23rd
un-Clear
So one of my favorite travel services ceased operations today, Clear. The service (where available) allowed you to get through security in less then 3-4 minutes guaranteed.
My only disappointment with Clear’s ceasing of operations is how they decided to do it. Hundreds of thousands of customers like me have been prepaying for the service, in fact I just renewed for the next 12 months 2 weeks ago for $200. So when I saw that website just had the below, I have to say that my sadness for the service turned into a bit of anger…
I have seen a few VC contracts but in all of them there is nothing about control of how a shut down would take place if one ever happened. Clear had many funders, one was my friend Bijan’s firm Spark Capital. Now I am sure that Spark had absolutely no control over how things went down at Clear so I in no way feel this is their fault but it would have been good if they had been able to control the communication of a shut down in order to make it as soft of a landing as possible. The above is definitely not soft.
I hope that another service will take the place of Clear as I think it was really a great and valuable product. In fact if I had a little more money and time on my hands I would buy the assets of Clear today and try and make a go of it.
