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Away’s former CEO is returning as its co-chief
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sudhirj 7y agoTLDR: CEO says stupid shit to make a point and drive the team hard, Interwebs raise hell because some of the recipients were minorities, CEO feels the only way to defuse the situation is to apologize and resign, handing over to Eric Schmidt type adult supervisor who was already slated to come on board, then realizes that everyone thinks the public face of the company is exiting in disgrace and that sales and partnership meetings are going to be awkward, so stays on as co-CEO until adult supervisor is fully caught up and ready to do the IPO.
- notfromhere 7y agoIt was more the abusive work environment. She’s a good example of someone who shouldn’t be in charge of employees.
- brodo 7y ago“The internet” has short memory, but not that short. She should have waited at least half a year.
- r_singh 7y agoPG's prediction inspired by this event: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1217010274672304130 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1217010274672304130
- whywhywhywhy 7y agoTwitters relevancy to the wider world and your actual customers is extremely exaggerated simply because so many journalists rely on it to make their lives easier or are actively addicted to it. End of the day it’s just a glorified Internet forum. Would you oust a CEO because 1000 Reddit users commented against them in a thread? Not likely but it’s about as relevant in the real world as a twitter outrage mob. Not commenting on Away CEOs actions specifically. Just saying that hardly anyone has a twitter account. Hardly anyone with an account actually uses it and out of those who do use it most of the content is driven by a small group of actual addicts of the platform and shouldn’t really be taken as seriously as it is. It’s not the real world, it’s a lens that magnifies a tiny and specific sliver of the world and gives it false credibility beyond what it actually has.
- r_singh 7y agoWhat do you think about people who leave reviews on websites like yelp, tripadvisor, capterra, etc? Do you think they're also review writing addicts who shouldn't be taken seriously or do you think one should take what they write seriously while making a purchase decision? PS - Not trying to compare deciding who to keep CEO vs. making a purchase. Genuinely want your opinion.
- barry-cotter 7y ago> What do you think about people who leave reviews on websites like yelp, tripadvisor, capterra, etc? Those people are (former) customers. They gave you money and might do it again. Their opinions have real relevance. A journalist’s opinions only matter insofar as they are a customer or their writing changes the behavior of customers.
- netsharc 7y ago
- achow 7y ago>The members of Away’s board say they feel as if they fell victim to management by Twitter mob. Interesting times. Social media is dictating countries, and companies governance. Of course, before internet there was media (newspaper etc) which used to do that. But in these times people or rather mobs have got that power - for better or worse.
- bloogsy 7y ago"Social media" make it seems like some separate entity, it's still public sentiment. You have also bought into the framing the company has used to make itself seem like the victim by referring to "mobs" having power, rather than a company and CEO facing backlash from the public finding out about its terrible culture behind the scenes, as it rightly should.
- barry-cotter 7y ago> "Social media" make it seems like some separate entity, it's still public sentiment. If your target market is American teenage boys and some Qatari old men really, really hate you their feelings are public sentiment too but you shouldn’t care in the slightest. Likewise what journalists think should be irrelevant compared to what customers think.
- macspoofing 7y ago> it's still public sentiment. I think the point is that it isn't a 'public sentiment'. Public sentiment would imply some sort of representative sample. Twitter people engaging in Twitter mob behaviour is not representative. It's like calling the Campus students freakouts when some conservative speaker visit, as 'public sentiment'. >You have also bought into the framing the company has used to make itself seem like the victim by referring to "mobs" having power, That's exactly what it was. It wasn't a balanced view on this CEO or company culture. It wasn't even that bad. I remember reading the Verge article, and thinking "Meh". There was one circumstance when the team was asked to work New Years Day in return for getting a month off. Everyone would make that choice. But OK, Korey clear set high expectations and created a culture where working a high number of hours was encouraged - is that bad? "Meh". It's an interesting case study but a investigative report from the The Verge is overkill. And this is another aspect to this story, this mob behaviour was triggered by 'The Verge', itself a billion-dollar conglomerate owned in part by NBCUniversal, another global media conglomorate. 'Public Sentiment' indeed.
- Traster 7y agoThis seems incredibly cynical. She pretends to step down to try and do damage limitation, then when customers, investors and suppliers are surprised they are still dealing with her she decides, actually, the heat is off and she'll just cancel her stepping down. Notice how through all of that she's actually not really dealt with the problem in the first place - only the PR impact. Now having changed literally nothing, and not addressed the issue she's decided she can move on and wants to sue the reporters. Oh and to really put the icing on the cake she gives a statement saying she's been doing some deep soul searching and reframed all of the issues as just >“When I think back on ways I’ve phrased feedback, there have been times where the word choice isn’t as thoughtful as it should have been, or the way it was framed actually wasn’t as constructive as it could have been,” she said. “Those are not, in the eyes of our leadership and the eyes of our board, terminal, unsolvable problems.” Well firstly, the eyes of 'our leadership' appear to be... guess who! And apparently, creating corporate policies to publicly humiliate employees and denying them private spaces to talk is a matter of how she "phrases feedback"? Pressuring workers to work extra outside of work hours and at anti-social hours? Badly phrased feedback. To me this just screams "I didn't do anything wrong but need to handle PR for the IPO".
- stock_toaster 7y agoIt's pretty amazing what awful things executives can get away with. Though, truth be told...compared to stories about some of the CEOs in the valley, this seems pretty small potatoes.
- jariel 7y agoI read into the details of this and I suggest that this person was assertive but not toxic. They have the stupid koolaid going, but not necessarily any worse than many places. I think the top line story is reasonable: this is not any kind of normal scenario for the CEO to get the boot.
- bootlooped 7y agoI like how she didn't admit that some feedback wasn't thoughtful or constructive, just that it could have been more thoughtful or constructive. It's implicitly stating "I already was thoughtful and constructive".
- Thorentis 7y agoI guess he just couldn't stay Away
- drsozesakamoto 7y agoIt's a she
- thomasedwards 7y agoIf you like the cases and want an alternative, the Muji ones are probably better in a lot of ways, and Muji have shops.
- siralonso 7y agoI’ve been using the muji cases for years. My partner just got an Away case of equivalent size as a gift, and I can’t figure out why people would choose them over muji. In almost every way the muji cases feel better to use, and they seem much more durable. The one attractive thing about the away cases is the lifetime warranty, but I don’t know how easy it is to submit a claim.
- zemo 7y agothey do almost zero advertising and their stores only exists in the New York, SF, LA, and Boston metro areas, plus one shop in Portland. The majority of Americans have never heard of Muji.
- rconti 7y agoAway has even fewer stores!
- samsolomon 7y agoCurious, how are the wheels on the Muji luggage? The wheels on the Away cases are the best of any luggage I've owned.
- kolencherry 7y agoThe wheels are pretty fantastic on the Muji cases. IMO, they're equivalent to the wheels on the Away cases. They're not as nice as the wheels on my Rimowa case, but the difference is not worth the premium (given how cheap Muji is).
- fnord77 7y ago> The one attractive thing about the away cases is the lifetime warranty lifetime warranty is worthless if the company goes out of business, too
- Mindwipe 7y agoFollowup prediction - this year more major platforms will realise that there's no fixing the calls for increased moderation and policing and will switch back to not really doing any content policing at all.
- seemslegit 7y agoafk, brb
- Apocryphon 7y agoStartup name breaks promise
- leothekim 7y ago“The members of Away’s board say they feel as if they fell victim to management by Twitter mob.” This statement speaks volumes about the efficacy of board governance.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> volumes about the efficacy of board governance Not sure it does. The Board could have gotten caught up in a mob, regained its senses, and started pulling on the reins again. Or blaming Twitter could be the messaging around what was really a compensation (or some other) negotiation.
- Traster 7y agoThere's nothing about this that indicates the board asserted itself at all. The plan to step down was presented to the board by the CEO who wanted to move to become Chairwoman of the board.
- CPLX 7y agoIt’s also just factually incorrect. Her problems were created by the detailed investigative reporting of an establishment media outlet. The issue raised by the reporting spoke directly to her abilities as a manager. It wasn’t a scandal about her dating life or standup comedy routines she did in college. That kind of thing is precisely what the business press is supposed to do, and there’s absolutely nothing at all new about this dynamic.
- lordgrenville 7y agoIt's very hard to define good leadership, or to scientifically measure how effective it is (one of the reasons C-suite pay doesn't seem to follow regular market forces). But - taking the board at its word - this is a perfect definition of bad leadership. Making your decision based on what you see as a "mob" - and then retracting and blaming the mob! Either you think the complaints on social media are accurate, or you don't. But this back-and-forth is the worst possible course.
- excerionsforte 7y agoI'm confused, the backlash was after they already started the search in early 2019 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/online-luggage-startup-away-says-ceo-is-stepping-down-11575930577 https://www.wsj.com/articles/online-luggage-startup-away-say...). I thought they said they wanted to install someone who had more experience before all of this due to their own internal investigation.
- Terretta 7y agoTranslated, the founding CEO wanted to install someone that would “sell well” for IPO. Successful Lululemon exec story brings that. They’re going back to that because it’s how they will get best valuation as shareholders. Not an ego play, a convert shares to more cash play.
- walterkrankheit 7y agoI've worked with people like the one The Verge paints Korey to be. The fact that she quit and then came back points more to The Verge's reporting to be accurate - this kind of personality can usually never accept the mistakes they've made and just doubles down in the future in an attempt to prove they were right.
- gregd 7y agoOh but the article claims she's done some "soul searching", when in fact, I think they meant she's found all the souls she sucked the life out of.
- rguzman 7y agowhy is coming back a failure to accept they made mistakes?
- sushid 7y agoLooks like it’s more of a PR duck your head for a while until things cool down vs. external pressure and internal acceptance of bad behavior that led to them stepping down.
- papito 7y agoShe just couldn't stay AWAY....
- simplicio 7y agoReading between the lines of the Verge piece, I got the impression that weird abusive behaviour aside, she just wasn't very good at managing her company. They seemed to have chronic supply problems that she didn't seem to have any idea how to fix beyond yelling at her customer outreach staff. And when her customer outreach people kept getting behind, she tried to con them into working extra till they started quitting or complaining to Verge, instead of just, like, hiring 3 more people
- weston 7y agoSadly, this seems to be common with many startups in terms of treating the support + success team like garbage. Which is so short sighted because they tend to be the teams that many customers have their only interactions with at the company.
- spamizbad 7y agoThis was my read too, which is mostly why I'm completely incredulous that people actually defended her. She clearly is doing a poor job managing her supply chain, and ultimately giving her support staff the yeoman's task of preventing operational shortcomings from destroying the company's reputation with customers, while chronically understaffing a division that clearly needs to be twice as large as its clearly being used as a "hack" to compensate for other organizational deficiencies. If your entire organization is riding on the backs of a bunch of over-worked, underpaid staff... hooo booy buckle up Verge stories are the least of your worries.
- subsubzero 7y ago> They seemed to have chronic supply problems This is absurd as both Co-CEOs(Jen Rubio and Steph Korey) come from supply chain backgrounds, so they should at bare minimum get the supply chain right. Would never spend a dollar with them, treat your workers like humans, not trash.
- crsv 7y agoI’m sure she’s totally learned her lesson and will change her abhorrent behavior permanently.
- Touche 7y agoFrom the article it seems that they are now disputing the reporting and blame Twitter for her having stepped down. So from her perspective the lesson to learn here is to keep the company's dirty laundry out of the media. I suspect the culture will become even worse at Away, but more secretive. Monitoring people's Slack messages. Scolding people in places without a paper trail, etc.
- wbl 7y ago"Come work for us. We're changing the world" "By curing cancer or going to space?" "Not exactly..."
- samdung 7y agoIm glad this is happening ... for reasons aptly stated in this essay: https://eggonomy.com/blogs/news/ellsworth-toohey-award-for-zoe-schiffer https://eggonomy.com/blogs/news/ellsworth-toohey-award-for-z...
- crispyambulance 7y agoSeems like a lot of drama for 4-year old luggage company that has a couple dozen products, some accessories and a podcast. Yet they got 100 million in their last round of funding and have a "valuation" of 1.4 billion according to wikipedia. What's wrong with just building a business that makes stuff, selling and marketing it, hiring people as needed, making a decent profit, and per-chance innovating? But giant globs of venture capital money for luggage, LUGGAGE?
- PedroBatista 7y agoThe problem with that is you wouldn't get 100 million. This is a merry-go-round of printed money and the game is to get yours before the ride stops.
- seibelj 7y agoVery well put. Governments are in a race to inflate their currencies, and the dollar being the global reserve makes it uniquely positioned to decrease the wealth of the entire world every time another dollar is printed. My only recommendation is to buy assets, but who knows which assets are in a bubble! Maybe it’s all of them.
- papito 7y agoI would just like to point out that Sikorsky, the company that makes the damn Black Hawk helicopter, was sold for $9 billion. These valuations are not rooted in reality.
- tomhoward 7y agoA reminder of this article/HN discussion [1] where John Gruber speculated that the attacks on Korey published in The Verge may have been part of an internal power struggle. I have no particular insights or opinions on the matter; I do think it's worthwhile context, given this development. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21749694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21749694
- lotsofpulp 7y agoI don't see how that's possible considering the proof of Korey's unprofessional communications.
- ec109685 7y agoHe makes it sound like some back room coup when in reality she maintained her executive chairwomen title, so his whole thesis made no sense.
- CPLX 7y agoPerhaps. But it seems to me that preventing an internal power struggle from leaking out into a disastrous press crisis is another part of her job description as CEO.
- Cyclone_ 7y agoShe disputes the reporting, but didn't say specifically what it was that they got wrong. The screenshots of slack messages were pretty clear evidence to me.
- hadiz 7y agoI am not surprised. She somehow was able to bleed her employees dry for business benefits. People at power love someone like that. Of course they're not gonna let her go so easily.
- jjmorrison 7y agoThis is the story of a young founder who is scared and trying her best at an impossible task. And young employees who believed they were allowed to get the job they wanted at the company they wanted. But that's not how the system works. You need to vote with your feet - you don't like it, leave and let them know you aren't going to put up with it. Without that, we're all just arguing about what's ok and what's not. Don't complain, vote!
- TimothyBJacobs 7y agoAre you saying the workers need to vote with their feet? If so, I disagree. As an employee, I'd always want to try and affect change before leaving. Leaving is the last resort. Complaining is part of trying to affect change, and is one of the "let them know you aren't going to put up with it" step. You seem to be advocating for leaving first.
- jjmorrison 7y agoYou're right on that. I'm more reacting to this story where the complaining is not try to change things, but an attempted take down of the company. I disagree with the anger and sense of having been wronged that's portrayed in the original article. You're not a victim if you can leave, that's totally ok to do. I would definitely agree a company is a long series of people affecting changes that hopefully make the whole better.
- Uehreka 7y agoPart of the problem with that approach is that the market won't sink bad companies unless it has information that they are bad. Plenty of companies play the game of "hire employees, treat them like crap, when they leave hire new employees by misrepresenting what the company is like". The labor market is huge, and you can always find new employees that don't know your previous employees. So you could argue "If you don't like what the company is doing, don't shop there!" But unless current/former employees speak out, the market (consumers, investors) won't necessarily know "what the company is doing" and won't penalize them. In this case, employees spoke up, and a whole bunch of people who read the Verge (who are probably in the "luggage buying demographic") decided they didn't like what the company was doing and voiced their concerns stating they would no longer buy the company's product. The board fired the CEO, this apparently satisfied many customers, now they're walking it back and I guess we'll find out how the market feels about it. But I don't see anything wrong with this approach as long as the reporting is well done (and in this case it was).
- mrcu5 7y agoTo quote Oscar from The Office: Look, it doesn't take a genius to know that every organization thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead, name a country that doesn't have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes?
- Fede_V 7y agoThe part of the original story that upset me the most is how the people she abused were underpaid and overworked customer support staff. An incredibly strong signal of how decent someone is is how well they treat people that have no ability to help them. Even a selfish asshole will be charming and kind to the rich and powerful: if you want to see their true colors look how their reports talk about them when they aren't around, or how they treat a waiter who messed up their order.
- jahlove 7y ago> Even a selfish asshole will be charming and kind to the rich and powerful See Harvey Weinstein.
- yowlingcat 7y agoThe journalists are going to continue to have a field day with this. She shows no signs of growth, and in fact seems to have doubled down on denial. The company turns a profit with a simple business model and a product people like, but the brand halo will only last so long, and this kind of dysfunction can only be catnip to a fast follower. There is only one way to play this, which is for the adult in the room who was hired to clean up this mess to defang her and give her a short leash, seek exit, and fast. The alternative is that she runs the company into the ground on the backs of her employees and courts PR disaster after PR disaster. It's a dangerous game to play -- in this climate, bad PR is still PR. But she's going to be in the hot seat now, and one slip up that the court of public opinion doesn't like, and she's going to be back to square one.
- alfalfasprout 7y agoOne of my friends has an away bag and I don't really see the hype. If you're looking for a lower priced bag with a great warranty then Brigs and Riley's build quality is far better and they have a lifetime warranty. If you want a well-built aluminum case then Tumi and Zero Haliburton are the way to go (sadly Rimowa went downhill after the LVMH acquisition).
- cwkoss 7y agoOn original verge article: "Update December 6th, 8:20PM ET: This story was updated to reflect that Erin Grau does not identify as a person of color." I'm curious about the story of this update. Original reporting claimed Erin Grau identified as a person of color (near context of "“The stuff you said was hateful, even racist. You no longer have a job at this company.” Emily, who is a person of color, was shocked. “That was jarring — three white people telling me I was racist,” she says.") Did Erin Grau previously identify as a person of color at time of reporting? Does she no longer identify as a person of color as a result of this article? (I saw her get a lot of ridicule online because she very much looks white.)