I grew up in Brazil, where customer service was bad-to-terrible in 90% of the companies I had to deal with.
When I moved to Australia, I thought it would be a lot better. It wasn't much different.
When I joined a wine subscription startup in 2016 as the technical co-founder, I wasn't just building the recommendation engine. I was also helping to pack the boxes at the warehouse.
We all got fascinated with Tony's book "Delivering Happiness" [1]. As I packed boxes, I listened to the audiobook several times. Then I read it later on again.
I'm still surprised how bad customer service is in most companies. Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now.
A few years later and our customers are obsessed not just about the wine we recommend. They also write love letters about how happy they are to deal with our customer service team. I'm still writing code on the other side, but it makes my day to see that part of the business working so well.
> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now.
This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person.
I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to do so. Almost all of my customers speak to me in a rude tone.
I have no incentive to pretend to have an interest in their issues. I don’t think the issue is with customer support, but general attitudes among IT professionals.
On top of this, customer success is treated as a second class to engineering even if our problems are harder and more stressful. Imagine finding a bug and being blamed for the bug not being fixed while at the same time engineering is mad at you for wanting it fixed. Gross.
I work closely with support teams and it's one of the toughest jobs in tech. I say toughest because it is stressful and the payoff for that stress isn't that high.
I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas.
IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve.
Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.
> Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call
How companies should do this: provide self-serve options for most things. Make the status of a long-running transaction transparent. Fix issues that cause people to call in the first place.
Precisely. I get that a large portion of the population just wants to pick up the phone and call but that can be totally avoided with so many messaging outlets today.
On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard.
Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.
> Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way.
The fundamental problem is coders want to code. At least in my experience. Many are poor to terrible at talking to customers and have little desire to learn. If it isn't related to code they don't care. It's someone else's problem.
A few developers, the good ones I've worked with, know how to talk to customers and how to talk to support team members to help them.
I work in a support role now and I have worked in a development role in the past. I know both sides of it fairly well.
Finding good developers isn't trivial, but finding good developers that can communicate and work as a team, that's really hard.
Agreed, I don't imply that developers should talk to customers but they should at least work with support team in a more cohesive manner.
I have seen the flip side also where the developers are very accessible, support pushes every minor issue over to engineering. This is like super rare though.
Microsoft at least used to send engineers over to answer support phone calls occasionally and it provided a level of insight into users they wouldn't get otherwise.
Very true, there is a very good blog post by Joel Spolsky on that: a good support person will spot recurring technical and report that to devs. Some offshore "consultant" support or badly paid "call center person" does not give a crap about product quality; more, such support has no incentives to provide any meaningful feedback, as the more support incidents gets reported, the more money they earn.
I was in a role to take customer calls for years, and did straight up support for a while early in my career. I found that if I took a genuine interest in their problems, and an interest in the individual, it turned a lot of bad attitudes around. Someone calls and is angry, frustrated with the thing we’ve made, it was my job to help them, not just fix the issue but feel happy with the product, too. That being said, there’s no helping some people, and some products may be too bad to rightfully support.
Ah true. Last thing I did before leaving a support role - in a company that regretted hiring support people in EU and was actively driving us out of the door - was indeed this.
This customer had become aware of the MTTR metric driven bouncing around with his tickets and was playing cat-mouse.
I got this lost-cause chore as a good-bye (sarcasm) gift and it took me 1h to study the problem (at that stage, a PIP offense) identify the issue and report the bug, respond to the customer with a well-written apology, confirming that they were correct and a bug tracker id to follow.
Customer was very pleased they were finally escalated to the adult in the room ;)
Salary. It’s much cheaper to outsource a “cost center” to a country where employees have passable proficiency in English and costs of living that are significantly lower...
As a customer, it's a painful experience when you realize the support people are in this position. I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. At a certain point (around the third three hour phone call, in my experience) it feels like they're mocking you with their saccharine lies, and I begin to loathe the company they represent.
I suppose if I was an entrepreneurial type, I'd try to disrupt industries like that by creating a company that charges extra to provide service that doesn't make customers want to spit in your face. Surely there's a market for that...
I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful.
I wonder if companies are relying on your empathy. They want you to realize this and just close tickets before they're resolved. Like the service desk's primary directive is to get customers off their employer's backs. If they happen to fix an issue along the way, that's a nice bonus.
For example, I've had to call Amazon 4 times recently over the same issue. I've been lied to each time that they fixed it. I was promised evidence that I was never given. I really don't know what to do about this...
I think you're on to something. I've been working for as a contractor for a big health insurance company and that seems to be the impression for the purpose of my job: "Get the customer off the phone as soon as you can."
In more polite terms, "Try to escalate the ticket by 15 minutes if you haven't resolved the issue."
Agree with you. Apart from rude customers, sometimes you face below problems (mostly process/org related)
- limited decision power. Many times even though you genuinely want to help customor you can't because of it.
- have to cover up others' lies like sales people etc
But still, I would recommend having support experience (atleast a month)to developers. It will change your attitude to solve problem. What really matters to customer is not fancy tech-stack or shiny interface but working service.
Amen, I work in IT support and when I try to provide good customer service that is empathetic and customer-centric, which takes time, I get seen as worse than other agents who get the customer off the phone as soon as possible. After a while, I changed to be more "results-oriented", which does not help for customer focus.
Any engineer that takes issue with that statement has never spent a day dealing with rude, angry customers and has no accurate frame of reference to draw up a response.
I remember some time in support, most customers weren't rude. It's boring calls to register on the service, moving out to a new address, or confirming identity.
If telephone support is the final option after email doesn't work, I feel entitled to be angry. That doesn't mean I have to be rude, but I let the call center person now that I am fucking angry if I wrote 2 emails/support tickets already and they haven't solved the problem.
I have been in dev, qa and support roles. When I write code today, I always keep in mind what steps I can take to help folks in support troubleshoot any issues with it. Having clear and informative logs, comments including wiki links for more details etc. I have a lot of empathy for support now. Once you have to baby sit an error-prone daily batch or deal with issues from users who think you aren't much use - things that basically screw up your day - you never forget.
Having experience in both roles (and some more, all on the technical end), I don't think so. Of course, it's not a simple harder/easier question and it doesn't apply to everyone but if you are good at supporting customers you naturally care about stuff and the customer's issues. You file an internal ticket, have to keep watching it but in many cases there's just no progress or even a response.
Ultimately when there's a real bug you are just being an (internal) customer requiring support. The support quality of a company is not only determined by the right customer support employees or vendors but how good the internal support and escalation paths are.
As an internal engineer, when an internal ticket comes in I'm going to track down the issue, may realize it's a known thing that requires a lot of planning to resolve, loop in my manager, etc. but ultimately it usually ends with "we don't have time to address this right now and it doesn't affect enough users". If you're lucky there's a workaround that can be shared.
Now, I don't like that. I'd rather fix the issue for the user but I already have committed deadlines and team goals and it's rather easy to just go with a "sorry, we may revisit in Q1 or Q2 next year".
The support agent still has to a) deal with the customer's anger and b) cannot be honest with them, i.e. needs to wrap the situation in a blanket of corporate speak so as not to shed a bad light on internal teams / the company. At the end of the day they are just powerless and have to take on the responsibility in front of the user, whereas the engineer may feel unsatisfied not being allowed to spend time on it, but ultimately is far enough removed from the user to be actually affected by the situation. Granted, personally I always try my best to get a fix out but a lot of engineers would rather work on their projects and the managers want that too.
FWIW, when I did customer support I always reminded myself that nothing is personal. When I'm at the opposite end (a customer) I also don't get mad at the individual I'm dealing with unless they are not trying to understand or help at all.
I work in a senior support role and I am constantly telling my juniors not to take things personally.
Funny thing is I used to take things personally and it did occasionally lead to me going the extra mile to save the situation, but it is just so emotionally exhausting, to the point where I do not think it is humanly possible to maintain that level of service (I suppose some one might be able to, but I have not met anyone like that).
A part of me misses that do-or-die personal commitment to the customer, but for the most part I enjoy not going insane
as an engineer, i typically face complaints i have the power to fix. it would be a lot more stressful to spend all day fielding complaints i had no power to fix.
I used to be a software engineer at a nonprofit that handled a lot of customer care requests. I wanted to see what frustrated our users, and I also wanted insight into how we could better support the customer care team. So I talked to the volunteer coordinator, took a day of PTO, and worked a shift in customer care. (Because I did it as volunteer work on PTO, my boss and project manager couldn't tell me not to do it.)
Reader, working in customer care blows. It sucks hardcore. From my engineering work, I actually knew what the cause of the problems were and understood the timeline for fixing them -- information that real customer care reps rarely have available to them, but even that wasn't enough to appease some people. Even when people weren't rude, just the never-ending barrage of complaints and problems that I had to fix wore me down. And I only worked one shift, and then went back to engineering the next day.
People who can do this day after day, retain their composure, and somehow not burn out from the nature of the work are awesome, and they have my respect. Their jobs are absolutely more difficult than mine.
I really believe customer service this effective is worth its weight in gold.
I worked on a SaaS product that was essentially a booking engine. Vacations, rentals, tours, b&bs; etc. Their product was complete shit and it was so stressful to work on. Nearly a decade of terrible choices and the wrong technologies stacked up like a card house.
The only thing that kept the customers there was the insanely talented and competent customer service. They knew the app inside and out and were able to smooth out the insane number of rough edges for new and old customers alike. When gifts were sent to the company, they were typically sent to customer service.
Everyone in CS was paid terribly. It really bothered me. The software team was doing a Bad Job and getting paid well for it, and CS was really saving everyone’s asses. Since then I look at the customer support team a lot differently.
How do you measure your customer support staff performance? Many companies fire employees for having "low numbers" but since they can't measure tone, they end up driving their reps to optimize for other factors.
When I used to work support in global escalations for a big multinational, my manager, nor his, ever knew what to do with me.
I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else.
I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls.
Management could never come up with a purely zendesk based overall performance metric I wasn't near the bottom of. I never much cared because at least weekly a customer that I helped would try to convince me to quit and come work for them as a private consultant, making it incredibly hard for my manager to convince me I should change anything at all about what I was doing.
I left after 3 years and shortly after the whole thing got outsourced to an Alorica call center. So I guess management did figure it out, they'd rather have 4 people who's only qualification is the ability to fog a mirror, giving out near worthless support very quickly, than pay for 1 person like me.
Having been in a similar position usually being on the 'inside' with access to code/tools/etc was more interesting than being some consultant who didn't have sufficient access and was saddled with the job responsibility of actually using the product for it's intended goal in an ordinary business setting. Playing troubleshooter for the real hard problems that nobody expected or thought about and delivering a solution in one in a hundred calls can be more rewarding than just turning the crank on a business system.
Some companies actively solicit feedback after interactions with customer support, about the interaction. Those surveys link back directly to the agent. More generally there's also NPS.
I always give those the maximum number of stars/smiles/whatever and put the interaction in the best possible light no matter what. I always assume problems at the front line start somewhere further back.
This is what irked and continues to irk me about working in a customer support position. When I was going above and beyond for customers, customers would go out of their way to let my boss and others know that I was their hero. However, what did that get me? A shallow, perfunctory reply that "the [redacted] department was lucky to have me" and to keep doing great work! When I'd meet with my boss or get feedback, they'd basically shit on my numbers.
As a consequence, I eventually gave in and decided to improve my numbers to see how "well" i could do. I was able to cut down my times to about a third of a normal agent, but that also resulted in me being more robotic and much less of a human to the customers.
+1 for the CD Baby reference. Derek's book Anything You Want is maybe my all-time favorite business book. I still remind myself to "Treat every customer like Mick Jagger" when replying to customer emails.
In his In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery, Wilfrid Sheed wrote that a guaranteed route to success for any company would be to put its intelligent people on the phones and hide the morons in management where they can do only limited damage. I wish I could remember the context.
Yeah my one call center experience involved cameras over everyones desk and the cruelest management team I've ever experienced that watched you like a hawk.
> Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues
This is what caused service reps to waste everyone's time with elaborate fake displays of empathy and forced unwanted small talk. I'd prefer an efficient robot.
Everyone is different. What you’d prefer is not what others would prefer. Hopefully a customer service agent is going to be able to pick up on someone who dislikes small talk and just get the job done.
I want to also counter-balance the negativity towards Hsieh with my own experience. From 2015-2017, I worked at Edmunds.com which was (to put it lightly) a bit obsessed with "Delivering Happiness" and Zappos' culture. So much so, that the leadership team visited Vegas to get a tour of the Zappos HQ (this was before I joined). But Edmunds based their entire cultural approach, including hiring, interviewing, and onboarding on Zappos.
The Edmunds onboarding experience has been by far the best out of any company I worked at. Sure, it was silly games and scavenger hunts that didn't really have anything to do with "work," but I look back at the entire experience with a lot of nostalgia. I loved the onboarding so much, I've been contemplating doing a startup that literally just focuses on improving cultural onborading at companies. It made my first few months at Edmunds not only incredibly productive, but also intellectually and socially stimulating.
And they were doing something right. Over there, I had the honor of working with one of the best managers I ever had (he's now at Amazon), and with one of the best software architects I've ever worked with (he's now at Facebook). My team was made up of motivated, smart, folks from all walks of life (recent grads to data science PhD's in their 50s). I still keep in touch with my old team even though we're spread all over these days: doing our own startups, at Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and beyond.
I have the utmost respect for the cultural revolution that entrepreneurs like Tony Hsieh brought to the fore. People that call it a "cult" are missing the point. It's no more a cult than cheering for your school mascot or being in a club. We seem to forget that people are inherently social and need a sense of belonging.
> We seem to forget that people are inherently social and need a sense of belonging.
As someone who used to work at a company that also was fairly well known for its 'cultish' culture, while I agree with your statement above, I also strongly believe that the modern corporate workplace is fundamentally incompatible with the sense of social belonging that humans need. Worse, many smart people take advantage of this need for a sense of belonging with the sole goal of making more money for rich people.
Early human social groups, namely the family, village, and tribe, were strongly cohesive. You were only "kicked out" if you had made some severe transgression against the group (or you had "come of age", and needed to start your own group, which is something else entirely). You were not kicked out the second the group's profits took a dip or it was determined you were dead weight and the group you could do better without you. But these days "fiduciary duty" actually demands the group leaders take a simple utilitarian viewpoint of whether they keep you in the group.
This isn't meant to be totally pessimistic. Some of my favorite times and best friends were at companies that had a great corporate culture with a corporate mission I believed in. But these actually tended to be more mature organizations that were honest about what they were doing: being a successful business that made money, was an enjoyable place to work, and created value for customers. It's actually the 'cultish' places I find that people get extremely bitter when they leave because they were sold a bill of goods that was never true to begin with.
Second this and i'm glad you described it so well. No matter how hard most companies try to create an atmosphere of "family" for their employees, it fundamentally rings hollow almost all of the time, and by definition it has to for exactly the reasons you stated. These are organizations that exist to make money for themselves and their owners/investors, not to support their staff through thick and thin, bad or good (as a family or tribe is almost morally obligated to).
Any employee who isn't a total fool should know this and the executives certainly do because they have to to keep their efficiency numbers and bottom line looking decent. So any claims to the contrary just sound forced, false and absurd because that's all the are, the employee equivalent of some corp also expressing loving platitudes to its customers
Example: during the pandemic I've seen several major banks and other corporations send out emails and publicity material with phrases like "we're all in this together" scattered around it..... Yeah. as if my own experience as some random individual customer or employee with limited resources and all sorts of personal struggles in any way relates to their main concerns as a multibillion dollar corporation.
So yes, comparing almost any company except a literal extended family business or a small startup staffed by a group of close associates and friends working together to a tribe or family group is empty nonsense 99% of the time.
> As someone who used to work at a company that also was fairly well known for its 'cultish' culture, while I agree with your statement above, I also strongly believe that the modern corporate workplace is fundamentally incompatible with the sense of social belonging that humans need. Worse, many smart people take advantage of this need for a sense of belonging with the sole goal of making more money for rich people.
Totally agree with this and you should always draw a line between "work stuff" and "personal stuff." There's definitely a dark side here. However, I do think there's value in making your employees feel welcome and wanted.
It's hard to tell because I didn't have much insight (I was "just" an engineer); but I people loved working there and the folks on my team in particular were smart, interesting, and engaged.
A few years back, I went to their office tour in Vegas, and I've read Hsieh's book, which doesn't cover much of the post-Amazon years.
It seemed pretty clear to me that Zappos was in decline as an independent entity. Fulfillment was already gone. They were in the middle of removing their product photography team. A section of their office was being used as a community co-working space. There were fun quirky office areas but completely devoid of employees. It wasn't clear if Zappos did anything beyond customer service. I don't know if Tony Hsieh could really call himself a CEO anymore under Amazon's thumb.
Zappos was really proud of their long weird onboarding process. They stress over and over their core values. You write and perform a skit about those core values to the company when you "graduate". At the end, if you don't think Zappos is the place for you, they'll pay you a few thousand dollars to leave. I'd imagine that people who aren't completely in love with the company would never go through this process.
Interviewed there for an internship way back. It's basically a cult. I was relieved to find out other companies to be expectedly normal after having Zappos be my introduction to the professional world.
> It wasn't clear if Zappos did anything beyond customer service.
But ultimately, isn't that what Zappos is? Their bread & butter? Footware is a commodity. Ecomm stores more or less a commodity. Fulfillment? The same.
The key point to being unique? Service. A lesson more ebusinesses wpuld be wise to learn.
Most people I know order 3 or more to try and keep the one they like returning the others. Not sure how you can compete on price when people are doing that.
Whether the question is returns or something else. Few will open their wallet if they have doubt. Unlimited and free returns removed a large amount of doubt. If fact, as mentioned, it likely triggered more sales.
You'd have to spend a significant amount of marketing budget to get what Zappos did from their return policy and customer service. Those weren't expenses, they were investments.
That's why Zappos doesn't compete on price, I've never seen a shoe there listed at anything but MSRP. I still buy all my shoes there because I'm very picky about fit, so I order several pairs, wear them around the house, and then pick what I'm keeping and send the rest back.
There’s a fine line between trying to to welcome people to a new culture, and being creepy.
Personally I find the “we’re a family” attitude of a lot of these places deeply offputting; most families won’t lay off members when things get tough economically, so let’s stop pretending that we’re doing this for fun.
Worked with someone that had bought into the cult of Zappos as an HR/Head of People/Whatever the fuck you want to call it these days.
They were gross. The happiness culture is toxic and if you don't buy into it and aren't projecting rays of sunshine 24/7 from all your orifices you're expected to just fuck off.
Your stance that they are overly intolerant would have more credibility if you had stated it more tastefully. As it is, you have lead me to believe your attitude was more likely the actual problem.
I mean often online discourse is different from real life discourse. Additionally I could imagine that OP could be fairly upset about this, I know such a culture would drive me insane after a few days.
Going by your tone I'm going to assume you almost never project rays of sunshine from any orifices and maybe it's not their culture of happiness that's the problem.
Wow. In many years of reading posts on hackernews I've never seen 3 immediate replies asking if the writer of the comment is the problem, given their tone.
Have you ever considered that you might be the problem?
When I was younger I may have written a very similar comment about some places I've worked... and while I still agree that the environment wasn't my cup of tea... my intolerance of others was a bigger problem.
Have you considered that he may not be the problem? It is known by now that too much sugar is bad for you. And for someone not raised on American diet of the dumb smiles and constant fake positivity that diet is indeed vomit-inducing.
That comment may simply reflect the experience and frustration felt in such a place, it bears no indication how the op was acting there.
One of my favorite (and definitely my Mom’s favorite) parts of Zappos is the hand written note that they send with each pair of shoes.
My mom is an avid walker and she loves comfortable shoes so most birthdays and Christmas’s I send her a pair from Zappos.
The hand written note is such a nice touch for such a big business (especially from a parent company like Amazon- the anti-personalizer) that it makes the gift of Zappos (or even the gift card) something fun to give and fun to receive.
Tony, keep on experimenting! It makes it more fun for the customer.
I've ordered many pairs of shoes from Zappos over the past decade and have never once received a hand-written note, or anything except just the shoebox inside of their white shipping box.
I'm very curious why you get them when I don't...? :P
Its amazing, this is so far away from what. If I got a hand crafted note I'd assume it was written under duress and not something I'd want to be party to.
This sounds like a forced exit. For the founder and CEO and basic Messiah of the company to leave with 0 days notice, and for the incoming CEO to be sending the notice, sounds like someone got their email terminated and walked off the property. Even CEOs who are fired for company performance sometimes get to send their own farewell letter: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/01/grou...
I visited maybe 4-5 years ago. I had just read about Hsieh, and his business philosophy, and his attempt to revitalize downtown Las Vegas.
It was ... odd.
My immediate impression was favorable. A very quirky looking area -- a small outdoor mall, with the buildings framing a little courtyard area. Built out of shipping containers, or something that looked like that.
But the businesses. Each one was quirky in the extreme. A combination convenience/art supply store. A store selling nothing but socks. A store selling used luxury goods. Maybe one of these could survive in a high traffic area of a conventional mall, but there was nothing to draw anyone. There was a bar that had some odd twist, but I don't remember what the twist was.
I didn't see how the area could survive. It wasn't right in the middle of downtown LV, so I don't think they could rely on people visiting there. I'm sure there were people like me who somehow heard of it, and went to visit. But one visit was plenty. There was absolutely nothing to draw me back. And it was pretty deserted.
BLUF: it takes more than one man with a vision to create a tech ecosystem. It takes rich nerds who want to invest locally and stick around. Las Vegas will never have that.
I have lived in Las Vegas for 24 years. We moved here to raise a family because it is my wife's home town. (Her father was a scientist and manager with the federal government.)
I was and am in tech, working from home except for two years with one of the very few successful tech startups in Las Vegas from 2000-2001.
I wanted the tech-oriented revitalization to succeed, but it it hasn't and we are moving to Utah ("Silicon Slopes").
Preface: I love Vegas and feel strongly about my experiences at UNLV so forgive my passion. It is my own opinion at the end of the day.
As someone who grew up, went to school, and worked in tech in Vegas, I place some of the blame on UNLV and its computer science program.
The computer science curriculum taught at UNLV is designed to do nothing more than churn on casino gaming employees; it's so extreme that the only web development course doesn't even count towards your computer science degree. It's absolutely bonkers to me how students are trained from the start to feed right into the golden handcuffs of the casino industry and yet people wonder why Vegas can't get it's tech industry started.
There's just simply no local talent pool here as a result. The casino industry is, in my opinion, a solved domain with little innovation room for incoming passionate engineers. I remember applying to a big gaming company here for an internship while at UNLV, and they legitimately couldn't provide a clear answer to "How often do you innovate within your domain, and what are some examples".
I feel fortunate that I had already found an interest in topics outside the gaming industry and managed to land a job here for a tech company constantly moving the needle in a challenging domain.
You are totally right about this (and thanks for sharing your personal perspective). I used to think the CS program at UNLV was excessively backward or old-school, which it is, but the root cause is those golden handcuffs. What company do you work for in LV? If we should take it offline, I am bo@blnqr.com
When I visited Vegas a few years ago I tried to find some tech or entrepreneur events. It was strangely barren compared to what I had been used to in Utah. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was just too spread out? Too many other things for people to do? There was a desperate feeling I couldn't shake...
Money, money Everywhere, but not a dime to spend.
Anyway, I've just left Utah forever, and live in Arkansas now.
Have you driven the blocks around downtown Vegas lately? It's very seedy, full of pawn shops and payday lending stores, liquor stores and closed stores. Streets are dirty, numerous homeless people. I admire his goal of revitalizing it, but it didn't work.
If you think it has issues now, you should have seen it pre-downtown revitalization. I went to high school in downtown and you wouldn’t dare stray from campus. Literal meth lab houses would blow up in that area during PE class. It’s not perfect now but you feel safe walking there anytime of day. As for payday loans and all the other items listed, that’s just how Vegas works. It’s sad but I doubt a gambling town could be any other way.
Last time I was there was for CES, and they had a "completely" autonomous bus that went around the arts district of downtown Las Vegas. The autonomous bus was disappointing, but I actually thought that particular part of Vegas was looking pretty good. It seemed very hipster/gentrified and not at all touristy.
I think the revitalization project was at least somewhat successful.
It's too bad, because I really wish Vegas could somehow magically turn into a tech jobs hub. It's got a lot going for it: No state income tax. Cheap housing. Minimal regulation. Cheap, relatively private LLCs. World class restaurants. World class entertainment/shows (even if touristy). Casinos, if you're into it. If NorCal is a heaven for people who like outdoor activities, then Vegas is the heaven for people who like the indoors. The only down side is it's really hot, but going indoors fixes this.
If my employer opened an office anywhere near Las Vegas, I'd list my house and call the moving truck the next day.
For a long time, it's been quite obvious that these 3 laws are a cornerstone of why California had the tech boom. And yet almost no other state has managed to put these on the books! I'd be willing to bet that if Nevada implements these (properly), they'll attract a lot more tech startups.
True for small tech companies, but major tech companies routinely flaunt CA loopholes to lay claim all sorts of employee-produced IP, and prevent moonlighting. If an invention is similar to something your company makes or might one day make (which could encompass anything for a major tech company), then they can lay claim to it and prevent you from moonlighting working on it.
I'd add that those are more significant to create a liquid labor market than to empower founders. The other missing component to a startup scene is reckless venture capital. Even if you found in another city you'll probably need to travel to California to get funding.
Where I come from, the business culture can be described as somewhere between complacent and cautious that borders on cowardice. There's really no other choice but to bootstrap or relocate to California.
Vegas is not bad for outdoor activities either. World-class rock climbing, good hiking and mountain biking, 2 hours to the Grand Canyon, 2.5 to Zion National Park, 5 to Mammoth (not close but no worse than Los Angeles). Alex Honnold owns a house there.
If I ever achieve my dream of being a seasonal nomad, Vegas just might make the cut.
Outdoor activities are available, and the seasonality is probably no worse than other parts of the country with inclement weather, but it's pretty shocking to see hiking trails closed from May 15-Sept 30, for example. Not a mundane detail.
Vegas summers are brutal no doubt. There is a fair amount of hiking and climbing in the Spring Mountains though, that's generally nice in the summer. But in town the heat just never lets up for several months. It's not uncommon for it to be 95+ degrees hours after sunset.
Personally, I probably wouldn't live in Vegas. I'd live somewhere at a higher altitude in that area of the country. But a lot of people equate Vegas with The Strip which isn't really fair.
Yeah, the redeeming feature of Vegas as a conference destination is that there are great long weekend or week trips to have from there. Also Death Valley. (Grand Canyon is >2 hrs though.) Utah NPs beyond Zion. Etc. Don't like Vegas itself but lots to like about the general region.
Las Vegas is great for outdoor activities. I've lived here for 24 years, out west toward Red Rock, and we do a lot of hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking, camping, skiing/boarding is close at Mt Charleston. Soccer teams, excellent parks. Even Pickle Ball LOL
I probably wouldn't mind Vegas except for one extremely important thing. The whole place reeks of cigarettes and I can't stand it. I don't ever want to live in a place where indoor smoking is legal.
TBH, I find Vegas restaurants mostly underwhelming. If you're on an extremely generous expense account of course there are lots of celebrity chefs. But I've found otherwise, even off-strip, generally pretty mass produced food.
I visited Detroit in May 2016 and was very taken aback by the revitalization. Granted, it was Memorial Day weekend + Movement Festival [0] so the city was certainly not in it's normal day-to-day look, but Dan Gilbert's money [1] appeared well spent to the eyes of a visitor. I learned about it from talking to my Lyft drivers, who all seemed to think positively about the effort.
If you put aside economic problems Detroit just has so much more going for it in terms of history, culture, location, small business, family ties etc. than Las Vegas. That is why dumping money into it has shown immediate returns. When you say Vegas 100% of people are going to (justifiably) think casinos and not much more.
That's exactly right. The best bookstore in town shut down. The best coffee shop is still there, a wonderful place, but not much else, sadly. (Disclosure: I am a 24-year local in tech who really wanted it to work.)
Did he or others invest as much as was originally implied? I remember it being spoken of as a long-term project. If it was a little shipping container mall, that's a bit of a meagre attempt. You'd need to loss-lead dramatically to attract people across from The Strip to visit.
For just part of $350m, you could comfortably bankroll 20 small businesses to effectively create the dynamic you wanted. Couple that with some drawcards to lure tourists across, free travel, etc. That would've worked.
You got that right, 20 startups or even 200. And they might have made a great return. Instead, they focused on bars and public art (which I think is cool btw) and made a fundamental real estate mistake by loudly announcing where they were going to buy and how much they had to spend.
I can't speak to how well the project has been doing, but just last week I happened to listen to his 2014 Long Now Foundation talk on this project. I didn't even know who he was before this talk, which was simply next in my podcast feed for this subscription. Maybe the ideas he espoused aren't universal to US areas, but I found plenty worth mulling.
This is a good guide for the young aspiring entrepreneur as well as an autobiography. He made a self narrated audio version that I highly recommend. It adds depth to hear his story narrated in his own voice.
I had the chance to meet Tony in 2009, ~early July. Looking at Wikipedia now, I guess it was a month before they sold to Amazon. I was part of the first "Zappos Insights" class. I was able to find my application, and posted it on Twitter, sorry anyone who sees it who was involved: https://twitter.com/CameronBanga/status/1298465073430700033
No idea what people think of Zappos, their culture, and Tony in 2020. I was able to interact with him I guess via email and in person from ~2008-2010?
Every interaction I had with Tony, and every story I heard, he was just Tony. Personally happy for him, as 21 years at the head of any clothing/fashion/design company has to be tough.
Zappos is an interesting experiment but I’m not sure what to make if it overall. It isn’t ubiquitous or commonly known to everyday consumers. The model of shopping online for something that requires personal fit just doesn’t make sense to most people.
Hsieh has also made some strange choices internally like to reorganize using “circles” (holocracy). I’ve heard secondhand that this experimental approach to management didn’t work out in practice, that a lot of talent left, and that the circles ended up having organically emergent managers anyways.
It wasn't creepy to me, just unrealistic. Power structures form, whether you want them to or not. So 'holocracy' still has managers, it's just unpublished info who they are.
I interviewed there in 2007, and I got about 45 minutes with him. He's definitely really smart, and seems honest...but has some ideas that are pretty polarizing. It was clear to me in the first 5 minutes that I wouldn't fit in.
Over the rest of the interview with various folks there was a distinct split of believers and "yeah this place is weird, but I can't leave just yet" groups. Pretty clearly it works though.
Edit: One example. It's minor, but indicative of the weirdness. As a "visitor/interviewee", I was obligated to carry around a 6 foot flagpole with a sizable Zappos flag on it for the several hours I was there. Not a deal breaker by itself, but odd enough I knew the place wasn't for me, because there was probably more of the same coming. Maybe it was some kind of test?
I spoke with Hsieh briefly after his talk at Draper University in 2015.[1] I was in Boost Accelerator for Gliph and our group got to sit in on some but not all of the guest lectures that season. (Elon also spoke, but we did not get to attend that one)
Before Tony gave the above speech, Tim introduced Hsieh and his relationship in investing in Zappos.
I may not have this quite right but I believe Tim talked about a time where either Hsieh needed bridge money and either Tim's fund or DFJ had to make a call on whether to bail out Zappos.
IIRC, Tim or the fund he was managing chose not to bail out Hsieh.
It may have been because of the 2000 crash, I can not remember. But Tim was very open about this decision and I believe the choice Tim made was not good for Tony at the time. I can’t say for sure, but I recall Tim saying it hurt their relationship.
He told this story standing right next to Hsieh.
I'm not sure exactly how but they worked it out, not only because Hsieh pulled through and raised capital elsewhere, but because he was there to give that talk in person. The relationship was clearly in good shape.
Wish I could remember more details. I'll try to get them if the opportunity presents itself.
I know him a little. He's as-expected based on all the writings on him, as most people will tell you. He's weird. Works his ass off. "Good" to his employees if you're into the cult-ish like environment he's about.
Completely tanked DT Las Vegas project, but that was easy to call. Way out of his skillset.
A pretty good guy I think. Always followed through with promises to the best of his abilities, never did me wrong. Just a weirdo. Which ain't so bad.
That's not why he's weird. It's how he goes about it. I like Tony. And I don't personally think he's weird. But objectively... most people probably do and I understand why.
Worked at Zappos for a couple years. Worked closely with the incoming CEO Kedar. I might even say, I had a small role in his early rise.
I don’t have a lot to share, and out of respect for folks privacy. I won’t share much. I will say this. Their customer service isn’t a lie and it’s good inside and out. But much of their culture is PR. Internally it’s far more toxic than you see on the exterior. It is cult like.
I think Kedar is a solid person, and while him and I have our differences. I think he’ll make a great CEO and has the qualities needed. While his approach may be different than Tony’s approach. I don’t think it will be lesser, if that makes sense.
No personal direct experience - I like that he was an experimenter. Great experimenters have lots of failures to go along with their successes. He made a great company in a way that went against the grain, and survived an acquisition from a buyer with a very strong culture.
No personal experience here, either, but word on the street last year was that he was widely disliked outside of Zappos.
When I lived in Nevada, he was heralded as the future savior of downtown Las Vegas, having bought up a bunch of dead motels and vacant lots to transform into something new and better. Plenty of "tech disruptor" headlines in the newspapers.
After a few years, when virtually nothing came of it other than a quirky-but-empty strip mall and a clubhouse for his hangers-on to gather in, there started appearing articles about people being unhappy with how things were going, and him in particular.
Never heard about any strife from inside Zappos, though.
I am leery of any company that comes off with culty-vibes and that was the impression I got from various media I read and watched about it. I’m sure it’s great for business but not for me, I am free thinker. Same reason I think Ray Dalio / Bridgewater is an insane asylum. I briefly worked with someone who did a stint there and he embraced the principles / radical transparency thing and it made him extremely hard (even obnoxious) to deal with.
You can't be an island of radical transparency. It has to be an organizational thing, and even then you'd be well advised to not act that way with your spouse or at a retail store.
the radical transparency thing is very interesting
When you embrace it, you will definitely piss off a LOT of people
society is all about 'being polite' and 'wearing a mask'
if you stop being polite and stop wearing masks, while still maintaining common courtesy
life becomes MUCH easier
I'll give you an example
2 of your friends have problems which prevent them from having a good relationship
you have a frank talk with them
Hey, Jack, you need to get over your abandonment issues and commit to a woman and marry her. You've passed on some pretty amazing women just because your father walked away when you were 4
Hi Sophie, perhaps the reason you only date losers is that is your type. Perhaps your type is guys who will cheat on you. Perhaps when your mother divorced your father after he cheated on her with her sister, his secretary, and the school principal, you should have realized that's genetically your type. So you can either accept that you are making this choice and be at peace with it, or you CHANGE your decision making process
*
guess what's going to happen
usually, 1 of them will get mad at you, then realize you are right, and then make a change, and then your friendship will be much stronger
and the other will hate you for life. Well not hate you. Will avoid you forever
So that's what radical honesty and radical transparency does
*
of course you have to be prepared for people to also be radically honest with you
you find out things that are painful. Then you have to decide whether you will embrace the honest feedback you are getting or run away from it
Here's another problem with radical honesty: You think you're right, and say something that's going to be a painful but beneficial truth. But you might simply be wrong: you don't have all the facts, you're missing some context, your interpretation is hampered by your own issues, whatever. Now you've caused someone pain and haven't helped them, and maybe further contributed to their problems.
Radical honesty works great with I-statements (e.g., "I stopped listening to you a couple minutes ago because you're boring me") in terms of communicating effectively without the baggage of courtesy. But radical honesty for criticism rarely works as well as propenents think.
Yeah, that's not how it is used though. It is an alternate system of control with its own set of rules. It is creepy and dishonest to its core even if it works at the top, it certainly does not carry all the way down.
When I moved to Australia, I thought it would be a lot better. It wasn't much different.
When I joined a wine subscription startup in 2016 as the technical co-founder, I wasn't just building the recommendation engine. I was also helping to pack the boxes at the warehouse.
We all got fascinated with Tony's book "Delivering Happiness" [1]. As I packed boxes, I listened to the audiobook several times. Then I read it later on again.
I'm still surprised how bad customer service is in most companies. Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now.
A few years later and our customers are obsessed not just about the wine we recommend. They also write love letters about how happy they are to deal with our customer service team. I'm still writing code on the other side, but it makes my day to see that part of the business working so well.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happi...