10 GREAT Rules for TEAM Success!

People!

People!

People!

People!

People!

People!

We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did but weren't necessarily those seasoned professionals, but who had on— at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that technology, and you want to bring that to life. To lots of people. So the neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of, you know, 10 great people, that it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting.

I always kind of like— I get a little upset whenever any media attention focuses on me personally and me leading Facebook, much less a movie.

It's been kind of a bad year, hasn't it?

It turned out okay.

Time, Academy.

It turned out good. The Time thing was awesome. That was really flattering. But like, but I think that it's one of these things that the media systematically gets wrong, is that this idea that it's a person, right? It's never a person, right? It's always a team. And the most important thing if you are an entrepreneur trying to build something is you need to build a really good team. And that's what I spend a lot of my time on. I mean, I spend probably at least 3 hours a day with our core team, right, doing things. I spend probably 25% of my time recruiting, finding good people, both outside the company and inside the company, to put in more impactful roles.

At the end of the day, when you talk entrepreneur, you're talking about a creative visionary. You're talking about somebody who's the impetus, who's the spark to the business, to everything. And then you're smart enough smart enough to grab this person who's great at marketing or this person who's great at, you know, all the different aspects of what you'll need to make whatever it is your business is to succeed. I always say chemistry is everything, you know. You have to find chemistry with people, and the people that you have chemistry with— it doesn't always work. That first person that you choose for that job, it's like, uh, it's not gonna work. But then there's the people that come in and you just— you're like, wow, stuff happens when we're together, you know. And I've I've been lucky enough to have a lot of people like that in my life. And because I'm a Leo and I'm very loyal, I stay with those people and we're able to build and build and build and think and create and discover and keep challenging ourselves to be better and better and better. And what else, what other product could we create? What other thing can we do for the audience that's watching?

You look for people that are not political, people that are not bureaucrats, people that really don't care who gets credit, people that are, can privately celebrate the achievement but not care if their name is the one in the lights you know, that there are other— there are greater reasons to do things. You look for wicked smart people. You look for people who appreciate different points of view. You look for people that care enough that they have an idea at 11 at night and they want to call and talk to you about it because they're so excited about it and they want to push the idea further, and that they believe that somebody can help them push the idea another step instead of them doing everything themselves. I've never met anyone, at least in my life, maybe they exist, that could do something so incredible by themselves. In companies with global footprints and in our world, in Apple's world, the reason Apple is special is that we focus on hardware, software, and services, and the magic happens where those three come together. And so it's unlikely that somebody that's focused on one of those in and of themselves can come up with magic. And so you want people collaborating in such a way that you can produce these things that can't be produced otherwise. And you want people to believe in that.

Yeah, I always believe in— I love the, you know, I love that thing of collaborating. You taking the best of what you do and someone taking the best of what you're doing. You not robbing from what they do and they not robbing from what you do. And y'all bring the best of what you are to the table and you put it in this mix and you see what happens. You know, I love that part of creating.

You just don't succeed in any endeavor unless you've got a team that's been supporting you. And that's part of my political philosophy. It's really based on my own experience, which was if somebody hadn't been out there looking out for me, starting with my mom, my grandmother, my grandfather, then I wouldn't have made it. It wasn't because of my brilliance or something that these things happened. It had to do with people investing in you. And so we've got to make sure we're investing in the next generation just like somebody invested in us.

Find the smartest people you can and surround yourself with them. Working with smart people means that you'll be challenged to do your best. You'll have to strive to keep up with them, and as a result, they will elevate your thinking. When there are better players around you, you get better. I first noticed this when I was growing up. I had a friend, Laura Beckman. Laura tried out for the volleyball team her junior year of high school, and at the end of the tryouts was given a hard choice: bench on varsity or start on JV. Most people, when they're faced with this choice, choose to play and will pick JV. Laura did the opposite. She chose varsity, and she benched the whole season. But then, an amazing thing happened. Senior year, when she tried out, she made varsity as a starter, and all the JV starters from the previous year benched. And I remember asking Laura, "How did you know to choose varsity?" And she said, "I just knew. I just knew if I got to practice with the better players every day, I would become a better player." even if I didn't get to play in the games. How does the sporting example relate to smart people? I deeply believe that the same thing happens intellectually. When you surround yourself with smart people, they challenge you to think harder and in entirely different ways.

But does that look like your group? No! It doesn't look like your group. I mean, in no way, shape, manner or form. You know, maybe if we had a bunch of bunny rabbits, running there.

Or—

it's unbelievable. But again, you are who you hang around with, you know? And as Oprah Winfrey says, which I talk about a lot, is that you want people with a like mind and that are better than you, smarter than you, more intelligent than you to get on your bus. And don't be so concerned about what you're going to do with those people, but you want to, you know, The joint brain is, you know, there's nothing the joint brain, collective brain or brains, can't overcome. And I give the example of the atomic bomb, Manhattan Project. And they were put together and they were told, we need to develop a weapon of mass destruction, which they didn't call it that back in those days, in the middle '40s, to end the war in the Pacific. And they did. They didn't know if it was implode or explode, but they did. But if your team doesn't look like that, then you should— I won't say you should give serious thought, you should just fucking change.

Building a team is the hardest thing for an entrepreneur to do because very often they don't know what they don't know, right? They know their area of specialty really well, But other areas they think they understand, but they don't. And every area is more complex and more nuanced than it appears to somebody. You know, to— I see so many entrepreneurs who think marketing is about a press release or an advertising campaign. It's not. It's much more nuanced and sophisticated than that. So team building is very important. Some entrepreneurs do a really good job of growing. Larry Page is an example. Mark Zuckerberg is an example of being better at new functions as they come up. And also they've done a really good job of adding people who they can learn these new areas from. What I find is some entrepreneurs assume they know the answer, and that's very dangerous. And others know they don't know, and they hire the people who they can learn from. But they can still apply their entrepreneurial style in these new areas. Sometimes it makes sense for the entrepreneur to keep being CEO and driving the whole vision. Usually that's the best course. But some entrepreneurs can't think broadly enough to do that, and they can't grow fast enough.

Company culture was always important, and myself and Fred, like, interviewed everyone when we were still in San Francisco, basically until we couldn't do that anymore because there were too many employees to interview. But basically we wanted to— we had this criteria of, you know, yes, interview for the normal business technical stuff, but—

Do they meet the bar?

Right. Technically. So do the normal set of interviews, but then you kind of had this final test of, like, is this someone I would choose to hang out with or grab a drink with? And if the answer was— if we weren't in business together— if the answer was no, then we wouldn't hire them.

So that goes against a lot of the things that, you know, I've heard out there in the past. It's like, keep your work and personal relationships separate. You know, like, that's kind of been like a thing that's been stated out there, like there should be this firewall between the two. But you went in and said, okay, it's very important that I can actually get along with this person.

This is a someone I could go out and have a beer with.

Why was that so important to you?

I guess I have two answers to that. One is, yes, there are companies that focus on work-life separation or work-life balance, and at Zappos, we really focus on work-life integration, and at the end of the day, it's just life, so you might as— and especially if you spend so much time at work, you better hopefully enjoy the the time that you're spending there and the people that you're with. So that's one answer. And then the other answer is— and I don't think the book existed at the time Zappos was founded, but Jim Collins, his book Good to Great, researched and looked at what separated the great companies in terms of long-term financial performance from just the good ones or mediocre ones and found that the great ones had two important ingredients that separated them from just the good ones or mediocre ones. And one of them was that they all had strong cultures. And we formalized the definition of our culture into, we have 10 core values at Zappos. And one of the actually really interesting things I found from the research was that it actually doesn't matter what your values are. What matters is that you have them and that you align the organization around them. And the power actually comes from the alignment, not from the actual values. So there's no judgment in the values. And so we're not out there telling people, "Oh, you should adopt the Zappos values and culture," and so on, because actually that would probably not work in most cases. Our message is more, you should figure out what your values are and then align the entire organization around them.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know what you think of the video. If you want to leave a comment below, I'm going to join in the discussion. I'd also love to know which of the clips that you saw today had the biggest impact and what change you're gonna make in your business as a result of watching this video. I'm really curious to find out. Leave in the comments, we'll join the discussion. Again, thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.