Zappos is a customer service company that just happens to sell shoes.

There's a big difference between motivation and inspiration: Inspire through values and motivation takes care of itself.

If you're focused on the friendship as its own reward, serendipitous stuff just happens. I know that sounds weird, but I can tell you for our 12 years of existence, it's actually how a lot of stuff happens.

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).

Success is getting to a point where you'd be truly OK with losing everything you have and starting over.

Service Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

Inspire other communities and cities to reinvent themselves.