The first time I met Tony Hsieh was two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2003. I was interviewing for a Merchandising role in Zappos’ 1000 Van Ness building in San Francisco. In a room of eight Zappos leaders, he simply introduced himself as “a guy that works at the desk across from Fred’s (Fred Mossler)” as he pointed through the conference room window and across the office. It wasn’t until after my interview that I found out that he was CEO of Zappos. Ha!

In my early years of Zappos, I had a relationship with Tony like anyone had with him really. We only really engaged at parties and get-togethers, around the office corridors for some Core Values jabber, and chitchats over Grey Goose shots where we mostly talked about our love for McDonald’s, random challenges and sentimental quotes. In my first seven years, he never butted in my business. Heck, he never even asked me about the business – he had hired the right people to do that and could spend his time working on more important things to help grow Zappos.

It wasn’t until I moved to the Operations and Tech Teams in 2011 to help with the customer experience that I formed a “business relationship” with the man. One of the areas I was tasked to oversee was Zappos VIP and VIP is what Tony cared most about (after company culture, of course). It was his baby and his MO was, if you were a customer of Zappos, you were a VIP. Period. Nothing else mattered. His focus was ALWAYS on the customer. It was relentless. He would do anything to deliver the best service and experience to the customer; to save the customer time; to consistently outdo the Zappos promise and to be the world’s most customer-centric company.

We got even closer when he asked me to move to the Holacracy team at the end of 2013. He believed that self-organization and self-management was the key to Zappos’ future growth. He cared about engaging the employee in a much more important and authentic way. He cared about the future of work and how companies would operate in years to come. He cared about evolution and creating a more dynamic, more responsive company, one that can stand the test of time.

He cared about being the company that could show the world how it could be done.

I connected closely with the things he cared about at Zappos: employees, customers, and culture. I saw utmost value in his path forward. Him and I would bond greatly over creating a new paradigm and a new way to do things for years to come. It was one of our love languages, you can say.

Our 1:1 conversations almost always started with curiosity – questions to get to know each other better, even though it had been years. He always knew that just because you knew someone, it didn’t mean you knew them all the way through. He authentically cared and our talks were always meaningful, each one ending with at least one connection point more than we did the time before, and we would always use them as jumping off points for our next catch-up.

We had built a comfort with each other that was trusted, respected and appreciated between us both. It was a friendship that surpassed my wildest expectations, one that I never took for granted and always took the time to let him know.

While things always seemed to be good between us, we didn’t always see eye-to-eye on things. Actually, most of the time it seemed we were debating about most everything. Making “management science” and self-organization, especially creating our own homegrown version of it, “a thing” was never easy. To say the least, It was probably the most difficult project I ever worked on, inside the walls of Zappos or out. I know it took a toll on both of us.

At the end of June 2020, I went to visit Tony in Park City for a few days. Although things were very different with and about him, it was good to spend a bulk of my time in his presence. We had the opportunity to hike Park City Mountain together. All the way up the mountain, we reminisced about older, simpler and more happy times at Zappos – the parties, the work we did, of marathon and 8,000 meter training days, of its people, friends and family who we loved and admired. I took it all in, every second of it.

On my last day with him, I had a terrible feeling I wouldn’t see him again. As I hugged him good-bye, I really did squeeze as hard as I could, for as long he would let me. I will never forget it.

Tony was…

• generous and selfless; he always cared about the happiness of others, even over his own
• compassionate and caring, even if he seemed like a robot to most
• curious, creative, and brilliant; he was a master of seeing things from a new, different, and clever perspective
• courageous and a visionary, but humble, in every sense of the word
• never complacent and a risk-taker; he always believed that good was the enemy of great
• a dear friend, mentor, confidante, amazing human being, and a great hand-hugger

Tony, my friend, I am forever grateful. I love you and you are missed. You made me better. I will never forget you and everything that you meant and done for me, and so many others. Rest In Peace.