WeTransfer has offered to pay laid-off SoundCloud employees $10K for something new
WeTransfer has offered SoundCloud employees a gift of $10K to start something new.
At the beginning of June SoundCloud laid-off 40% of their staff when they closed their London and San Francisco branches. 173 employees suddenly sat without jobs.
SoundCloud did release a public spreadsheet titled Hire a SoundClouder which contains the names, skills and location of the fired employees.
This mass-firing of SoundCloud employees shook the Tech world and the spreadsheet has seen support from top tech companies like Adobe and Twitter who added their contact information as well as upbeat messages.
Naturally, with such impressive resumes 32 employees already found new jobs by June 20th.
Damian Bradford, president of the file-sharing company WeTransfer, has a completely different idea and vision for these ex-employees.
Innovation Station
His vision is to see these former SoundCloud employees carry on their important work in music streaming innovation and to help with this has offered each ex-employee $10 000.
He wrote each employee a letter explaining his idea.
“[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,” He said in his letter.
WeTransfer offers SoundCloud employees a gift of 10K to carry on innovating music streaming, read the full letter here.
