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We asked ourselves what we wanted this company to stand for. We didn't want to just sell shoes. I wasn't even into shoes - but I was passionate about customer service.

Tony Hsieh

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Tony Hsieh
Age: 46 †
Born: 1973
Born: December 12
Died: 2020
Died: November 27
Businessperson
Computer Scientist
Entrepreneur
Internet Entrepreneur
Urbana
Illinois
Xie Jiahua
Tony Xie
Didn
Passionate
Wanted
Shoes
Even
Service
Asked
Customer
Wasn
Boots
Stand
Sell
Company
Sells
Inspirational
Customers

More quotes by Tony Hsieh

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Business is all about learning to balance the short-term, medium-term and long-term and I think it's when things are going well it covers up a lot of mistakes and bad decisions because you're growing so quickly.
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Sorry, investing was pretty boring and I really missed being part of building something. I felt like I was always standing on the sidelines, so Zappos... really liked the people there and got involved full-time and I've been full-time ever since.
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We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer service, will just take care of itself.
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Service Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.
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A bigger business is like a cruise ship: There are lots of amenities and you can go a lot further, but it's harder to turn quickly.
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Don't be cocky. Don't be flashy. There's always someone better than you.
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If I was going to go into an office I wanted it to be with people I would choose to be around even if we didn't have to work together and so that was one of the major reasons why I decided out of all the different companies we invested in to work with Zappos.
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I made a list of the happiest periods of my life & I realized that none of them involve money.
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Your personal core values define who you are, and a company's core values ultimately define the company's character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.
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Ask yourself: would you be comfortable printing everything your employees, customers & partners have to say about your culture?
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Businesses often forget about the culture, and ultimately, they suffer for it because you can't deliver good service from unhappy employees.
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Zappos uses call center technology to track average call time per agent. But the goal isn't to reduce this average - it's more important that we make an emotional connection with the customer, rather than just quickly getting them off the phone.
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I view my role more as trying to set up an environment where the personalities, creativity and individuality of all the different employees come out and can shine.
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Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn fast.
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Rather than focus on trying to get a lot of customers to market yourself, really focus more on the actual product or service itself and existing users to, like, what would make them happier, what would make them come back more and more times or in our case buy more often.
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For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.
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The problem when someone feels burned out, bored, unchallenged, or stifled by their work is not the job itself but rather the environment and playground rules given to them to do the job at hand.
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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).
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A lot of people realize I don't have to work in this job that I'm miserable at every year, or every day, and I don't have to live in, for example, New York City where it's super expensive and if I live somewhere else that is less expensive and could pursue my passion like, I can afford to do that.
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...the best leaders are servant leaders - they serve those they lead.
Tony Hsieh