Being in a start up is like being in a family. In our case a band of brothers united by the common desire to make the internet work for us, fusing it with music in a way that no one had done before. There is adversity, there is achievement, and there are emotions, emotions that we all share together. Just like in a family, losing a family member means sadness. The sadness of knowing that they won't be there when you arrive in the morning, adding events to their multiple Gmail calendars. The sadness of having one fewer mouth on pizza day. The sadness of knowing that they won't be back. 

Oui mon p'tit gars, c'est comme ça

Today marks the official departure of one of the strands of the DNA of Whyd. The developer responsible for coding and building nearly everything we enjoy today. The rocker responsible for some epic jamming. The friend responsible for endless laughter, mouth trumpeting, and GIFs. The man responsible for the care taken towards each of his teammates and every visitor that came through Whyd. Dr. Adrien Joly is leaving us for the next chapter in his life and career. 

Oui mon p'tit gars, c'est comme ça

Adrien was here from the very beginning, coding remotely in cafés and in Whyd's first incubator. He ventured with Gilles, Jie, and Loick to San Francisco to alternate sleeping in a one bedroom apartment in Chinatown for three months while the young team soaked in the charged atmosphere of California's legendary tech mecca. 

He expertly directed the team through a few pivots before the mission became music, and it was here that Adrien truly excelled. He had already hacked together multiple music apps, like his location-based Foursquare app "Hear I Am" that he built with Loick, and "GigFM," for creating playlists from upcoming concerts. Whyd was a natural extension of his passions. One that kept him working with us for over four years. 

Oui mon p'tit gars, c'est comme ça

As the team expanded both in terms of numbers and in terms of geography, Adrien led the development and release of our 5-star iOS app. He tutored interns. He kept an impossible number of moving parts aligned to ensure that music lovers could listen on Whyd. And, perhaps most importantly, he tempered the team's expectations to protect the functioning of Whyd - to keep it from becoming too complicated, from becoming too heavy to stay afloat. There could have been no replacement for that potent combination of ability, intelligence, and demeanor. Something that is so perfectly summed up in his classic phrase, said with acceptance that some things are not to be changed, but with the hope that there will be another, better option: "Oui mon p'tit gars, c'est comme ça."

Adrien is moving to the next challenges that he will face, as he navigates his career helping dreams become reality through technology. We have absolutely no doubt that he will be successful in every problem and opportunity he comes across. We believe that few people on this planet have his methodical ability to break apart obstacles into manageable pieces, then take out each of those pieces with precision. And we will be jealous of each and every person that gets to work with him. 

Oui mon p'tit gars, c'est comme ça

Hello everyone! Hope you had a nice weekend, we celebrated Thanksgiving in Paris, with the Whyd team and our buddies coming together to give thanks for everything that we are lucky enough to have. One thing that we are very lucky to have are great friends and co-workers, who have become big parts of our lives. One of those people, Adrien, the man who makes everything at Whyd possible, needs our help! 

As you surely know, Adrien is the drummer for the post-rock group Man Is Not A Bird (MINAB), who have been buzzing lately around northern France after their tour last week in Angers, Strasbourg, and Paris. They are playing a concert on Wednesday (December 4) here in Paris at Batofar, and it is very important that you are all there. 

The organizer of the concert is also organizing a concert of MINAB's favorite group: And So I Watch You From Afar, in the spring 2014 here in Paris. He said that if we can get a big group together, Man Is Not A Bird might be able to open for And So I Watch You From Afar! It would be a dream come true, a completion of the cycle of creation and inspiration, and would be the type of story that everyone wants to see. This week, we can make that happen. 

Even though it was recently the long holiday weekend here in Europe, our dedicated programmers were hard at work. We are still working on our native mobile apps for iOS and Android, but in the mean time, our guys hacked a quick fix. 

Now you can go to whyd.com/mobile and see a list of your tracks, search for any track, and add tracks to your profile from the search. This will give you the chance to go directly to the media and play the tracks that you want. It won't play everything in a row and it doesn't have playlists, but at least for those with iPhones you can get to your music, plus any other song in the world, and listen to it.