Zappos, every mention
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every year anyone Alfred Lin 32Shane Parrish 10George Stalk Jr. 5Adam Grant 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Zappos comes up
Be Your Best in 2026: The Most Important Lessons from The Knowledge Project (2025)
- ▶ 4:48 Alfred Lin Another situation is the distribution at Zappos was not flowing well, um, and we couldn't figure out which 2 times in the scene
How to Win by Being Right and Contrarian: Lessons from Zappos to DoorDash
- ▶ 1:11 Shane Parrish Alfred went on to help build and sell Link Exchange to Microsoft, then scaled Zappos from startup to its 1.2 billion dollar acquisition by Amazon as the COO and CFO. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:26 Alfred Lin Another situation is the distribution at Zappos was not flowing well.
- ▶ 17:34 Shane Parrish Uh, I want to get into more of your experience, not only at Zappos, but, um, being on the board of some of the companies that everybody has heard of, um, today are being involved.
- ▶ 19:44 Shane Parrish You started a company before you joined Zappos.
- ▶ 34:31 Shane Parrish Was there any moments sort of at Zappos or earlier with LinkExchange where you thought you had the wrong fit, but it turned around? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 42:43 Shane Parrish Dive into this story behind Zappos from sort of the initial idea in the early days, just high-level, five-minute version to the, the exit with Amazon.
- ▶ 42:54 Alfred Lin Maybe from the start, Zappos was, this is this weird idea, we, I can't even believe, uh, we funded it because that, this was, uh, 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 50:56 Alfred Lin Yeah, that was a very contentious discussion, because every, every year the return rate would go slightly higher, and it went slightly higher, but we kept growing, so one way to look at it is, well, it's not really hurting us, and then the… 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 55:32 Alfred Lin The culture of Zappos, um, was very special, and it was something that we wanted to preserve partly because Tony Hsieh had this experience at Link Exchange where we didn't define the values of the company. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 59:12 Alfred Lin And at Zappos, we were very mindful that whatever customer experience that we delivered, it was the best customer experience that we can deliver at that growth rate.
- ▶ 1:00:50 Alfred Lin You're talking about Zappos? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:05:26 Alfred Lin There are two things at Zappos that I, um, I, I pushed very hard and popularized. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:13:11 Alfred Lin Um, at Zappos, it was, what do we do, um, after nine-eleven, um, when sales went to zero, what do we do during the financial crisis when credit became very, very difficult, and we were borrowing, uh, sixty million dollars, and we had sixty…
- ▶ 1:38:45 Alfred Lin And if you decided not to invest in that time, you would have missed out on Google, Salesforce, PayPal, Zappos, OpenTable.
Proven Strategies to Accelerate Growth, Productivity and Profits with George Stalk, Jr.
- ▶ 1:12:46 George Stalk Jr. But, uh, that's where I was heading, is Zappos is one of the first companies I ran across where they use returns as a marketing opportunity. 5 times in the scene
Luke Burgis: The Power of Mimetic Desire
- ▶ 1:58:04 Shane Parrish Well, the Zappos guy, what's his name? 2 times in the scene
#22 Adam Grant: Givers, Takers, and the Resilient Mind
- ▶ 1:08:38 Adam Grant Here's what we've learned from studying Zappos.