Away nears 100K stylish suitcases sold as it raises $20M

What do people actually want in luggage? A phone charger, unbreakable exterior, and maximum packing space at a resonable price is what Away discovered. So it built a line of sleek but expansive polycarbonite suitcases equipped with battery packs, and sold them direct-to-consumer.

Now after selling nearly 100,000 suitcases and generating $20 million in revenue, Away has raised a $20 million Series B led by existing investor Global Founders Capital plus Forerunner Ventures, Comcast Ventues, and Accel Partners. They were attracted by Away’s $50 million revenue run rate and strong unit economics that should make it profitable this year.

The cash brings Away to $31 million raised, and will fund its entry into retail with plans to open four to six retail stores. Next, Away seeks to become a lifestyle brand with its new podcast and forthcoming print and digital magazine.

Finally, Away will grow its product line from the two carry-on and two checked luggage pieces it currently makes. Co-founder Jen Rubio tell me Away plans to “make the one-perfect everything that you need for travel.” While she wouldn’t give specifics, you could imagine the startup selling an Away toiletry kit.

By applying lean startup methodology and the direct-to-consumer strategy Rubio and co-founder Steph Korey learned as some of the first 15 employees at Warby Parker, Away is shaking up the stodgy luggage market. The company has grown to 66 employees in New York since launching just 15 months ago. That’s because it initially focused on customer surveys to find the needs unfulfilled by over-priced luxury luggage, ugly utility products, and budget brands whose suitcases brokedown quickly

I’ve been testing Away’s checked and carry-on luggage and found them to hit the sweet spot between its competitors. The shells don’t crack or dent under abuse. The phone charger with external USB plug on the carry-on is useful when you don’t want to sit on the floor of an airport. And they fit a remarkable amount of stuff in a compact package. And since you buy them straight from Away, rather than marked-up through a third-party retailer, the $225 to $245 carry-ons and $275 to $295 checked bags are a good bang for their buck.

My biggest complaint is since they feature a hard exterior clam shell design, you have to fully unzip the bag to be able to jam something in last-minute. But Rubio says Away has heard that feedback and the startup is developing a product to address it. There are certainly decent quality alternatives at a lower price. Since the shell is lightweight, it can feel a little flimsy. Still, no other luggage has taken the beating I dish out with so little visible wear-and-tear.

Luggage might not be the sexiest business, and its far from a traditional software startup. Yet Away proves there are plenty of commerce markets left to disrupt if companies are willing to listen to what customers really need.

Watts is a huge battery that powers your home

Like Tesla’s Powerwall, Watts is a big battery that can power your home. One Watts cell can support a few small appliances including computers and refrigerators and a few units can power TVs and electric washers. The units can charge via the grid or with solar panels and the Watts units include an app that shows discharge and battery remaining.

The batteries, which were designed in Russia, are stackable which means you can add as many or as few devices to your power network. They can also send energy back onto the grid as necessary. It offers 1.5 kW with a 3kW peak and a capacity of 1.2 kWh.

The company is shipping batteries in August and one unit costs $2,999. They aim to be the LEGO of high-end home batteries, allowing you to add some real power storage to your home, office, or Zombie-proof bunker.

Google in, Google out

Call it the Triumph of the Stacks. I attended Google I/O this week, and saw a lot of cool things: but what really hit home for me, at the keynote and the demos and the developer sessions, was just how dominant Google has become, in so many different domains … and, especially, how its only real competition comes from the four other tech behemoths who dominate our industry’s landscape.

Typically, Bruce Sterling saw it coming first, five full years ago:

“The Stacks” […] Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. These big five American vertically organized silos are re-making the world in their image.

Today the five companies he cited are the five most valuable publicly traded companies on the planet, and practically a software oligopoly. They all make hardware, too, but of course there are many more important hardware companies: Intel, AMD, ARM, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung, Tesla, Taiwan Semiconductor, Hon Hai, et al. When you talk about software, though — you know, the stuff that’s eating the world — then you’re almost certainly, if indirectly, ultimately talking about the Stacks.

Who in fairness are all doing amazing things. (Whether you like them or not, they’re still amazing.) Sundar Pichai mentioned during the I/O keynote that there are now more than two billion active Android devices on Earth. Most organizations are only beginning to think and talk about machine learning; Google has already woven it into a wide range of its products, ranging from little things like Android’s new smart text selection, to semi-automatic photo curation and sharing, to voice recognition and translation, to custom-build Tensor Processing Units providing petaflops of processing power available via Google’s cloud, and to what may be its biggest machine-learning breakthrough yet, coming later this year:

OK, I am reflexively skeptical, but Google Lens looks like it's awesome out of the gate, and eventually could be genuinely mind-blowing.

— Jon Evans (@rezendi) May 17, 2017

Google has so many tentacles in so many pies that it was a bit mind-numbing to see them all sardined into a single event. (takes a deep breath) Polymer and Angular and AMP and Dart and Flutter and WebAssembly and Instant Apps and Analytics and Fabric. Compute Engine and App Engine and Firebase. Tango and Daydream. TensorFlow and Mobile Vision and Cloud TPUs. Android Phone, Android Wear, Android TV, Android Auto, Android Things, Android Pay. Google Home and Google Assistant and Google Play. And that’s withoutmentioning Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and Chrome — each of which has a billion-plus users — much less Alphabet’s “Other Bets.”

That list also deliberately elides the Giant Google Fountain Of Money, i.e. the search and advertising engine that still provides 90% of Google’s income. There always seems to be a certain awkward disjoint between that colossal money machine and everything else Google does. “We use deep computer science to solve hard technical problems at scale,” Pichai said at the keynote, with relish. He said almost nothing about the unseemly business of actually making money. He didn’t need to. All of the Stacks seem to devote much more of their high-grade brainpower and executive time to spending their money, rather than making it. Nice work if you can get it.

Remarkable work, too. The most “living in the future” project I saw at I/O was, to my surprise, Project Tango, Google’s augmented-reality initiative, about which I had been skeptical. The image above, of yours truly cavorting with a Tango creation, may make it look like a Pokémon-esque toy … but don’t be fooled. Tango can do a whole host of eye-opening things, like 3D-scanning and rendering your surroundings — on your phone, in real time — or superimposing dynamic virtual objects, like whole wardrobes of clothes, onto fixed ones, like mannequins, again in real time. It’s early days yet, but the possibilities are clearly extraordinary.

It was nice to see Google paying a lot of attention to identifying and mitigating implicit bias in machine-learning models and algorithms; it was nice to see that the crowd was, by tech standards, impressively diverse; it was really excellent to see a panel like this one —

Not unrelatedly check out this power machine-learning panel: Fei-Fei Li, Diane Greene, Françoise Beaufays, Fernanda Viegas, Daphne Koller. pic.twitter.com/p92DyJc48H

— Jon Evans (@rezendi) May 19, 2017

but what I kept coming back to, as I roamed, was the conclusion that Bruce Sterling actually understated his case for the Stacks. They don’t just want to remake the world in their image. They want to remake our individual lives. Each Stack — bar Facebook, for now — offers the same awkward bargain: commit wholly & wholeheartedly to our ecosystem, and we will better your life.

You can use your Google Home to send directions to your Pixel, or to Chromecast a YouTube video to your Android TV, or to order a sandwich seamlessly via the Google Assistant because it already knows your credit-card details, your delivery address, your Gmail address, and your food preferences. Similarly, you can streamline your whole life around the Apple ecosystem, or Amazon’s Prime / Fire TV / Kindle / Echo ecosystem. Microsoft, which increasingly looks like IBM 2: IBMer (which is no bad thing), seems more interested in being your work ecosystem these days; it still offers you a Home Hub / XBox / Cortana combo, though.

On the one hand this surveillance-capitalism data grab (and make no mistake, that’s what it is, at least in part) feels creepy and intrusive in a deeply personal way. On the other you can actually make the compelling, if depressing, case that hey, it’s the 21st century, someone’sgoing to surveil you, you may as well choose the Stack that you find least untrustworthy, give all your data to them, and rely on them to keep it safe. After all, you know they don’t want to let anyone else have it. It’s valuable.

It would be disingenuous of me not to stress that the majority of Stack employees and executives really and truly want to do the right thing with this data. Apple went to the mat against the FBI for the sake of user privacy. You will never meet a more dedicated, passionate, and influential privacy/safety team than Google’s. Amazon’s single highest corporate value is customer satisfaction, and they’re clearly willing to sacrifice profits for that. Microsoft has learned better than to risk its reputation. Facebook’s CISO, Alex Stamos, is a longtime prominent privacy advocate.

And yet. Like every I/O attendee I received a free Google Home device as part of the I/O experience. (I attended as an engineer, not as press.) But I don’t want one; I’ll be giving mine away. Sorry, Google. It’s not that I mistrust you. It’s just that I don’t want to have to trust anyprofit-driven megacorporation quite that much. Not Apple, not Amazon, and not even you.