The toxic work environment at Away

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks Verge news reporter Zoe Schiffer about the concerning work conditions at luggage startup Away and the details from the Verge investigation. Further reading: Former Away employees describe a toxic work environment Away replaces CEO Steph Korey after Verge investigation The Away scandal is a moment of reckoning for Slack Here’s the leaked memo in which Away tells employees not to fave The Verge’s investigation Away’s new CEO was going to be second in command — until a toxic workplace story blew up Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Sam from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, Verge reporter Zoe Schiffer joins us to talk about her series of reports on Away, the luggage company. You're probably aware of Away if you listen to The Vergecast or read The Verge. It is a hip, new luggage startup. They have some culture problems inside the company. Zoe reported on them. Their CEO, Steph Corey, stepped aside for a new CEO. And then Zoe has some more reports on what it's like inside the retail stores of that company. So we talked about where the story came from. There's a lot of weird conspiracy theories about that floating around. But we talked about how she reported that story, where it came from, specifically how Away's culture was shaped by the use of Slack, which is of particular interest to us. We obviously run a Slack-based workplace. Slack is taking over the workplace.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Its competitor, Microsoft Teams, is also taking over workplaces. What does chat software do to a company? That's something we talked about a lot. We talked about what it takes to start a startup. That's something that a lot of people have been reacting to with the Away story. And we talked a lot about how people are reacting to it and what it means for our workplaces and what it means for startups. A great conversation. Zoe is a terrific reporter. She's new to our team. I'm so happy she's here. So it was a really fun conversation. She's also so deep in this world. She knows so much. Check that, Zoe Schiffer, on The Vergecast.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Zoe Schiffer, welcome to The Vergecast.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  Thanks for being on. It's your first one with us, right?

• 2:19Speaker 03

  Yes, this is the inaugural cast for me.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  You are new to The Verge. You're making a huge splash here in like month five or something with your reporting on Away. So obviously you had the big story about the company culture, their use of Slack. Steph Corey stepped down after that came out. There's a new CEO. He was the CEO of Lululemon, all those changes. But you've got a new story today about the conditions of Away's retail stores. Tell me about that.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And to be clear, it's month three, so I appreciate that you think I've been here for that long. But the latest Away story is really about how the corporate culture has trickled down to Away's frontlines. And I'm focused on two teams in particular: the team that deals with product, the monogramming artists, and the retail employees. The monogramming artists have complained about paint thinners and fumes. They're in a room without any ventilation. The company in July moved them from the company headquarters to this outpost that they said would be better set up for them to paint the luggage. They're kind of stenciling these initials onto each piece of luggage, which is kind of a claim to fame of Away's, that they're all hand-done and they look really nice.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  But unfortunately for the artists, the room was not set up for them at all. There wasn't ventilation, there was not working heat. And so as it got colder, they're essentially just trapped in this space, huffing chemicals, in their own words, in a way that they felt was really dangerous. People were getting eye irritations and coughs, rampant headaches all the time. People were throwing up in the bathrooms. And they were talking about it really openly on Slack, but they felt like they were being utterly ignored.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  That is ridiculous.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  It's pretty unfortunate. The Slack conversations that we've seen, some of which we published... In the new article is really this like sad conversation between all the artists kind of day after day saying like, are you guys feeling dizzy? I'm feeling really dizzy. You know, we have headaches, but Away was doing things like sending them desk fans. They sent them fingerless gloves, but they weren't actually fixing the underlying problem.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  Why weren't they fixing it? Is it just too expensive?

• 4:18Speaker 03

  So the company hasn't responded yet about why it's taken them so long to fix the issue. I know from the monogramming artist's perspective, they just didn't feel like the company wanted to spend more money on them. They had kind of said, you know, we got you this new space, can you stop complaining? Was the feeling that they were getting, at least. It felt like they were kind of trying to implement these Band-Aid solutions to get them to shut up, but they weren't actually interested in, you know, helping them. There were other things like, I mean, basically, people just felt kind of out of sight, out of mind. They used to be invited to company-wide events, and when they moved to the new space, Away said, you know, oh, you'll get your own holiday party this year. Okay, you're not invited to ours, but full-time monogramming artists could come to both. And then, you know, week before the event, they saw that the Google Calendar invite

• 5:03Speaker 03

  had just disappeared from their calendars. And when they asked about it, corporate was like, oh, we think it's better if you just, you know, go to yours. So there wasn't, there just wasn't a lot of communication between the two sides, which is kind of ironic, because the company prides itself on very transparent, open communication. So that, that was just kind of the monogramming part. The, it's, their experiences on the monogramming team are really mirrored by the retail employees' experiences, which is basically that all around the world, as, you know, Away is expanding, they're opening new retail locations, retail employees are running into all of these issues with like the physical environment that they're working in. They talked about not having heat in the store in New York in winter, and it being, you know, they could see their breath in the stores. In summer, the air conditioning broke and it wasn't fixed for the entire summer.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  And so customers were coming in and like fully sweating while trying to shop for luggage. And I mean, not to mention what was going on for the employees themselves in the store. The company was supposed to deliver them water, drinking water every week, and they weren't, so people were just running out in the middle of the shift to grab water for the cleaning employees, because, you know, the cleaning people just like looked really thirsty, and the retail employees felt bad for them. I mean, it was like, A tough environment.

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  Were they reporting all the stuff in this very public Slack situation?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  They were talking about it, yeah. They felt like they would kind of complain about stuff that was going on. And they also say that there just wasn't a lot of organization, like they were never sure who to speak to. And when they brought it up, they were kind of given these Band-Aid solutions. You know, for a long time, the retail stores didn't have bank accounts. And so cash was just piling up at the stores. I have this anecdote in the story that a retail store in L.A. couldn't close the safe one night because cash was just like spewing out of it. And they had been asking for bank accounts for months. And then when they actually got bank accounts, which, you know, had taken quite a long time, away didn't want to pay for an armored truck to pick it, to pick up the cash. So they had to walk it, you know, to the nearest branch, the nearest bank every week.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  And they would have just cash in essentially a tote bag that they were kind of carting back and forth between the store and the bank.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  So what strikes me about this is that running a store is a fairly solved problem, right? Like, people know how to do it, they know how to account for it, they know how to handle the cash that a retail store generates every single day, they know how to get it into a bank. Is this just a startup not accepting the known solution and trying to reinvent the wheel? Or were they just completely asleep at the switch?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  I think that they really didn't understand what opening a retail store would entail. I mean, one thing that I tried to ask every source I talked to, and you know, some people are on the record for this piece, is like, was this abnormal, given your previous retail experience? Most everyone I talked to had had multiple retail jobs. And every single person said this was extremely abnormal. It was so much more disorganized than what I experienced before. There were no processes in place. There was management who'd never worked retail themselves. And so they really didn't understand what we were going through. And a lot of the things that corporate has talked about and implemented, like, you know, auditing the stores through secret shoppers and stuff, which were supposed to kind of do quality control worldwide in all these locations,

• 8:09Speaker 03

  actually just created the situation where retail employees felt really surveilled, like the corporate employees on Slack.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  This seems so backwards because one of the themes with direct-to-consumer brands like Away, and we'll talk about it a little bit more, but their cost curves are rising, right? Like Instagram ads are getting really expensive, Facebook ads are getting really expensive. Their whole thing is they don't have all these big carrying costs. They can ship you a high-quality product at a lower price, but like, opening and running a store is expensive. And it seems like they were just cutting corners on the basics to do it as cheaply as possible while still having this image of really high quality. Is that sort of what you think was driving it, or was it sheer ignorance?

• 8:48Speaker 03

  No, I think, to me, it really seems like they were pouring money into advertising. Like, that was the bet they were making. They were saying, "We're gonna make this brand look really, really sexy on social media," and the result is that there wasn't a lot of money left over to like, get the heater working in the store in New York, or get a bank account in L.A. There wasn't time to do those things.

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  It's just funny, like, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of luggage stores in every city, right? And like, you can just get somebody who managed a luggage store well to come in and do it for you, and they just didn't, it didn't seem like they did it, or they didn't empower those people?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there were, I mean, there are other things that are like, funny little quirks about like, a startup running a retail location, which is that like, at the store in New York, you know, they wanted to have cold brew on tap, which would be like, a cool thing. You walk into the store, you get a cold brew, you shop for luggage, and it created this kind of like, massive rodent infestation where there was, I know. One night, one of the store managers, who's in the piece, got a call at 5:00 a.m. because the alarm had been tripped up. And when she looked at the security camera footage, it was a mouse. And, you know, they moved the cold brew keg at one point, and there was a dead mouse under it. There were just these things that she was like, "I've worked in Soho for a long time, I've worked in New York for a long time, I've just never experienced this. We need an exterminator." But it was like, months

• 10:01Speaker 03

  before they actually got someone in there. It just, time went by, because everyone at corporate was dealing with a whole bunch of other stuff. One other thing that I think is kind of interesting to mention is that I mean, kind of in this vein of corporate culture trickling down to the front lines, when in the first piece, I talked about how the customer experience team was really struggling in 2018 with the volume of calls they were getting. And at one point, the executives just decided to temporarily shut down the customer experience phone line because they were missing so many calls and they felt like it was embarrassing, just like shut it off. But what happened is that people started calling the store in New York incessantly. And so these retail employees are trying to manage customers who are in front of them in person while like answering the phones and dealing with issues that they have no idea how to solve.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  And they're frantically slacking corporate, being like, hey, what do I do about this? And they're just getting zero response from corporate. And it was like, all of these actions that they were taking were having these massive ripple effects kind of globally to all the people in the stores and on the front lines.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  What kind of customer support does a luggage customer need? I think this is one of those things I just don't understand about a way. Like, I am not needy with my suitcase seller. Like, I don't call to me a lot, I guess. You know, like, the North Face has never heard from me about a backpack or whatever. Like, what were they asking for?

• 11:18Speaker 03

  I mean, it was all happening around the holidays. So I think one interesting thing is like, Away was really, in my mind at least, selling to people who didn't necessarily need a new suitcase. They were getting one because they kind of bought into the brand, or they were giving it as a present because they'd bought into the brand. And so a couple of things were happening. If they were giving it as a present and the present was going to be late, people were like totally irate and furious. Another thing that retail employees talk about a lot is that the bags would break frequently. They would break, they would scratch the wheels, something would happen with them. And so they were like having to deal with a lot of repairs. I mean, they were told, you know, to kind of be like, oh, this never happens, we'll get it fixed right away. But kind of back channel talking to me, they would be like, it happened every day.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that is one of those things where there's, I guess there's not a lot of review sites for luggage. There's not a lot of market signals about the quality of luggage. So Away like operates in a little bit of a vacuum.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I know, and people, some people really like, I don't have an Away bag myself, so I can't speak to it. But yeah, I think it's like, They really elevate the people who love the product. Those are the people who they're, you know, posting their Instagrams and they're retweeting their tweets and stuff. And those voices are loud and they're heard. And then the people they're not, they're trying to do damage control. They're saying, you know, we'll fix it for free. We'll send you a new one. And so people are kind of like mollified in this way.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  It's so funny because I, what I always think about, I mean, we obviously review lots of tech products. And one thing that actually gives like a little bit of comfort to me in operating your review program is if something's wrong and we say it's wrong and everybody yells at us. Like the camera on the iPhone isn't as good as they say it is, which is a thing that I've written. Like eventually it just outs itself. Like they can't spin out of it, right? Like eventually people get the product, they start using it and the truth is out there, whether or not the early reviews got it right or wrong. Like I'd like to be more right than wrong, but there's just a part of, in the back of my head, it's always like, eventually people are going to find out. Eventually the processor is slow or it's fast.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  Here it seems like they managed to hide that if all these people are coming to the store and saying, my wheels are broken or whatever. They managed to somehow suppress that from coming out by elevating all these other happy customers in their marketing.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I mean, it's a difficult thing to report, right? Because I don't know what normal is for a suitcase. Like I would be pissed if my suitcase broke the first time I used it. But you know, if that happens to one in every 15 or 20 customers, it's kind of hard to tell if it's a pattern, if it's normal. A lot of people only upgrade their suitcase like a few times in their life. So it's like, it might not seem like a red flag until you start to, yeah, get someone kind of reporting it out and saying like, wait, is this, you know? If every single bag is getting like scratched beyond repair the first time we use it, is this an issue with like how they're making the bags?

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  So let's talk about the, you said your news story is about how the sort of corporate culture bled into the actual working conditions of the company. Let's talk about that corporate culture and where it came from, which is really the subject of your first piece. Why were they using Slack in this way? I think that it was really missed by a lot of people who picked up the story and ran with it. It was like the story took on a life of its own. But the heart of it is that no one was allowed to communicate privately, that they all had to do everything publicly in Slack. What was the root of that decision?

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was something that Steph Corey and Jen Rubio, the co-founders, talked about really openly. They said it was a strategic decision they'd made to make the culture more transparent and more inclusive. They said that at times, you know, women and people of color would be left out of critical conversations when they took place of our email, and Slack was a way to ensure that that never happened. But in reality, employees say it kind of did the opposite. Minority employees in particular, who are a massive part of my first article, talked about how they felt like they couldn't make even minor mistakes because they would just get eviscerated on public Slack channels, and the entire company would watch as they were kind of taken down in these very brutal ways. And so when they tried to form their private Slack channel to talk about some of these issues, to talk about some of like

• 15:16Speaker 03

  the workplace toxicity that they were experiencing, six of them were fired because the company felt like they'd been prejudiced towards, you know, managers or others at the company.

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, one of the things that I have noticed over and over again is we have like moved from different chat platforms over the years, is that there's always a point at which you just have to stop typing in chat or Slack or whatever and be like, let's get on the phone. And that usually changes the entire dynamic of the conversation. I think that's what most people do. I'm just very curious why that never seemed to be happening in a way.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it was really discouraged. I've seen the companies, the like Slack handbook that they give all new employees with how they direct people, how to speak. And one of the things that jumped out to me in that is that they said, you know, if you direct message someone, don't be surprised if they say, hey, I'll respond to you in a public channel. And then they like post your message and respond to it right there.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  That is insane.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Which the company was not embarrassed about at all. They were like, this is the way we do things. And I was like, this is wild. I mean, I can't even imagine, especially because you're hiring people one to two years out of school who have like, no idea what's normal. And then all of a sudden, they're just like, like, okay, I guess this is what's happening. Feedback is a spectator sport at this company, and I've got to participate.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  So it's weird, because every little, like Slack doesn't have rules. It doesn't guide your behavior. And so you have to impose your own sort of norms and rules and culture on to Slack, which is not, I don't think people talk about it. I think Slack's own blog has done the most talking about it. Right? There's not like some body of literature. There's not, I don't know, college courses or management courses and like chat software should be used in this way. Like, it's new. Do you think this story is a shift in how people are going to start to think about this chat? Like, particularly because you've got screenshots, which are damning, right? They are the story in many respects. Do you think a lot of people are going to rethink how they use the software?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  I don't know, because I thought that after, you know, the Gawker hip chats were read into position during the trial against Hulk Hogan, which ultimately culminated in Gawker being bankrupted, essentially. You know, I don't know if anyone remembers that, but they read the office-wide chats back and forth between the journalists that were like incredibly inappropriate and hilarious. And at that point, I thought like, oh, no one's ever going to use chat again. Like, that was horrific. You know, it was so embarrassing to see your like, private communications aired in front of the entire world. But I don't think it actually changed that much. I mean, I think one interesting thing is that there's a lot of executives who look at this behavior and say like, well, that's crazy. I would never do that. But then they're actually participating in it at their own

• 18:02Speaker 03

  companies. They maybe just aren't as aware. It's one thing that I've been hearing a lot from employees. And I think the response to the article on Twitter has been really split between workers being like, this is terrible. We are treated like trash and people should be held to account. And venture capitalists and executives saying like, this is part of the hustle. This is how you grow a high-powered company.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  So that's the other piece of the puzzle, which I have found utterly fascinating, is that split in reaction. There's the people who do the work, who are saying, you treat us like crap, especially on these chat platforms. And then the notion that In order to have high standards, to drive your company, to grow your business, to deal with all the crap that involved, like, entailed being a founder, you have to behave in this way? Is that as black and white of a split as it seems like? Or is there a lot of, are there people saying stuff in the gray area?

• 18:58Speaker 03

  It seemed pretty split. I was pretty shocked with the response. Overwhelmingly, I think it was overwhelmingly slanted towards workers being very happy and excited that this stuff was coming to light. People who, in all different industries, at all different companies, feel like it's an under-reported story that they are treated like trash by executives all the time and no one seems to care. And finally, they felt like they had a voice. We heard that over and over again. Venture capitalists and executives felt often that it was either not a big deal, the stuff that she was saying and how she was saying it, or it was overblown, or it was an unfortunate byproduct of, you know, trying to grow a company. It was just part of it.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  I think a lot of venture capitalists felt like Cory was something they would want, someone they would want on their team.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that, is that kind of sort of undercut by the fact that she was so quickly removed in favor of this new guy?

• 19:53Speaker 03

  You definitely heard that conversation quiet down. I think the VCs were really out in force defending her in the first couple of days and kind of trashing the article and saying it was overblown, it wasn't fair, it was a hit piece, I heard that over and over and over again. And then when she stepped down, it kind of went silent. And they started to say, okay, no, you were played, Away was planning this the entire time. They wanted to use you to help push her out so they could like bring in new leadership. Which, you know, it's just baffling to me, but here we are.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  That is like the most galaxy brain thinking in the world. By the way, first of all, if any company would like to expose its own toxic workplace in order to make an executive change, like, call me, like, sure?

• 20:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, slide into my DMs.

• 20:36Nilay Patel?

  That seems like maybe you should clean your own house first before letting us do it for you. I thought that, that particular action that you got played or that we got played, what struck me about it the most... Is that you have to just assume everyone is so much smarter and capable of predicting what will happen than any other person in history, right? That you're, that we, like, The Verge will do exactly what you expect when you tell us the story, that people will react the way that they reacted, that it will hit this cultural note that seems to be so resonant, that Seth Corey will agree to step down as a result.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  Like, you just have to assume so many things will happen that actually rarely happen. And that is, it's such a mistake of, what's the phrase? It's such a mistake of hindsight. Like, all of that makes sense if you're looking back. None of it is even remotely rational if you're looking ahead.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I had a moment when I saw it where I was like, wow, I wonder if those people who were with me at the bar at 2:00 a.m. and who were like crying, literal tears, were being like paid by the company. And I certainly hope they were being paid more than $40,000 a year to do that, because like, that is insane. But of course, yeah, when you've spent like months and months getting people to trust you and talk and you've like met them on multiple occasions in person and texted with them on every platform possible, like, there's just, yeah, there's not a doubt in your mind that this was not at all planned, especially because so many of the people felt incredibly burned by the company. These were not employees who were like in contact with the organization for the most part anymore.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  They had real beef based on what had happened and were willing to talk about it after they felt like they trusted them.

• 22:32Speaker 04

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• 23:32Nilay Patel?

  You've brought up how little some of these people made a couple of times now. I think it's $40,000. There's also a split here in how hard the founders are expected to work and how hard the employees are expected to work. And it seems like part of this reaction is everyone at a startup signs up to work this hard. But the reward for that is nowhere near the same, right?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, no. I mean, I think that that is part of it. There's two things it makes me think of. One, it's that you can put in really nice policies that are supposed to enable work-life balance and all of those good things. But if you see executives modeling the behavior of being there till 3 a.m., it's really hard for you to not stay until that time as well. Similarly, if they're working Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Year's, you're probably going to feel like you have to do the same. In a way, it wasn't even that flexible. It was like a literal mandate. But I think at a lot of companies, the executive behavior kind of sets the tone for the rest of the organization. The other part of it that I was thinking after this piece came out is that I think employees used to be willing to put up with a lot more bullshit, for lack of a better

• 24:38Speaker 03

  word, because of the promise of a big payout later on. It was like the stock was going to make them, you know, it was going to be life-changing money. And I think part of the cultural shift is that we're seeing these IPOs not go as planned, and people are not willing to put up with years and years of abuse because they're not sure that the payout will be as big. I think all the people who worked at WeWork probably expected a very different outcome from what actually occurred.

• 25:03Nilay Patel?

  Or they don't have equity in the first place. I mean, your $40,000 frontline customer support person is not going to be a millionaire if Away sells itself to Samsonite.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  No, they're not. Yeah.

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  But I think that's real. And the reason I'm kind of pushing on it is that seems to be the part of the founder VC criticism that they were just blind to. That, yeah, maybe your founder who's trying to make something out of nothing and they're going to be a millionaire, maybe that person needs to be insanely driven and that feedback needs to be harsh and like, I have a lot of sympathy for going from zero to one. Like, that stuff is really hard. But you're a person who's just like, solving your FedEx shipping problem for your suitcase. They're not going to get the return on that investment at all. And I don't think that makes any sense.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  No, I feel that. I mean, I think that's where the company mission comes in. The mission and values have to sound so good. You have to get people so hyped up about the mission of the organization that they're willing to put in those hours. And I think that's what these companies do really masterfully. You know, if you looked at Away's branding, it was like a travel and lifestyle company. It wasn't just hawking luggage. It was doing so much more than that. And I think that that's, in some ways, weaponized to get people kind of bought into the idea of what the company could be and make them feel like it's really worthwhile to pour all of their time into it.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  But this brings into another kind of big question, which is that Away is a suitcase company and we are mostly a tech and science website. And yet, this felt like our story so completely. Like, I don't think we ever asked ourselves, like, why are we covering a suitcase company? There's something about this company in particular where they took the language of the tech industry, they took the money of the tech industry, they're deeply related into the tech industry, but they make a plastic box. Right? And like, we didn't talk about it, and certainly, it is absolutely a ver故事, but why do you think it felt so connected to the tech industry when the product is so old, like, so traditional?

• 27:03Speaker 03

  That's part of what's really fascinating to me about this story and why I kind of look at these brands in particular. It's not the first time I've written about the direct-to-consumer industry, because there are this whole host of companies that are treated like tech companies even though they are not at all. I think like the Warby Parker, Outdoor Voices, Glossier, like what they are selling is literally makeup, workout gear, et cetera, but they're really treated like startups and they talk about themselves like startups and they have investments that look like startups. You know, Away was worth 1.4 billion. And I think part of that is the way that they kind of the the bet that they make in terms of where they spend money. They pour a ton

• 27:43Speaker 03

  of money into Facebook and Instagram advertising. They have really sexy websites. The models look very good, very young, very millennial focused. They all kind of look the same, all of these places. I mean, if you look at the website, it's like they've taken the playbook and copied it again and again. And I think it works. It's also what makes the disparity so difficult. It's like if you're pouring all of your resources into advertising, you might not have a lot left over to actually pay employees a living wage, to give them paid holidays, to give them good benefits. And that's those kinds of things, I think, are obviously more important to the people at your organization, but they're a lot less interesting to talk about kind of in the media.

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  I think there's just another piece of it, which this might be, it's the end of the decade, you know, like the decade of disruption is like winding to a close. And the idea that Samsonite and TravelPro are are brands that need to be disrupted, at one point sounded good, right? Like, we're going to disrupt the travel industry by building a better suitcase with a battery in it. At one point, I think, in the the sort of cultural conversation around startups, that sounded like a tech pitch. Like, here's this old industry and I'll fix it with like better marketing or honestly putting a battery in the in the bag. So I don't have an Away suitcase and I know people are like religious about it and I've never quite understood it. But that, to me, it seems like that moment is

• 29:08Nilay Patel?

  over, right? The reality of what these companies make and sell seems to be superseding the the pitch to investors at the beginning.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. I would be surprised if it's actually over, although I think that some of the shine has worn off a little bit. I think we're, as consumers, a little savvier about what these companies are actually doing. And we're a little more immune to like the very, very lofty language. I think that, you know, when you looked at WeWork's website, or you listened in on one of their earnings calls, like you would literally have no idea what the company actually did, because it sounded like it was saving the world single-handedly. And I think that we're a little more suspicious of that kind of thing now. But whether companies are gonna stop trying to do it, I don't know.

• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  Did you ever see that, there's like a, it's embarrassing that I even know this, but there's like a pitch deck meme. I don't know how else you would describe it, where it's like, pistachios are a $1.4 billion industry, and no one has ever tried to disrupt it. And it's like, it was just a template that we would see, particularly when startups would come to us, like, here's this old thing, we can make more money with the new thing, and like, computers are in the middle of it somewhere. Trust us. And at the end, it's like, oh, you're a real estate company, you're a suitcase company, you saw makeup, right? Like, they are classic kinds of companies. But the thread that connects most of them, not WeWork, but most of the companies you're describing, is that they are direct-to-consumer brands.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:29Nilay Patel?

  And they seem like they have their own, unique kind of economics. They are spending a lot on marketing, they're spending a lot on customer acquisition. As you have spent more time in, like, investing in the workplace cultures of these, it just, I keep thinking, like, no one's writing the expose about Samsonite, right? Which is also, like, they also, like, make a lot of products, they ship them to people, they break, they get lost in air, but like, they have all the same problems. But they're just like a bigger, older, traditional company that probably outsources its customer support or whatever. What about these direct-to-consumer brands made them like this? Made them work, run this hard?

• 31:03Speaker 03

  I think there's actually a crucial difference, which is that Samsonite hasn't made a promise to customers that they should love the brand for all of these reasons. They haven't said, like, we created a brand persona that is supposed to be your friend, creating excellent customer experience that is supposed to get you to, you know, feel really good about your purchase, in all of these different ways. You know, many people didn't need a new suitcase. You only need, like, one. But you get it because you're buying, you're kind of virtue signaling with your purchase. You're saying like, I am part of this group. I am in the know. And you would see other people at the airport who also had it and you all kind of like, you know, you'd done it together. It was, it was a thing. Which sounds totally ridiculous, but I do feel like it's true. It was like, I mean Glossier does this too.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  They're, you're really like part of their community when you buy the makeup. And I think that there, because there's such a closer link between the companies and the customers, and that's kind of like the crucial difference about why they are quote unquote, like disrupting the industry. It's a lot further of a fall for them when it turns out they're treating people like trash. Samsonite never made that same promise. And so, one, no one cares. And then two, if it comes out, it's like, okay, well, yeah, they treated people poorly. We never expected so much different.

• 32:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't know the names of anybody who works at Samsonite. Like, I don't know who their CEO is, I don't know who their end buyer, like, it's funny how much I've considered luggage since the story came out. Cause it's just like this invisible, I don't know, is there like a Elizabeth Toomey out there who like makes the bag? Like, I have no idea. I hope there is. I hope she's doing great. But that, like, those brands, they just sell you a product and they, all of the effort is like, once the transaction's over, they hope you really like it, so you buy another one, or you tell a friend. They're not doing Instagram shoots.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  They're not buying tons and tons of Facebook ads in the hope to convert people to a lifestyle. But was that happening at a way? Like, at some point, that is untenable, right? Like, you just have to sell people more suitcases. Like, how are they thinking about making their community so big to be worth 1.4 billion dollars?

• 33:12Speaker 03

  I mean, that's the other thing with a lot of these direct-to-consumer brands, is that they do think of themselves like startups. So it's not just about the suitcases. We know that Away is planning big things, which I can't talk about yet, but.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  Scoop Schiffer is on the case.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Their end all be all is not just luggage. And we know from Glossier, it's like they started with a website that just talked about what makeup people were wearing, then they launched their own makeup line, then the makeup line launched this like party makeup line. It's like they want to take over bigger and bigger parts of the market because that's what startups do. They want to ingratiate themselves into like every facet of your travel life or of your getting ready world. And they do that really successfully by creating this attachment between the customer and the company. So then when they want to sell you, you know, like body lotion in terms of Glossier, you're like, okay, well, I've always been buying it from Trader Joe's, but I guess now I'll switch to get this more expensive lotion online because, you know, I'm part of this whole thing.

• 34:10Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that to enter a space like that where you are selling a mission, where you are selling a lifestyle to people, where you're trying to build a community of brand loyalists, where your goal is to be, like, when you're trying to operate at that level, do you need this personality? Like, Mike Isaac was on the show a few months ago, and he just written his Uber book, and like, the thesis of the Uber book is Uber would not exist but for this asshole, right? And the entire book is like very much a meditation on how much of a jerk you really need to be. You've now been reporting on another CEO who seems to have aggressive tendencies towards her staff, who seems to be driven by a much bigger vision than just selling suitcases. Do you think you need that personality to make something from nothing?

• 34:52Speaker 03

  It's an interesting question. I definitely think you need to be pretty fanatical, you need to be really like passionate and dedicated. I like to think that they're not mutually exclusive, that you can be a like high-powered CEO and not treat people poorly. But I think, of course, if you're starting a company and it's going to grow to like 1.4 billion dollars, you are going to work all the time and you're not going to have days off and you're going to have to get people really, really hyped up about it. But I think that you can also be cognizant of the fact that this is your dream. It's not the person shipping your FedEx packages dream. They are doing it for a paycheck. And so do you really need to use the language of like, we are a family to dupe them into working all the time?

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Or can you just treat them humanely? Ask for like, in a way that you get their respect by treating them with respect. And when you ask them to work on a holiday, you pay them for that time. Like, those kinds of things, in my mind, go a lot longer towards getting people bought into the overall vision and making them feel like they're okay working towards your vision than just using kind of the company values to say, we're in it together. If I'm staying here, you have to stay here, too.

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  Allow me to be a ruthless capitalist. That's like mostly my role here. It's cheaper to lead with the mission, right? It's cheaper to get the buy-in. It's way more expensive to pay for more customer service associates. Do you think the cost evens out in the long run, though?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  I think it does. I mean, I think that like what we're seeing in this circumstance is like, yeah, they cut costs, they didn't hire enough people for the customer experience team, they didn't pay people overtime for a long time, but like, look how that worked out. In the short term, obviously, it's cheaper to use the company values as your like payment method. But it's kind of ridiculous when you look at it over the long term. Like, it's expensive to hire and fire people. But at these startups, really high turnover is just like part of the game. I think if you stepped back and you said like, what would it look like to actually try and retain talent? You would make a different bet.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  And like, what would it look like if our customer service team had institutional knowledge of every holiday season?

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Actually, yeah. I mean, it's not like people aren't going to work. People's complaints, especially at a way, weren't like, we don't want to work hard. It was like, we want to be compensated for our time. We don't want to be spoken to like we are small children being taught a, you know, lesson by our teacher.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  What do you make of it? So that's another one of these criticisms of your piece that, to me, felt very disconnected from what was in the piece. The notion that just like millennials are soft, right? And this is what workplaces are like, and you got to toughen up to make a buck, kid. Like, what did you make of that in the context of what you had been hearing?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  I mean, I've always felt like that's ridiculous. I don't, I just, it's just not what I see with my demographic and my friends. Like, it's none of us, and when I say us, it's like people who are in. Well, no, I mean, part of the reason that I'm interested in these types of stories is that the customer experience, experience level people are like my peers. And it's like, I'm not connected to the investors and the executives of these organizations. I'm connected to the people who are my age, who are working these jobs out of school and who aren't getting paid a lot. And so their stories are interesting to me. What I have seen from the people I've reported on from my sources is that they're down to like work their asses off. They're down to work really late hours and to put in the time and to put in the energy and

• 38:10Speaker 03

  the work. What they don't want is to feel like at the end of the day that they were tricked and duped and that they were kind of told something was other than what it was. I mean, part of the issue is that people come in feeling like the company is going to feel different because it tells them it feels different here. The company culture is like, one of the biggest things about this organization. You're buying into a mission. We are a family. Like, they use this language to get people hyped up. And then the reality is that, no, it's just like a startup and you have to work all the time. And people kind of are mean sometimes, et cetera, et cetera. If you'd, if you'd set that up from the beginning, I think it would be different. No one goes to Wall Street and then is like, I have to work at a bank for a long time. It's like, you expect that. Or, you know,

• 38:53Speaker 03

  people who go into consulting, it's like my friends who went to like McKinsey or something aren't like, and then I have to travel. It's like, well, you have to travel, but you're getting paid, what, $350,000 a year? Like, you're fine with that for five years. So I think you gotta make, you know, one of those calls.

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  I definitely know people who made a lot of money who went to work for the bank and are like, no, I have to work for the bank. But it's happened.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  Fair, fair.

• 39:13Nilay Patel?

  But they're, they're like crying tears of pure gold.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. Must be nice.

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  The other piece of it that I want to try to connect with the tech industry is, let's pick on Google, right? Google's like going through this moment where its workforce is saying this company is broken, we need to fix it. They're obviously firing people for being critics of Google. They were a startup at one point. They famously had a broken early company culture, just a ton of issues. But the mission they were selling was actually like somewhat more real, right? It was somewhat more tangible. We're gonna organize all of the world's information is actually like a world changing thing that Google accomplished. But like, that same question of, do you need to be that forceful personality?

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  Do you need to to cut many corners in how you design your organization and your culture, which Google absolutely did, is mitigated by a different mission or of a different caliber of mission? Because I I honestly struggle with it. I think Google really, really screwed up their early culture and they're paying a heavy, heavy price for it now. But that's a long timeline to pay out that price, right? Like, a lot of people got rich along the way. A lot of people who were recruited in that mission got rich along the way. Like, Google did IPO. So I wonder, you're talking about the cohort that you identify with, they're not getting it from Away, but they might be getting it from another startup that actually has a tech-focused mission that might change the world on the scale of Google. Do you think that changes the equation? I'm honestly asking.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think if you if you truly believe in what the company is doing, it's a lot easier to sacrifice some of your well-being to try and make that happen. Like, if you think the company is changing the world, maybe it's OK to, like, put in all the hours, even if you're not really getting compensated for it, because you really think that, like, and, you know, these people are recruiting people just out of school who are in a, like, pretty idealistic phase of life. It's like, they want to feel like their work matters and has meaning. The tough thing for a company like Away is that they have extremely talented people coming out of, like, the best schools in the country with the best pedigrees. And it's like, you're not going to be recruiting from, like, the business school at Harvard or Stanford if you're just like, "We Hawk luggage."

• 41:23Speaker 03

  You kind of have to present it as something other than what it is. And they've successfully done that. And so that's, yeah, that's kind of the the tough piece, is that if you inherently have a great mission, like, good on you. I think that that's probably a lot easier to get people hyped about. And if you don't, and I think that when, you know, the workdays are tough, as they inevitably are at any organization, people are able to put up with it a little more. When you don't, and then you kind of do what Away did, which is present your company as something other than what it is, then the tough workdays become that much tougher because people are feeling like they were tricked.

• 41:59Nilay Patel?

  So I want to, I want to switch back to Slack for one second, and I want to ask you a question. And maybe, maybe this is going to go sideways on me. But you joined our company. Our company runs on Slack. We have a lot of, like, I mean, honestly, the entire verge runs on Slack. Like, that's where mostly the action is every day. Do you think that's bad? Like, not at The Verge in general, but like, in the world is the use of Slack, the way it skyrockets, the way that people use what is very much an enterprise messaging product controlled by their company, monitored by their company, subject to discovery laws in lawsuits, the way that we use it. Do you think it's appropriate? Do you think it needs to change?

• 42:38Speaker 03

  It's an interesting question. I mean, I think it does a lot of good. Like, I don't, I can't even imagine how The Verge would run if it weren't for Slack.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Before Slack, we ran an IRC, and before IRC, we ran an AOL Instant Messenger. Like, it's, it's in the DNA.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it had to be that, because I think the, the speed at which a lot of companies are running requires a kind of instant messaging back and forth, whichever platform it's running on. You know, my experience of Slack at The Verge has been interesting, because I basically ignore it all day when I'm actually working. I remember, like, day two, when I started, I, I went home and said to my partner, like, "My brain just feels like a slower human brain than all of my coworkers." Like, the speed at which people talk is mind-boggling to me, and I, like, literally can't keep up, so I don't even try. But the other thing is that, like, when I'm trying to actually work, I can't, I just, like, cannot pay attention to it. And my work, or the stuff that I really like to do, are these longer-form pieces, and so they kind of require tunnel vision for a little while.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  I don't think that any technology, well, I wouldn't say that. I was gonna say, I don't think any technology is inherently bad, but that's not true. I don't think that Slack is inherently bad.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  Um, I actually think one of the, one of the big shifts we all need to make is to let go of the idea that technology, most technologies are inherently neutral.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's true. I regretted it as soon as I started saying that.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, like, I, I get it, and it's been rhetorical, and yes, some technologies are inherently bad, fine, but I think it'd be better if we thought of all technologies as inherently costly. Right? And Slack exerts a cost on, on every organization. Like, I see it in ours. Like, it is easier for us to chat about something and pretend to have made a choice in Slack, or make a decision in Slack, than to actually talk about it and actually make a decision and actually follow up. But we make many more of those decisions, those, like, half decisions, all day long. And so that's a price that we pay and it has some benefit and has some cost. But we haven't really ever, this is the most rigorously I've ever talked about it. It's because we're talking about a way, right? Like that restructuring of how companies think about their workplace tool has not yet occurred.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I still think it's better than the alternative. Like, I would not want to go to a world where we just use email or we only have meetings in person. One, because that's impossible. Everyone's too distributed all over the world. And two, because it's a time suck. Like, it's annoying to go back and forth on email like 15 times to come to a decision. But at the same time, I think that there's a really important piece of this that was lost at Away, which is that you kind of do need all of them. There are some meetings that should only happen in person. There are some conversations that are much easier to have over email and that you kind of want that record of to be able to just go back and really easily reference. And when you're imposing too many rules on how people can communicate,

• 45:26Speaker 03

  I think you get to a place where your stated reason for imposing those rules looks really, really different from the reality on the ground when people are kind of living under them.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  So what do you think happens next for Away? Is the first thing the new guy does like ban Slack?

• 45:42Nilay Patel?

  What do you think that first move looks like?

• 45:44Speaker 03

  I don't know. I would imagine that they would relax the rules a bit. You know, one thing that has come out of this is like, what does it mean to have a safe space to talk about a toxic work culture at work? Because one of the problems that Away ran into is that when employees created a private channel to kind of air some of their grievances, they were summarily fired without like any conversation whatsoever. So, yes, if I were him, I would make it safe for employees to speak privately about what's going on. I feel like that that is a basic human right that should be applied to any company, that you shouldn't be so scared of your employees that you literally will not let them speak privately. I think that there's gonna have to be a lot of work done to kind of relax the

• 46:27Speaker 03

  culture around harsh feedback because it is so endemic to the company. I would have a really hard time imagining that executives are gonna continue speaking extremely harshly to those under them, probably because they're so traumatized from this article that it's like horrific to think about what could be screenshotted. But the other way that this could go is that there's just a lot more surveillance of employee activity on these platforms. You know, I still have people leaking me stuff and I'm like, I have to imagine that at this point, the company is really, really watching who's taking screenshots. And so ideally, it doesn't go that way, but we really don't know yet.

• 47:01Nilay Patel?

  Can Slack tell if you've taken a screenshot? That seems like a nuclear feature for them to add.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  They can, they can tell based on the activity. This was something that actually was brought to my attention after the article came out. Based on the emoji reactions and the activity log on Slack, they can tell who took a certain screenshot. And in fact, there's like a funny anecdote that came out. After the article broke, a few employees were kind of coming out with their own experiences on Twitter and saying, this happened to me, this happened to me. One of the things that someone said, this guy Nate, had said publicly that Cory had posted an article in Slack and the whole team had emoji reacted to it except him. And later, she followed up with him, having gone through all of the emojis and said like, hey, you didn't react, I thought that that article would be particularly important for you.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  And he was kind of like.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Wow, so.

• 47:53Nilay Patel?

  That is an enormous combination of weird and creepy things, leading to like one subtweet in person?

• 48:00Speaker 03

  An incredible subtweet.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  All right. What is, what's next on this story and what other things are you looking at?

• 48:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have, my DMs are quite full right now with other employees coming forward with their own stories. I am really interested in these companies that present a really different image than what's actually going on internally. And I think I'm excited to kind of keep diving into these subcultures of the tech industry and saying like, where is the marketing kind of obfuscating what's actually going on? And what do the lowest level employees at these places have to say? Because they're often the people who are treated the worst.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  All right. If people want to reach out to you, where can they find you?

• 48:40Speaker 03

  You can find me on Twitter, @ZoeSchiffer. Z O E S C H I F F E R.

• 48:47Nilay Patel?

  Excellent. All right. Thank you so much, Zoe. It was really great to have you on. We'll have you back soon. All right. My thanks to Zoe Schiffer.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 48:54Nilay Patel?

  She's got a lot more reporting on startups like this coming. Check her out. She's on Twitter at Zoe Schiffer. We'll be back later this week for the chat show and then we're off for the holidays. So check us out on Friday and we'll see you again with more interview episodes into the new year.

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