SoundCloud’s struggles have been painful to watch. While Chance the Rapper has stepped in to rescue the site, that’s cold comfort to the people the site was forced to lay off as it struggled to find a way to stay profitable. Fortunately, file-sharing company WeTransfer has stepped in to give them a hand up.
In a letter, Damian Bradfield, the president of WeTransfer, offers the laid-off employees a strings-free $10,000 for their startups. They just have to submit their ideas:
Companies like SoundCloud and Medium have tried to ease the pain of layoffs by sharing contact details. We admire this attempt to get you employed again, but we’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.
Even WeTransfer agrees that $10,000 isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things, but as they point out, it’s a little seed from which great things can grow. And it will help SoundCloud employees stick to the spirit of why the company was founded and why everybody from remix fans to podcasters was so worried about it going under. There’s not a service quite like it, and we were perilously close to a world without it. Hopefully, this seed money ensures that music fans have SoundClouds, or even better services, around for a long time.
(Via WeTransfer)