Work With Friends: Tony Hsieh and Zappos.com

Work With Friends: Tony Hsieh and Zappos.com

In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Tony Hsieh (2010) shows us how to make friends and succeed in business. And how does Tony define success? Not by the money he’s made by selling Zappos.com for $1.2 billion to Amazon.com. Instead, Tony has always defined success and happiness in terms of his friendships and the life experiences he’s had. To a cynic, this may sound like a meaningless PR statement. But time and time again, Tony gave up money to pursue his work interests and work with his friends. And Tony’s willingness to put people and experiences first – over money – is what ultimately led to the biggest financial returns for him and his friends.
Tony and his good friend, Sanjay, thought they had hit the jackpot when they graduated from Harvard with great job offers from Oracle: At $40,000 a year (good money in 1995), they would be making more than their other friends from Harvard. But soon, Tony found that his job – running routine statistical tests – was pretty boring. Moreover, no one seemed to even know who he was or care. He felt isolated. Sanjay was bored as well. So they started their own business – doing web design – on the side just to keep from getting bored. After a few months, they had some paying clients, but their income from web designing was still far less than they made at Oracle. Nevertheless, Tony and Sanjay decided to quit Oracle (a nerve-racking decision for Tony) and devote their time to their web design business.
Tony and Sanjay came up with the idea for LinkExchange, and in a couple of days, they developed a test program. LinkExchange allowed websites to advertise on
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