Posts Tagged ‘Tony Hsieh’

TWiST #45 with Tony Hsieh

Monday, March 15th, 2010
Play

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download

Podcast (audio-only): Play in new window | Download

Jason’s guest this week was Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and author of the soon to be released book Deliverying Happiness (June 7, 2010).  Highlights of the show included 2 points of advice from Tony to entrepreneurs, a bunch of giveaways and multiple mini-guest segments.

00:03 Surprise guests include:
Brian Alvey
Don Dodge
Matt Coffin
Shel Israel

00:13 Tony Hsieh interview

  • Book discussion (why, what’s in the book)
  • Delivering Happiness Bus
  • How to motivate employees

Ask Jason
00:19 Rob May, CEO of Backupify asks, How much focus should I place on competitors?
00:23 Don Dodge, Developer Advocate at Google asks, If you took Tony out of Zappos would Zappos be successful and follows up could Tony turn around an old company like General Motors?  This is one of the things I love about Don Dodge, he’s not afraid to ask questions.  This is the second time he has asked a question on the show, last question was on TWiST #10

Jason’s Shark Tank contest
00:27 Scripped, eBay for scripted content, helps producers find content
00:31 Youphonics, a tool to let musicians jam online together
00:34 Throwboy Pillows, custom pillows (winner)

The winner receives:

  • One year of VPS service from PowerVPS
  • One year of Email service from DNAmail (up to 10 mailboxes)
  • One year of High Speed Internet from DSL Extreme
  • One hour of business strategy consulting from IKANO team
    • The IKANO team will provide up to one hour of strategy consulting to Startup via conference call.  Jason or anyone from Mahalo/TWIST team can join if they would like. The startup can ask IKANO team for advise on any business related questions including social media, marketing, technology or general business questions and the IKANO team will provide insight and feedback.  IKANO services and interacts with tens of thousands of business and can provide guidance based on our experience.
    • Team

00:41 Tony Hsieh interview continued

  • When Tony joined Zappos
  • Zappos culture and it’s development
  • Paying employees to quit
  • Zappos sale to Amazon and how things have changed
  • Tony’s advice to entrepreneurs
  • What Tony reads

00:56 News with Lon Harris

Special thanks to our title sponsors this week: Bing and Sonos

Additional sponsors this week include: Loopt, Redpoint Ventures and Youphonics

TWiST is brought to you by our generous sponsors:

Bing Logo PowerVPS Logo webspy

Tags:
Posted in Episodes, Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Saturday’s Guest: Tony Hsieh of Zappos

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Saturday’s guest will be Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, General Manager of Venture Frogs, coming to you live from SXSW.  Many of you already know Zappos and the amazing customer service and culture that surrounds the company but what do you know about it’s CEO?  I thought I’d focus on somethings you might not know:

  • He attended Harvard, class of 1995
  • He Co-Founded LinkExchange and sold the company to Microsoft in 1998 for $265M
  • He is a Co-Founder of Venture Frogs an incubator / investment company
  • Did you know Tony isn’t a founder of Zappos?  He was and investor and advisor in the beginning but quickly joined the Zappos team in 2000 and yes he recently sold Zappos to Amazon in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing.
  • He has a book coming out soon, Delivering Happiness, release date June 7, 2010.

Some of the highlights of Delivering Happiness include:

  • Pay new employees $2000 to quit.
  • Make customer service the responsibility of the entire company, not just a department.
  • Focus on company culture as the #1 priority.
  • Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business.
  • Help employees grow both personally and professionally.
  • Seek to change the world.
  • Oh, and make money too.

Here is a few of Kevin Rose’s favorites quotes:

“It may seem sometimes like we don’t know what we’re doing. And it’s true: we don’t. That’s a bit scary, but you can take comfort in knowing that nobody else knows how to do what we’re doing either… so there are no experts in what we’re doing. Except for us: we are becoming experts as we do this.”


“The role of a manager is to remove obstacles and enable his/her direct reports to succeed. This means the best leaders are servant-leaders. They serve those they lead.”

Special thanks to Bing and Sonos and our regular sponsors DNAMail, Ustream, WebSpy and PowerVPS for bringing TWiST to SXSW.  We will have more exciting sponsors announced soon.

Details: Saturday the 13th at 2pm (Pacific), 5pm (Eastern), 10pm (London), March 14th 9am (Sydney) at the Six Lounge (117 West 4th Street Austin, TX 78701)  if you plan on attending live the first 200 in the door get two drink tickets.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/charliellewellin/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Tags:
Posted in Announcements | 4 Comments »