Zappos.comCEOTonyHsieh is probably the least-likely online shoe baron you’ll evermeet. For one, the 37-year- old Internet entrepreneur has never been a “shoe person,” as he put it in a recent interview with Convene. Quite the contrary.Heused to buy one pair of shoes, wear them for
about two years, and then, when the holes-to-shoe ratio began to tip in favor of the holes, buy the exact same pair and start the process all over again. No, a passion for footwear wasn’t what interested Hsieh in
Zappos, for which his Venture Frogs firm—co-founded with current Zappos COO and CFO Alfred Lin—provided initial funding in 1999. Rather, it was Hsieh’s belief that Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn, alongwith Swinmurn’s first employee, aNordstrommen’s-shoes salesman named FredMossler, “were exactly the type of people we were lookingto invest in,” Hsieh
pizza, business and life lessons, and cans upon cans of the energy drink Red Bull—and through speaking engagements such as the General Session presentation he’s set to give atPCMA2011 Convening Leaders in Las Vegas next month.
On_the_Web
Tony Hsieh will deliver a General Session presentation at PCMA 2011 Convening Leaders on Tuesday, Jan 11. For more information, visit www.pcma2011.org. To learn more about Tony Hsieh and Zappos, visit http://about.zappos.com.
Whatare you planning on talking aboutat Convening Leaders? Well, really the title of the presentation is actually the same title asmybook, DeliveringHappiness, and it’s basically about using happiness as a business model to drive business profits and growth. For us at Zappos, we started out focusing on customer happiness and really buildingthe brand around deliveringthe very best customer service, and now we focus on employee hap- piness, and really the focus there is on company culture. The message is that if you get the culture right, then most of the other stuff, whether it’s delivering great customer service or building a long-term, enduring brand or business—that type of stuff will happen naturally on its own if you make culture the No. 1 pri- ority for any organization.
writes in his New York Times bestseller, Delivering Happiness: APath to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.“We didn’t know if the shoe idea would work or not, but they were clearly passionate and willingto place bigbets.” Alongwith a seed investment, Hsieh’s other bigcontribution
to the company he would later join full-time asCEOwas to sug- gest that Swinmurn change the name. The young entrepreneur was calling it “Shoesite.com,” which Hsieh felt was too generic, and might hamstring the business if it ever decided to start sell- ingother merchandise. Hsieh was prescient. Today Zappos is a wildly successful—and much loved—online retailer, sell- ing not only shoes but also “clothing, handbags, beauty prod- ucts, even housewares and kitchenware,” Hsieh said in our interview. The company, now based in Las Vegas, was sold to Amazon for an estimated $1.2-billion, all-stock deal in Novem- ber 2009. Passion had carried the day, proving Hsieh right. And that’s a message that Hsieh is still trying to spread,
through his work as CEO of Zappos, in his book—a funny, disarmingtale of early dot-com success, Bay Area raves, poker,
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Does the location of Zappos in Las Vegas play a part in that happiness? We actually started out in San Francisco, and the reason we moved to LasVegas was because, in the Bay Area, in San Fran- cisco, it’s pretty hard finding people that wanted to do customer service as a career. AndVegas has plenty of call centers—so for a company like us, that’s really focused on call-center and cus- tomer service,Vegas was one of a few different choices that we looked at. But it’s definitely been great from that perspective.
Why do you wantto speak atConvening Leaders? Having the conference be in Las Vegas definitely helps, but I actually am currently in the middle of a three-month, 22-city, cross-country bus tour, trying to spread this message of deliv- eringhappiness.There’s 10 of us goingon this cross-country bus tour.We’ve got a 50-foot bus with nine bunks in it, and what’s been really interesting as we’ve gone from city to city is that we’ve found there are actually organizations beyond just busi- nesses that are really takingthis idea of focusingon organiza- tional culture to help drive whatever their goal is.
Are the people on the bus tour all Zappos employees? No,weactually have a separate company called DeliveringHap- piness. It’s an LLC, and there are about 20 people involved with