Wetransfer
OPPORTUNITY
Acknowledged as one of Fast Company’s most innovative companies in 2019, WeTransfer is a Dutch-based tech company founded in 2009. Known as the simplest solution to send big files around the world they are dedicated to making creativity easier for everyone. The WeTransfer team recognized that in order to scale fast they would need to get clear on their vision, culture, and organisational structure. It was clear that as they grew, their culture would evolve and their leadership team needed to be conscious as to the kind of company they were building, recognizing the need to adapt their team leadership along the way.
WeTransfer has seen a lot of change since it was founded, in fact, they've:
Landed their first round of funding with Highland Capital - a VC firm that raised over $3 billion in committed capital.
Hired their first external CEO, Gordon Willoughby, previously CEO of Amazon and Ebay
Acquired Present Plus – A design agency founded in 2010 by Damian Bradfield and Nalden.
Acquired Sketching App Fifty Three in 2018 along with their products Paper and Paste which now make up their suite of tools to enable creative ideas to flow.
CHOOSING OVERTIME LEADER
The leadership team at WeTransfer needed a team that already had experience working in the technology and design sector, and could provide them with highly focused attention–they needed to work with a team small enough to know that it would not be distracted and distributed out across many projects such as is the case with large scale consultancies. With these parameters in place, OverTime Leader was a natural fit.
Solutions & Working with OverTime Leader
Over the course of three years we worked alongside leadership teams at WeTransfer to design and deliver:
Organizational strategy to define and align the right culture for growth
Leadership development programs for multiple levels
A product development culture
We worked across multiple teams to drive alignment, team dynamics, and focus. We helped ensure smooth international growth and led the onboarding of their acquisition of Product Studio 53 Fifty Three – a superbly designed sketching and drawing app along with its products Paper and Paste. The team at OverTime leader played a significant role in facilitating the onboarding process of the Fifty Three team to WeTransfer.
Over the years, we have led multiple initiatives for many different sections of the company. WeTransfer is extremely proud of our partnership together and given the immense strides that they have taken under our guidance – our years of dedication to WeTransfer–we hold our relationship with their team very close to our hearts 💙
“OverTime brings objective advice and is a great sounding board that has been invaluable to the senior leadership team here as our business has scaled and has so, changed significantly over the past few years. They have helped us understand better how we need to shape our organisation, how we can effectively ‘land’ those organisational changes, and how we need to show up as leaders in order to reach our goals”.
— Gordon Wiloughby, CEO, WeTransfer
Results Achieved
Our founder, Gillian Davis, worked with the executive team of WeTransfer to bring whatever underlying organizational issues surrounding culture that remained festering and unaddressed, to the surface.
“Gillian and her team have a great talent for teasing out the sorely felt but often intangible aches of an organisation. And then confronts them head on, with candor, grit, and humor. I can honestly say that their coaching was one of the key factors that gave me the confidence and purpose to step out of the limelight and embrace the challenges of leadership”.
– Bastiaan Terhorst, CTO Wetransfer
OverTime Leader enabled the WeTransfer team to find alignment amongst their team in shaping their culture, identifying necessary changes, and putting in place a roadmap of actions for how the WeTransfer team could initiate those changes.
The team at WeTransfer gained clarity, alignment and direction from the sessions we designed for them, developing a culture that they could scale and live by. Having vocalized the necessary changes for the company, and armed with a list of tangible actions, WeTransfer emerged ready to take on uncertainty and has performed particularly well in COVID-19.
Lessons Learned
This project's biggest challenge was to get the founders and executive team at WeTransfer to define their company culture. As people grow a company, the culture can often get lost or fall to the wayside in the interest of scaling quickly. Thus, it was vitally important that the WeTransfer team came back and got centered around their values, and culture and developed a compelling vision, with the guiding hand of OverTime Leader, before continuing to grow their business further.