With all the makings of a buddy road trip adventure, two longtime Seattle friends and tech veterans have teamed up to breathe new life into a popular travel app under the umbrella of a thriving business built around a love for “vanlife.”
Jordan Schwartz, the software entrepreneur who previously founded and led Seattle startup Pathable, is the new chief product officer at Sēkr, an app to help travelers plan trips, find campsites and more.
Founded in 2018 and originally based in San Diego, Sēkr was acquired last year by Peace Vans and owner Harley Sitner, whose nationally known business south of downtown Seattle specializes in classic Volkswagen van repairs, rentals and electric conversions, as well as custom builds on modern camper vans.
Sitner always wanted to build out a digital strategy to boost the Peace Vans business and serve his thousands of travel-minded customers. He explored launching something himself, but the prospect was daunting. The road eventually led to Sēkr.
Together, Peace Vans and Sēkr — and Sitner and Schwartz — want to reimagine how useful an app and technology can be in boosting the community aspect of travel and vanlife in particular. And they’re bringing AI along for the ride.
“There’s a genuine opportunity with Sēkr to not just remove friction from the road trip experience, but to introduce some fairly sophisticated and advanced planning tools that bring travelers closer to those serendipitous moments we all long for,” Sitner said this week during a GeekWire visit to Peace Vans HQ.
Tech with a hippie vibe
Among a sea of Vanagons on the Peace Vans lot, all in need of varying degrees of care and repair, the scene might appear to be the last place that technology would interfere with the dreamy notion of road tripping. Just point it and go, right?
But while Sitner and Schwartz can come across as a couple of hippie dads, they aren’t exactly Cheech & Chonging their way through this venture. The two have strong tech chops that date back to stints at Microsoft, where Sitner was a senior product manager for five years and Schwartz spent more than 10 years as a program manager.
Sitner took over Peace Vans when the opportunity presented itself 12 years ago, and he’s built the business into a destination in the Pacific Northwest for vanlife enthusiasts.
“There’s very few people and entities with more expertise in this space than myself and Peace Vans,” he said. “I say that with a bit of hubris, but also some confidence. I’ve lived and breathed this space for 12 years and I’m going to infuse all of that into Sēkr, and I’m super stoked about it.”
Schwartz ran Pathable for 13 years. The startup built mobile apps for conferences, pivoted early in the pandemic to focus on virtual events, and was acquired in 2020. He’s been focused on climate tech investing for the last few years.
A camper van owner for 14 years or so, Schwartz has always been a big proponent of remote work, years before the trend took off during the pandemic.
During a meeting at Al’s Tavern in the Wallingford neighborhood — where Sitner previously advised Schwartz to sell Pathable — Sitner brought up Sēkr.
“I told him, ‘I’ve acquired this thing and I think you’re gonna love it,'” Sitner said. “We pulled [Sēkr] up on our phones, and we started using it. And I was like, ‘Will you help me, please?'”
Schwartz was in.
“I’ve been looking to get back into building product, because I love it,” Schwartz said. “If you’re building something, and people are using it, and you’re getting the feedback from them about how it’s changing their lives … I just really want to be able to do something like that again.”
Faster, smarter travel tips
Sēkr was originally founded by Breanne Acio and Jess Shisler as “The Vanlife App.” The company raised $2.5 million in seed funding in 2022, and was attracting about 10,000 monthly active users.
The goal was to help travelers avoid having to use a handful of different apps and websites to locate and book campsites equipped with the specific services those travelers desired. Other apps competing in the space include Portland-based The Dyrt and Hipcamp. Seattle-based Cabana rented custom-built vans before shutting down at the end of 2023.
Schwartz — with a small team of remote developers he used at Pathable — is excited to get his hands on an existing Sēkr database of over 75,000 waypoints and campsites, and a community of 100,000 members. With a refresh and relaunch of the app this spring, he’ll harness generative AI to power what he and Sitner are calling a “secret copilot” to help create magic road trips for users.
“The beginning of the conversation that you have with your secret copilot is around what you look for, and the kinds of things that you enjoy,” Schwartz said. “AI can not only digest all the information about everything that’s going on in all these different places, but it can personalize it, and it can start to know you.”
A traveler might be looking for a solitary place to hang out, or maybe enjoys having a conversation with an artist in a gallery. Maybe the traveler is looking to find a local band that’s playing, or she wants to find other like-minded vanlifers for a spontaneous meet-up. Sēkr’s copilot will mine the database and the community to make faster and smarter recommendations.
“AI, I think, enables those kinds of personalized connections in a way that search filters and hunting around the traditional apps just don’t,” Schwartz said. “You can’t Yelp ‘authentic experience.'”
A community focus
Standing beneath a Vanagon on a lift in his repair shop, Sitner gets fired up when discussing the legacy of loving the road and the road trip as an American archetype. He swings all the way through mentions of manifest destiny to the National Highway System to Jack Kerouac to VW’s recent Super Bowl commercial, and back to vanlife.
While there might be some irony in wanting to introduce artificial intelligence into something that has been such a uniquely human-powered endeavor, Sitner has a vision.
The guy who has been to the Burning Man festival for 27 straight years is big on community — whether he’s on the road or in Seattle at the Peace Vans shop where a yearly party shuts down 6th Avenue South for 1,000 van-obsessed revelers.
Sitner is embracing AI and its place within Sēkr as a means to strengthen the human element that powers vanlife.
“I’m a bit old school despite my technology chops,” Sitner said. “AI builds the scaffolding, lays the groundwork, elevates the experience. But then there’s that opportunity for more human connection.”
