Text Size 
CNBC: Where did you grow up?
TONY HSIEH: San Francisco.
CNBC: Was it a big adjustment moving to Las Vegas?
TONY HSIEH: It's different, but I like it here a lot.
CNBC: When I read that about how you moved here for the business, I thought that was a really interesting.
TONY HSIEH: Yeah, about seventy out of ninety employees ended up moving here.
CNBC: When did your company move down here?
TONY HSIEH: A little over three years ago.
CNBC: I was reading that you had a big milestone recently?
TONY HSIEH: I think it was last August. We hit a billion dollars in gross merchandise sales for the company. We were pretty happy about that. We made tee shirts.
CNBC: What did it say on the tee shirt?
TONY HSIEH: They said, "My company has sold a billion dollars in shoes, and all I got was this lousy tee shirt.”
CNBC: I heard that your first college job was managing a pizza shop?
TONY HSIEH: Yeah. Actually, I was running a pizza business with a college roommate and sold pizzas to all the people in our dorm. I think one of the things I learned then was really listening to your customers. We originally only sold hamburgers, but customers kept asking for pizza, so we eventually switched to just selling pizza. And, the now, CFO and COO of Zappos was my number one customer at the pizza business, and that’s actually how we met. As it turned out, I found this out later, he was buying pizzas by the pie and then selling them off by the slice, so that’s why he’s CFO today.
CNBC: Were there any other business lessons that you learned then?
TONY HSIEH: I guess just learning that growing a business is a lot of hard work and that you need to make your customers happy.
CNBC: After college, I know you were at Oracle for a while and you quit to start your first business. I assume you had a pretty decent job. Wasn’t that kind of a risky thing to do?
TONY HSIEH: I guess at the time I was fresh out of college so really didn’t have many obligations, so it didn’t seem that risky at the time, and I really didn’t like having a big corporate job, so it really was just a lot more fun trying to do something from scratch and watch it grow.
CNBC: When you first decided to start your own business, did you have ideas about what kind of a workplace it should be?
TONY HSIEH: Not really. Originally, it was out of our apartment, so we dreamed one day of having an actual office. It was called Link Exchange, and actually over time, we grew to about a hundred or so people. And one of the things that we didn’t know to pay attention to at the time was the company culture, so as the company got bigger and bigger the culture kind of deteriorated, and that’s actually why we ended up selling the company. So with Zappos, from day one, we’ve paid a lot of attention to company culture, and in everything we do, the main question we ask is, “How is this going to affect the company culture?” And that goes with our hiring process, our performance reviews, and we judge managers and everyone in the company by what they contribute to the company culture.
Print
Email
Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes