Tony Hsieh describes Zappos moving into a renovated Las Vegas City Hall to unite scattered offices and eliminate cultural divides. Employees requested doggy daycare most, and the company plans an "inside-out" campus that opens to the community rather than staying insular like Google or Apple.
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So this is our offices in Henderson, which is a suburb of Vegas. But we actually announced about a little over 2 years ago that we'll soon be— this is actually happening in September of this year, finally. But at the time, we announced that we'll be taking over the former Las Vegas City Hall. And this is actually a picture of City Hall in downtown Vegas. The city literally just moved out of this place last year, and since then we've been doing renovations and so on inside. And we were actually really excited about this from a company culture perspective for Zappos, because right now we're spread amongst 3 different buildings, and it's actually had an impact on our culture, because the people at the top of the building hardly ever see the people— top of the hill hardly ever see the people at the bottom of the hill. And here we finally have an opportunity to get everyone under one roof and have enough land to expand. upon. And so we sent an email out to employees and asked them, what do you want in your dream campus? We can finally build a permanent headquarters. And Fred and I— Fred's actually sitting in the back— we toured different campuses like Nike and Google and Apple, which have these amazing campuses. And I remember actually in the Nike campus, in one of the buildings, they had this running track where you can run around one of the buildings. It was really beautiful. In one of the other buildings there, there was an on-site pub. And we thought to ourselves, we need one of those. And— oh, and actually, it turns out there's jail cells in the former city hall. So we thought about turning that into like a secret speakeasy bar. And if we do that, I think the name of it should just be Bars. And then— And so we emailed all our employees and asked them, okay, what do you want in— Your dream campus, and people said like a pub or an on-site gym and so on. But the number one request we got back from employees—any guesses? Good food. Good food. A nap room. A nap room. We got both of those, but the number one request we got was actually doggy daycare. More than human daycare. So, but then as we started thinking about this more, we realized it, and we got literally hundreds of requests, that we realized 2 things. One, it wasn't possible to fit all of those things into our single campus. But the other thing we realized is that all those other campuses like Nike, Apple, Google were great for employees, but they were actually really insular and didn't really integrate or contribute to the surrounding communities. And so we thought to ourselves, well, what if we actually turned the entire thing inside out? What if instead of just focusing on ourselves, we took an approach that was more like NYU, where the campus kind of blends in with the city, and you don't really know where one begins and the other ends? And so we've actually been designing our campus to encourage people from the community to come in, and then encourage employees inside to not just stay within the 4 walls, but actually go out into the community and contribute and and interact with the community.
