Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
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Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
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Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#2I've always heard mixed feelings about Tony. I wonder if there are any HNers who have a perspective they'd like to share.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#3I first heard (about) him on a Podcast called How I built this. It's a good listen. https://www.npr.org/2017/01/23/510576153/zappos-tony-hsieh
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#4I've always heard mixed feelings about Tony. I wonder if there are any HNers who have a perspective they'd like to share.
No personal direct experience - I like that he was an experimenter. Great experimenters have lots of failures to go along with their successes. He made a great company in a way that went against the grain, and survived an acquisition from a buyer with a very strong culture.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#5I had no idea they were a 20 year old company.
I assumed they were a fresh startup around 2015 or so when they started getting a lot of media traction.
Maybe I was just out of the loop, but that's really surprising to me.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#6Does anyone know how his "The Downtown Project" (aka Vegas revitalization) is going?
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#7I've always heard mixed feelings about Tony. I wonder if there are any HNers who have a perspective they'd like to share.
No personal direct experience - I like that he was an experimenter. Great experimenters have lots of failures to go along with their successes. He made a great company in a way that went against the grain, and survived an acquisition from a buyer with a very strong culture.
No personal experience here, either, but word on the street last year was that he was widely disliked outside of Zappos.
When I lived in Nevada, he was heralded as the future savior of downtown Las Vegas, having bought up a bunch of dead motels and vacant lots to transform into something new and better. Plenty of "tech disruptor" headlines in the newspapers.
After a few years, when virtually nothing came of it other than a quirky-but-empty strip mall and a clubhouse for his hangers-on to gather in, there started appearing articles about people being unhappy with how things were going, and him in particular.
Never heard about any strife from inside Zappos, though.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/hsieh-lands-in-court-...
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/nightclu...
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/downtown-project-lays...
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#8One of my favorite (and definitely my Mom’s favorite) parts of Zappos is the hand written note that they send with each pair of shoes.
My mom is an avid walker and she loves comfortable shoes so most birthdays and Christmas’s I send her a pair from Zappos.
The hand written note is such a nice touch for such a big business (especially from a parent company like Amazon- the anti-personalizer) that it makes the gift of Zappos (or even the gift card) something fun to give and fun to receive.
Tony, keep on experimenting! It makes it more fun for the customer.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#9I've always heard mixed feelings about Tony. I wonder if there are any HNers who have a perspective they'd like to share.
I am leery of any company that comes off with culty-vibes and that was the impression I got from various media I read and watched about it. I’m sure it’s great for business but not for me, I am free thinker. Same reason I think Ray Dalio / Bridgewater is an insane asylum. I briefly worked with someone who did a stint there and he embraced the principles / radical transparency thing and it made him extremely hard (even obnoxious) to deal with.
Re: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years
#10I first heard (about) him on a Podcast called How I built this. It's a good listen. https://www.npr.org/2017/01/23/510576153/zappos-tony-hsieh
I first learned about him from reading about drunken Zappos employees ordering a 100x100 burger from In-n-Out
http://whatupwilly.blogspot.com/2006/01/in-n-out-100x100.htm...