Frank Hsieh

Tony Hsieh - Startup School 2009

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• published: 24 Apr 2013
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This video has been optimized for SEO by Veezio. Learn more at http://veezio.com That Tony Shea here with us today is the CEO of the outposts and flew in for from last big effort. Great. And I don't know if any of you have been lucky enough to have a tour of that. If you've ever been there it is. I had one recently and it is just off the charts. Amazing how happy the employees are, it's a very unique place with that and return in overtime. Wanted to do a quick survey for how many of you have heard is that part of this and how many have actually but from us. 8 so actually speed through going over too much of the history is that this basically in college. I was running a pizza business after running a to business. The women as when you working I got together and start a company called Link Exchange, which was in on line advertising at work. We ended up selling the company Microsoft in 1998 but what a lot of people actually don't know the reason we ended up selling the company was because the company quarter just went completely downhill and you know there's been a lot of talk today about in parts of and for me it was always mind those things where before getting involved with frank exchanges wondrous things like oh yeah yeah like that that all sounds good both that's not gonna happen to me or there's talk about making sure you have the values of the company, right, and that was something that I never paid attention to, especially at linkage engine so lot people ask me if I could you zap us all over again, what would I do differently and I I think the most important thing is actually figuring out your company's values core values from the very beginning, some to talk a little bit about that later on, but you know change when it was just fiver 10. It was kind of like your typical.com start up back in the day working round the clock had no idea what day of the week it was showering once weekend misleading, but it was a lot of fun and we had a great culture, but then we don't pay attention to whether the people we hired they had all the right skill sets and experiences and so on but by the time a hundred people I myself judges getting out of bed and and so with sat which I got involved with about 2 months after it started. I want to make sure that the same happen again. So from the beginning we've always paid a lot of tension to company culture but it wasn't actually until about 5 or 6 years into it that we came out with the national list of core values and that's something that I really wish that we had done from processed meats such a huge difference for us over the last several years. And then in July the actually haven't closed yet but Amazon has announced that it will be acquiring Zappa for us we're still gonna we're really doing it as just switching out her board of directors. We're going to continue operating as a separate entity and really continuing with their own culture and the way we've been doing this. So we started in 99 with notes sales that's San in 2008 we did a little over a billion dollars in gross merchandise sales and really the number one driver for growth over the years has been to key customers and word of mouth and the way we think internally about how we want to build our brand is really to have this Apple's about the very best customer service and customer experience and 10 years from now, 3 people wanted and realize we started out something Suzanne line and actually doesn't even have to be on line that customers you know us and asked us if we would please start an airline or run the IRS. So we're not gonna do either of those things. This year, but the 30 years from now, I wouldn't rule out as airlines. That's just about the very best customer service. So one brand, we look at some times for inspiration is Virgin there in a whole bunch of different businesses, music airlines and so on. The difference is the Virgin brand is more about being hidden corners. We just want to be about the very best customer service and customer experience. So in terms of our brand of how we think of it, if we really think of it in terms of the 3 seats and this is really more I guess in terms of the life cycle of the customer for customers that never heard of before. Then the most important sea for them to know is clothing that we have a great selection a huge selection of clothing and footwear and and really should go to our website to check it out once they know that, then we want them to know that we're all about the very best customer service and that's something that isn't so much something we tell them, but just something they experience when they call us they its use free shipping both ways are they see how easy it is to return stuff to us and then once they know that we're all about customer service, then we really want them to know about our company culture. Our core values because that's really the platform that makes all the rest possible. So we've actually had customers email us and tell us that