What if one of the best online success story was inspired from Poker?

Tony Hsieh is one of the genius of our Modern times, founder and CEO of Zappos.com, he revolutionizes how business is done today. 9 years after its creation, the startup is ready to be the new Amazon.com and Tony H. the new Richard Branson.

But what is his secret? How a simple online shoe seller became a near-future e-commerce empire?

• Cheerful work environment: today I watched an ABC documentary about the firm and to be honest who would not want to work for this company after seeing happy and cool employees. Each employee was praising the quality of the work environment as the reason to the success of the company. Tony even offers $2,000 to anyone who leaves the company if he is not happy at work. Guess what? Nobody accepted the offer.

Okay. Actually Tony says it, he is not responsible of the ambiance at work. So what is his secret?

• Customer service: Zappos.com is known to have the best customer satisfaction thanks to many factors. “Free shipping both ways”, they deliver for free and if you are not happy you have 365 days to return your order for free… Which other company does that?! And the call center is based at Las Vegas and not in India… thanks God! If your employees are happy at work, they take care of your customers very well. Tony H. even revealed that if an agent does not find the right product for a customer, he can redirect the customer to a competitor. Well, the result is that Zappos.com keeps growing with new customers but also build ‘very’ loyal customers.

Every company should provide this level of customer service but this is not the reason of his success, he says.

• The truth is here: Poker. On his latest blog post, Tony H. reveals he learnt everything from poker and he is about to start writing his next book about this topic. It’s definitely interesting to read the parallels between business and strategy based games like poker. Usually famous CEOs would have compared their business mindset with the book “The Art of War” but I was kind of surprises to see Poker as inspirational. I actually don’t play Poker and don’t know anything about it, but I highly recommend reading his article.

His blog is very inspirational for business people and we learn a lot about his insight. We also learn they are working on a new platform called Zeta, you can find it here - it’s quite amazing.