Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By Danielle Morrill

Tonight I had the pleasure of attending Startup2Startup in Palo Alto, a regular event organized by Dave McClure to bring together members of the Bay Area startup community to learn from one another.  Dave kicked off his shoes (literally) and made us feel at home as we launched into deep discussions about the nature of happiness.  The speaker for the evening was Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, and he focused on what it takes to create great culture within your company – and how that fits with having a healthy company culture.

  

Zappos 7 Steps for Building a Great Brand

1.  Decide if you’re going to build a long term sustainable brand. This approach requires more patience with revenues and profits to lay a foundation. Decide sooner, rather than later.

2.  Figure out the company’s values and culture — Zappos asked the whole company what corevalues should be, and it was a year long process.  Tony said he would have done this on day one, ifhe could to it again because it guides hiring and firing decisions. Is hard – ask yourself, what do youstand for? What are your own personal values in life? Particular valuesare not as important as having alignment.  Live the brand. photo credit: (CC) Brian Solis. www.briansolis.com

3. Commit to transparency (follows naturally from step 2).  The company’s brand and culture are the same, although brand may sometimes lag culture.  Examples of transparency at Zappos:

  • Twitter.zappos.com,
  • ask anything newsletter internally (employees can ask about financials, strategies, anything they want)
  • extranet for vendors
  • tours and reporter visits (they trust any employee to talk to the press and let reporters roam freely in their office)
  • zapposinsights.com

4. Have a vision – does the vision have meaning? Is it big enough?  What are you most passionate about, and could see yourself doing for10 years?  “Don’t chasethe paper, chase the dream” — Biggy Smalls (Notorious B.I.G.)  People need motivation and inspiration, but inspiration takes you further (because it is a virtuous cycle).

5. Build relationships, but not in the typical networking sense.  Be genuinely interested in the people you meet, as opposed to trying to beinteresting.  Focus on deep engagement, so that you will really get to know these people.  Think for the long term, a 2-3 year old relationshipis the sweet spot for getting help from a contact on a great connection.

6.  Focus on building a great team. Hire slow, fire fast.  ”If you want to go quickly goalone.  If you want to go far go together.” -Al Gore, quoting Africanproverb. Invest in training and developing your employees, think longterm. Overnight successes are never really overnight – Zappos success was 10 years in the making.

7.  Take step back: what is your goal in life?  People have a lot of different answers when asked what would make them happy, but for most happiness is thefundamental life goal.  Tony Hsieh has been studying science of happiness. People are bad at predicting what will make them happy.

Frameworks of happiness:

  • Control
  • Progress
  • Connectedness
  • Vison / Meaning (part of something bigger than yourself)

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

photo credit: (CC) Brian Solis. www.briansolis.com

Take Aways for Future Events

After the talk there were table discussions based on themes from the presentation, but as Dave said (and this was interesting to me) those are “off the record”.  Each table had a moderator, who was responsible for making sure there was one conversation per table of 10 people and no use of cell phones during the conversation.  I got a lot out of the topics raised during the 40 minutes at my table, and was impressed to see that each person was engaged and contributing.  This event format might work very well for some Seattle organizations hosting events, I certainly felt that my interest was held the entire time.
 
UPDATE: Loic Le Meur (of Seismic) streamed the event live, although I’m not sure how good the quality is due to wifi/camera challenges: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1303311
 
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