Delivering Happiness

Maura’s Vegas Story
I had been working at Zappos for about six months when they
announced the move.
My first reaction: “Hell, no! I’m not moving to Las Vegas!”
But after the initial shock, we talked about what we really
thought, and it turned out that a good number of people wanted to
relocate. I started feeling different, and asked myself, “Why not?” I
knew I loved the company and my job, so why not try it out? Worst-
case scenario, I could always move back.
When I first saw our new building in Vegas, I thought there was
no way we’d ever fill it. It was so much larger than our San
Francisco office, it felt like there was nobody in it. Everything was
still being built out and phones weren’t even installed yet, so we
communicated exclusively through e-mail. We had a lot of work to
do.
Now, almost five years later, we occupy two buildings that are
even larger than the original one. It’s been exciting times and I guess
the fact that I’m still living here speaks for itself!
Although it seems obvious in retrospect, probably the biggest benefit of
moving to Vegas was that nobody had any friends outside of Zappos, so we
were all sort of forced to hang out with each other outside the office. It was
an exciting time. We were all beginning a new chapter of our lives together
and forming a new social network. We worked together and hung out
together during almost all of our waking hours.
In San Francisco, we had always said that culture was important to the
company, mostly because we didn’t want to make the same mistake that I
had made back during my LinkExchange days, when the company culture
went completely downhill.

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Now that we were in Vegas with nobody else to lean on except each
other, culture became our number one priority, even more important than
customer service. We thought that if we got the culture right, then building
our brand to be about the very best customer service would happen
naturally on its own.
To keep our culture strong, we wanted to make sure that we only hired
people who we would also enjoy hanging out with outside the office. As it
turned out, many of the best ideas came about while having drinks at a local
bar.
There was a group of about ten of us hanging out one night talking about
how we could make sure that we continued to hire only people who would
fit into the Zappos culture. There was a new hire in the group, so I asked
each person to talk about the Zappos culture. We each gave our own
interpretation.
When everyone was done, I felt that the new hire had gotten a pretty
good idea of our culture.
“I wish we had recorded our past twenty minutes of conversation so that
we could show it to all new hires,” I said.
“Yeah,” someone else said. “That would have been pretty cool.”
“Or we could have transcribed it and given it as a handout to prospective
employees,” someone else chimed in.
“You know what?” I said. “We should just ask all of our employees to
write a few paragraphs about what the Zappos culture means to them, and
compile it all into a book.”
And just like that, the idea for the Zappos Culture Book was born, and
it’s been a part of Zappos ever since. Every year, a new edition of the
Zappos Culture Book is produced, which we give out to prospective
employees, vendors, and even customers.
I
sent the following e-mail to all of our employees in August 2004:
From: Tony Hsieh
To: All Zappos Employees
Subject: Zappos Culture Book

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We will be putting together a mini-book as part of the orientation
package for all new hires about the Zappos culture. Our culture is the
combination of all of our employees’ ideas about the culture, so we
would like to include everyone’s thoughts in this book.
Please email me 100–500 words about what the Zappos culture
means to you. (What is the Zappos culture? What’s different about it
compared to other company cultures? What do you like about our
culture?)
We will compile everyone’s contribution into the book. If you
wish for your entry to be anonymous, please indicate so in your
response. We will be distributing the book to all new hires as well as
all existing employees.
Also, please do not talk to anyone about what you will be writing
or what anyone else wrote. We want to know what the Zappos
culture means to you specifically, as it will be different for different
people.
We wanted to be as transparent as possible, so we decided that none of
the entries would be censored or edited, except for typos. Every edition of
our culture book includes both the good and the bad so that people reading
the book can get a real sense of what our culture is like. With each new
edition, it would also be a way of documenting how our culture was
evolving over time.
While the vast majority of the entries in our first culture book were
positive, we also learned that not every employee was thrilled about the
company’s growth. A couple of early Zappos employees complained about
the additional processes and procedures that we had implemented and not
being able to do things the way we used to. Some things, like filling out
expense reports, were necessary by-products of our growth. Other things,
such as criticism about communication within the company being harder
than before, served as a wake-up call for us to be more proactive on that
front.

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