Transcription
I can't take credit for any single activation, idea, or concept. If I'm gonna take credit for one thing, it's that I've built an amazing team.
In summer 2011, I started a new job at a ven seed stage, 15-person Warby Parker. There was another person who was having their first day, and we immediately became friends. Her name was Jen.
After a couple of years, we both moved on. I went to business school at Columbia, and Jen moved to London. In January 2015, she gave me a call because her suitcase broke. I was traveling, and my luggage broke too. I went to look for a replacement and realized there just wasn't anything out there that really talked or thought about travel the way I think modern travelers do today.
We spent basically that first month doing surveys and focus groups. We either spoke with or surveyed 800 people in a month. By the end of those 800 surveys, like going through all the results, we basically were like, holy, we need to do this.
One thing led to another, and we were prototyping our first perfect area. Starting a company never appealed to me. It just seemed like so much unknown, and I like to have a plan. I'm like a person with a plan.
So when Jen called me, I was like, all beauty, some research, like you should definitely do this. After a couple of months of us working on it and learning a bunch, we were having so much fun that we were like, let's make this happen.
I thought there was a great opportunity to create a beloved brand and a new experience in the space. She knew that with a different business model, we could create something that was really meaningful and different from anything else out there.
So those two sides came together, and that's how we created Away. We systematically solicit and listen to feedback from our customers. We have a 13-person customer experience team and a three-person social media and community management team.
Those teams are tagging every message in every comment that a customer says on any platform. Then, at the end of the week, they funnel to the rest of the company: here's what people are confused about, here's what people are wishing we did.
As a company, we systematically take all that feedback and turn it into actionable insights, like website changes and product changes. That tight customer feedback loop, I think, has been a really important part of how the company has grown and continued to be really customer-centric.
From what other people tell me, it's super common for CEOs or someone in a boss position to need to portray themselves as an expert on a lot of things. I am like super not an expert on a lot of things. There's some stuff I know a little bit about, some stuff I know nothing about, and some stuff I know a medium amount about.
But I'm curious, and I always want to learn more. I try to ask the questions that will get us to the best outcome. I think that humility around your own knowledge is something that's permeating throughout the company. We don't have people pretending to be experts in things they're not. Everyone's just very intellectually curious, and they're like, I don't know that much about that, but I'm gonna go find out.
I think Away is a success every day, but I don't think success is like a destination. At no point am I like, oh, we did it, we're done, and now this is successful.
My team is accomplishing amazing things. Jen and I would have never imagined the company would be where it is today. But our vision for the future is we're the number one travel brand in the world. Even when we do become the number one travel brand in the world, we'll still think we can become that by a wider margin. So it's not a destination.