Spending time with folks who build companies, there's one thing that's clear - they look at the world a little differently than most folks.
Last week I spent an hour with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. And the conversation reminded me that folks like he and I probably have a screw loose, at least by conventional standards.
Tony was clear about one thing, failing doesn't count. He explained it this way: "I think entrepreneurs view the failures as getting one step closer to the success. As opposed to oh, like I'm a failure."
Tony's start-ups included a worm farm (FAIL), greeting cards (FAIL), button printing (WIN) and then a long line of college entrepreneurial endeavors that including buying pizza by the pie, and selling it by the slice, and crowd-sourcing and re-selling test-prep materials for class. Tony didn't count the failures, in fact from his point of view, there are no points off for failing.
Now Zappos is on a roll - with 2010 sales year over year to Q1 of 2009, up almost 50%. And so Tony's thinking about where his Happiness formula is needed most:
"We talked about starting maybe a Zappos Airlines" says Tony Hsieh - grinning.
Steve Rosenbaum is founder and CEO of Magnify.net, a NYC-based platform for Realtime Video Discovery and Curation. He has been building and growing consumer-content businesses since 1992. He was the creator and Executive Producer of MTV UNfiltered, a series that was the first commercial application of user-generated video in commercial TV. Steve can be contacted at steve@magnify.net Follow Steve Rosenbaum on Twitter: www.twitter.com/magnify
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