The E-Entrepreneur

About two weeks ago, I had the pleasure to Skype-meet with a fellow entrepreneur from Toronto Spencer Thompson (www.sokanu.com). During our insightful conversation, Spencer recommended a few books. One of them was Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh.

I recently finished reading this book written by the CEO of Zappos – an online shoe company that was acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion dollars worth of stocks. In the book, Tony shares his life story from starting a button business during his childhood to founding and selling his first company LinkExchange to Microsoft for $245 million when he was only 24 years old!

If you are an entrepreneur, you’ll find that he’s someone who you can relate to and you’ll learn the importance of maintaining a strong company culture.

If you are not an entrepreneur, it doesn’t matter, you’ll still find his book insightful and inspirational.

During the early years of Zappos, the business was not profitable and it was struggling to raise money from investors despite Tony’s good relationships with venture capitalists from his first venture LinkExchange. On the verge of company bankruptcy, he put the money from the sale of his properties and investments into Zappos to keep the company afloat.

It is no doubt that many people did not understand why he did that. But to him, it didn’t matter what others thought because he believed in the business. Tony showed that as entrepreneur, you do what you do because you are passionate about what you are working on and you find it meaningful. Your company might not be profitable at the moment, but you continue to work hard on growing the company because you believe that your product would deliver a positive impact on people’s lives. Today, many companies focus on maximizing profitability and completely neglect on delivering value and purpose to its customers.

The same can be applied to individuals. Are you delivering what you really want to be delivering? For me, I want to deliver WOW’s in life — to people around me and to myself.

I highly recommend this book to everyone, whether you are a business-owner or not, you will take away something valuable from it.