

What Silicon Valley Can Learn From Zappos - Alex3917
http://scobleizer.com/2009/04/23/learn-from-zappos/

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aditya
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.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
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._

~~~
aditya
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.

~~~
gnaritas
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.

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boundlessdreamz
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...](http://friendfeed.com/e/c487ea34-ee9c-4794-9bc6-29d2cc1ceda1/Prove-
that-Techcrunch-did-not-pay-biz-10-000-to/)

~~~
physcab
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 :)

~~~
boundlessdreamz
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.

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quellhorst
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.

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browser411
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).

