Tony Hsieh

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
Published 25 Apr 2023

Bloomberg/Getty Images Fig. 12 Tony Hsieh with Senator Harry Reid and President Barack Obama at a fundraising event in July 2010, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 13 Tony Hsieh judging Halloween contest, 2013. Ethan Miller/Getty Images Fig. 14 Tony Hsieh and Mimi Pham, 2014. Michael Kovac/Getty Images Fig. 15 Tony Hsieh and Michelle D’Attilio, courtesy of Michelle D’Attilio. Fig. 16 Tony Hsieh at Bigfork, Montana, 2017, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 17 Tony Hsieh with Justin Weniger, Ryan Doherty, and Tyler Williams, courtesy of an anonymous source. Fig. 18 Tony Hsieh with Fred Mossler and others at Zappos event. Denise Truscello/Getty Images Fig. 19 Tony Hsieh cooking at Park City home, 2020, courtesy of an anonymous source.

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“The brewing employee discontent”: Gelles, David, “At Zappos, Pushing Shoes and a Vision,” New York Times, July 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/business/at-zappos-selling-shoes-and-a-vision.html. “The media has kind of portrayed it”: “Tony Hsieh Explains Why He Sold Zappos and What He Thinks of Amazon (Full Interview),” YouTube, posted by Recode, May 24, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69WEofQd1DM&t=54s. “It’s an intense display of loyalty”: Komenda, Ed, “Is Tony Hsieh Downtown Las Vegas’ Savior or Conqueror?,” Las Vegas Sun, February 23, 2014, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2014/feb/23/tony-hsieh-downtown-las-vegas-savior-or-conqueror/. “‘can feel cultish’”: Walker, Alissa, “Zappos Isn’t a Cult? All Tony Hsieh’s Friends Got Matching Tattoos,” Gizmodo, February 24, 2014, https://gizmodo.com/zappos-isnt-a-cult-all-tony-hsiehs-friends-got-match-1529721696.

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both Suzie Baleson and Justin Weniger: Charns, David, “I-Team: Company Seeks Millions from Tony Hsieh’s Estate, Some for ‘Magic Castle’ Project, Included Traveling Magicians,” 8 News Now, November 22, 2021, https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/i-team-special-reports/i-team-company-seeks-millions-from-tony-hsiehs-estate-for-magic-castle-project-included-traveling-magicians/; Newburg, Katelyn, “Life Is Beautiful CEO Withdraws Creditors Claim in Tony Hsieh Case,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 28, 2022, https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/courts/life-is-beautiful-ceo-withdraws-creditors-claim-in-tony-hsieh-case-2520681/. Only one statement: Au-Yeung, Angel, and Jeans, David, “Tony Hsieh’s American Tragedy: The Self-Destructive Last Months of the Zappos Visionary,” Forbes, December 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2020/12/04/tony-hsiehs-american-tragedy-the-self-destructive-last-months-of-the-zappos-visionary/.

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
by Tony Hsieh
Published 6 Jun 2010

“We should just ask all of our employees to write a few paragraphs about what the Zappos culture means to them, and compile it all into a book.” And just like that, the idea for the Zappos Culture Book was born, and it’s been a part of Zappos ever since. Every year, a new edition of the Zappos Culture Book is produced, which we give out to prospective employees, vendors, and even customers. I sent the following e-mail to all of our employees in August 2004: From: Tony Hsieh To: All Zappos Employees Subject: Zappos Culture Book We will be putting together a mini-book as part of the orientation package for all new hires about the Zappos culture. Our culture is the combination of all of our employees’ ideas about the culture, so we would like to include everyone’s thoughts in this book.

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If you have any questions about your specific job or department, please talk to your department manager. For all other questions, comments, or thoughts, please feel free to email me. —Tony Hsieh, CEO After the weekend had passed, I sent a follow up e-mail to our remaining employees, which we also publicly posted on our blogs: Date: November 11, 2008 From: Tony Hsieh To: All Zappos Employees Subject: Moving forward Last week was a tough week for everyone, as we went through the process of laying off 8% of the Zappos family. At the same time, it was also heartwarming hearing all the stories of Zappos employees and ex-employees getting together for drinks Thursday night after the layoffs as well as over the weekend.

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We had to coordinate with Amazon to get all the timing down perfectly. We had to communicate with Zappos employees, Zappos vendors, Amazon employees, Amazon vendors, the press calling Amazon, the press calling Zappos, our customers, the SEC, our board of directors, our investors, and the general public all within a two-hour window, and it had to be perfectly coordinated. It felt like we were about to launch a rocket to the moon. Finally, at the predetermined time, I sent the following e-mail to our employees: Date: July 22, 2009 From: Tony Hsieh To: All Zappos Employees Subject: Zappos and Amazon Please set aside 20 minutes to carefully read this entire email.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail
by Robert Bruce Shaw , James Foster and Brilliance Audio
Published 14 Oct 2017

But they don’t focus on profit as their highest calling. A small story from Zappos illustrates this point. Several years ago the firm’s founder and CEO was attending an all-day out-of-town meeting with individuals from Sketchers, a manufacturer of shoes. The group went back to the hotel after the meeting and too many drinks at a local bar. They wanted to order a pizza, but room service at the hotel was closed (as it was far past the 11 p.m. deadline). One person in the group suggested that they order out from a pizzeria. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh suggested, half in jest, that they call the Zappos 800 number for ordering shoes. He said they should, without telling the Zappos call-center employee who they were, ask for help in finding a pizzeria that would deliver to the hotel.

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He said they should, without telling the Zappos call-center employee who they were, ask for help in finding a pizzeria that would deliver to the hotel. Hsieh made a bet that the Zappos call-center employee would help because his firm is dedicated to serving others—regardless of the request. One of the Sketchers people took the CEO up on his boast and made the call, with others in the group listening in on the speakerphone. The Zappos call-center employee was initially confused as to how to respond. But, as Hsieh predicted, she then helped locate the desired pizza. Tony Hsieh tells this story to illustrate that his firm’s first priority is not selling shoes but, instead, creating happiness through service to others.14 This statement is more than rhetoric at Zappos.

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The comparison is inevitable given the degree of passion one finds within these companies, particularly when they are led by a highly charismatic leader who engenders a strong sense of loyalty. Zappos, for example, is very much the creation of its founder Tony Hsieh. His personality is stamped on most of the company’s beliefs and practices. For example, he believes that the lines most people draw between their work and personal lives are artificial and unhealthy. He requires Zappos managers to actively socialize outside of work with others on their teams. Hsieh believes this fosters closer relationships and allows good ideas to surface more naturally. Managers who are unwilling to do so are not hired or don’t remain with the firm. A second example of Zappos being an expression of Hsieh’s thinking involves his dislike of hierarchy.

The Thank You Economy
by Gary Vaynerchuk
Published 1 Jan 2010

If you understand the culture we’re in right now, you understand that there’s nothing an employee can say that will irreparably damage your business, especially if you fix it quickly. That’s what capitalism understands and communism doesn’t. Tony Hsieh’s Letter to His Employees When Amazon acquired Zappos, even the way the acquisition was announced was culturally significant. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, wrote an incredibly personal letter to Zappos employees explaining the details of the transaction, what it meant for the company, and how it would affect their jobs. Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 From: Tony Hsieh (CEO—Zappos.com) To: All Zappos Employees Subject: Zappos and Amazon Please set aside 20 minutes to carefully read this entire email. (My apologies for the occasional use of formal-sounding language, as parts of it are written in a particular way for legal reasons.)

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The last 10 years were an incredible ride, and I’m excited about what we will accomplish together over the next 10 years as we continue to grow Zappos! —Tony Hsieh CEO—Zappos.com Compare this letter to some of the stiff, jargon-filled letters most CEOs send out to their companies when they make big announcements. They may as well have been written by HAL, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, for all the genuine personality, compassion, and concern they project. Very few employees feel safe after receiving one of those, yet I imagine that most of the Zappos staff who read Hsieh’s letter believed that the decisions made on behalf of the company were made with the right intent.

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HONEST He doesn’t make any promises he can’t keep, and explains the practical and financial reasons why the unpopular decision had to be made. ACCOMMODATING He offers a way for the customer to try some other options on the menu, free of charge. I read this letter, and the one written by Tony Hsieh to announce the Zappos/Amazon deal to Zappos employees,* and I wonder why so many business leaders have such a hard time being real. Imagine how a customer would feel if he got a letter like this from a CEO, instead of one packed with stiff, formal, empty jargon. Pepper is walking the Thank You Economy walk, and from Boloco’s success and loyal customer following, it’s clear that his efforts to properly set the tone are flowing downhill, out the front door, and into the streets.

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
by Scott Belsky
Published 31 Mar 2010

For a business that puts customer service at the center of its mission, the commitment and contentment of its employees is extremely important—and employee morale at Zappos is legendary. I was struck by the expression of company spirit as my tour guide led me through the company’s cavernous hallways. Every department offered a custom greeting as we passed. The “Kids’ Shoes” team shook their pompoms. The “Clothing” department rang cowbells. The “Company Coach,” Vik, took a photo of me wearing a crown and placed it on the VIP wall—reserved for everyone who comes to visit Zappos. Because, Vik explained, “at a company all about service, everyone is a VIP.” The CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, also serves as the company’s cultural attaché, with a steady stream of speaking engagements, blog posts, and Twitter commentary.

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Your team’s chemistry is a reflection of your ability to strike a harmonious balance and constantly make small tweaks in the service of making ideas happen. During my visit with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, it was clear that a potential employee’s culture-fit and commitment to serving customers are as important as the technical skills required for the job. To demonstrate this core value, Hsieh tells the story about a key technical hire—a top executive—whom the company recruited and moved from Los Angeles to Zappos’s headquarters in Las Vegas. Upon arriving to solve some critical technology challenges for the company, the new hire made it clear that he wasn’t interested in doing any direct customer support.

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Nearly every individual or company I’ve spoken with has harnessed the power of the Web to achieve many of the goals we’ll discuss in this section: gathering feedback, honing ideas, increasing transparency, and sharing and promoting completed work. We’ll look at, among other examples, how Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh uses Twitter to increase transparency and find inspiration, how best-selling author and Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson uses a community of engaged readers to refine his groundbreaking theorems, and how marketing strategist Noah Brier gathers feedback to improve his Web experiments. Of course, the Internet is just one means of accessing and building your community.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

Such transparency takes a considerable amount of cultural and organizational courage, but Google has found that the openness it engenders is worth any discomfort. Tony Hsieh built Zappos into a billion dollar company using this very same philosophy. Everything at Zappos is about customer service and openness. Its publicly available and annually updated 500-page Culture Book defines who and what the company is. According to David Vik, Zappos’ “company coach,” there are five key precepts to Zappos that drive culture across the organization: Vision: What you’re doing Purpose: Why you do it Business model: What will fuel you as you’re doing it Wow and uniqueness factors: What sets you apart from others Values: What matters to you The control frameworks used by traditional organizations were devised because the longer (and slower) feedback loops between management and teams often required considerable oversight and intervention.

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In 2011 Zappos opened its competitions to the external developer community as well (the API Developer Challenge and the Winter Hackathon), and awarded money and gift certificates to the winners [Engagement]. In December 2013, CEO Tony Hsieh adopted the Holacracy approach and shook up the 1,500-person organization by moving to full Autonomy. After six months, 225 employees had been transitioned from the old hierarchical model, and Zappos is currently stripping all job titles and management layers—eventually, even the CEO job will disappear. This is an extraordinary move for a large firm, perhaps the largest such transition ever attempted. A key question that often comes up with Zappos is, “How does it hire without job descriptions?” In 2014, despite the fact that Zappos planned to expand its workforce by a third, from 1,500 employees to almost 2,000, no job postings went up anywhere.

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Talk about a platform…(More on this later.) Tony Hsieh, CEO of Las Vegas-based Zappos, was inspired by the Burning Man community to combine both physical and trait-based communities within his Las Vegas Downtown Project. The project combines work and play in an urban landscape with homes, infrastructure, hacker spaces, shops, cafe/theater and art. In addition to the goal of helping to transform the downtown area into the most community-focused large city in the world, Hsieh aims to create the smartest place on the planet by maximizing the chances of serendipitous learning between Zappos insiders and outsiders. The result is not only a community built around common passions, but also around a common location.

The Connected Company
by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal
Published 2 Dec 2014

Reps are encouraged to take as much time as necessary to solve the customer’s problem, and their mission is to provide the best customer service possible. Zappos has a 100% satisfaction guaranteed return policy. After the call, service reps follow up and keep their promises, and they send a personal note as part of their follow up. Good customers are profitable customers. Zappos treats frequent customers well, with surprises like upgrades from standard ground shipping to next-day air. Making customers happy, says CEO Tony Hsieh, leads to cost savings elsewhere, like marketing. “We let our customers do our marketing,” he says. By making sure they get the right people and giving them the autonomy and authority they need to serve customers, Zappos call centers are designed to absorb variety, not contain it.

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This means valuing long-term relationships over transactions and short-term profits. In the long run, the Golden Rule strategy is the most winning strategy of all. Make people feel good. Happiness is contagious. Happy employees create happy customers. Happy customers create happy shareholders. As Tony Hsieh of Zappos has said clearly and often: happiness is a business model. Principles Trump Processes Every connected company stands for something. It has opinions. Its people are bound together by shared purpose and principles. One way to help people make good decisions in uncertain environments is to have a strong, constant purpose so everyone understands the job to be done, and a few clear principles that they can use to guide their decisions about “how” to do that job.

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Vendors can see inventory levels, prices, and profitability. They can suggest orders to buyers and communicate with Zappos creative teams about marketing and make changes to their brand boutique on the Zappos website. Usually, retailers hide their profits so they can demand lower prices from vendors. But for Zappos, cooperating with vendors means more merchandising expertise, and brand representatives spend more time working with Zappos than they do their other accounts. When a hot item is scarce, Zappos has access to inventory that its competitors lack. Adaptive Moves Can Create Opportunities for Others Sometimes one species creates benefits for another as an unintended byproduct of its natural behavior.

Think Like a Freak
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 11 May 2014

DeVoss, “Ping-Pong Diplomacy,” Smithsonian, April 2002; “The Ping Heard Round the World,” Time, April 26, 1971. 128 ZAPPOS: This section was based in part on author interviews with Tony Hsieh and a visit to Zappos headquarters. See also: Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (Business Plus, 2010); Hsieh, “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers,” Harvard Business Review, July 2010; Robin Wauters, “Amazon Closes Zappos Deal, Ends Up Paying $1.2 Billion,” TechCrunch, November 2, 2009; Hsieh, “Amazon Closing,” Zappos.com, November 2, 2009; Alexandra Jacobs, “Happy Feet,” The New Yorker, September 14, 2009.

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Retail Compensation and Benefits Survey,” October 2013; Jordan Melnick, “Hiring’s New Frontier,” QSRmagazine.com, September 2012; and Melnick, “More Than Minimum Wage,” QSRmagazine.com, November 2011. 150 A WORKER WITH A FOUR-YEAR DEGREE EARNS ABOUT 75 PERCENT MORE: See “Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators” (OECD, 2013). 150 ZAPPOS AND “THE OFFER”: See Stephen J. Dubner, “The Upside of Quitting,” September 30, 2011; Stacey Vanek-Smith conducted the interview with Tony Hsieh and other Zappos employees. Thanks to various Zappos employees for follow-up interviews. / 151 It costs an average of roughly $4,000 to replace a single employee: See Arindrajit Dube, Eric Freeman, and Michael Reich, “Employee Replacement Costs,” U.C.

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All they have to do is go through an exit interview and surrender their eligibility to be rehired at Zappos. Doesn’t that sound nuts? What kind of company would offer a new employee $2,000 to not work? A clever company. “It’s really putting the employee in the position of ‘Do you care more about money or do you care more about this culture and the company?’ “ says Tony Hsieh, the company’s CEO. “And if they care more about the easy money, then we probably aren’t the right fit for them.” Hsieh figured that any worker who would take the easy $2,000 was the kind of worker who would end up costing Zappos a lot more in the long run. By one industry estimate, it costs an average of roughly $4,000 to replace a single employee, and one recent survey of 2,500 companies found that a single bad hire can cost more than $25,000 in lost productivity, lower morale, and the like.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 26 Jun 2013

In the mornings, the traffic on the 101, the main commuting freeway out of San Francisco toward the Valley, is now heavier heading out of the city than the reverse. One of the more interesting company relocations these days is happening in Las Vegas, where Zappos, the online shoe giant, is getting ready to move from a cookie-cutter suburban office park off a highway interchange in Henderson, Nevada, to a brand-new headquarters in Las Vegas’s old city hall. The company’s CEO, Tony Hsieh, is something of a guru when it comes to building workplaces, and the zany, quirky Zappos offices are legendary both for the employees’ cubicles, which are decorated with streamers, foil, kitschy figurines, faux-jungle greenery, and more, and for its stated mission to “create fun and a little weirdness.”

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And that spontaneous interaction is important, as a growing body of research has shown. Researchers have found that when people bump into each other, good things happen. Both the Harvard economist and urban scholar Edward Glaeser and the urban theorist Richard Florida have linked higher-density or pedestrian-friendly places to higher levels of innovation. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, is moving his company from suburban Henderson, Nevada, to downtown Las Vegas precisely because he believes the “serendipitous collisions” that happen when people are freer to walk between the office and local cafés, restaurants, and other public places will make his employees happier, help them forge closer relationships with one another, and lead to the faster cultivation of new ideas.

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We have many different cohorts and a continuum of housing preferences. “People really just want more alternatives,” Katz says. Now, they will undoubtedly get them. But there’s still some of what Chuck Marohn of Minnesota would call “lobster-eating” going on. Driving around the far reaches of Summerlin, Nevada, after my visit with Zappos’s Tony Hsieh, I found myself at what seemed like the end of the earth. It was really just a small subdivision up a hill right off Paseo Breeze Drive, but as I drove up the half-developed street, it seemed like the final frontier, the edge of the developed United States itself. Soon the pavement turned to dirt road, and I pulled over when the road ended and got out of my rental car.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

He also came up with the ideas: Sarah Buhr, “Elon Musk Is Right, Burning Man Is Silicon Valley,” TechCrunch, September 4, 2004; Ferenstein, “Burning Man Founder Is Cool with Capitalism, and Silicon Valley Billionaires.” 12. Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hsieh: David Hochman, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 2014. 13. While much has been made of the fact’: Zack Guzman, “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Shares What He Would Have Changed About his $350M Downtown Las Vegas Project,” CNBC, August 9, 2016, and Jennifer Reingold, “How a Radical Shift Left Zappos Reeling,” Fortune, March 4, 2016. 14. As Burning Man cofounder Will Roger: Nellie Bowles, “Is Burning Man on the Cusp of Becoming a Permanent Utopian Community?

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Summit began in 2008, when five entrepreneurs in their early twenties came together to solve a common problem. They didn’t know any really successful entrepreneurs, and had no one to ask for advice. So the quintet came up with a creative solution: cold-call business leaders and ask them to go skiing. Nineteen people showed up, including Zappos’s Tony Hsieh and Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. “We learned that when you take a bunch of really bright, diverse people,” explains Rosenthal, “and let them share a dynamic immersive experience, you get powerful results. Lifelong friendships were formed. It removed the tedious, transactional nature of networking.

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Their goal was to forge a future based on the shared experience of communitas writ large: a permanent Burning Man community, a place where experiments with the four forces could be conducted year round. As Burning Man cofounder Will Roger recently wrote: “I would argue that the proposal is part of a large strain of utopian separatism that can be found in the modern-tech boom: Peter Thiel’s Sea-steading efforts or Tony Hsieh’s attempt to build a start-up city in Las Vegas. But a Burning Man permanent community would arguably be the most interesting and achievable manifestation of it.”14 In the summer of 2016, they achieved just that, closing on the purchase of Fly Ranch, a parcel of nearly four thousand acres a few miles north of the festival site, filled with geysers, hot springs, and wetlands.

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It.
by Mitch Joel
Published 20 May 2013

In June 2010, Delivering Happiness was published and became an instant bestseller. The book is written by Tony Hsieh—the CEO of Zappos. Most people know Zappos as the hot footwear/clothing retailer that has taken the e-commerce world by storm, or for the acquisition of Zappos by Amazon (which paid close to $1 billion for the business). Scratching a little deeper beneath the surface, you’ll uncover that what really drives this profitable, likable, and media-friendly company is amazing customer service. Buying shoes seems like one of the more difficult things to do online, but Zappos has overcome this hurdle by initiating a radical (and much-lauded) customer service protocol.

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They were always in control (of the artists, of the music’s distribution channel, of what the fans would hear), and they took that power on with the kind of pretentious attitude that is similar to how kings used to rule their empires. When the C-suite makes the call, everything changes. Don’t believe me? Just ask Tony Hsieh over at Zappos, Richard Branson at Virgin, or Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com. These business leaders (and there are many more) didn’t sell social business through their organizations as a marketing and communications initiative. They sold it through as customer service. We’re not talking about customer service in terms of the call center, we’re talking about the core of customer service: Why are we in business?

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If you don’t turn marketing into a horizontal that runs pervasively throughout the organization, your competitors will. And when they do, they will not only eat your lunch but they will marry your beloved consumers. Want an excellent primer on social business and customer service? Pick up a copy of the blockbuster bestseller Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. You’ll get a terrific understanding of how and why Zappos has become beloved by its millions of customers. THE NEXT #3—RISE OF THE INDIE BRAND. In March 2012, I had the pleasure of delivering the opening keynote address at the Art of Marketing event in Toronto. With more than fifteen hundred business professionals in attendance, I shared the stage with people like Martin Lindstrom (author of Brandwashed and Buyology), Randi Zuckerberg (former head of marketing at Facebook and sister of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg), Scooter Braun (music industry professional and the person who discovered and manages Justin Bieber), and many others.

Rework
by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Published 9 Mar 2010

Decommoditize your product. Make it something no one else can offer. Look at Zappos.com, a billion-dollar online shoe retailer. A pair of sneakers from Zappos is the same as a pair from Foot Locker or any other retailer. But Zappos sets itself apart by injecting CEO Tony Hsieh’s obsession with customer service into everything it does. At Zappos, customer-service employees don’t use scripts and are allowed to talk at length with customers. The call center and the company’s headquarters are in the same place, not oceans apart. And all Zappos employees—even those who don’t work in customer service or fulfillment—start out by spending four weeks answering phones and working in the warehouse.

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More Praise for Rework “In typical 37signals fashion, the wisdom in these pages is edgy yet simple, straightforward, and proven … Read this book multiple times to help give you the courage you need to get out there and make something great.” —Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com “The brilliance of Rework is that it inspires you to rethink everything you thought you knew about strategy, customers, and getting things done.” —William C. Taylor, founding editor of Fast Company and coauthor of Mavericks at Work “For me, Rework posed a new challenge: stifling the urge to rip out each page and tape it to my wall … Amazing, powerful, inspirational—those adjectives might make me sound like a fawning fan, but Rework is that useful.

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And all Zappos employees—even those who don’t work in customer service or fulfillment—start out by spending four weeks answering phones and working in the warehouse. It’s this devotion to customer service that makes Zappos unique among shoe sellers.* Another example is Polyface, an environmentally friendly Virginia farm owned by Joel Salatin. Salatin has a strong set of beliefs and runs his business accordingly. Polyface sells the idea that it does things a bigger agribusiness can’t do. Even though it’s more expensive to do so, it feeds cows grass instead of corn and never gives them antibiotics. It never ships food. Anyone is welcome to visit the farm anytime and go anywhere (try that at a typical meat-processing plant).

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

The ones who stick it out receive free, comprehensive health insurance and full indoctrination into a cult. The first item on Zappos’ list of core values is “Deliver ‘wow’ through service,” and the last is “Be humble.” In between is “Build open and honest relationships with communication.” Tony Hsieh, its CEO, has taken this to heart, Facebooking and Twittering constantly to a half-million followers. After the acquisition was announced, he displayed seller’s remorse on Zappos’ blog. This philosophy has made Hsieh a guru of the middle-management set, and Zappos one of America’s most enlightened companies. But its gold standard of customer service is based on something more prosaic: free overnight shipping and returns.

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In the first half of 2009—dark days for retailing— buyers of fashion footwear spent almost 20 percent more online than they had the previous year, while sales at brick-and-mortar stores fell 11 percent. “In the long term,” Tony Hsieh told me, “we want our brand to be about the best service. And we deliver the best brand experience with overnight delivery and free returns. We just happened to start with shoes the same way Amazon just happened to start with books.” In the short term it’s worked, albeit too well. Zappos’ best customers also have the most returns. In 2008, Zappos surpassed $1 billion in gross sales for the first time, a year ahead of schedule. But because of the lenient return policy, revenues were only $635 million.

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Lands’ End could retire hunt-and-peck picking methods and switch to more efficient methods, quadrupling productivity from 175 items picked per hour to 600 or 700. Zappos’ carousel picker tripled their pace; Kiva’s robots doubled it again. Kasarda believes the next doubling will come when RFID chips replace bar codes, and then again when “intelligent agents” embedded in those chips guide packages, robots, and belts to their final destinations, with no humans necessary. The Internet arm of Zappos could physically be located anywhere, and Tony Hsieh knows it. He moved his headquarters from San Francisco to Las Vegas several years ago in pursuit of cheaper labor.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
by Richard L. Brandt
Published 27 Oct 2011

It also paid 100 percent of employees’ health care premiums. How could Bezos resist a company with such ideals and ambitions ? In 2005, he visited CEO Tony Hsieh at Zappos headquarters in Henderson, Nevada, to discuss buying the company. Hsieh turned him down, worried that being absorbed into Amazon would destroy the unique Zappos culture. “We told Jeff that we weren’t interested in selling at any price,” Hsieh wrote in an essay in Inc. magazine. But Bezos returned four years later. Hsieh still didn’t want to sell. Zappos was now profitable, but the economy was in a recession, and Bezos was offering an astounding amount of money, although in the form of stock rather than cash.

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“One of the biggest problems: Tim O’Reilly, “Jeff Bezos at Wired Disruptive by Design Conference,” O’Reilly Radar (blog), June 15, 2009, http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/jeff-bezos-at-wired-disruptive.html. Chapter 16: Head in the Clouds 178. Robert Frederick, then: Wade Roush, “Amazon: Giving Away the Store,” Technology Review, January 2005. 184. Hsieh turned him down: Tony Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos,” Inc., June 1, 2010. 185. But Bezos was so excited: Video from Jeff Bezos about Amazon and Zappos, July 27, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. Chapter 17: Step by Step, Courageously 187. It adorned a warehouse: Brad Stone, “Bezos in Space,” Newsweek, May 5, 2003. 188. We want to try: Hof, “Speaking Out: Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos,” BusinessWeek , August 18–25, 2003. 190.

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But Bezos was so excited about this acquisition that he made his own video to discuss it (now available on YouTube). “Zappos is a company I have long admired for a very important reason,” he said in the video. “Zappos has a customer obsession. . . . I get all weak-kneed when I see a customer-obsessed company.” In fact, he seems to just love everything about the Zappos culture. “Zappos has a totally unique culture,” he added. “I’ve never seen a company with a culture like Zappos’s. . . . That culture and the Zappos brand are huge assets that I value very much, and I want to see those things continue.” Even when not buying companies to add to Amazon, Bezos likes to invest in other companies he believes are exceptional.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

—Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments DELIVERING HAPPINESS If you ever have to work at a call center, make sure it is Zappos. The online retailer has built a business around the idea of, as founder Tony Hsieh put it in his bestselling advice book cum autobiography, Delivering Happiness, the unlikely premise that buying and selling stuff over the phone can be an emotionally nurturing experience for both parties. In pursuit of that goal, Zappos has created a corporate culture so widely admired that the online shoe seller now has a business sideline teaching others how to operate the Zappos way—for $5,000 and two days of your time, you and your top team can be trained on how to bring the Zappos culture back to your own cubicles.

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Rather, it’s what author Michael Lewis has dubbed “the new new thing”—the insight or algorithm or technology with the potential to change the world. Hence the presence of three Nobel laureates, including Daniel Kahneman, a pioneer in behavioral economics. One of the business stars in attendance was then thirty-six-year-old entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, who had sold his Zappos online shoe retailer to Amazon for more than a billion dollars the previous summer. And the most popular session of all was the one in which Google showed off some of its new inventions, including the Nexus phone. This geeky enthusiasm for innovation and ideas is evident at more intimate gatherings of the global elite as well.

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A cheaper option is to take one of the free company tours Zappos offers to anyone who wants one, including complimentary pickup and return on a bus driven by one of the characteristically upbeat members of what they call “the Zappos family.” When I stepped outside my hotel on the Las Vegas strip and got on board on a blisteringly hot day in August 2010, a vacationing family of three from Virginia were already seated. They had been recruited to make the visit the day before while hiking in one of the canyons outside the city. There they met an evangelical Zappos employee—there is no other kind—who urged them to visit. On the outside, Zappos’s headquarters in Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, is a typically nondescript, low-rise building in a corporate park surrounded by desert and freeways.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Published 23 May 2011

But highlighting this support activity is also an objective, which is why Zappos collects all the Twitter mentions of Zappos and posts them publicly on its Web site at http://twitter.zappos.com, along with the list of all tweeting employees and all of their tweets. This demonstrates an incredible amount of trust in both its employees and its customers, but it also makes it clear to anyone considering buying from Zappos that the company’s commitment to service is real, as reflected in the groundswell. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, tweeting at @zappos, has gathered 1.7 million followers by behaving just as he expects his employees to behave.3 supporting with twitter We’ve already seen that people who use Twitter are influential. As a result, more and more companies are using Twitter to do support.

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To see her tweets, go to http://www.twitter.com/allthingsfadra. 2. doing “twelve hours in a city.” The blog “Twelve Hours in a City” by Clark Dever and Joe Dinardo is visible at http://www.twelvehoursinacity.com. 3. behaving just as his he expects his employees to behave. Tony Hsieh has made a career out of being Tony Hsieh. As of this writing, he has over 1.7 million followers at http://www.twitter.com/zappos. He’s also written a number-one best-selling book, Delivering Happiness (Business Plus, 2010). The Web site for the book is http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com. 4. customer service and sales staff to respond to Twitter requests, as we describe in Empowered.

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When it comes to energizing, though, one company stands out. Zappos, the online shoe retailer that is now a division of Amazon, encourages all its employees to use Twitter. Since Zappos has built its reputation on an over-the-top level of service, listening and responding on Twitter make natural sense (and the company would most likely agree that it uses Twitter mostly for a supporting objective, rather than an energizing objective). But highlighting this support activity is also an objective, which is why Zappos collects all the Twitter mentions of Zappos and posts them publicly on its Web site at http://twitter.zappos.com, along with the list of all tweeting employees and all of their tweets.

Unleashed
by Anne Morriss and Frances Frei
Published 1 Jun 2020

One company that doesn’t make this mistake is Zappos, the service-crazed online retailer that flamboyantly defies industry norms when it comes to suppliers. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is super clear about the rationale for investing in healthy supplier relationships: when your suppliers can’t thrive and make a profit, they start making choices that are bad for you, like cutting back on service and innovation. And when suppliers can thrive—as in Zappos’s case—Hsieh estimates the number of benefits as roughly “endless.”11 The company walks the talk in its supplier relationships. Zappos returns vendor calls within a few hours.

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This framework is an illustration of value-based strategy, an approach to strategic management that builds on the foundational work of Michael Porter, Adam Brandenburger, and Harbone Stuart. 9. David Yoffie and Eric Baldwin, “Apple Inc. in 2015,” Case 715-456 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2015). 10. Tim O’Reilly, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us (New York: Harper Business, 2017). 11. Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010), 185–186. 12. Ibid., 187–188. 13. Zeynep Ton, The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2014). 14. QuikTrip, “QuikTrip Opens 800th Store, Celebrates Huge Growth Milestone in Its 60-Year History,” QuikTrip News, April 3, 2019, https://www.quiktrip.com/About/News/quiktrip-opens-800th-store-celebrates-huge-growth-milestone-in-its-60-year-history. 15.

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Zappos returns vendor calls within a few hours. Vendors who visit the company’s Las Vegas headquarters are picked up from the airport by a Zappos employee and treated like royalty when they arrive on site. They’re thrown a blowout vendor appreciation party every year at a club on the famed Vegas strip. Zappos even gives vendors access to the company’s own performance data, which helps them run their own companies better while becoming better suppliers to Zappos. And when it comes to negotiating price, Hsieh honors supplier surplus as the strategic input that it is: “Instead of pounding the vendors, we collaborate. We decide together … the amount of risk we want to sign up for, and how quickly we want the business to grow.”12 This same logic applies to all of your suppliers, including your labor suppliers.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

“Zappos is struggling with Holacracy because humans aren’t designed to operate like software” is how Aimee Groth, a writer at Quartz, put it. Instead of admitting failure, Zappos CEO and founder Tony Hsieh doubled down on Holacracy and added a new concept called Teal, which was created by Frederic Laloux, a Belgian business guru and former McKinsey consultant. Teal isn’t just a management concept. Its proponents bill Teal as—drum roll—“the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness.” Zappos employees get “points” and “badges,” which sounds more like going back to kindergarten than leaping forward into the next stage of human consciousness.

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Bruch, Heike, and Jochen I. Menges. “The Acceleration Trap.” Harvard Business Review, April 2010 Issue. https://hbr.org/2010/04/the-acceleration-trap. Holacracy website. Homepage, accessed May 31, 2018. https://www.holacracy.org. Reingold, Jennifer. “How a Radical Shift Left Zappos Reeling.” Fortune, March 4, 2016. http://fortune.com/zappos-tony-hsieh-holacracy. Rogers, Christina. “A Pioneer of the Open Office Helps Ford Rethink the Car.” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-pioneer-of-the-open-office-helps-ford-rethink-the-car-1480441096. Rumbles, Sally, and Gary Rees. “Continuous Changes, Organizational Burnout, and the Implications for HRD.”

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On Glassdoor, one Zappos employee declared that “leadership is insane and completely disregards employees and reality in decision making, but parties are fun.” For all its hippy-dippy hoo-ha about empowerment and freedom, Holacracy turns out to be doctrinaire and authoritarian. Everyone must follow the rules, and there are lots of rules. Instead of reducing internal politics and eliminating favoritism, Zappos got more of both. People resented being put into a social experiment and treated like human lab rats. They hated that the system itself was more important than the people working inside it. “Zappos is struggling with Holacracy because humans aren’t designed to operate like software” is how Aimee Groth, a writer at Quartz, put it.

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms
by Beth Buelow
Published 3 Nov 2015

Company Culture and Values: Not Just for the Big Guys If you’re a solopreneur, chances are you’ve not given a lot of thought to your company culture. And if you have employees, you’ve probably noticed a particular culture developing, and it may or may not be intentional. In reading the enlightening corporate history of Zappos, Delivering Happiness by introverted CEO Tony Hsieh, I was reminded that the concept of culture is highly relevant, whether you are a company of one or one thousand. It’s the place where values, truth, and purpose come together. According to Hsieh, your culture is your brand. They are two sides of the same coin. We all recognize the importance of our brand; have we paid equal attention to our culture?

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What many people, including introverts themselves, may not know is that the strengths and traits of the typical introvert—curiosity, desire for depth over breadth, comfort with going solo, thoroughness and introspection, love of research—lend themselves well to entrepreneurship. Introvert entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tony Hsieh, Guy Kawasaki, and others have transformed our lives not by pretending to be extroverts but by applying their introvert strengths to their entrepreneurial endeavors. • • • An introvert trying to be a fake extrovert is just that: a fake extrovert. If you choose to approach your business with that mindset, you won’t solve your problem.

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Webster’s New World Telecom Dictionary copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing Inc., Indianapolis, IN. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons Inc. 3. Finding Your Voice 1. William Deresiewicz, “Solitude and Leadership,” American Scholar essays, March 1, 2010, theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership. 2. Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose (New York: Business Plus, 2010). 3. Anahad O’Connor, “The Claim: A Fake Smile Can Be Bad for Your Health,” New York Times, February 21, 2011. 5. “But I’m Not a Salesperson!” 1. Simon Sinek, Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action, TEDxPugetSound, video recorded September 2009, ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action. 2.

America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom
by Meghan McCain and Michael Black
Published 31 May 2012

As weird as it sounds, it is really refreshing to do business with a company that seems to truly believe in customer service. For the record, I have no affiliation with Zappos other than as a customer. On top of that, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has established a substantial cult following as a result of the wild success of Zappos and its somewhat unorthodox business environment; or depending on your perspective, the working environment all other working environments should follow and replicate. Zappos made Fortune magazine’s annual Best Companies to Work For list and it grosses over a billion dollars in sales annually. In fact Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, has been an overwhelming success, spending twenty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

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Thank God I have a happy-ending shower waiting for me back at the Palms. Meghan: One of the main things I want to do with Michael while we’re in Vegas is tour the Zappos headquarters. I am a frequent user of the Zappos website to buy shoes and sometimes clothes. Although that is what I use Zappos to shop for, you can find a huge variety of things to purchase on the site that extend past shoes and jeans. Everything the Zappos company touts itself to be is true. My shipments come when they are supposed to, it is easy to print out a return slip from their website, and the customer service is amazing, probably the best I’ve ever encountered.

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Michael: I have never ordered anything from Zappos and do not know anything about them as a company, but Meghan is excited to tour the company because apparently people come from all over the world to observe their amazing corporate culture. In my experience the words “corporate” and “culture” do not coexist well together, sort of like “chocolate” and “martini.” People often put the two together, but why? What’s so special about Zappos that people are freaking out about the company and wanting to emulate its success? As it turns out: construction paper and tambourines. The Zappos corporate culture can basically be boiled down to “adult day camp.”

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
by Jeff Sutherland and Jj Sutherland
Published 29 Sep 2014

Delivering Happiness One company that views happiness as core to their culture is Zappos. The wildly successful website convinced people to do something a lot of folks thought couldn’t be done: buy shoes over the Internet. CEO Tony Hsieh wrote a book about it, Delivering Happiness. Tony writes about the unique culture at Zappos, which is based on creating “Wow!” moments for customers. It turns out that to make customers happy, you want happy people on the other end of the phone. In talking to executives at Zappos, one of the words you hear a lot is connection. Their research shows that the more connected people are to other people at work, the happier they are—and, apparently, the more productive and innovative as well.

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The idea is that by having people bump into one another, they’ll more likely create, and nurture, those connections. Another example relates to the way people are brought into the Zappos culture. Each employee, from a warehouse worker to a director, has to go through what Christa Foley, the Senior Manager of Human Resources at Zappos, calls “boot camp.” For four weeks each employee is brought up to speed on how the company works, but also on how the company’s culture works. It is really the second screening within the Zappos hiring process. Even after getting the job offer, you have to prove that you can absorb the culture. The results, says Foley, are remarkable.

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The company also offers free classes taught by other employees—Finance 101, Coding for Beginners, whatever. Zappos wants people to grow at and within the company. As I mentioned in chapter three, on teams, people want to grow; they want to get better at what they’re doing and find what else they can get better at. The idea is that mastering work motivates people. Giving people the chance to find out where they fit helps Zappos keep employees happy, excited, and engaged. For many who’ve plugged along in a very traditional career, this culture can be a breath of fresh air. “All of my career before Zappos I was mostly focused on recruiting,” says Foley. It was a rote job, she says, and she was burned out.

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck
by Jon Acuff
Published 6 Apr 2015

Joyce, “What 80% of Employers Do Before Inviting You for an Interview,” Huffington Post (March 1, 2014), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-p-joyce/job-search-tips_b_4834361.html. Chapter 2 1. Jules Pieri, “Happiness Equals Reality Minus Expectations,” Inc. (November 21, 2013), http://www.inc.com/jules-pieri/happiness-equals-reality-minus-expectations.html. Investment 1 1. Will Wei, “Tony Hsieh: Bad Hires Have Cost Zappos Over $100 Million,” Business Insider (October 25, 2010), http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-hsieh-making-the-right-hires-2010-10. Chapter 3 1. Michael Pantalon, Instant Influence: How to Get Anyone to Do Anything—Fast (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011), Kindle Edition. 2. Patricia Ann Wade, “Do Students Learn Better by Typing on a Keyboard or Writing with a Pen?”

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—THE BEATLES I once worked for a company that paid employees $250 if someone they recommended got hired and stayed longer than ninety days. They paid $2,000 if the person referred was that mythical creature known as a “developer.” They did this because $2,000 was a small amount of money to pay for the right person. The wrong person is always more expensive, which is why Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, once estimated his bad hires have cost his company “well over $100 million.”1 Finding good people is difficult, and companies know that the fastest, cheapest way is often via a relationship. Long before the term “hacking” was popular, the original way to hack a job search was to know someone.

The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
by Jim Whitehurst
Published 1 Jun 2015

It is what makes people willing to do the hard tasks of innovation together and work through the inevitable conflict and tension.”6 More and more, executives and entrepreneurs are beginning to understand the importance of having a purpose in business—you need to have a goal in mind that transcends the profit motive. That’s the only way you’ll be able to attract the best and brightest talent. Think about the success that Tony Hsieh and his company, Zappos, have had, for example, by focusing on delivering happiness to their customers. But what’s less clear is that to truly perform at a peak level, simply defining a purpose is not enough. It’s just a first step, the table stakes for competing in the twenty-first-century economy. What sets open organizations apart, and what gives them a true competitive advantage, is that they also have embraced the idea that they need to activate the emotional passions and desires among their workers to actually reach that ultimate destination as defined by their purpose.

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Unlike my experience at Delta during the takeover attempt, Red Hat maintains an extremely high level of passion every day. It’s not episodic or periodic: it’s consistently there, bubbling, simmering, and sometimes exploding. At Zappos, the idea of delivering happiness to its customers begins by focusing on first building a team that believes in the company’s purpose. As Mig Pascual, a content developer for Zappos Insights, part of the Zappos Family of Companies, puts it, “Zappos hires talent whose personal values align with the company’s core values, our employees have a genuine interest in helping others. They’re inspired to be a part of something bigger than they are, and are able to fulfill their personal higher purpose at work by living out their own values every day.”8 Red Hat associates passionately live our purpose every day, so it becomes the norm.

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Gary Hamel, “The Problem With Management,” The Guardian, March 9, 2012. 8. Mig Pascual, “Zappos: 5 Out-of-the-Box Ideas for Keeping Employees Engaged,” U.S. News & World Report, October 30, 2012. 9. Mackey and Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism, 183–184. 10. “Why These 6 Companies Are the Best Places to Work in Medical Sales,” Business Insider, January 20, 2014. 11. Burchell and Robin, The Great Workplace, 134. 12. Simon Sinek, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” filmed September 2009. TED.com, http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?quote=709. 13. Burchell and Robin, The Great Workplace, 153. 14. Pascual, “Zappos.” Chapter 3 1. “Worldwide, 13% of Employees Are Engaged at Work,” Gallup World, October 8, 2013, http://www.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx. 2.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Jan 2008

In some call centers the annual turnover rate exceeds 100 percent, meaning that, on average, none of the people working there today will be there a year from now. Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer (now part of ), thought there was a better way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees. So new hires at Zappos go through a week of training. Then, at the end of those seven days, Hsieh makes them an offer. If they feel Zappos isn't for them and want to leave, he'll pay them $2,000 no hard feelings. Hsieh is hacking the Motivation 2.0 operating system like a brilliant and benevolent teenage computer whiz.

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He's using an if-then reward not to motivate people to perform better, but to weed out those who aren't fit for a Motivation 3.0-style workplace. The people who remain receive decent pay, and just as important, they have autonomy over technique. Zappos doesn't monitor its customer service employees' call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well; how they do it is up to them. The results of this emphasis on autonomy over technique? Turnover at Zappos is minimal. And although it's still young, Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best companies for customer service in the United States ahead of better-known names like Cadillac, BMW, and Apple and roughly equal to ritzy brands like Jaguar and the Ritz-Carlton.

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And although it's still young, Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best companies for customer service in the United States ahead of better-known names like Cadillac, BMW, and Apple and roughly equal to ritzy brands like Jaguar and the Ritz-Carlton. Not bad for a shoe company based in the Nevada desert. What Zappos is doing is part of a small but growing move to restore some measure of individual freedom in jobs usually known for the lack of it. For instance, while many enterprises are offshoring work to low-cost providers overseas, some companies are reversing the trend by beginning what's known as homeshoring. Instead of requiring customer service reps to report to a single large call center, they're routing the calls to the employees' homes. This cuts commuting time for staff, removes them from physical monitoring, and provides far greater autonomy over how they do their jobs.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Published 14 Feb 2012

And even when giants like The Gap mimicked the free shipping and free returns offer in their online shoe store, they buried a customer service phone number in small print at the bottom of the page. Zappos’ 1-800 number, on the other hand, is displayed “proudly,” in CEO Tony Hsieh’s words, on every single page of its website. Moreover, local employees working at corporate headquarters in Nevada answer every call. There are no scripts and no time limits on such calls—virtually unheard of in an age of quota-driven, outsourced customer service centers. Zappos massively differentiated itself from its competition by building a culture that is customer-centric in every way imaginable. This is what has made Zappos a trusted destination for millions of loyal online shoppers (and it’s also why it was acquired by Amazon for close to a billion dollars).

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They are able to finish the sentence, “Our customers buy from us and not that other company because …” Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer founded in 1999, has a clear answer to that question: insanely good customer service. While other online shoe stores like shoebuy and onlineshoes.com offered 30-day return windows, Zappos made a name for itself by being the first to offer a 365-day return policy on everything they sold. While retailers like L.L. Bean and J. Crew expected customers to pick up the shipping costs each time they returned something from an online order, Zappos offered free shipping on all returns, no questions asked. And even when giants like The Gap mimicked the free shipping and free returns offer in their online shoe store, they buried a customer service phone number in small print at the bottom of the page.

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If you want to chart a course that differentiates you from other professionals in the marketplace, the first step is being able to complete the sentence, “A company hires me over other professionals because …” How are you first, only, faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to do what you’re doing in the world? What are you offering that’s hard to come by? What are you offering that’s both rare and valuable? You don’t need to be better or faster or cheaper than everyone. Companies, after all, don’t compete in every product category or offer every conceivable service. Zappos focuses on mainstream shoes and clothes. If it tried to offer over-the-top customer service on a range of high-end luxury products, it couldn’t be the place for quality shoes delivered with terrific service, because its focus would be diluted and its differentiation eroded. In life, there are multiple gold medals.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

McAdoo suggested they take a few lessons from another Sequoia company, the shoe retailer Zappos, an unconventional e-commerce player that had originally focused solely on shoes and that had won customers’ loyalties with free shipping and by accepting returns with no questions asked. When he spoke to the founders a few days later, they had already taken his advice and been to the Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas; they’d toured the company’s tchotchke-lined offices, where employees stood in unison to warmly cheer guests, and met CEO Tony Hsieh and his COO, future Airbnb board member Alfred Lin. Amazon had acquired Zappos in June 2009, but its slightly madcap vibe remained intact.

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Airbnb furnished each new manager with a set of online tools to monitor the health of the business and with something Chesky called an “office in a box.” It contained a guidebook to setting up an Airbnb-like working environment and included various props, like a portable Ping-Pong table and the books Delivering Happiness by Zappos founder Tony Hsieh and Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss. “Brian was always worried about how do we scale our culture—how does every Airbnb office feel?” says Dubost, who joined Airbnb’s business travel team and left the company in 2016. Some of the new regional managers modeled themselves after Chesky.

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Kalanick found a few willing backers there, including Calacanis himself, who for the next ten years would revisit his investment decision on various podcasts, in blogs, and on the Q-and-A website Quora. But as much as they might want to cast their decisions as intuition, most of the early investors would have to bow to that unpredictable Silicon Valley divinity—luck. “It was controversial to invest in the company,” says Alfred Lin, then the chief operating officer at the online shoe retailer Zappos. When Lin heard about the deal, he doubted Uber could ever work back at his home in Las Vegas. He had serious misgivings. “I just thought that founders who are passionate about the idea would run the company,” he says. But he ponied up anyway after trying out the service in San Francisco and deciding he’d rather not be left out.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

“The team is ruthlessly focused on the right things with a fraction of the input.” Admittedly, they are a small company of what Evan describes as “incredibly well-rounded individuals”. But in spite of its small-scale experiment, it is inspiring others like Debbie at Mozilla, and more recently Tony Hsieh at Zappos, to push the limits of what work can and should be. Debbie and the Mozilla team are at the forefront of the Purpose Economy and wrestling with some of the new challenges that come with it. For example, the non-engineering team members tend to be less purpose-driven. If you are working in accounting, how do you still feel like a strong part of the community?

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Erik Hurst, Bob Epstein and Nicole Lederer, Ryan Gravel, Cathy Woolard, Tom Cousins, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Craig Jelinek, Bernie Glassman, Juliet Ellis, Freelancers Union, Paul Rice, Charles Montgomery, Jacob Wood & William McNulty, Jennifer Pahlka, Melinda Gates, Jeffrey Stewart, Indra Nooyi, Ryan Howard, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Steve Ells, Ray Oldenburg, Vivek Kundra, Tony Hsieh, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk, John Tolva, Rob Spiro and Alon Salant, Yancey Strickler, Charles Adler, Perry Chen, Meg Garlinghouse, Mitchell Baker, Dr. Tom X. Lee, Elon Musk, Peter Koechley & Eli Pariser, David Payne and Michael Tavani, Michael Bloomberg, Rachel Kleinfeld, John Mackey, Michael Pollan, Brad Neuberg, Chris Anderson, David Edinger, Scotty Martin, Dr.

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Well-being, by contrast, is a more enduring condition. Vital to its attainment, Seligman argues, are five core components: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.18 But well-being isn’t just good for people; it’s good for business. 21st-century-born organizations like Zappos and Etsy are making investments in measuring and maximizing the well-being of their employees, levering the emerging research of pioneers like Seligman. Matt Stinchcomb, Etsy’s Vice President of Values and Impact, partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Positive Psychology to launch a company-wide study of employee well-being.

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos
by Sarah Lacy
Published 6 Jan 2011

But here’s the remarkable part: Just as those McMansions on the hil s could be under construction anywhere in the world, as I sit and talk business with Kagabo, I can’t stop thinking about how much he reminds me of an entrepreneur I’d recently interviewed in the United States: Tony Hsieh, CEO of the ecommerce shoe company, Zappos.com. Part of this resemblance is physical: Both men have thin, slight builds, close-cropped hair, and boyish faces. Neither is particularly emotive or talkative. They both answer direct questions, succinctly and without pretense in a soft-spoken tone, more out of shyness than any sort of coldness.

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Almost like the kid in the story “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” for both Kagabo and Hsieh, the obvious answer is the right one, and no one wil persuade them otherwise. Zappos, for instance, was a dot-com survivor that shouldn’t have survived. When faced with the concern that shoes were too difficult to purchase online because fit matters and can vary so wildly across brands, Hsieh solved this problem with a common-sense solution. Zappos would pay for the shipping and returns so people could order several different sizes, styles, or colors and just send the rest back. He’d even pay to have a UPS driver come to your house to pick the boxes up. He also gave every customer a surprise upgrade to priority shipping. The hidden truth behind Zappos’ nearly $1 bil ion in gross merchandise sales in 2009 was the fact that some 40 percent were returns—and Hsieh was fine with that.

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Of course, some competitors argued that Zappos had kil ed their business models by setting such expensive customer expectations, but Hsieh’s approach solved the customer loyalty problem. That was more important to Hsieh, because Zappos wasn’t just sel ing shoes, it was sel ing “happiness,” in his words. It was a way of constructing a business that no seasoned manager would have ever al owed, but Hsieh saw this clearly and believed that it was the only way to build a bil ion-dol ar ecommerce business for long-term success. He wasn’t going to stop at shoes either. Zappos started sel ing cookware because customers suggested it, and he stated that he could see a scenario where one day Zappos might have its own airline.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

Bezos had absorbed the lessons of the business bible Good to Great, whose author, Jim Collins, counseled companies to acquire other firms only when they had fully mastered their virtuous circles, and then “as an accelerator of flywheel momentum, not a creator of it.”3 Now that Amazon had finally mastered its flywheel, it was time to splurge. For Bezos and Amazon, the irresistible temptation was Zappos.com, the online footwear and apparel retailer founded in 1999 by a soft-spoken but unnaturally persistent entrepreneur named Nick Swinmurn. By all measures, Swinmurn’s unlikely idea—to let people buy shoes over the Web without trying them on first—should have drifted off with the other flotsam in the dot-com bust. But after getting turned away from a dozen venture-capital firms, Swinmurn finally solicited an investment from an equally tenacious entrepreneur named Tony Hsieh, the son of Taiwanese immigrants and a seasoned poker player who had sold his first company, LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $250 million in stock.

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In August of 2005, Bezos e-mailed Hsieh and told him he was going to be in Las Vegas and would like to pay him a visit. The meeting was held in a conference room at a DoubleTree hotel a few blocks from the Zappos office. Bezos brought Jeff Blackburn. Hsieh brought Nick Swinmurn, Michael Moritz, and Alfred Lin, who had just joined Zappos as chairman and chief operating officer. Playing off Amazon’s famous two-pizza-team culture, the Zappos executives served two pizzas, one with pepperoni and one with jalapeño peppers, from a local restaurant. The meeting was brief and awkward. The Zappos executives suggested potential partnership arrangements, but Bezos politely said he would rather own the whole business.

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But Amazon was walking an almost impossible precarious tightrope, trying to assuage the fears of brand-name companies with industry-standard pricing while also using Endless as a way to undercut Zappos on price. In early 2007, with apparel brands watching closely for any signs of discounting, Amazon added a five-dollar bonus to its free overnight shipping. In other words, a customer was given five dollars just to buy something on the site. It was a clever but transparent ploy, an effort to inflict further pain on Zappos. Employees who worked on Endless say that, naturally, this was Jeff Bezos’s idea. Yet Zappos still continued to grow. Its 2007 gross sales hit $840 million and in 2008 it topped $1 billion. That year, Bezos learned that Zappos was advertising on the bottoms of the plastic bins at airport-security checkpoints.

Designing Interfaces
by Jenifer Tidwell
Published 15 Dec 2010

Some companies, such as SAP and Oracle, put their guidelines on the Web to serve as examples. Examples The CEO of Zappos tweets frequently, and as of this writing has 1.7 million followers (see Figure 9-4 at the top of the pattern). Tony Hsieh’s quirky, humorous, very personal tweets draw lots of attention, without ever being overt advertising for the brand. Zappos also encourages its other employees to use Twitter, and the company’s website devotes a page to the tweets sent out by its employees (see Figure 9-5). Figure 9-5. Zappos employee tweets Several of CNN’s well-known anchors and reporters use Twitter, including Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, and Ed Henry (see Figure 9-6).

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As shown in Figure 9-3, Whole Foods’ blog deals with many topics related to natural food, whereas the Google blog, reflecting Google’s variety of products and services, covers a much broader range of topics. Figure 9-2. The Facebook page for Starbucks Figure 9-3. Headlines from the Whole Foods and Google blogs Personal Voices Figure 9-4. Tony Hsieh’s Twitter feed What Encourage individuals to use their own voices, separate from the social media streams published by the organization itself. Let them publish blogs and write guest blog posts; encourage them to use Twitter and other social channels. Use when You have social media champions within your organization—people who are willing to put themselves out there, as both individuals and representatives.

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Mac OS Finder AIGA’s design archives (Figure 5-12) and YouTube (Figure 5-13) are two Picture Manager that show no text information and lots of text information, respectively. Figure 5-12. AIGA design archives Figure 5-13. YouTube Zappos (Figure 5-14) and Hanna Andersson (Figure 5-10, at the top of the pattern) demonstrate nicely designed Thumbnail Grid for product galleries. Uniformity is beautiful here—the similarities and differences between products show up with stunning clarity, and a strong visual rhythm exists on the page. Figure 5-14. Zappos Mobile devices need Thumbnail Grid in many contexts: to show applications, features, and images themselves. Note the relative sizes of the thumbnails in Figure 5-15; the Google Images and iPhone home screen examples are just big enough to be touched easily by human fingertips.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
Published 10 Jun 2013

These offices have open floor plans that can be easily reconfigured to create dense, collaborative spaces for new teams and projects.18 The line between private and public spaces is now blurred. When Zappos, the online retail giant that grew to scale in suburban Las Vegas, was looking for new headquarters in 2010, the company’s CEO Tony Hsieh decided to create a denser workplace to increase interaction and collaboration. For Hsieh, that meant not only providing open floor plans and amenities within the office but also embedding the new headquarters (and 2,000 Zappos workers) downtown, in Las Vegas’s Fremont East neighborhood in the city’s old city hall. Hsieh is pairing the move with 06-2151-2 ch6.indd 119 5/20/13 6:53 PM 120 THE RISE OF INNOVATION DISTRICTS a new private investment fund (separate from Zappos) called the Downtown Project to build a dense, multiuse and walkable environment; the strategies include luring new start-ups close to the headquarters and creating more housing and co-working spaces in the district.

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Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (London: Phoenix Giant, 1999). 18. Owen Washburn, senior policy analyst at Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, personal communication with Randy Howder, senior associate and workplace strategist at Gensler, February 20, 2013. 19. Quoted in Leigh Gallagher, “Tony Hsieh’s New $350 Million Startup,” Fortune, January 23, 2012. 20. Arthur C. Nelson, Reshaping Metropolitan America: Development Trends and Opportunities to 2030 (Washington: Island Press, 2013), p. 49. 21. Paul Taylor and others, “Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married—A Record Low” (Washington: Pew Research Center, 2011), p. 2. 22.

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Hsieh is pairing the move with 06-2151-2 ch6.indd 119 5/20/13 6:53 PM 120 THE RISE OF INNOVATION DISTRICTS a new private investment fund (separate from Zappos) called the Downtown Project to build a dense, multiuse and walkable environment; the strategies include luring new start-ups close to the headquarters and creating more housing and co-working spaces in the district. “The idea,” said Hsieh said in an interview with Fortune magazine, “went from ‘let’s build a campus’ to ‘let’s build a city.’”19 DEMOGRAPHICS ARE DESTINY Innovation districts are the product of another transformative trend: Americans’ changing family structure and the shift to smaller and more numerous households.

The Compound Effect
by Darren Hardy
Published 1 Jan 2010

Your success is truly in your hands... in this book.” —Jim Cathcart, speaker and author of The Acorn Principle “At Zappos, one of our core values is to Pursue Growth and Learning. In the lobby of our headquarters, we have a giving library where we give away books to employees and visitors that we think will help with their growth, both personally and professionally. I can’t wait to add The Compound Effect to our library.” —Tony Hsieh, author of Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos “If there were ever a person who has his finger on the pulse of success, it’s Darren Hardy, publisher and editorial director of SUCCESS magazine.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

It apparently worked—Katie turned the money down twice, and so did most people. CEO Tony Hsieh later wrote in Delivering Happiness, a history of Zappos, that less than 1 percent of Zappos employees took the offer. This is why, Hsieh writes, he used to let journalists roam free around Zappos buildings. “Unlike most companies, we don’t give reporters a small list of people they’re allowed to talk to. Instead, we encourage them to wander around and talk to whoever they want. It’s our way of being as transparent as possible, which is part of our culture.” Katie quit not too long after Amazon acquired Zappos and began changing its warehouses into fulfillment centers.

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Katie’s one of the latter. As a teenager, she worked in one of the Zappos warehouses clustered near Louisville until the shoe company was bought by Amazon in 2009 for $1.2 billion. Katie says the hype about Zappos treating its employees famously well wasn’t exaggerated; she’d loved working there. But once Amazon took over the warehouses, things got bad, so she quit. I want to hear more, but my twelve hours on the road catch up to me all at once. Katie leads me to a room off the den with a double bed that used to be her brother’s. I want to hear more about Zappos and Amazon, but upon seeing a bed, it’s as if someone’s pushed my shutdown button.

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She started at SDF8 a little before Thanksgiving through Integrity, but it’s not her first time picking. “I actually used to work for Zappos ten years ago—before Amazon bought them, when they were the small guys. I was one of under a hundred employees back then, when they couldn’t foot the light bill for the whole warehouse and all the pickers wore aprons,” Blair says. Like Katie, she says Zappos was much more fun than SDF8, though much less efficient—“There weren’t elevators and conveyor belts; you did everything by hand.” Blair eventually left Zappos to have her son and since then has mostly worked in the restaurant industry. She applied at Amazon this year because she’d heard it was a good job with good insurance if you were willing to work hard.

Curation Nation
by Rosenbaum, Steven
Published 27 Jan 2011

From corporate leaders like News Corp’s Jonathan Miller to Edelman’s Steve Rubel. From BlogHer’s Lisa Stone to Modem Media’s Jean-Philippe Maheu. There’s a whole new world of content strategists, with Brain Traffic’s Kristina Halvorson leading the charge. And there’s a groundbreaking group of brand marketers and e-tailers like Zappos’ Tony Hsieh and Pepsi’s Bonin Bough. Privacy is emerging as a critical issue in this era of both purposeful and accidental sharing, so Jules Polonetsky from the Future of Privacy Forum and Stanford University’s Lauren Gellman are critically important voices. And then there are the content makers both old and new—some embracing, some struggling with this new era of consumer curation.

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In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers—creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages. It’s worth remembering that content isn’t the same thing it used to be. In fact, you may be surprised to know the folks at Zappos, the Web e-commerce site that is legendarily known for its customer service, consider every item they sell on their site content. There’s a team photo on the wall of their Las Vegas headquarters with a caption that reads: “The Content Team, formerly known as Product Information.” Information about shoes, headlines in the New York Times, data about New York City subway arrival times—it’s all content.

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And knowing your spending habits are being transmitted to a flock of friends might make you think twice before spending $500 on a pair of designer shoes. Kaplan assured the Wall Street Journal that the idea is not quite a creepy as it might sound at first. “You can choose on a vendor-by-vendor basis,” he says. “Like automatically post all my iTunes or Zappos purchases. You can connect a credit card to Blippy. A lot of people connect just one card to Blippy and use a different one if they don’t want it shared. You can also connect without any credit card. You can just connect it to your iTunes account to just show what you’re buying on iTunes.” And if you think there’s danger of sharing too much personal information, Kaplan says there’s more danger in being perceived as lame: “A woman tweeted and said ‘Everyone’s going to know about the vibrator I bought last week!’

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?
by Raj Raghunathan
Published 25 Apr 2016

Another company that serves as an example of trust begetting trustworthiness is Zappos. As Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, notes in his book Delivering Happiness, “We don’t have scripts (for our customer service employees) because we trust our employees to use their best judgment when dealing with each and every customer.” As a result of such trust, Hsieh goes on to note, “escalations to a supervisor” (whereby customers wish to speak to someone higher up at Zappos) were very rare in the company. Trusting customers was also a core element of the Zappos business model. Customers could, after ordering shoes from the store, try them on and return them without spending a single penny.

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Customers could, after ordering shoes from the store, try them on and return them without spending a single penny. And—get this—the return period at Zappos was (and continues to be) a full year. What did Zappos get in return for trusting employees and customers? Financial success, for one. Zappos was one of the few bright stars in an otherwise bleak landscape after the 2007 financial crisis that sent the world economy into recession. Zappos was eventually bought out by Amazon for an incredible $1.2 billion in 2009. To this day, Zappos continues to be one of the best companies to work for, ranking eighty-sixth in Fortune’s 2014 list. According to Hsieh, Zappos achieved remarkable success not despite trusting its employees and customers, but because of it.

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an incredible 98 percent: This statistic is from S. M. Covey, G. Link, and R. R. Merrill, Smart Trust: Creating Prosperity, Energy, and Joy in a Low-Trust World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). Zappos: Information and details about Zappos are from T. Hsieh, Delivering Happiness (New York: Business Plus, 2010), 147. ranking eighty-sixth in Fortune’s 2014 list: Source: http://fortune.com/best-companies/zappos-com-38/. because of our hardwired cynicism: For more on this topic, see I. Bohnet and R. Zeckhauser, “Trust, Risk and Betrayal,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 55(4) (2004): 467–84; C.

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by Susan Pinker
Published 30 Sep 2013

But if, as an entrepreneur, you wanted your staff to connect with clients to sell them stuff or to come up with creative solutions to their problems, then you’d want them to be in a good—if not a fabulous—mood, which, with any luck, would be contagious. Social contact would facilitate matters at the front end, making staff at all levels feel relaxed and happy about their work. And it would also affect their output as they extended that feeling of magnanimity and connection to clients. Tony Hsieh, co-founder of the online shoe retailer Zappos, discovered this for himself early on. After selling his Internet banner business LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998, he was asked to stay on to help with the transition, a scenario that would net him $40 million. If he left, he’d forfeit 20 percent of that sum.

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William Taylor, “Your Call Should Be Important to Us, But It’s Not,” New York Times, February 26, 2006. 44. Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,” Science 306, no. 5702 (2004). 45. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. 46. Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose (New York: Grand Central, 2010). 47. Alexandra Jacobs, “Happy Feet,” New Yorker, September 14, 2009. 48. Zeynep Ton, “Why ‘Good Jobs’ Are Good for Retailers,” Harvard Business Review 90, no. 1/2 (2012). 49. James Surowiecki, “The More the Merrier,” New Yorker, March 26, 2012. 50.

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Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy. Trick-or-treating in middle school with a group of my closest friends made me happy. Eating a baked potato after a swim meet made me happy.” He concluded that, along with creating something new, social contact was key to his happiness.46 He turned his back on that $8 million and moved to Zappos, which he had helped launch as an investor a year earlier. He couldn’t care less about shoes and cared even less about fashion. “Long term, it’s not even about e-commerce necessarily,” he told the New York Times. “I guess it’s about an experiential brand that’s really about making people happy, or improving their life somehow.”

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

Now possessing the ability to access high-level introductions through the Sequoia network—Greg McAdoo had become a close adviser, and they all were having breakfast once or twice a week together at Rocco’s, a neighborhood spot around the corner—Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk were able to reach out to companies like Zappos, whose culture of friendliness and “zaniness” they particularly admired, as well as Starbucks, Apple, Nike, and others. During one breakfast meeting, they asked McAdoo for an introduction to Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, whom McAdoo knew since Zappos was a Sequoia portfolio company. McAdoo fired off a quick e-mail introduction as he was on his way to his car, and the next day when he called Chesky was surprised to learn that the founders were already on the ground in Las Vegas, touring Zappos’s headquarters. One thing the founders noticed was that all the companies they admired had a strong mission and a set of defined “core values,” a somewhat overused term for the general principles that guide an organization’s internal conduct as well as its relationship with its customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders.

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A Few “Punches Right in the Face” During the first Internet boom, a trio of brothers in Germany—Marc, Alexander, and Oliver Samwer—started making a living taking the ideas of the most successful U.S. tech start-ups and cloning them abroad. Their Berlin-based venture capital firm had funded the launch of clones of eBay, Zappos, and Amazon. In 2007 they started another firm, Rocket Internet, to apply this same strategy to the new crop of Internet start-ups. Their playbook was always the same: start copycat websites in Europe early, while the originals were still focused primarily on the United States and before they had the bandwidth and capital for overseas expansion; spend lavishly to grow them almost overnight to dominate the market; and then sell the idea back to the original company, which would by that point pay a huge premium to reclaim “ownership” of its own brand overseas.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

Andy’s big miscalculation was magnified by the divide between the tech side and the fashion-product-retail side of the business, but it was grounded fundamentally in another identity issue altogether. This was brought squarely to his attention after the presentation by a brilliant, ex-Zappos engineer whom Andy and Brian had hired early on to lead the tech team. “He called me and said, ‘I wish you could have seen the spirit of joy that Tony Hsieh created at Zappos. I wish you could see the way a spirit of positivity actually creates a much better work environment at a startup.’” What this engineer had landed upon without realizing it was the disconnect between the type of business Bonobos was in and the type of businesses Andy had come from.

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Like Jenn Hyman who, in 2009, went out to raise a $1.75 million seed round for an online designer dress rental business she called Rent the Runway, where women could browse dresses that might cost thousands of dollars to buy, but that they could rent for a fraction of the cost. A dress would then show up at a customer’s home, she’d wear it for whatever occasion had brought her to the site to begin with, and then she’d ship the dress back when she was done with it. It was like Zipcar meets Netflix meets Zappos, with what would eventually become the country’s largest dry-cleaning service on the back end. Today, Rent the Runway has more than 1,200 employees and does more than $100 million in revenue, but in 2009 the responses Jenn and her co-founder, Jennifer Fleiss, got from investors were less than encouraging, sometimes even startling.

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“This isn’t consulting or private equity, where people are motivated by fear. This is a startup, where people are motivated by joy. It’s about creating something versus making sure that you’re working hard enough to get to the next rung.” This realization would turn out to be more than a wake-up call. First, the ex-Zappos engineer’s point wasn’t just a friendly piece of advice. It was his parting thought. He quit, leaving the tech team unguided and the whole business potentially underpowered. At the time, the website was the only entry point for Bonobos customers. If that broke down, it could be incredibly costly.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future
by Chris Guillebeau
Published 7 May 2012

‡John Jantsch wrote a great book called The Referral Engine, which is all about creating a systemized process for encouraging referrals. Highly recommended. §A little-known secret at Zappos is that they do cut people off who abuse the generous return policy. CEO Tony Hsieh explained to me that if a customer blatantly takes advantage of them—returning worn shoes on day 364 of the 365-day return period, for example—they’ll honor the refund once, but they’ll also gently advise that customer not to purchase from Zappos anymore. Fortunately, he also said, most people are honest. INSTRUCTIONS ON CLONING YOURSELF FOR FUN AND PROFIT. “I’m not a businessman; I’m a business, man.”

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But when we buy something, our money isn’t all we’re concerned with. We’re also concerned about time and validation. If I have to return something, will it be a pain in the ass? Make it the opposite of a pain in the ass—some businesses provide a guarantee of 110 percent, ensuring that the burden is on the business to deliver. Zappos famously created free shipping both ways to take away the hesitation about buying shoes without trying them on. A host of competitors had to follow suit.§ ALTERNATIVELY, MAKE A BIG DEAL ABOUT OFFERING NO GUARANTEE. Instead of providing an incredible guarantee, provide no guarantee—and make a big deal about this fact.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

It’s clear to me how my work fits in with the overall strategy and goals of the company. Footnotes 1 In late 2013 the online shoe retailer Zappos began experimenting with holacracy, a management system that did away with hierarchy and well-defined management roles in favor of “distributed authority.” It was not universally popular. When CEO Tony Hsieh announced in March 2015 that all employees would have to fully commit to the new system, 18 percent of the workforce instead took a buyout. In January 2000, the Quartz website announced that “Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy.” 2 Ford was the second-largest company in America, which was by far the largest economy in the world, having grown by more than 50 percent during World War II while most other large countries’ productive capacities were ravaged by the conflict.

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Chapter 5: Ownership 1 discussed on the CIA’s website: “The Art of Simple Sabotage,” Central Intelligence Agency, April 1, 2019, www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage/. 2 “The consultants were available now”: Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), 66–67. 3 “specific form of organization”: Bert Rockman, “Bureaucracy,” Britannica, accessed January 6, 2023, www.britannica.com/topic/bureaucracy. 4 “However many people complain”: “Max Weber Quotations,” QuoteTab, accessed February 15, 2023, www.quotetab.com/quotes/by-max-weber. 5 survey on bureaucracy: Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, “What We Learned About Bureaucracy from 7,000 HBR Readers,” Harvard Business Review, August 10, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/08/what-we-learned-about-bureaucracy-from-7000-hbr-readers. 6 18 percent of the workforce: Jena McGregor, “Zappos Says 18 Percent of the Company Has Left Following Its Radical ‘No Bosses’ Approach,” Washington Post, January 14, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/01/14/zappos-says-18-percent-of-the-company-has-left-following-its-radical-no-bosses-approach/. 7 “quietly backed away”: Aimee Groth, “Zappos Has Quietly Backed Away from Holacracy,” Quartz, January 29, 2020, https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy. 8 “promiscuous distribution”: Lawrence H. Summers, “Why Americans Don’t Trust Government,” Washington Post, May 26, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/26/why-americans-dont-trust-government/. 9 vetocracies: Ezra Klein, “Francis Fukuyama: America Is in ‘One of the Most Severe Political Crises I Have Experienced,’” Vox, October 26, 2016, www.vox.com/2016/10/26/13352946/francis-fukuyama-ezra-klein. 10 40 percent faster than the American economy: “Reg Stats,” Regulatory Studies Center, Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University, accessed February 15, 2023, https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/reg-stats. 11 relatively minor repairs: Summers, “Why Americans Don’t Trust Government.” 12 buying Ferrari outright: Angus MacKenzie, “What if Ford Had Bought Ferrari?

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff
by Clara Shih
Published 30 Apr 2009

This is an important and active step employees must take because by default, the privacy settings on Facebook and MySpace are relatively open. From the Library of Kerri Ross 202 Pa r t I I I Yo u r S te p - B y - S te p G u i d e to Us i n g Fa ce b o o k fo r B u s i n e s s Tony Hsieh, CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos, trains every new call center employee on the appropriate use of Twitter. This has encouraged employees to become active users of social media while supporting Zappos’ brand and mission, which is highly motivating and mutually beneficial for everyone. Reconciling Grassroots Initiatives Particularly given its newness, enterprise social networking to date has largely taken the form of grassroots initiatives driven by individual people or departments.

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In addition to traditional CRM information such as products purchased and case history, reps can speak to lighter topics like sports teams, hometowns, and hobbies. As a result, support reps are achieving higher customer satisfaction and greater success with attempts at cross-selling and upselling. On a more ad hoc basis, companies like Zappos and Comcast are beginning to assign dedicated support reps to monitor and respond to questions that come up in Tweets. By responding in real-time on Twitter, these vendors not only establish better customer service with the original person who Tweeted, the solution is now posted as a Twitter reply for everyone else to see, search, and benefit.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

I learned how to read a balance sheet, profit and loss statements, and cash flow statements. I took a class from Robert Merton, who later went on to win the Nobel Prize. He suggested I should do a PhD instead of working in finance, so that’s how I ended up going to Stanford. Soon enough, though, I learned that getting a PhD for me was very isolating. So I dropped out and I joined Tony Hsieh, a friend of mine from back at Harvard. Tony was working at Oracle, and on the side he was building websites and marketing them. Very few people knew how to create these websites, and even fewer people knew how to bring traffic to them. So Tony founded this banner-advertising network called LinkExchange, to help link and promote websites, and I joined as the VP of finance.

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So we decided to focus on the couple of investments that we could help get to scale. One of our investments was a company called Zappos, which sold shoes online, and the other was Tellme Networks, which was a voice-recognition platform in the cloud (before the cloud). I joined Tellme Networks to help with finance. It raised a lot of money but was losing $60 million a year with no revenue. After a couple of years of hard work that required a business-model pivot and a few rounds of layoffs, we were able to successfully sell the company to Microsoft for $800 million. In the meantime, Tony joined Zappos as a consultant and eventually became CEO and helped the company grow to over $100 million in sales while maintaining break-even.

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In the meantime, Tony joined Zappos as a consultant and eventually became CEO and helped the company grow to over $100 million in sales while maintaining break-even. I joined Tony in 2005 at Zappos as CFO and then became COO. We grew it to over a billion dollars in sales, and in 2010 Amazon acquired it for $1.2 billion. After the acquisition, I joined Sequoia Capital. A lot of founders are curious about fundraising and how to best raise money. You need to know that every dollar you raise in the early stages is going to be the most expensive capital that you’re going to raise, so you should be thoughtful about it. Everybody thinks about how to get in the door to pitch VCs. Very few people think about who they want on their capitalization table.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

One thing Amazon didn’t do was turn over the Whole Foods management team. The activist investors had darkly joked about how many days it would take Bezos to fire John Mackey. But Bezos often allowed acquired companies and their eccentric CEOs to operate autonomously, as he had years before with the late Tony Hsieh and Zappos. He preferred to learn from their experience and harvest the data and business lessons that emerged. Now Bezos had to find alignment among Amazon’s divergent approaches in the trickiest product category it had ever encountered. So he also gave Steve Kessel authority over Prime Now and Amazon Fresh.

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In 2008, Amazon surpassed eBay in market capitalization and was beginning to be mentioned in the same breath as Google, Apple, and a new Silicon Valley upstart, Facebook. Bezos then used every bit of leverage at his disposal to outduel Walmart and acquire two emerging online rivals: the shoe-retailer Zappos and a seller of consumable goods called Quidsi, which owned the popular website Diapers.com. Antitrust authorities approved those deals quickly—decisions that would later be regarded skeptically in light of Amazon’s growing dominance. It turned out that there was more depth than anyone had suspected to the increasingly fit CEO with the now clean-shaven head.

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“Today’s big tech companies have too much power—too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” wrote Senator Elizabeth Warren at the debut of her unsuccessful bid for the White House in 2019. “Amazon crushes small companies by copying the goods they sell on the Amazon Marketplace and then selling its own branded version.” She urged that Jeff Bezos’s meticulous creation be forced to spin off Zappos and Whole Foods Market and be stamped into smaller parts. * * * As Amazon changed, so too did Bezos undergo his own startling transformation. In the company’s early years, he usually sported pleated khakis and navy-blue button-down shirts and rode his two-wheel Segway scooter around the office, his laugh ricocheting off the walls.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen
Published 30 Dec 2014

Mergers and Acquisitions Acquirers are clearly motivated by the desire to acquire resources, positioning in a new market, or the potential for scale. Sometimes, mergers are overtly about the people running the operation and their ability to pursue ideas. The acquisition of Zappos by Amazon is an example of the Producer Jeff Bezos recognizing another Producer in CEO Tony Hsieh, and buying not only the business asset but the skills and vision of its leader. Warren Buffett, in contrast, could be said to be a Producer who has made his billions by acquiring cash flow in established, unchanging Performer industries. And the acquisition of Climate Corporation by the agricultural science firm Monsanto reads to us as an effort by a diversified agrigiant to grow Producer capability in an area with enormous potential.

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Studios, 98–99 Washington, D.C., 68, 85, 175 Washington Post, 198 Wayne, John, 98 Wayne, Ronald, 134–35, 207 Westbeach Snowboard Ltd., 40, 217 Westbeach Surf, 39, 40, 89 Whitman, Meg, 153 Williams College, 43, 68 Wilson, Chip, 38–39, 40, 52, 75, 88–89, 92–93, 217 Windows, 203 Windsor Mountain, 39 Winfrey, Oprah, 4, 36, 162, 198, 217–18 Wonderful Pistachios, 212 Woodall, Martin, 129, 153–54, 185, 201 World Bank, 90, 99, 142, 213 World Economic Forum, 178 World War II, 106, 114, 195, 207 Wozniak, Steve, 134, 148, 150, 155, 207 Wynn, Steve, 130, 131, 218 Wynn Macau, 219 Wynn Resorts, 130 X.com, 211 Xerox, 170 Yahoo, 170, 201 Yale University, 102, 103–4, 106, 216 Yanai, Tadashi, 65–66, 219 Yoovidhya, Chaleo, 8, 210 Yoovidhya, Chalerm, 210 Zappos, 180 Zara, 148 Zuckerberg, Mark, 11, 153, 213, 219 Looking for more? Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books. Discover your next great read!

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

But now two other companies have challenged Google for the jester’s crown—Twitter, up the road in San Francisco, and Zappos, a state away in Nevada. Twitter employs a team of people whose job is to make workers happy (for example, by providing them with cold towels on a hot day). The company’s Web page features workers wearing cowboy hats and boasts that “crazy things happen every day … it’s pretty ridiculous.” Zappos, an online shoe and clothing shop, describes creating “fun and a little weirdness” as one of its core values. Tony Hsieh, the company’s boss, shaves his head, spends 10 percent of his time studying what he calls the “science of happiness,” and once joked that Zappos had issued a class action lawsuit against Walt Disney for describing itself as “the happiest place on earth.”

…

Firms should use internal markets to turn their employees into mini-entrepreneurs, and external markets to make sure that they are not wasting their time doing things that could be done better elsewhere. For Peters, “crazy” organizations are more efficient as well as more fun than their sane rivals. But is this really true? Peters has had plenty of reason over the years to congratulate himself on his influence. Zappos, America’s most successful online shoe and clothing store, has borrowed many of Peters’s principles: the company’s number-one core value is to “deliver WOW through service.” He has even more reasons to relish the failures of scientific managers, with their complex mathematical formulae. In Re-imagine!

…

Tony Hsieh, the company’s boss, shaves his head, spends 10 percent of his time studying what he calls the “science of happiness,” and once joked that Zappos had issued a class action lawsuit against Walt Disney for describing itself as “the happiest place on earth.” The company practices regular “random acts of generosity,” when workers form a noisy conga line and single out one of their colleagues for praise. The praisee has to wear a hat for a week. The most unpleasant thing about the fashion for fun is that it is mixed with compulsion. Zappos and ePrize don’t just celebrate wackiness; they require it. Compulsory fun is not only cringe-making—Twitter calls its office a Twoffice; Boston Pizza encourages workers to send “golden bananas” to colleagues who are “having fun while being the best”—but hollow and contrived. You do not have to look hard to see the crude management thinking behind the “fun” façade—the desire to brand the company as better than its rivals or the plan to boost productivity through team building.

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
by Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber
Published 9 Feb 2014

It’s a tribute to Zappos’ outstanding culture that the percentage of people taking the money and leaving is only around one or two percent. Whenever the percentage of people taking the check draws too close to zero, Zappos increases the amount (it started with $100, then raised it to $200, and raised it again and again up to its current level). The practice, in essence, boils down to a real-life barometer of the health of the organization’s culture. (Zappos.com is famous for its Green cultural practices described in the bestseller Delivering Happiness, written by CEO Tony Hsieh. The 1,500-employee company is currently making the leap to Holacracy, which will make it the largest holacratic organization to date.)

…

Some organizations, such as FAVI, make extended use of the trial period for both parties to test whether the match works out. Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer, offers its new hires a $3,000 check if they have second thoughts and choose to quit during the four-week orientation. The idea is that everyone will be better off not staying in a marriage that isn’t meant to be. Three thousand dollars is a lot of money for people working in call centers or moving boxes in fulfillment centers, which is what most Zappos employees do. It’s a tribute to Zappos’ outstanding culture that the percentage of people taking the money and leaving is only around one or two percent.

…

With fewer ego-fears, there is less need for PR polish, less urge to hide failures. Outsiders can be granted a deep view inside the organization, in all sorts of ways. Clients can participate in workshops to listen in to the purpose; all-hands meetings can be streamed live over the Internet (a regular practice at Zappos.com, for instance); or, like Patagonia, companies can choose to film their key production processes and publish them online. HolacracyOne has developed an intranet-type software called Glassfrog that captures people’s roles and accountabilities, the structure of the organization, meeting notes and metrics.

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy
by John Lee
Published 13 Apr 2015

Believe money will come to you in good ways and in great quantities—truly believe it—and once you take action, it will happen! Your perspective is your reality. Perspective is everything. Everything you see will be filtered through your mindset. Your perspective is your reality. If you don't like the way things are, change your mindset…sometimes that's the only thing you can change. Tony Hsieh is a hugely successful entrepreneur and the CEO of Zappos, an online clothing and shoe company. At some point in the company's early days the board sent a marketing executive to India to see what the business opportunities were like there. He came back and said, “It's terrible. No opportunity at all. No one wears shoes there.”

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See Undesirable truths Twain, Mark Undesirable truths education failure friendship frugality greed investments jobs money mortgages overview of pensions risk saving time work United States flipping property in higher education in multilevel marketing schemes repossession in Valuation of property Value, vs. cost Value investing Value of money Van Gogh, Vincent Visualization boards Vujicic, Nick Wages Wales, dragon national emblem WamBamBoo.com Warhol, Andy Wealth definition of fear as roadblock to get-rich-quick schemes hard work and monetary wealth vs. moral wealth more money mindset negative people as roadblock to parallel universe perspective rat race trap as roadblock to strategy for building undesirable truths about Wealth Dragons first international tour founding of significance of name top principles of Wealth education Wealth strategy asset building business creation importance of infinite wealth achievement path overview of steps passive income generation See also Property investment Wealthy people, characteristics of Wilde, Oscar Williamson, Marianne Without Risk There’s No Reward (Mayer) Wong, Annika Wong, Vincent auctions Bruce Lee influence celebrity lifestyles daughter’s egg business education failure family background and childhood fear financial abundance financial experts hard work learning curve lease options lotteries luck making commitment to success moral obligation to be wealthy negative people off-plan property investments people skills property investment advantages property investment beginnings property investment deal making tips property investment experiences property investment learning curve rat race trap recessions as opportunity to make money relationship with John Lee taking action unglamorous nature of property investing Wealth Dragon origins wealth journey of Work, finding passion for. See also Hard work Working for yourself Worth, vs. cost Ying Tan Youngman, Henny Zappos Ziglar, Zig Zuckerberg, Mark WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
by Sarah Frier
Published 13 Apr 2020

Despite the discouragement, Systrom spent hours brainstorming with White and Amy Cole, the early business employee, about what a strategy might look like, whether in commerce, advertising, or something else entirely. Until that happened, he and Krieger decided, it was time for Instagram to execute on one of Zuckerberg’s other priorities. It was time to address a competitive threat. Systrom thought about his counterparts at other acquired companies. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of the online shoe business Zappos, hadn’t gotten to remain in Jeff Bezos’s orbit after Zappos was acquired by Amazon in 2009. YouTube’s founders weren’t even relevant to YouTube anymore—they’d left the company after the 2006 Google acquisition. He had no intention of being forgotten like that. DOMINATION “We’re looking to have a level of impact on the world that is unmatched by any other company, and in order to do that we can’t sit around and act like we’ve made it.

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ABC News, 211 Above Category cycling, 185 abuse, abuse content, 41, 97, 261 Academy Awards, 152 Systrom at, 191–92, 204 Accenture, 260 Acton, Brian, 125, 256, 258 Adams, William (will.i.am), 128 Adidas, xix Adobe Lightroom, 240, 243 Adobe Photoshop, 21, 23, 244 advertising, 59, 176, 256 false, 244; see also fake news FB’s business of, 75, 77, 89, 91–92, 94, 96, 105, 118–19, 125, 149–50, 163, 217, 224, 277 IG’s business of, 104, 118–21, 124, 151, 155, 163–65, 174, 175–76, 184, 225, 241, 277 mobile, 74–75 television, 215 see also brand advertising advertising agencies, 89 FB’s relationship with, 120–21, 124 Ahrendts, Angela, 147 @aidanalexander, 171 AiGrow, 246 Airbnb, xvi, 45 Alba, Jessica, 130, 250 Alexander, Aidan, 171 algorithms: FB’s use of, 91, 103, 128, 162, 163, 208, 209, 210–12, 215, 221, 224, 259 IG’s early lack of, 34, 143 IG’s use of, 81, 170, 174, 197–98, 218, 229, 230–32, 233, 251, 271 IG users’ mistrust of, 197 YouTube’s use of, 233–34 @alittlepieceofinsane, 161 Allen, Nick, 117 Allen & Company, 49 Amanpour, Christiane, 127 Amaro photo filter, 23 Amazon, 22, 28, 139, 242 Communications Decency Act and, 41 Whole Foods acquired by, 64 Zappos acquired by, 105 Amazon Web Services, 26, 79–80 American Medical Association, 244 American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 244 analytics, 90, 102, 226 IG’s use of, 100, 178, 183, 226 IG users’ access to, 275–76 Anchor Psychology, 172 Anderson, Steve, 34 early IG investment of, 11, 15 on IG board, 37, 56, 63–64 Anderson Cooper 360, 142 Andreessen, Marc, 11 Andreessen Horowitz: early investment in IG by, 11, 15, 33 investment in PicPlz by, 33–34, 36, 77 Android, 19, 33, 110, 203 IG app for, 50, 51 angel investments, 16, 17, 24, 36 anonymity, user, 41, 80 on Formspring, 40 on IG, 41, 80, 163, 173, 218, 219, 260, 261 troubling content and, 40, 163, 218–19, 260; see also bullying antitrust laws, 75, 268 Antonow, Eric, 165 AOL, 116 Apple, 10, 21, 56, 65, 147, 167, 234 Apple app store, 26, 28, 38, 115 Apple IDs, 42 apps: filter, see filter apps, photo location-based, 15 see also mobile apps; specific apps Argentina, 12 Arthur D.

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, 2, 8, 11, 24, 116 in attempt to buy Facebook, 57 Flickr acquired by, 54 @yock7, 169 Young, Neil, 129 YouTube, 39, 59, 109, 112, 130, 137, 157, 165, 171, 215, 219, 232, 240, 248, 253 algorithm on, 233–34 Communications Decency Act and, 41 fake news on, 225 Google’s acquisition of, 53, 105 Yuki, Ashley, 175–76, 177 Zappos, 105 Zazzle, 5 Zero to One (Thiel), 191, 193 Zimmerman, Joel Thomas (Deadmau5), 70 Zipcar, 3 Zollman, Jessica, 40, 41–43, 53, 70, 72–73, 97, 104 Zoufonoun, Amin, 58–59, 60, 61–62, 84–85 Zuckerberg, Mark, 27, 52, 106, 112, 148–49, 150, 213, 220–21, 262, 274, 276 in attempt to buy Twitter, 57 in attempts to buy Snapchat, 114–15, 116, 117, 122, 125, 183, 191, 200–202 better understanding of FB users as goal of, 221–22 and Cambridge Analytica scandal, 258 as committed to IG’s independence at FB, 54, 55, 63, 67, 95, 96, 106, 121 competitiveness of, 108, 148 credit for IG’s success taken by, 266–67 in decision to buy IG, 56–57; see also Facebook, Instagram acquired by dominance as goal of, 78, 109, 124 and fake news scandal at FB, 211–12, 225 “family of apps” bundled together by, 255–56, 267–68 FB support for IG shut down by, 268–69 and FTC investigation of FB’s IG acquisition, 76 Greek and Roman history interest of, 106 hoodie worn by, 2, 74 IG cannibalization of FB concern of, 223, 226, 227–28 at IG video launch, 111 Krieger’s meeting with, 60 Krieger’s relationship with, 252–53, 254–55, 256, 264 and Krieger’s resignation from IG, 272 in negotiations with Systrom, 57–58, 60–62, 73; see also Facebook, Instagram acquired by new year’s resolutions of, 221–22 personal security of, 107, 134, 222 problems anticipated by, 149, 214–15 rising tensions between Systrom and, 217, 252, 262, 267 similar background of Systrom and, 106–7 6,000 word manifesto of, 221 Spiegel and, 116–17, 200, 201–2 Systrom pressed to build IG’s business model by, 163–65, 167 Systrom’s 2005 meeting with, 1–3 Systrom’s relationship with, 7, 38, 55, 95, 104–5, 107–8, 216–17, 251, 252–53, 256, 264, 266–68, 269–70 and Systrom’s resignation from IG, 272 testimony to Congress by, 258–59, 262 understanding of teens as goal of, 116 and WhatsApp, 64, 125, 217, 256 see also Facebook Zuckerberg, Randi, 126–28, 130, 148 ZuckPri, 95 Zwift, 186 Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Frier All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 14 May 2017

Louis also undertook a renaissance—retrofitting industrial lofts for residential living, bringing more amenities into the city, paving bike paths and pedestrian-friendly walkways to attract members of the creative class (thought to be the lifeblood of the new economy).13 Local politicians and developers advocate for active street life, coffee shops, and live music as a part of the new urbanity. Countless new-build developments around the country in both urban and suburban areas offer residential, shopping, and restaurants as a combined experience for the consumer. While some of these developments are in downtown (Zappos’ founder Tony Hsieh’s Las Vegas Downtown Project, Chicago’s New City, or the Los Angeles Staples Center), many simply replicate the downtown experience with sidewalks, outdoor music, and cafés and apartments overlooking the “street life” (Santana Row in Silicon Valley, the Grove in Los Angeles, or the uber-luxury Bal Harbour shops in Florida).

…

Today, a simple click on Sak’s Fifth Avenue’s website will send a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s “BB” shoes to any woman in the country, provided she’s willing to spend $600 for the privilege. Additionally, the web enables luxury brands to distribute items from their past seasons to various discount fashion sites. Apparel and shoes websites such as Bluefly (1998), Zappos (1999), Overstock.com (1999), and of course the original bargain-hunting virtual mecca, Ebay (1995), allow mainstream consumers to engage in conspicuous consumption at blue-light special prices. Some more recent additions to this group include Gilt (2007) and Rue La La (2007), which offer luxury goods from Cartier watches to Chanel handbags at shockingly reduced prices through their “flash sales,” in which an Hermès handbag will be reduced from $20,000 to $10,000 and La Perla lingerie is 60% off for a limited time (sometimes hours or a day or so).

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See the rich Weber, Max, 58, 96, 177 Weingarten, Essie, 46–47 West, Geoffrey, 159–60 wet nurses, 89–90 Wharton, Edith, 10, 164, 182 white farm imaginary, 124 whites, consumption patterns of, 37 Whole Foods, 117–20, 122, 124, 126 Whyte, William, The Organization Man, 16, 106 widowers, 37 Williams, Deric, 102 Williams, Jennifer, 102–3 Wilson, William Julius, 186 wine, 164 Wirth, Louis, Urbanism as a Way of Life, 159, 176 Wolf, Joan, 86 Wolfe, Tom, 10, 101, 162 women, working, 65–66, 83–84. See also motherhood Women Infants and Children (WIC), 82 working class. See the poor and low-income group World Health Organization, 94 World Wildlife Fund, 134–35 Wrigley, 194 Young, Molly, 180 Zambito, Mark, 112 Zappos, 12 Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Contents Acknowledgments Chapter 1: The Twenty-first-Century “Leisure” Class Chapter 2: Conspicuous Consumption in the Twenty-first Century Chapter 3: Ballet Slippers and Yale Tuition: Inconspicuous Consumption and the New Elites Chapter 4: Motherhood as Conspicuous Leisure in the Twenty-first Century Chapter 5: Conspicuous Production Chapter 6: Landscapes of Consumption Chapter 7: “To Get Rich Is Glorious”?

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

“So although we were only a week away from launching the jewelry business, we pivoted. We sold all the rings, necklaces, and bracelets—and the safe—and started learning everything we could about the pet industry,” wrote Cohen.[1] His inspirations were Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, and the late Tony Hsieh, who started the customer-obsessed online shoe retailer Zappos. Chewy matched prices found elsewhere, but it spent far more on support for “pet parents” than competitors, employing a whole team to send out cards expressing condolences when a pet died. Despite rapid early sales growth, Cohen had even more trouble raising money than Tenev and Bhatt did at Robinhood, in no small part because online pet goods were considered something of a cursed category.

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or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street (Schwed), 233–34 wholesalers, 33–35, 49, 104, 106, 203, 208–9 Whyte, Keith S., 31, 55 Williams, Serena, 64 Wirecard, 85 Wisdom Homes of America Inc., 167 Wolf, Kurt, 222–23 Wolfie Has Fallen (Comeau), 47 Wooten, Jadrian, 19 WorldCom, 42 World Wide Robin Hood Society, 197 Y Yahoo, x, 163 Yellen, Janet, 10, 231 YOLO traders, 16, 23, 33, 42, 200, 201, 231, 237, 249, 261 YouTube, 2, 18, 37, 92, 131, 162, 166, 214 Gill’s videos on, as Roaring Kitty, 2, 18, 45, 48–49, 92, 130, 133, 144, 171, 174–75, 191, 211, 213 Z Zappos, 89–90 zero commissions, 47, 48–51, 54, 59, 70, 101, 102, 139, 166, 218, 241, 247, 259 zero interest rates, 58, 72 zero-price effect, 51 Zuckerberg, Mark, 37–38 Zuckerman, Gregory, 237 Zulu Dawn, xiv, xv Zweig, Jason, 179, 181 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z About the Author Spencer Jakab is an award-winning financial journalist and a former top-rated stock analyst at Credit Suisse.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late
by Michael Ellsberg
Published 15 Jan 2011

For three days, they were stopping their lives and meeting amazing other people, doing business together, learning from each other. We made these great friendships,” Elliott said. The trip went so well, in fact, that Elliott decided to do another trip six months later, for sixty young business leaders. Naturally, he found sponsors to pay for that as well. Dustin Moskovitz attended the second gathering, as did Tony Hsieh from Zappos. The trips took on a life of their own, grew and grew. Elliott brought on some friends to help him, Jeremy Schwartz (a Berklee College of Music dropout), Brett Leve, and Jeff Rosenthal, and the gatherings morphed into what is now Summit Series (http://www.summitseries.com), an annual invitation-only gathering of young entrepreneurs, innovators, and thought leaders, which has been called by Forbes “the Davos for Generation Y.”

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See Mentors TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) TheFacebook.com Therisetothetop.com Thiel, Peter and Facebook higher education, critique of Thiel Fellowship criticism of elements of Thievery Corporation Third tribe marketing Thrillist TOMS Shoes Tracy, Brian, on money, connection to value Treasure Island Hotel and Casino Turner, Ted Twain, Mark Twitter Value, relationship to money Van Veen, Ricky Vimeo Vlogging Vocational training Wallerstein, Michael, education debt of Weisberg, Jacob, Thiel Fellowship, criticism of Whitehottruth.com Williams, Evan Word of mouth, power of WordPress Work ethic, versus cash-generation ethic Worry, common sources of Zappos Ziglar, Zig Zivity Zuckerberg, Mark as college non-graduate success, evolution of

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky
Published 31 Mar 2017

He raised $600,000 for the inauguration, and so he invited a large number of his posse—at $12,500 a pop—to attend a multiday party that would include the main event itself, a ball, and concerts by Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen. Camp and Kalanick went together, joining a group that included Evan Williams as well as Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin, both early investors in the online shoe retailer Zappos. Once again, cold and wet weather bedeviled—and possibly inspired—the pair. “Travis and Garrett were fidgety and annoyed at waiting for cabs to get from party to party,” recalls Lin. Experienced traveler though he’d become, Kalanick arrived in Washington unprepared.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
by Alexis Ohanian
Published 30 Sep 2013

And that’s just one example of many—not unique to hipmunk but unique to a new generation of companies building products and services that actually give a damn about the end customer. How bad has it gotten? My friend and fellow author Tony Hsieh, who’s also published by Business Plus, wrote a major international bestseller, Delivering Happiness, that essentially boiled down to two points: excellent customer service is vital to Zappos, and it should be vital in your business, too. Think about that. What does it say about the state of business when CEOs everywhere hear that and think, “Wow! That’s a revolutionary idea—we should be treating our customers well!”

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

He looked very serious. “I agree with you that the track record for effecting large-scale organizational transformation is dismal,” Meng said. “But that’s because the executives weren’t trained in mindfulness.” A couple of my colleagues began to eavesdrop. Meng continued: “I fully agree with my good friend Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos that the pursuit of mindfulness and the pursuit of corporate profit are completely compatible.” Becoming more animated, he reached for my hand. “I am going to tell you a secret that I often don’t share,” he said. “My mission in life is to democratize enlightenment and bring one million people to stream-entry before I die.”

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by Laszlo Bock
Published 31 Mar 2015

Both models can be very profitable, but this book presumes that the most talented people on the planet will want to be part of a freedom-driven company. And freedom-driven companies, because they benefit from the best insight and passion of all their employees, are more resilient and better sustain success. Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Reed Hastings of Netflix, Jim Goodnight of SAS Institute, and many others will gladly tell you about the business results that come from giving their people freedom,258 as the leaders of Wegmans and Brandix have. These technology companies have continued to see year after year of growth. Wegmans grows regardless of what happens in the economy, and continues to be a great place to work.

…

United States Congress House Special Committee to Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management, The Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management: Hearings before Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1912), 3: 1397, http://books.google.com/books?id=eyrbAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1397&lpg=PA1397&dq=physically+able+to+handle+pig-iron. 258. Tony Hsieh: “I think of myself less as a leader, and more of being almost an architect of an environment that enables employees to come up with their own ideas, and where employees can grow the culture and evolve it over time.” (Adam Bryant, “On a Scale of 1 to 10, How Weird Are You?,” New York Times, January 9, 2010.)

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy
by William Poundstone
Published 4 Jan 2012

There is much speculation about how best to answer the “scale of 1 to 10” questions that have become popular lately. For example, Wells Fargo has candidates rate their competitiveness on a 1-to-10 scale. In practice, almost everyone rates himself 8 or higher, and if you want the job, you should avoid false modesty. Online retailer Zappos has a trickier question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you?” The preferred answer there is somewhere in the middle, CEO Tony Hsieh explained. A 1 is “probably a little bit too straight-laced for us,” and a 10 “might be too psychotic.” It’s possible to flunk a litmus test without realizing it. According to one recruiter, Nordstrom screens out more than 90 percent of female applicants with a simple three-part test: Is the applicant wearing black?

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work
by Scott Berkun
Published 9 Sep 2013

The Year Without Pants is a brilliant, honest, and funny insider's story of life at a great company.” —Eric Ries, author, New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup “WordPress.com has discovered a better way to work, and The Year Without Pants allows the reader to learn from the organization's fun and entertaining story.” —Tony Hsieh, author, New York Times bestseller Delivering Happiness, and CEO, Zappos.com, Inc. “The Year Without Pants is a highly unusual business book, full of ideas and lessons for a business of any size, but a truly insightful and entertaining read as well. Scott Berkun's willingness to take us behind the scenes of WordPress.com uncovers some of the tenets of a great company: transparency, teamwork, hard work, talent, and fun, to name a few.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 13 Mar 2012

When some or all of these ingredients were combined, the result was so deeply appealing that young people began converging by the thousands for all-night dance parties, first in the United Kingdom and then, in the 1990s, throughout the developed world. There’s a description of a rave experience in Tony Hsieh’s autobiography Delivering Happiness. Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) is the CEO of the online retailer Zappos.com. He made a fortune at the age of twenty-four when he sold his start-up tech company to Microsoft. For the next few years Hsieh wondered what to do with his life. He had a small group of friends who hung out together in San Francisco. The first time Hsieh and his “tribe” (as they called themselves) attended a rave, it flipped his hive switch.

…

Many friends and colleagues gave me advice on one or several chapters. I thank them all: Gerard Alexander, Scott Atran, Simon Baron-Cohen, Paul Bloomfield, Chris Boehm, Rob Boyd, Arthur Brooks, Teddy Downey, Dan Fessler, Mike Gazzaniga, Sarah Estes Graham, Josh Greene, Rebecca Haidt, Henry Haslam, Robert Hogan, Tony Hsieh, Darrell Icenogle, Brad Jones, Rob Kaiser, Doug Kenrick, Judd King, Rob Kurzban, Brian Lowe, Jonathan Moreno, Lesley Newson, Richard Nisbett, Ara Norenzayan, Steve Pinker, David Pizarro, Robert Posacki, N. Sriram, Don Reed, Pete Richerson, Robert Sapolsky, Azim Shariff, Mark Shepp, Richard Shweder, Richard Sosis, Phil Tetlock, Richard Thaler, Mike Tomasello, Steve Vaisey, Nicholas Wade, Will Wilkinson, David Sloan Wilson, Dave Winsborough, Keith Winsten, and Paul Zak.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities We need to make sure that we’re building . . . neighborhoods that are mixed, where people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and particularly income levels can live in the same neighborhoods. . . . Social inclusion . . . can go a long way in reducing inequality. Mayor Naheed Nenshi, Calgary If you fix cities, you kind of fix the world. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos Youth unemployment is an incredible problem in Europe, [where] we have 5.5 million youngsters without jobs, without hope. . . . I think it’s awful for me, it’s an awful situation. [To deal with it] we will need different levels of responsibility and competence, but it will only happen if we have different ways of cooperation.

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It turns out that in cities it is often the mundane issues that affect the momentous ones—bike-shares and express bus lanes are a way to address climate change and emissions, information sharing can be a path to collective security—which is precisely why cities can often achieve the momentous while pursuing the mundane. Perhaps it is why Las Vegas urban reformer Tony Hsieh is right to say, if rather too grandly, that “if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.” A global assembly of cities, meeting as a parliament of mayors, offers a fresh approach to global governance because in my conception it would seek progress through voluntary actions and consensus rather than through executive or legislative mandates.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
by Jane McGonigal
Published 20 Jan 2011

Once you start thinking about games as ‘happiness engines,’ and the ways that our lives, our schools, our businesses, and our communities can become more ‘gameful’—more fulfilling, more engaging, and more productive—you’ll see possibilities for changing the real world that you’d never imagined.” —Tony Hsieh, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos.com, Inc. “Jane McGonigal’s work has helped define a new medium, one that blends reality and fantasy and puts the lie to the idea that there is such a thing as ‘fiction’—we live every story we experience and we become every game we play. Her insights in Reality Is Broken have the elegant, compact, deadly simplicity of plutonium, and the same explosive force.”