“I find myself starting conversations at the moment with, ‘Well, if you remember back in 2009’, and some people I’m talking to literally can’t, but it was totally different,” says Damian Bradfield, WeTransfer’s co-founder and former CCO. “It was a lot of people trying to figure out what the internet meant, what you could make, and how to make it. I felt like there was huge excitement and energy, and we thought anything was possible, but had no real idea of where it was going to go because no one did.”

When CR catches up with Bradfield over Zoom from his home in Amsterdam, he is feeling reflective about the brand that he helped bring to life 15 years ago, along with fellow co-founders Nalden, Rinke Visser and Bas Beerens. It’s been over six months since WeTransfer’s widely publicised (and controversial) acquisition by Italian tech company Bending Spoons, which led to 75% of its staff being made redundant. Having exited himself at the beginning of this year, most of the co-founder’s energy has been spent on his new book, Not a Playbook, which tells the story of what he’s learned along the way.

Co-authored with strategist and writer Andreas Tzortzis, the book’s focus is on how brands can grow without sacrificing integrity, told through the lens of a file-sharing company that became a beloved brand by prioritising intuition, creativity and relationships over marketing trends and algorithms. When WeTransfer first launched in December 2009 with a simple, friendly flash site that had little more than a few lines of copy and some buttons, it felt like a breath of fresh air in the tech landscape where Bradfield recalls engineers being “the kings of the internet”.