I’ve had this on my reading list for a while now, but following Tony Hsieh’s sudden & very tragic death in late 2020, the book got pushed up the list very quickly.
Obviously the loss hit everyone involved pretty hard, but judging by the extremes in which Tony lived all his life, it won’t come as a total shock to those closest to him. Also, all the money-grubbing lawsuits over his estate that have followed—some filed by whom he considered his closest friends and confidantes—is a bit shocking to say the least, especially after reading the book and getting the sense that Tony’s friends were literally everything to him. Most shocking of all was the fact that Tony failed to leave a will. How is this even possible? I see homeowners living in $2m homes bought with family trusts! Let’s just say there aren’t too many people in the western world with an estimated $800 million net worth without some sort of estate planning. This tells you a lot about the man who wrote this book.
Let’s now turn our attention to the book. Early on Tony states that he passed on the more traditional path that the typical tech executive follows when writing a business-oriented book: he didn’t pair up with a ghostwriter. Once you finish the first chapter you quickly learn that Tony Hseih is a man who likes to do things his way. And his way is very different, to put it lightly. Tony loves to experiment, try new things and isn’t necessarily afraid to fail.
Oddly enough, the fact that he passed on the ghostwriter made this particular book a very enjoyable read because it almost felt like you had Tony reading the book to you. Don’t you love it when a book has a voice of its own? If I had to find a downside to not using a ghostwriter, I guess it would be simply that he went on a lot of peculiar tangents that I’m sure a ghostwriter would chop away, but I feel like that’s what made the book unique and special. He didn’t get right down to business and run through his literary PowerPoint like most books do in this category. He actually starts off with how his Asian parents wanted him to attend Harvard and play multiple instruments simply because they wanted bragging rights among their cohort of immigrant friends. I’ll be completely honest, early part of the book had me laughing out loud. So, if you’re a powerful tech bro looking to write your mid-life memoir, screw the ghostwriter and just write. Don’t worry about including a few run-on sentences and providing excessive details on wild tech-bro parties. That’s what readers want, damn it!
Rest assured, the book isn’t all about making millions in your early 20s, throwing crazy house parties or attending wild raves! Tony ultimately brings it all together and gets serious. He takes the reader on a roller coaster ride on how absolutely difficult it is to build a super popular and ultimately very profitable business. He pays tribute to the hard-learned and infrequently accepted statistic that most businesses ultimately fail. Along the way, I think Zappos could have failed countless times, but Tony’s somewhat extremist, life-or-death way of approaching business made it happen. He somehow figured out a way to avoid one of the single biggest sources of human misjudgement: loss aversion. When the odds were stacked against him, Tony was the crazy guy who was doubling down.
The heart of the book revolves around how the unique Zappos corporate culture gave the company its competitive advantage. I’ll admit, this culture somewhat revolved around Tony’s free-wheeling personality and penchant of extreme risk-taking, but it was noticeably a culture that ultimately kept employees very happy and delivered profits for its shareholders.
Along with providing all the details one could ever want about building a profitable corporate culture, Tony makes sure to include an important caveat: each company works differently because each company has different types of people. In short, it’s very easy to copy/paste bulleted line items from a business book and put it inside your employee handbook, but the real magic happens when you actually live out those bullet points. Apparently that’s not easy to do.
At the end of the day, this is an inspiring read. As it should be because Zappos did ultimately let Amazon buy it for around $1 billion. It’s also bittersweet because Zappos became somewhat of a critical appendage to Tony Hseih’s body over the years as he risked everything (on multiple occasions) to make it thrive. Once the company was bought out, Tony lost a critical part of himself. Sadly, I feel like that was the beginning of the end. It was never about the money with Tony. He proved that very early in life when he sold LinkExchange to Microsoft. He proved it again while nursing Zappos through the difficult years when most business types would move on to the next project. And then finally, he proved it after his painful death when everyone learned he didn’t have a will to help distribute all his millions.
R.I.P., Tony Hseih. Everyone misses you.
Faisaling.com 
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