The Dutch founder of tech company WeTransfer is working on an alternative file sharing service which “champions creativity, not steals it”.
Ronald Hans went public with the new service, called Boomerang, this week after telling the NRC in an interview that the changes made to WeTransfer’s terms and conditions by the new owner are a “slap in the face” only appreciated by “a handful of people in suits”.
Hans told the paper he had recently “come out of retirement” and is creating user-friendly software, including a newsletter tool called Rumicat.
“And there’s an alternative to WeTransfer in the works, because I saw this coming,” he said. “I just didn’t know things would move this fast with Bending Spoons, so it’s not ready yet. Just a little more patience.”
Hans founded WeTransfer in 2009, together with Bas Beerens and Rinke Visser. He left the company in 2018 and in 2022 it was sold to Italian tech investor Bending Spoons.
Last week, the company was forced to confirm it does not use files uploaded to their service to train artificial intelligence (AI) models after announcing a change in its terms of service, which some took as allowing the company to use files for AI training.
After a social media outcry, the firm has now updated its terms, saying it has “made the language easier to understand” to avoid confusion.
Hans told the paper in an email interview that he is sorry everything WeTransfer once stood for is being “flushed down the toilet”.
“Unfortunately, it’s the nature of the system the company is now part of. The private equity group [Bending Spoons] that bought WeTransfer is on its way to a stock market listing, and having an AI strategy is necessary to boost its valuation,” he said.
“It’s a numbers game. It’s not about creativity or people. That completely contradicts what I was doing when I—somewhat naïvely—started WeTransfer.”
Hans was asked by the paper about a social media post this week in which he said, “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.”
“There was a lot of goodwill in WeTransfer because, for years, we created beautiful projects together with our users,” he said.
Respect
“That earned it a lot of respect, regardless of how much the service was used. WeTransfer was one of those tech companies that did things differently—stood up for privacy and held creativity in high regard. Bending Spoons has flushed all of that down the toilet in no time.”
Bending Spoons told the NRC in a reaction that it did not recognise the picture being painted by Hans. The company said it has no plans for an IPO, has never sold the content of messages to third parties and would “never do something with AI just to please investors.”