Remembering Tony Hsieh
It’s hard to describe the sheer number of Tony Hsieh’s friends who are in mourning after the shocking news of his death Today. I say this because one of the secrets to Tony’s professional life was that, in the background, he had a stupendously large circle of people he cared for personally.
And, if I remember one thing about him, it will be his larger-than-life commitment to being the most welcoming human you could meet and how this made the world better.
I want to illustrate this through my experience with him, over about five years of writing journalistic articles about his projects (it’s important to note that as I describe my relationship, it shouldn’t be interpreted as something exclusive or rare, because he maintained a truly extraordinary number of them).
I first met Tony in a Southwest Airlines boarding line about a decade ago. I walked up to him, introduced myself as a greenhorn blogger for a business magazine, and just completely embarrassed myself with how I butchered his name. ‘Are you Tony Huu-say?’ I recall saying, meekly. He didn’t care. On the flight over, still feeling somewhat shocked that someone of his stature was sitting next to me on a budget airline, he invited me to a party bus he had assembled for the tech conference, SXSW, in Austin to promote his new book, Delivering Happiness.
Here I thought I was being invited to some super-exclusive networking thing and, little did I know, the bus would soon be overflowing with random people like me he had personally invited to share drinks and big-ideas-conversation with.
When the bus got full, we moved to bars that could fit more of the people he wanted to buy drinks for (video).
Quickly, I noticed a pattern emerging: for the next decade, Tony really was building bigger and bigger spaces to hold all his new friends — and their friends.
Tony had made his wealth spearheading Zappos’s explosive success, as the first e-commerce business to lean heavily on customer satisfaction. Indeed, someone on Twitter posted a lengthy email he personally wrote after a customer service snafu, which should give you some indication of how strong the company’s commitment was to being as friendly as possible.
Zappos began selling customer service consulting services for other companies that wanted to learn their unusual technique. At the intensive training session, the teacher bragged about how one customer service agent spent more than an hour on a call with a random customer just talking to them.
The company also had a hiring policy where an applicant’s job offer was partly dependent on whether they acted friendly towards the drivers and everyday service people who helped them on their job interview tour.
A lot (and I mean, a lot) of people bought from Zappos just because of how friendly and generous their customer service process is, a culture that now continues inside of the company that bought it, Amazon.
Soon after, Tony’s attention was drawn to city-building, where he invested over $300M to design a new area in Downtown Las Vegas. I visited a few times to write stories about it while I was still a journalist. The project was partly based on sociologist Howard Glaser’s Triumph of the City, which argued that frequent, serendipitous interactions were the keys to human prosperity.
It seemed like everyone was personally drinking buddies with him in Downtown. In the middle of this giant new section of Las Vegas he had personally designed, he was just another guy eating Tacos outside of a restaurant (of course he was friends with the proprietor of the Taco joint).
The revitalization quickly grew in popularity and to celebrate with his (now larger) group, he invested in a festival, Life Is Beautiful, which combined interactive art, music, and TED-like talks, much like the Burning Man festival which inspired a community-driven experience.
At Burning Man, an otherwise chaotic festival, it was easy to find Tony because he reliably took time to serve strangers drinks.
Tony made headlines again when he moved into a “trailer” park because he wanted to spend less time in a big house and more in a place that forced people to play and interact with one another (a mutual friend reminded me that the feeling of unity in rave circles had inspired his philosophy of bringing people together and the leadership of DJs who reflected the joyous energy of the crowd. I never got a full explanation for why it had a Llama. I think it just made people smile).
I am so sad to hear about Tony’s passing. But, I am grateful for what he taught me. There are many ways to become professionally successful in this life. Too many of us, including myself, tend to believe we have to sacrifice our personal relationships for professional goals. Tony taught me this wasn’t the case at all.
In fact, it was possible to become fabulously successful because of an extraordinary commitment to the people directly in front of us — to those who journey with us.
The next time you are buying something, find yourself at a festival or run into a conversation in a newly designed city block, and the experience is overwhelmingly welcoming, there’s a non-trivial probability that this was one of the ripples of Tony Hsieh’s extraordinary commitment to friendship.
Thank you, Tony. We miss you.
