it. So a guy that was a partner of mine in the business, called Nalden. He had a blog and again, this is going back to 2008, 2009, 2010. Bloggers were quite a big deal. Nalden in the Netherlands was quite a big deal. Mashable in the states was a big deal. And people were desperately searching for information. And the blogger basically was that source outside of the traditional news world. And what Nalden did differently was he was pushing and publishing content stories, narrative around and things. And in the background, he had these big images that were basically just making the site look very different from what everyone else is doing. And he brought that to, WeTransfer basically using exactly the same methodology to take a very simple site that didn’t need an awful lot of text or a lot of buttons or features or anything else and reduced the technology as such to the lowest common denominator. Again, which became that little box just to the left hand side of the screen and the rest of it we basically just filled up with a beautiful image.
Damian Bradfield:
And what you shouldn’t forget is WeTransfer was primarily designed for people like us. So if you are aesthetically driven, if you are desperately against the disgusting banner ad, then you’re designing a platform for yourself. You want to make it look as attractive as you possibly can. So the desire was really to build something that we liked that we think other people would like, that took what Nalden had done with this blog and brought it basically to WeTransfer. But as opposed to just having an image from universal music or something, there would also be ads.
Damian Bradfield:
It wasn’t particularly easy because no one else was doing this at the time. They’re still not doing it. There are no other platforms that have the format that we have in terms of advertising. It’s not revolutionary, it’s a billboard. That’s basically what it is. It’s a billboard on the web. It’s a full page ad that you would see in Vogue magazine or GQ or somewhere else, but basically on the internet. And for whatever reason, people, when they were building websites over the last 20 years, decided that the best thing to do was to fill it up with as much crap as you could possibly fill it up with as opposed to strip it back to what would be the most aesthetically appealing. And it’s still today, the only platform really that has that very intrinsic, very basic need or goal to really try to make the experience as aesthetic as you can possibly make it.
Simon Mainwaring:
That can’t be overstated. What you’re doing is you’re giving the primacy to the user and you’re staying in keeping with that sort of the nature of that user, which is they’re the creative class, yet so many technology companies today seem to have sold out. And really you feel like that you are the product that they’re selling to the advertiser and they’re leveraging your data to then market to those advertisers and make money. So how does your business model work then? How do you have that sort of counterintuitive advertising model and still stay true to your audience?
Damian Bradfield:
It was really difficult. I can’t say that it was easy in the beginning. As I said, we were the only platform that had this type of ad. So we had to build a studio internally to make all the ads for people that eventually would understand that we could actually reach a massive audience and that people were really responsive to our types of ads. So once we’d gone out and actually sold them to Mercedes-Benz or Vodafone or whoever else, we then had to make all the ads. Now this is a blessing and a curse because we are our own worst enemy in terms of quality control. So we were, would only want to produce something and run something that was beautiful. A lot of the time we would be dealing with media companies who were looking at banner ads and saying, “Well, it needs to have this amount of text. It needs to have this many images. It needs to have this many buttons.”
Damian Bradfield:
And we would be having this argument saying, “We don’t think it does. It’s a billboard. It doesn’t need to have more than 10 words on it. Actually, if you have more than that, people aren’t going to read it.” In our experience, less is better. And if you just run a beautiful image of a new car with nothing else on it, people will click on it. And we were getting five or 6% click through rates, which today just does not exist. No one else was getting anything like it. But it was a bit of a struggle to get people’s head around the fact that it was different, that they needed to look at the internet slightly differently, that we were a far sharing business that actually had a very creative audience. And if I fast forward it to where we are today as an advertising business, it’s hugely successful.
Damian Bradfield:
We are still the only platform in the world that pretty much dedicates 95% of the space that that is taken up on the screen to somebody else. Even if you look at the New York Times or any other big quality publisher, they’re still filling up as much as the screen with stuff as they can. And we are very fortunate that we pretty much have all the luxury brands in the world advertising with us and they bring with them other premium products. And now the bar is sort of being set. We are being pushed by our advertisers to actually retain the standards that we have. It’s no longer a question of, can you bend the rules? Could we do a little bit more like you used to do, or like the others do.
Damian Bradfield:
Now are they actually are desperate for us to retain those standards and to make sure that we are keeping true to what we started off with doing. And it wasn’t intentional, one of the biggest selling points today is what everyone calls brand safety, that if you are a Chanel, your Chanel ad will never run on WeTransfer alongside something else that could be controversial because there’s only one ad running. If on the rotation we can control every single ad that rotates every 40 seconds. So we can guarantee you that you’re not going to sit alongside a Viagra ad or something for selling fur coats. It’s all in our control. Because we make everything, we check every single rotation and we are pretty much in charge of what the space looks like, very much like it used to be when I first started in ads in Vogue or on a billboard.
Simon Mainwaring:
So you’re a purist, a die hard purists. You’re the singularity and simplicity of messaging. And the point is well taken because if you are going to equip anyone to be an effective sort of extension of your marketing department or advocate for your brand, keep it simple. You’ve only got a very short attention span. They’re only going to take in a certain amount of information and all of this density and this noise as you say, waste that opportunity. What you are really talking though in essence is, you built this true trust with a creative class by making sure the user experience was aligned with who they are. And now by the sounds of it, the brands that advertise on your platform want you to stay true to that. And I know that trust is just a fundamental concept to WeTransfer. And you also wrote a book it in 2019, and I’d love to talk about that for a second, because it was called The Trust Manifesto.
Simon Mainwaring:
And obviously when you feel so compelled to write a book about this issue, you are royally annoyed about something. You’re pushing against some sort of trend that doesn’t align with your thesis of trust. So what made you write the book? Why is the internet so off course? Give us a sense of that.
Damian Bradfield:
So the good news is that I don’t think the internet is so off course any longer, but at the time that I started writing it, we were right in the middle of Cambridge Analytica. It was really the scandals that were happening around data. And I think there was a real lack of understanding by the general public as to what was happening with data and what you were giving up and what was being done with it. I had kids at the time that were eight and 10 years old, and we lived in America.
Damian Bradfield:
It became very common place that my kids were being asked to create accounts for school, be it through Google or whatever else, and handing over data constantly. Not just in terms of creating a Google account, but the login through Google that would go to their math and their reading software that was tracking or measuring how fast they were reading and their ability to understand different words. And what scared me a little bit was that at the time when I was talking to the school, they didn’t really have a grip on what could potentially happen with this data. And my worst case scenario was that my kids that were eight and 10, that were brought up in Holland that had moved to the states that had a bit of learning difficulties in terms of English, grammar and language could potentially through a series of algorithms and pieces of software have their course sort of corrected by an algorithm in saying, “we’ve done two years of analysis on you. We can see that you are learning this pace that your math is this good or that good, not Harvard.”
Damian Bradfield:
And I don’t think that anyone was really aware of how potentially this data could be used. The response was always, “but we’ve checked out these companies”, and my answer was, “Yeah. But the company can be sold.” The data is not owned by anyone other than that company.
Simon Mainwaring:
Sure.
Damian Bradfield:
And if the company is sold to Facebook or whoever else, the data moves on. So the book was really trying to work out and highlight some of the issues that I think were happening at that time. And also from our perspective, trying to reinforce some of the things that we’d done really well that were painful. Again, this is, at that time, we were collecting pretty much zero data on our user base. There were no logged in accounts. Everyone was a free user and we managed to build a pretty successful business based on a very offline attitude to the internet. And my main goal was to try to shine this light on the difference between the offline world and the online world and how we had become quite accustomed to living two very separate lives. In the offline world, I would never ever accept somebody following me down the high street and trying to sell me something as I move through different stores, tracking my data and eventually turning up at my house to sell me something I might have seen ear ago.
Damian Bradfield:
In the online world of course, that’s totally normal. That’s totally acceptable that you would be tracked all the way through your web experience and continually bombarded with products or offers tailor made for you, because we are learning so much about you and I really wanted to just shine a light on the fact that I think you can run a decent business online without doing all the things that everybody else expects you to do in the world of the internet.
Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah. I think the whole privacy creep and this whole tracking as you talk about. We’re so well informed now as consumers, as citizens, although we do to some degree still feel powerless to control it obviously, and unless we actually step away from these platforms. But how would you say that WeTransfer, on the strength of your thesis around trust has built up this just resonance of trust with a creative class and with clients, is it just the consistency of what you’ve done? Because every brand out there that especially those who are being purposeful are trying to build trust so that they attract the employees they want, so they keep the employees, they want, they stand out and have a strong reputation and so on and so on. How have manifested that secret source to become such a trusted brand.
Damian Bradfield:
We always used to joke that there was the fast food movement and then the slow food movement and the fast internet and the slow internet, and that we were part of the slow internet. And I don’t mean that in the point of view speed and velocity of growth or velocity of development or anything else. I mean it, from the point of view of taking a longer term view and having a longer horizon. And I can remember sort of quite jealously looking at some companies that had scaled to 20 million users in the course of two years and had raised a hundred million and there was suddenly unicorns thinking, wow, that would be quite nice. What could you do with that money? How much good could you do if you were that big and quite a few of them are not around anymore.
Damian Bradfield:
Quite a few of them have been absorbed and no longer stand for anything. And yes, they made some money, but they didn’t actually have much impact on the world. From pretty much the get go we were bootstrapped. We didn’t take funding until 2015. So an awful lot of the things that we thought were important became pretty entrenched in the company. And what we noticed was that, when we made a commitment to give away 30% of our ad inventory to support causes, gun reform, racism, whatever it might be, it was a major attraction for talent. It was a major attraction and reason that artists would want to work with us and partner with us on projects. And those long commitments that we laid down are, I think the reason that we attracted talent, the reason that we have that trust. And these things were very organic and they were very rough around the edges to be frank for quite a while, until we became a B Corp. And until we started building out a team that really began to focus on what we wanted to do in terms of CSR.
Damian Bradfield:
But I really think it’s daring to take a long view and daring to have a longer horizon. And I’m really proud that we have some really long lasting relationships with musicians like Charles Peterson. He’s been our head of music for five years now. In the normal world, a brand would go out and get Lady Gaga to be the creative director of Polaroid. That will Last a year. Will I am, will be the creative director of Intel. Maybe he’ll do it for 18 months. Those sort of relationships were set up by somebody in marketing as a marketing stunt or an event, and not really entrenched into the business or given the space to really figure out how it should work properly.
Damian Bradfield:
And I think that our longer term view in that space has enabled us to have long relationships with the University of the Underground, Charles Peterson, Worldwide FM. Many of the artists that we work with and WePresent are relationships that are more than 10 years old, because I think we didn’t really have any pressure in trying to do anything other than give them the space to tell their story. And I still think we do that today.
Simon Mainwaring:
I think what you’re leaning into is just the different mindset and behaviors that come when you really take that longer term perspective. And I think hopefully the listeners and those who are watching will understand that when you take that long term perspective, there are huge benefits that accrue and magnify over time. And it’s interesting, I think when I reflect on the call for business more broadly to not be driven by quarterly earnings reports and the expectations of analysts, but to take this longer term perspective, but then to hear from you how that longer term perspective allowed you to stay true to what made you different, what made you authentic and that in turn has driven your business growth. So I find it fascinating. And just in terms of trust, I think you’re the only tech company that has a net promoter score up around in the 80s, hovering around the 80s.
Simon Mainwaring:
And that’s what I mean, a quantifiable level of trust out there, which is very unusual, which is why I want to ask you about it. And on the strength of that, every company today now faces this new demand to have a point of view or show up for multiple crisis. We’ve got COVID, we’ve got the response to the Black Lives Matter Movement. We’ve got the climate emergency. It seems like this daily diet of challenges out there. So as you mentioned that you’ve grown now and you’ve sort of built a team around it, help us understand how have you formalized what to speak up about? Because a lot of business leaders, entrepreneurs, or CEOs are sitting there going, what do I talk about and when? So how do you think that through?
Damian Bradfield:
I definitely don’t have the question for the problem of what should I talk about. I think you talk about things that matter. So I think if somebody has to talk about or question what their purpose is or what they should be saying, I’m not sure they’re really necessarily in the right job. I’d be very proud to say that we’ve done through B Corp, through conversion unit sort of relationships with Unilever, we became quite friendly with Ben and Jerry. You would never have had to tell Ben and Jerry what they should talk about. They talked
Simon Mainwaring:
Much very true.
Damian Bradfield:
… about what they felt mattered and they talked about what they felt was an issue at the time, and those things that they felt that they could have some weight with or make a difference. That’s the same for us. As I said, it was very organic for 10 years and it was very much on the case of, okay, we think this is important.
Damian Bradfield:
This is going to be an amazing artist, we should back then. This is something that we think is going to be something in the future that people would talk about. And a lot of the time we got it wrong, sometimes we’re really lucky we got it right. When it came to causes, we’ve been through some pretty traumatic times, the last six, seven years. And you touched on quite a few of them, particularly living in the states. You can’t really ignore them. Gun control, major issue, Black Lives Matter, major issue. These things are happening. The conversations that we are having every day, the conversations that are in the papers every day. And there’s certainly things that are really controversial and complex for people in the creative sector and in business. So when we can, we absolutely want to try and jump in and lend our voice to it, or simply enable the platform to help another lend their voice. What’s happened in the last couple of years though is, I’ve had to go back completely on something I said in the early on, which was, we’ll never have a CSR department.
Damian Bradfield:
Everyone in the company is the CSR department. We are all in it for the greater good. The reason I had to go back on it was because when everybody is the CSR department, then everybody to has things that they care about, and everybody wants to say something and you can’t. Physically we can’t do it. And what we did for quite a few years was just spread ourselves too thin. We would get involved in too many causes, too many projects. We would get over excited about things that ultimately we could only support with a limited amount of money or a limited amount of media. And it just wasn’t good business. We are a business, I’m always very conscious of saying we are trying to be a good business, but this was a good business.
Damian Bradfield:
So we now have a team, it’s very small. It works very closely with WePresent. We look at what WePresent can do in terms so making sure that we are truly diverse, that we represent every nationality that we can, that we touch every continent every year, and that it’s completely gender neutral. And then within the CSI department, really trying to work out what matters and what are we responsible for, therefore, what do we need to try to make sure that we’re fixing? And then last year we launched a foundation and the foundation’s role is also been recently defined that if CSR department within WeTransfer is responsible for making sure that we are trying to get towards negativity for the footprint that we have. The foundation is responsible for looking after emerging artists. And those two things are very clearly split. And the teams now know exactly what their roles are. There’s no overlap, there’s no crossover and we can be much more granular and singular in making sure that our money and our media goes to where it matters.
Simon Mainwaring:
And I think the structure you put there between your foundation, the CSR department, and being a B Corp, which is a certified company that has its values institutionalized into its articles of incorporation and so on, that really provides that platform. And then on top of that, I’d love to talk about WePresent for a second, because I know that you’ve got some content that’s nominated for an Oscar this year, a film that’s called The Long Goodbye. Why are you creating an editorial platform? What role does this content play? And it’s fantastic it is being so well received.
Damian Bradfield:
So it’s always been there to be honest, it was again, organic. In the beginning, we’d have a friend who was a photographer, an illustrator, and we’d simply run their work on WeTransfer. So they’d be given a wallpaper, we’d give them impressions. And as I touched on earlier on we used to have a 5% or a 6% clickthrough rate. And when you’re talking about 60 million people clicking on an image, then most of the time we would crash the artist’s website. Not particularly good business, not to be useful.
Simon Mainwaring:
No. A dubious honor for anyone.
Damian Bradfield:
So we said what we should do is we’ll build a website. So we’ll host their work on it and then we’ll click through to that place. So that started off as a platform called WeTransfer culture that turned into [ThisWorks 00:25:48] that eventually became WePresent. And over the years, it basically just professionalized and it was no longer a destination just to house and host some of the artists that we were supporting, but WePresent became and is a real destination telling stories around design, fashion, film, art, and no longer a collection of friends, but a collection of work that really matters. It’s got 3 million monthly readers. It’s become super well recognized by the creative community. There are barely any ads on it.
Damian Bradfield:
We only published two or three articles a week, and we’ve got to a privileged position where we are in close contact with some amazing artists. The one you mentioned Riz Ahmed who came to us and said it was height of Brexit worries in the UK, he’s a Muslim artist. And he was compelled to produce a film that was going to touch on what they were feeling at the time, which was the anxiety around Brexit and what it was going to mean for ethnic minorities and particularly the Muslim community in the UK. And he wanted to make a short film and would we be interested in financing it in working with him on it and then showcasing it on WePresent. No. The opportunity to work with someone like Riz is something that as a creative, you bite your arm off for and we gave him basically free reign to produce what he wanted. It’s a heavy film. I don’t know if you watched it, anybody that’s going to watch it. It’s not light content.
Simon Mainwaring:
Sure.
Damian Bradfield:
But it’s really important content. And I think the story is really resonated. And as you say, where I am 27th of March, we find out whether or not he and Anil the director win an Oscar for it, which would be amazing. Dreamt of it.
Simon Mainwaring:
It’s a powerful through line between you staying true to the integrity of your intent in the first place, just basic good business from an appetizing perspective, stay true to the creative class, keep it simple through to supporting the creative class through the file transfers that you do through to the CSR, the foundation to B Corp. And now this content, was it kind of strategic and logical in sequence, or was it just organic that you grew this way? When you look back now, how would you characterize it?
Damian Bradfield:
I’d love to say it was completely strategic and it was all well thought through, but it’s not. Honestly, it’s been very organic. The internet has moved and changed. We’ve had a pretty impressive velocity over the last 10 years. And I just like to say that we’ve managed to keep up with it. And keep delivering work that matters as opposed to getting trapped into the content game. I know I just referred to Riz’s film as content, but to make a clear delineation between what I see as content and what I think is film. There’s an awful lot of content that has a lifespan, the shelf life of maybe a minute, maybe a month, maybe a year. But what we are trying to produce is evergreen content that is going back to what we were talking about right at the beginning is, this work that you really want to spend time with and Riz’s film will be as relevant today as it will be in 20 years time.
Damian Bradfield:
And I’m very proud that we are able to play a role in that. It will likely evolve again. I’m quite proud to say a relatively nimble and adaptable company that as things have moved on and as situations have changed, we’ve been able to adapt to make sure that we’re working on stuff that matters right now, and hopefully will matter again in the future. But it’s really basic. It’s exactly the same as a brand would’ve done in the fifties and sixties and seventies. You are trying to build an experience that doesn’t have a gate at the front and a security check. It’s an open door that you can come on the high street, walk through, experience, browse, be entertained, find something that you like, and maybe you don’t have the money to purchase that thing right now. And that brand needs to have the confidence to let you go, to walk away and come back maybe in a month, maybe in a year, but to come back in because they know that they’ve given you something that is aspirational or exciting and interesting. That’s just really basic business that’s decades old.
Simon Mainwaring:
It is decades old. And I think you’re calling two really important points. One is, you need to be clear eyed about who you are, whether you’re a founder, whether you are a CEO who you are as an individual, and what role you want the company to play and stay true to that instead of sort of letting the tail wag the dog, and always try to be what anyone might want at any given time in any given market and match what a competitor’s doing. The other thing is that you’ve got to have the confidence, the self assuredness as a brand to just show up in a certain way and know that if you are purposeful and authentic and consistent, people can come and go, but they will orientate themselves around you and be loyal to you because of what you stand for, as opposed to being all those other things that I mentioned.
Simon Mainwaring:
And it is so basic. It is so fundamental, but there’s so much noise. The marketplace is so frenetic these days that people get very scattered and they get very schizophrenic in their messaging. And so I want to point forward. You pointed back to the fifties and sixties in these fundamentals, forces me to ask you a $10 question Damian, which is, you are unique in that you are an inherently purposeful brand. You’ve got this heritage of trust that you build, and you’re a highly regarded technology company. So how are we going to resolve this inherent tension between those who talk about humane technology, product ethicists, smart contracts that do the right thing by artists and what seems to be this relentless exploited in mindset that shows up and fuels the froth in any of these new technology arenas, and really does a lot of harm. How do we make sure that the stuff that serves everybody ultimately in the long term, whatever your brand is rises to the top?
Damian Bradfield:
I think everyone has to wake up and take responsibility themselves. It’s down to us. And I mean, that was a big chunk of my book is that I can hard on about the fact that we need to cap private wealth through the billion dollars and no one needs any anything more than, a billion or 500 million or something. I can harp on about how we need regulation and how companies need to be kept in check, but ultimately it’s down to you and me. And ultimately we have to deal with this thing and I don’t have a ton of confidence that’s going to happen, but hopefully there’ll be enough people out there that would think that it’s important that will shame you, or coerce you into thinking about what it is that you do.
Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah. I would like to think that when we get in enough trouble, we’ll pay attention and start to prioritize things the right way. So I’m, blissfully naive in that sense, in the same way, perhaps and as someone so deeply invested in the tech world as you are, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. It’s very broad to talk about the tech industry at large, but where do you see that it’s most egregiously lying to itself to others in terms of portraying the promise that technology in the role it could play in our lives? Because I feel there’s a real dissonance right now between how beholden we are to tech, in everything we do in all aspects of our lives yet, how exploited so many of us feel. What’s your great sort of angst with the industry right now?
Damian Bradfield:
I love technology, so I see it for what it is. So I think if you don’t see it for what it is, then I think you’re going to be angry with the internet for a long time. But if you look at Mark Zuckerberg and you look at Elon Musk and you look at these people that are multi-billionaires that control an in incredible amount of the internet, that literally have the power to move markets in a single tweet, you have to understand who and what these type of personalities are, and then work out whether you want to really spend time with them. And I think that’s something that perhaps people overlook or haven’t thought about enough when they get into bed with those types of organizations.
Damian Bradfield:
The thing that I’m most agitated by is actually the lack of regulation and the lack of input from government and organizations. There’s this chap called Eli Pariser, who wrote an article in Wired, that is one of the greatest thought pieces around the internet, where he talked about the need for public space. And his point was that if you look at a metropolis like London or New York, they were set up by and grew by incredibly wealthy people that became huge land owners that made everything private. And if you did London in particular, it was only in the 1850s that London started putting in parks, public spaces into the city of London. Hyde Park was a private hunting ground for the Royal family.
Damian Bradfield:
Hackney didn’t have a park. It wasn’t necessary. It was only in the 1850s, 1900s that there was deemed necessary for people to be able to go out into a public space to communicate, to converse all that sort of thing. It took 2000 years for that to evolve. The internet has evolved at an incredible pace and yet still 22 years, 25 years down the line, there is no public space on the internet. It is all private. Even if Wikipedia is the closest example we have to a sort of public space, the cable, the landline, everything else that you know is feeding it is private. And I think it would be great for us. It would be hugely beneficial for us to be able, not have this conversation through Zoom, but to be able to have it in a space that is just purely, truly public, that is safe, unmonitored, unrecorded no metadata being transferred between anything.
Damian Bradfield:
And if there’s one thing that I think is a shame that hasn’t manifested over the last few years, is that governments haven’t figured out how to actually create this space that labels everybody to be able to come together and talk and converse, without it being owned by a monopoly or an oligopoly.
Simon Mainwaring:
And as a purposeful entrepreneur and technologists, why should we as entrepreneurs, as businessly feet optimistic? There’s so many dystopian visions of the future out there right now. Why should we feel optimistic?
Damian Bradfield:
Because I think COVID was really an incredible challenge for us on so many levels. And of course it was tragic that we were forced indoors and we were forced away from work in different situations. But I think the upside of it was that I do believe that a lot of people reconnected with the local community and reconnected with families and friends at a different level. And although technology has become greater reliance for everybody, maybe just me but I feel as if there is a greater understanding of balance in the world. And if I look at the growth in companies like Headspace and Calm and the amount of conversation that’s happening around meditation and mental wellbeing, I do think that for the first time in quite a while, people are beginning to take a step back and say this needs to work for me.
Damian Bradfield:
How am I going to interact with this? I don’t want to go back to the office. I want to work from home two days a week, because actually for the first time in my life, I can go to the dentist and be back to my work in 30 minutes, as opposed to having to take half a day off, to go to the dentist. And I feel like we’ve reintroduced a bit of work life balance into the working life of a lot of people. Obviously not for everybody, but for a lot of people. And I’d like to think that this is just the beginning of us being able to reconsider and reevaluate what is really important in life. And it’s not all work.
Simon Mainwaring:
I completely agree. And I want to say, thank you, Damian, for making our lives easier through WeTransfer that we all use every day, but also being such a powerful example of an authentic brand. So thanks for sharing your insights.
Damian Bradfield:
Thanks very much for having me.
Simon Mainwaring:
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Lead With We, you can find out more information about today’s guest Damian Bradfield in the description below. And if you enjoyed this episode, give it a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to this channel. Lead With We is produced by Goal 17 Media and you can also listen to our episodes on Apple, Google, or Spotify. And if you’re looking to go even deeper into the world of purposeful business, check out my new book Lead With We, which is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Google Books. See you next episode. And until then, lets all Lead With We.
Simon Mainwaring:
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Lead With We, and you can find out more information about today’s guest, Ryan Moor in the description below. And if you enjoyed this episode, give it a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to this channel. Lead With We is produced by Goal 17 Media, and you can listen to all the episodes on Apple, Google, or Spotify. And if you want to do a deeper dive into the world of purposeful business, check out my new book Lead With We, that’s now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google Books. See you on the next episode and until then, let’s all lead with we.oble and Google Books. See you on the next episode and until then, it’s all lead with we.
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