Our customers call and e-mail us to say that's how it feels when a Zappos box arrives. And that's how we view this company.

Your personal core values define who you are, and a company's core values ultimately define the company's character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.

I view my role more as trying to set up an environment where the personalities, creativity and individuality of all the different employees come out and can shine.

Be true to yourself. If you follow that principle, a lot of decisions are actually pretty easy.

Open, honest communication is the best foundation for any relationship, but remember that at the end of the day it's not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most.

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.

Business is all about learning to balance the short-term, medium-term and long-term and I think it's when things are going well it covers up a lot of mistakes and bad decisions because you're growing so quickly.