Title: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Author(s): Tony Hsieh

The author’s claim to fame is that he sold his startup in 1998 for $265 million to Microsoft. Next year, he joined Zappos (online shoe retailing) as an adviser / investor before becoming the CEO. After a decade, Zappos was acquired by Amazon at around $1.2 billion valuation.

He is still running the company. So about 20 years of running a company with a mantra of “Delivering Happiness” – with lot of passion and bold experiments, and with some fun and some, well, uh….weirdness.

Yes, their THIRD core value is “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness”. 6th is “Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication”. 9th core value is “Be Passionate and Determined”.

Zappos is around US$2 billion (2015) in revenues with 1500+ employees. What kind of mind does it take to build something like this? It is quite simple actually – at least to begin with – take your FOOLISH ideas extremely seriously – and test them out.

As a nine year old, he wanted to be the biggest earthworm seller in the world – and began earthworm farming. When he first heard about the idea of online shoe sales (crazy actually, how will people buy without trying?) – though, he almost deleted the text received from the entrepreneur who pitched the idea…..he was (eventually) bold enough to jump in fully.

In this book, he shares the complete blue print for building a business worth a few Billion Dollars while delivering happiness to its customers.

Happiness + billion dollars, anyone?