Tony Hsieh's Email to Employees RE: Zappos' Sale to Amazon
blogs.zappos.com
blogs.zappos.com
"It was a great moment when we would examine every order coming into Amazon. And it was always a family member placing the order. And the first order we got from a stranger, I remember, there was probabaly 10 of us in the company. We were all gathered around after the bell rang, looking at the order. And we were like 'Is that your mom?', 'Thats not my mom!'. And thus, it began."
Can totally relate to this feeling.
Really awesome to see!
The real measure of a letter like this is how it reads six months from now.
[x] "Nothing will change!" [until we get around to changing it]
[x] "Your jobs are safe" [see point one]
[x] "It's about synergy, not money" (extra credit for using the phrase "high touch")
(agreed)
I read that as there was pressure from a shareholder for the short term. Some board member was pushing for an exit.
Most letters from top management that i know of are usually boring and i rarely understand the whole information (usually i ditched it far before i can get through the whole formal languages)
After all, what's the point of the letter if no one is reading it?
Securities law is large, well-established, and quite complex. Especially in the early stages of a merger, there are very clear legal restrictions on what you can and can't say, and very high requirements for precision in reporting.
Legal statements of this type (as you can see in the last paragraph) are meant to be very specific, and to say one thing only (and make it almost impossible to interpret it any other way). Casual conversation is designed to be pretty much correct, and leave some details unsaid/to common understanding. The clash comes in that it's hard to say something that's as precise as you need without sounding like a robot.
When you're thinking about things like this, don't think about Tony Hsieh, who seems (by all reports) to be a pretty open and upstanding guy. Think about the most fraudulent and deceptive private CEO you could imagine trying to merge his company with the most fraudulent and deceptive public company you can imagine. They're the people that these laws are designed to regulate - so that they can't say something in "casual English" which one would normally read one way, but could be read (and they would read) in a nefarious way. to disrupt he market.
Law is, in some ways, like an obscure form of math or engineering. We could say "the Fourier transform of a function is equal to the integral of the function times e^-i", which is broadly correct, but not sufficiently precise to understand what is going on and react accordingly. Instead, we specify it exactly and boringly in a domain-specific language, not unlike certain aspects of law.
Securities law is harder and more complex. :)
IANAL, but anything you do say on a deal can be used as evidence in a deal- even posts to twitter. Remember also, the deal may still not complete, depending on amazon's terms of business and if their shareholders need to vote on it.
The SEC's job is to try and protect everyone's financial interests - and to prevent people from gaming the system. Part of that is to regulate how and what people say during a transaction such as this.
But- the letter is being read, as will all the analyst reports and so on thru wall street... it's just that they speak in a different language- call it their own code. :)
No, because we are planning on continuing to run Zappos as a separate company with our own culture and core values. And we're not going to be giving the Zappos discount to Amazon employees either, unless they bake us cookies and deliver them in person.
By all accounts a fascinating culture. I wish them well!
For those that missed the video, Bezos's points: - Obsess over customers - Invent - Think long term - It's always Day 1
Employees with shares, options or RSUs of Zappos private stock now have the same on a publicly traded stock. There may be a holding period for them as well, but every time that I've been an employee at a company that's gone public or been bought by a public company (1 of the first and 2 of the second), the only bags I've been left holding were full of $$.
Somebody tell me it was the VC's.
Happy to oblige:
As far as I can tell, they're an online shoe store that focuses on customer service. I've never personally used them or been to their site, but I hear the occasional good story about them.