You've gotta love the game. To become really good, you need to live it and sleep it.

Hopefully 10 years from now people won't even realize we started out selling shoes. They will just think about Zappos as a place to get the best customer service.

The brand is just a lagging indicator of a company's culture.

Money alone isn't enough to bring happiness... happiness is when you're actually truly ok with losing everything you have.

I think a much better use of time and resources is to really focus on your existing users or customers and figure out what changes can you make in the Web site, the service, the product, whatever, to get them to come back more often to generate that repeat business and once you kind of figure out that formula, then when you get new customers the whole thing just kind of grows exponentially.

I think the most important thing is just if you hire people whose personal values match the corporate core values - and not just the stated ones.

My advice is to stop trying to "network" in the traditional business sense, and instead just try to build up the number and depth of your friendships, where the friendship itself is its own reward. The more diverse your set of friendships are, the more likely you'll derive both personal and business benefits from your friendship later down the road. You won't know exactly what those benefits will be, but if your friendships are genuine, those benefits will magically appear 2-3 years later down the road.