The retired CEO of the online shoe store Zappos, Tony Hsieh, died on Friday from injuries suffered in a fire.Throughout the tech industry, he had been seen as a visionary who revolutionized online commerce. He was 46.Last year, Steve Goldbloom from our That Moment When team spoke to Hsieh about his career and the importance of shared values at his company.After graduating from college in '95, I went to work for Oracle in the Bay Area. My college roommate, we decided to start our own business.And at the time, the Internet was just getting started. We started a Web design and marketing business.During lunch hours, I would go and make sales calls. In the evenings at home, we would create Web sites.And then we realized that all these Web sites we were creating, they didn't really have a way market themselves.And so that's what led us to start a service called LinkExchange. We started hiring friends.And that whole strategy of hiring friends and friends of friends worked really well until we got to about 20 people.And then we basically ran out of friends. We had to start hiring people through resumes and interviewing.And we also didn't know any better to pay attention to company culture. And not everyone we hired was good for the culture.And not everyone so by the time we got to 100 people, I dreaded getting out of bed in the morning to go to my own company.And that's really what led us to sell the company to Microsoft. We sold LinkExchange in 1998 for $265 million.
