[pretext: I first learned about Tony and this book after seeing news about his death 3 weeks ago).

This book is not about Tony's success, nor is it about Zappos. Tony wrote this book to share his journey to find happiness because he wants to contribute to the happiness movement to help make the world a better place.

I resonate a lot with Tony's childhood. From elementary school to college, he constantly wanted to make money. He wanted to make a ton of money so he can afford to do anything he wants later in life. As a child of first generation immigrants, I don't blame him. His entrepreneurial milestones included building:

1. a worm farm (all his worm escaped)
2. a button-making mail-order business (scaled up to a family business)
3. a magic trick kit mail-order business (received only 1 order)
4. selling ads on his magazine (fad)
5. running a grill at Harvard (turned a profit and met future cofounders)
6. a website making consultancy (failed, but inspired next venture)
7. an Internet service that helps businesses advertise on other websites (multi-million dollar exit)

I respect his entrepreneurial drive and persistence. Like him, I also built businesses to make money, but I did not focus and treat it as seriously as he did. I often thought about my business as a second thought to school work and only toyed with taking it to the next level. When he was 24, Tony's journey culminated in the creation of the 2 year old LinkExchange and a $275M exit, but that was actually the result of 24 years of trial and error. Despite making many millions, Tony was actually not happy. The culture at LinkExchange did not make him want to go into work and the people they brought in lacked the right fit, so he left.

Now rich and free, Tony tried a lot of things to discover his next play, including learning poker, partying, and building a venture fund to invest in early startups (Zappos was one of them). When Tony joined Zappos, the company was young and struggling, but he joined anyways because he saw its potential. He put in almost all of his personal capital to help Zappos realize its potential. Aside from recounting the fascinating journey of Zappos in its first 10 years, I am most impressed by how Tony built Zappos into a customer service company and created a set of practical core values.

Although they happened to sell shoes at that moment in time, he recognized that in order for Zappos to become successful in the long term, it would need to chase after a wildly ambitious higher purpose. They need this to inspire employees to come into work, vendors to want to work with them, customers to want to support their cause with their dollars... As an outsider, I am fascinated by the evolution of the Zappos brand promise over the years:

1999 - largest selection of shoes

2003 - customer service

2005 - culture and core values as our platform

2007 - personal emotional connection

2009 - delivering happiness

Even though it seemed wildly ambitious at the time, Zappos never settled and continued to iterate on their brand promise to better align their vision for the future with their values.