What Silicon Valley Can Learn From Zappos | Hacker News Reader

What Silicon Valley Can Learn From Zappos

scobleizer.com

30 pointsAlex391711 comments

I love Zappos as much as the next guy, but I wonder if people feel like they're being forced to be happy.

If I was haxin mad codez, and someone walked in and it was expected that I'd get up and wave to them in a silly way, I'd probably flip them the bird. I wonder if you can decide not to partake in all the look-we're-so-happy-awesomeness. I love having fun at work as much as every other person, but some of this feels a little too much.

Maybe I should go take the damn tour.

No offense, but I think this is their strategy for that:

3. Get rid of assholes. Zappos has a filtering system before, during, and after hiring to make sure they get rid of people who “don’t fit the culture.” That is the nice way of saying they get rid of assholes and they get rid of them quickly. They even pay candidates $2,000 after they go through training if they can admit they don’t fit into the culture.

None taken. :-)

But you're saying that if you don't get up and wave to people with a stupid grin on your face when you're "in the zone" when writing code and being productive, that makes you an asshole at Zappos and hence fired? Nice.

No, they're saying people who don't fit into that culture, having only invested a few weeks of training, tend to take the money and run leaving only those who actually fit into that crazy happy culture.

Agreed. Didn't we do the "ride scooter to the office beanbag" thing in 99? It all seems a little forced. Maybe sticking a vaneer of excitement over the front of your business is how things roll in Vegas.

Personally, I think they could lose a few Twitter experts and hire someone with a clue about foreign customers.

From their site:

"We ship to the following locales with a $60 USD shipping fee for the first item and $30 for each additional item, regardless of weight or dimensions" (Asia, Aus and NZ)

"To order please call +1 702 943 7909. Any orders placed online with an international shipping address will be canceled"

Good article. But Scoble is a hypocrite. I haven't seen any company obsessed about their number of followers or cribbing about not being in Twitter's suggested friend list. But scoble does both. The benefit of being on the list is that you get more followers. Since techcrunch was on the list and scoble was not, he was mighty pissed and started throwing around accusations that techcrunch had paid twitter for the position on suggested friend list.

If as he says, no of followers doesn't matter, then why would not being on the list matter so much to him. Here is the thread on friendfeed where he accuses TechCrunch of paying twitter and makes a huge deal about number of followers

http://friendfeed.com/e/c487ea34-ee9c-4794-9bc6-29d2cc1ceda1...

Man that was painful. Never in my life have a seen an adult act like such a cry baby. He can't face that other people may actually be more interesting to a wide cross section of people. No, it has to be a pay off.

I'm not sure what's worse: the guy complaining, or the guy complaining about the guy complaining.

Shouldn't this thread be about good corporate policy? I remember working for a government contractor and everyone seemed like a bunch of drones. I'm happy to hear one success story. It gives me ideas about how I want my own business to be someday :)

I had said in the beginning of my comment that it was a good article. Everything that zappos is doing is nice and it is evidently working for them. If the article was about strictly zappos I would have had no objections. I'm happy to hear success stories too.

What I'm not happy to hear is scoble's agenda. What I objected to was the mudslinging on O'Reilly, for promoting an event which focuses on number of followers and promoting 140 conference where he is a speaker. When scoble itself focuses more on number of followers than community and engage in trash talking O'Reilly (and TechCrunch) for the same, I see lack of credibility.

What scoble cleverly tried to say is "See, Zappos is doing great with twitter without focusing on followers. So come to 140 conference where we can teach you how". Riding on Zappos's success to promote his conference was distasteful IMHO.

Its good to study companies like Zappos. They are very successful without being in Silicon Valley.

I hope to take a tour of Zappos in May, when I'm there for rails conf.

there are so many stories like this that i've read about zappos... and i've enjoyed every one of them. the link to the video in the post was fascinating (learning about their order fulfillment tech).

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