WeTransfer is offering former SoundCloud employees $10,000 to stay unemployed
The file sharing giant wants them to keep pushing the industry forwards
WeTransfer has offered each of the 173 people laid off by SoundCloud $10,000 if they do not get another job. In an email sent to FACT, WeTransfer's Music Director Lukas Nieuwenhuijsensaid that he would give each ex-employee the "modest amount" if they directed their efforts towards music industry innovation rather than simply seeking another job.
The email revealed that the file sharing company's president Damian Bradfield is sending emails to the employees who were let go from the company encouraging them to attempt to create something to rival the innovative nature of the ailing music-hosting service.
Bradford writes on Medium that that he came up with the idea after attending the Tech Open Air Conference in Berlin a few weeks ago. Instead of watching "challengers" go off to other companies and abandon the forward-thinking ethos of SoundCloud, he would like to see them continue working on new music industry solutions.
“What if each and every one of them had been offered ten thousand dollars to refrain from getting a job? To leave and start something. To leave and start working on the new future of music, whatever that might be,” he writes on a short piece uploaded to his Medium account on Wednesday entitled '173 ideas'.
Read the email in full below:
“[W]e’d like to prevent you from just simply ‘getting a job’. Why? What’s wrong with a job? Nothing. It’s just that you might stray from your original mission to change the way we consume or create music – an endeavor that made SoundCloud unique in the world of tech.
“So we’d like to make you an offer. $10,000 to start something. This is not a loan or equity exchange. 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. This is not an investment. I hear you – 10k is a modest amount – but we started small too, and it could act as a runway. Or it could pay for the lights on a runway. Somehow, it could help you get off the ground.”
Read the full proposal from WeTransfer here.