CEO Insights: From Fast to Nurturing | Alexandar Vassilev, Massimo Marioni

First of all, great to be here, great to meet you, and hi everyone. I'm glad to hear there are smiles after yesterday's party. WeTransfer is a company that's been around for 14 years. We are known for our core product, WeTransfer, which moves digital content from A to B, but we do a lot more. We serve the creative community, build tools and provide platforms for folks to leverage their talents and make a living. We've been embedded in the creative community for a very long time and built a brand that folks trust. We use that brand to solve as many problems as we can. The company is a bit different: early on we focused on profitability, long-term thinking, understanding our user base, and that has driven a sustainable business model with over a decade of profitability and growth. We're very excited about where we're going.

It's quite interesting. We all knew that growth for the sake of growth was never going to be sustainable. It had its moment, allowing a new generation of entrepreneurs to use tech to disrupt and improve industries. I was in the middle of it; there was a lot of energy and passion to use technology to change the world. But at that time technology was on the fringes. Today, technology is how we live and work; it's intertwined in everything. The need to be responsible about that technology arose. We saw examples of companies that took the 'move fast and break things' mantra and betrayed user trust. There were high-profile cases. I think we realized it's time to be responsible. Now this is front and center as an alternative model of growth and profitability. It's incredibly important to talk about why this is better and why we need to keep focusing on that responsible angle as we build technology that intertwines with our lives.

From the perspective of the user, we use technology to do everything almost on a daily basis. It's really important when you build your business on a particular technology stack, or as a user using technology to develop your talents or be more effective at work, you need to have confidence and trust that the technology is not going to be pulled out from under your feet. You can rely on it being what it is. What we've seen in the past is that if you build a company or business model that is not sustainable, at some point you have to betray that trust: change pricing, change how you charge, do difficult decisions that throw people's lives into turmoil. I think it's important for users to know that the company they rely on has a sustainable, predictable business model. From a company perspective, it allows us to be that force for good with long-term thinking, leverage trust and position with your user base to continue building new products. It brings a level of trust between companies and users.

I think certainly to a certain extent that's true across the board. It helps from both sides: how the company treats its employees and how the company builds a sustainable business model for growth. If I'm a user relying on a certain application to make a living, I want to know this company is not going to blow up, not going to increase pricing or take a bigger cut of my living. The way the company treats its employees, builds its culture and business model are good indicators of whether you have to deal with problems down the line. We all know there are business models where we are the product as users. It's important to understand that, because we lived in a world of free money where everything was subsidized, and now we have to wake up to a moment where we start to pay more and more. That puts us as users in a difficult position. As a company, you want employees who are bought into your mission, who care about the problems they solve and how they solve them because they want meaning in what they do. That helps predict the stability of the company.

I would say there's no right or wrong; you have to find out what model predicts success. We've had examples where that philosophy was utilized and became very successful, but there are also many who did that and were not successful. For me, it's not a competition. It's about can we prove consistently that the culture of mending and nurturing is going to be as successful in the long term, if not even more, than some of the outrageous bets of moving fast and breaking things. I believe that at an aggregate, more companies will be successful with mending and nurturing than moving fast and breaking things. But we're here to prove it, and time will tell.

I look at it through two lenses: one is around company culture, and the other is around product. I don't know if any CEO will come up and say their culture is not great, so I'll surprise you by saying our culture is great. But it's about the sustainability of that culture and how much people identify with what you're trying to do and how you're trying to do it. In terms of practical examples, WeTransfer has several. Early on, we decided to be contrarian. For example, we had a freemium business model and wanted to monetize our free tier with advertising. At the time, advertising was just banners, but we said no, we're going to embed our ads into the user experience. Today, WeTransfer ads are part of the user experience. It's the first company I've come across where users write to us and ask to see another ad because we present this amazing interactive canvas for brands. It took a long time, but now we are quite differentiated and successful. Another example: I was with Joyn, a video streaming service in Germany, where we focused on local content alongside global content. That was considered contrarian, but it turned out to be a great opportunity. Sometimes it's about long-term thinking, going contrary to what's easy in order to capitalize later.

That's a billion-dollar question — how to transition one culture to another. Nobody probably has a playbook. I would say extremes are bad. If you're all the way on the 'move quick break things' side, we know the dangers. But there's also a danger if you go all the way on the other side, because you do have to have ambition, long-term goals, impatience to solve problems for your user base. Sometimes that gets lost when you focus too much on yourself. You have to find a balance. The difficulty is that people rarely seek balance; they often go from one extreme to the other, causing confusion and turmoil. It has to be a transition towards the middle.

Being very deliberate, not chasing the latest fad. A very clear mission and vision: going back to the basics, figuring out who your users are, what the problems are, being relentless in solving them, but also realizing you have a responsibility to solve them in a sustainable way. If you keep those principles intact and take the long-term view, it's easy to adapt or pivot if needed. You always have an anchor for yourself, your employees, and your culture to lean on to deliver what users expect.

Yes, certainly. I think users have realized the perils of trusting companies too much. We've seen a huge backlash when it comes to data, trust, and brands. The notion of a brand nowadays is a lot more important than perhaps 10 years ago. Consumers are now much more deliberate with their choices of where to spend their hard-earned income. As a company, you have to realize you're in a constant competition to do better, but also with other companies that have taken a similar path. Things have changed. Given the choice, people are much more willing to change their spending habits to support companies that do the right thing.

No, we don't. That's the good news. Our product has always been viral in nature. Even with many competitors and alternatives, we continue to grow quite sustainably and remain profitable. The reason is that we've built this trust with our user base for over 14 years. We have not gone against our principles, and people know that. That trust translates into a massive number of users every day: more than 80 million monthly active users from 190 countries. We continue to see strong engagement. In this new world of content explosion, especially with AI, I think we continue to be the preferred player for creative folks who want to engage their audiences directly. They know we are not a platform that will stand between them and their audiences. We continue to solve core problems in a frictionless way. As long as we keep true to our core, I am very bullish on the company.

In many ways, I feel very lucky because I came to a company that already embedded all of that into the core of how we do business. It goes on almost every front. For example, we are a tech company that uses the cloud, but we started doing ESG when we started the company. We've been on a mission with AWS for a long time to decrease our carbon footprint, not because it's modern but because that's how we do it. Everything we launch aims at decreasing our carbon footprint as well as delivering business outcomes. In terms of culture, we always wanted to support and nurture our audience. We started early on giving free inventory to emerging artists, partnering with responsible brands. We have a foundation that delivers one percent of our top line to support artists. All these things didn't start three years ago; they started 10 years ago. Back then, we were the contrarian in the room. I'm very happy to see that now we are leading the way in a wave that focuses on doing that consistently.

Thank you.