WELCOME ZAPPOS FAMILY

TONY ON ROC 2012

Collisions — “those random conversations when you run into someone at a bar or whatever, and it’s not someone that you necessarily talk to in your industry every day. And it just spawns new ideas or insights or patterns that they’ve discovered work in other industries.” He used Zappos current headquarters in Henderson, as an example. “In the building I’m in right now, there are doors all around the entire building. The previous tenant left all the doors unlocked so that employees can exit in and out of any side of the building. We decided to lock all the doors and force all of the employees through the front door in order to maximize the number of collisions among employees. The same type of thinking occurs at the city level when we think about how do we get people out on the streets.”

Co-learning — “the long-term vision is we want learning from external sources, but we also want the community to be teaching itself, and making itself smarter. And so, for example, we’re planning on investing in 100 to 200 small businesses that help build a sense of neighborhood and community. Maybe the florist is really good at marketing and the person who runs the coffee shop is really good at interviewing. So, ideally it’s something that they would all share with each other, within the community, and instead of everyone just being an island.”

Community — “the serendipitous encounters that you see from what’s happening right now in the Fremont East area [of downtown Vegas]. If you go to lunch or drinks or whatever for an hour, it’s normal to run into ten different people that you know. And that definitely helps that ongoing sense of serendipity and familiarity. It definitely helps in contributing to that sense of community. I guess it’s a widely overused word, so I try not to use it as often, but I guess we’re thinking of it more as the analogous thing to a company culture, but but just at a city level, so basically culture is to company as community is to city. And there’s lots of places that claim to have community, but don’t really.”