Delivering Happiness

The Room in Vegas

Picture seven hundred people in a Las Vegas ballroom on a July afternoon in 2009. They are standing because the news has just been confirmed. Amazon has bought Zappos for what will eventually be valued at more than one point two billion dollars, and a few of them are crying. Beach balls bounce over their heads. Tony Hsieh, the CEO, watches from the stage, and he keeps thinking about a rave he attended a decade earlier, the one where the music seemed to move through the entire crowd as a single body. He sees the same energy here, in a corporate conference room. That is the strangest detail in the whole story. The man who built a billion-dollar shoe company on the back of a phone center is thinking about raves and worm farms.

He also thinks, while the cheering goes on, that this looks like history repeating itself. He sold his first company, LinkExchange, to Microsoft in 1998 for two hundred sixty-five million dollars after two and a half years. He sold Zappos to Amazon ten years later. Two roughly equivalent paydays, ten years apart. From the outside it was the same script. From the inside, the second one was a completely different movie, and the difference is what the rest of this book is trying to explain.

Hsieh's argument across three hundred pages is small enough to fit on a napkin. Profits are not the point. Profits, passion, and purpose stacked on top of each other are the point, and if you build a company around all three, the money shows up as a side effect. He spends the rest of the book showing how he learned that the hard way.

The Worm Farm and the Mail Order Empire