Legacy of Tony Hsieh — CEO of Zappos!
Tony Hsieh, bestselling author and former CEO of e-commerce pioneer Zappos.com, died at age 46 on November 27, 2020. What a tragic loss!
Tony Heish built one of the best customer service brand in the world from scratch — Zappos!
Let’s take a closer look at how he built Zappos.
He described Zappos philosophy in his book ‘Delivering Happiness” as,
Tony Hsieh was born on December 12, 1973. His parents, both Taiwanese immigrants, always gave importance to education, always pushing Tony and his younger brothers to excel in school. Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the very early days of the internet, he wanted to be a part of that world. He graduated in 1995 with a degree in computer science from Harvard University. As a first step, he accepted a job at Oracle as a low-level programmer.
But his ambition and creativity were not suited for the large corporate life. He left oracle with a colleague to build an ‘Ad network’ for the new world of internet advertising — And that’s how “LinkExchange” was born.
Within 2 years, they had over 400,000 webpages. In 1998, just 2 years after starting the business, Hsieh and his co-founders sold LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million. In 1999, Tony Hsieh met Nick Swinmurn, the founder of Zappos, a company that wanted to sell shoes on the Internet. He left Microsoft and joined Zappos as its CEO.
With the dot.com crash, Internet business collapsed. And raising money for an internet shoe sales business was laughable. So, Hsieh sold his own real estate to fund the business. And that’s how he became a true servant leader. He believed in an idea and people who were working on that Idea.
As Zappos grew, Hsieh focused on building a company he could be proud of. He prioritized people and a unique culture that embraced individualism. Zappos famously asked the question, “How weird are you?” while hiring new employees. By 2009, the company hit $1 billion in sales.
Here you can watch an incredible video where Simon Sinek talks about culture with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Zappos. Why employees are important? How the right company culture will help the company thrive? What are the important aspect and hurdles for building great company culture ? and a lot more. Give it a watch 👇
So, “What made Zappos unique?”
Zappos is fanatical about great service — not just satisfying customers, but delighting them. The company promises free, four-day delivery. That’s pretty good. But most of the time it delivers next-day service, a surprise that leaves a lasting impression on customers: “You said four days, but I got them the next morning.”
The company mastered the art of customer service — It’s smart, entertaining, and full of empathy call center employees are free to do whatever it takes to make customers happy. There are no scripts, no time limits on calls, no robots — Just pure human to human conversations and lots of legendary stories. And that’s how you built a great customer service brand. One of Zappos’s employee narrated Tony’s out of the box idea of bringing people together,
He would intentionally schedule back-to-back meetings that had no connection and overlap them, so the 3 pm meeting would arrive early and catch the end of the 2 pm meeting, and the 4 pm meeting the 3 pm, and so on, with the people from the earlier meetings sticking around, so by 6 pm there would be a large group of people walking around Downtown Vegas and sharing ideas.
After hiring employees and training them, Zappos gives this offer- If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!
Philosophy — if you’re willing to take the company up on The Offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment the company looking for. ( I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.😎)
Tony’s vision — How we could avoid losing a startup edge and how we could empower every employee to act like an entrepreneur. End of bureaucracy!
His book “Delivering Happiness” has become a playbook for building company culture and delivering happiness.
“There is a big difference between motivation and inspiration: inspiring through values and motivation will happen by itself.” — Tony Heish.
Watch Tony Hsieh telling Zappos story in his own words. He is an incredible personality to listen to. He defines “How the modern-day leaders should be!”
How Tony Hsieh defined happiness?
“Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).”
― Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Tony Heish truly made a dent in the universe and his legacy will be how the new generation founders will look at company culture and customer service. RIP Legend!
You made it till here. Pat on your back for being curious!
If you want to read such interesting stories, subscribe to my newsletter — Curiosity Culture
Connect with me to have interesting conversations. My DM’s are open 👇👇
Nayan Mohitkar — Linkedin
nayan_mohitkar — Instagram
@NayanMohitkar- Twitter
Okay…
Signing off…Until next time with new stories. Take Care ❤
