Swinmurn History

Nick Swinmurn founded Zappos in 1999, an online retailer that sells shoes that makes it convenient for customers to browse the web, search and place orders for “any shoe they could possibly want” (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016, p. 3), and have it directly shipped to the customer (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016). Swinmurn started Zappos with a $500,000 investment by Venture Frogs an investing firm that provides investments to startup companies (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016) owned by Tony Hsieh and his college friend Alfred Lin. Tony Hsieh graduated from Harvard University, and always had the “desire to run a business” (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016, p. 2). Hsieh worked at Oracle right after college, but left, due to it not being challenging enough (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016). Then in 1996 Hsieh along with Sanjay Madan another college friend, “created LinkExchange, a network of banner ads on websites” (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016, p. 2), which was later sold to Microsoft “for $265 million in 1998” (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016, p. 2). By age 24 Tony Hsieh was a millionaire and in 1999

Zappos “philosophy is you can’t have happy customers without having happy employees” (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016, p. 7). But in 2013, Hsieh made the decision “for Zappos to become a self-managed organization” (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016, p. 9) and moved to Holacracy structure (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016). Hsieh was aware that many employees were unhappy with the new manager free structure so, Hsieh send out an email offering them a “3 months’ severance (and up to 3 months of COBRA reimbursement for benefits if he/she” felt this was “not the right fit” (Askin, & Petriglieri, 2016, p. 1). There were 1,443 employees that took Hsieh’s offer 20% from the tech department, which was in the process of completing “the Supercloud project” for Amazon in December, which would be “the single