I visited Zappos HQ with a university group in 2016. As part of the tour, we visited the executive area, where they all sat in cubicles/rows like anyone else's. They even pointed out Tony's desk, though he wasn't around at the time.
I came away from that tour with two distinct impressions:
1 - Zappos had an amazing company culture; everyone seemed to get along and really enjoy their work.
2 - Tony Hsieh had a surprisingly large collection of half-empty liquor bottles at his desk.
Tony's death is certainly a tragedy for his family and the communities he helped build. I hope even during this pandemic we can all maintain those key relationships in life that keep us in check.
>>Tony Hsieh had a surprisingly large collection of half-empty liquor bottles at his desk.
Not just Tony.
My best friend used to work at Zappos. He used to brag to me that every employee/team gets their own mini-fridge, which is stocked with booze and liquor. He said that a common "bonding" experience for different teams in the company is to exchange different types of liquor. This was in early 2010s.
He said drinking on the job is common, but going overboard is discouraged (for obvious reasons). But even he admitted that Zappos clearly understood that in order to attract customer service people to the company (headquartered in Las Vegas), being able to drink on the job, i.e. during the day, would be a great recruitment tool.
I thought it was very cynical, although it obviously worked out well for them. Too bad about Tony though, I hear he was a great guy.
Wait what are you kidding!? Drinking DURING the day was encouraged? So the famed company culture is to let everyone get drunk as long as they're all hitting targets? Recipe for disaster for anyone who stays a significant amount of time. It seems cool when you're young then after 10 years people start getting serious problems like alcoholic neuropathy. Very sad situation all round.
At AWS we had (still have?) Tatonka nights, where you go to a fast-food place (was it the Wingdome in Seattle?) and you race to eat 25 fried chicken wings.
I think something that gets lost in the concern about COVID is how many addicts and people struggling with mental health are being killed indirectly by these quarantines. I don't have an easy answer of course, it's a serious virus, but while for a normal person these shutdowns are depressing, for addicts these shutdowns can be indirect death sentences. I really think that needs to get factored into these decisions.
Based on the article, it doesn't sound like he was actually living in isolation. He just chose to surround himself with a crowd that enabled selfdestructive behaviors.
quarantine and flattening the curve is important imo, but the way governments go about it is not. there needs to be a parallel campaign educating people about the effects of quarantine - which are well researched. Also I highly recommend reading up on the psychological effects incarceration has on felons.
Quarantined people aren't prisoners but there are parallels due to effects of isolation. Every re-socializing attempt of a prisoner even in the most "progressive" manner, has at its core idea to _first_ rob that person of their own agency.
Isolation opens up minds to new ideas and to cause them question everything. What minds are being fed in such a state is absolutely crucial to how they're reorienting themselves and what they latch on-to. Isolation breaks everyone except the hardest psychopaths, which is why it's used in every society (since earliest civilizations) as an instrument of control.
This lancet research paper isn't talking about felons but there are some hard to ignore parallels, maybe this is why politicians avoid the subject.
It's really not lost at all. Most people know about the secondary effects of the lockdown. Loss of jobs, loss of schooling, mental health effects. It's all front and center.
The math is simple. Without lockdowns, millions die, so we lockdown to some degree.
It's not that government officials are enacting lockdowns in a callous disregard of their negative effects, we simply have no other sane choice.
The virus itself is doing far more to damage mental health than stay-at-home orders ever will.
Around the world, we’re talking about millions of grieving people who have lost parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, .... Millions more people who struggled to stay breathing and may now suffer severe long-term (or maybe permanent) symptoms. Health care workers around the world who will have PTSD from harrowing shifts treating an extremely high load of unbelievably sick people for month after month. Etc.
In places with significant community spread, people are rightfully afraid that anything they do around other people is exposing them to significant risk of severe illness or death. Even people who take every precaution sometimes turn up sick, and the sources can be hard to trace. Dealing with that for months is extremely stressful.
All while a significant part of the population continued to blithely party on as if their actions had no consequences, and “leaders” baldly lie about it day after day, month after month.
If we want people to return to normal life feeling free and safe, then controlling the virus must be the #1 priority. Indeed, in places where the virus was controlled via strong leadership and community solidarity, life is nearly back to normal; in places where leadership was absent, it will continue to be a horror show for many more months.
I understand why this was downvoted, but I am a bit annoyed at the downvotes because _we can do both_. We can do more to control the virus, and we can do more for people dealing with the fallout of mental health issues exacerbated by the pandemic. That these two very related things are seen as mutually exclusive is the real bummer of this whole scenario. The number one priority is not controlling the virus or helping people with mental health or addiction issues. The "number one priority" is helping people who are struggling, pandemic-related or not, period.
If I remember right, the authors estimated the scenario as:
* Project 500K-750K excess deaths in the US until mass vaccine availability based on current public health practices (conservative/linear, ignoring exponentials involved)
* Someone dying generally has ~10 people close to them => half will experience ~depression for 1mo, 1 quarter for 2mo
* Something like 10-20% will have severe forms (major/ptsd/..)
* So something like 3 million people across all of above
That's a lot. Not quite as high as # of addicts in the US afaict, but up there. I could have easily got parts wrong, so worth going to the interview+article if you're truly interested.
They also have some articles on depression in elderly and other groups being especially impacted right now. Pretty real.
I don't think the grief of losing someone to the virus is any greater or less than losing someone to an overdose or suicide. A death is a death and always tragic. I'm sure the mother grieving her sons suicide is just as sad as the person grieving the death of an elderly parent. (Of course in reality people care less about addiction deaths because many still mistakenly see it as a moral failing rather than a disease). The focus needs to be on controlling the disease while also limiting the collateral damage as much as possible. Don't forget: most of us are likely to get this disease at some point anyway, even with a vaccine it will mutate. The important point has always been to slow the spread. Preventing it completely is near impossible without very extreme measures.
I'm not sure if you genuinely believe the extreme hyperbole in the second paragraph of your post or if you're just trying to counteract the people who act like the virus is nothing at all.
If it's the former, you should probably find some more reliable information sources. If it's the latter, truth and accuracy are a better counterpoint than taking the opposite extreme of misinformation.
Children don't generally die from Covid19. Your numbers are exaggerated, Covid is not the only cause of death around the world.
The load of sick people is also not exceptionally high, at least not in the intensive wards (don't have data for normal hospitalizations).
Here in Germany we have daily updates on the number of ICUs in use. It shows Covid is only a fraction of the patients, even now only 10% despite of soaring infection numbers.
I think it's insane to change policy intended to protect a huge segment of our vulnerable population to placate addicts. Addiction is a terrible thing (I've lost family members to it), but I'm not going to prioritize their needs over the needs of the elderly, essential workers, medical staff and high risk individuals.
Fair enough, but it's not only addicts being adversely affected by the quarantines and lockdowns. I would go so far to say that everyone has been adversely affected by the lockdowns--it's just a question of how much and have these costs outweighed the benefits.
Until recently, I'd it was pretty clear that Sweden (no lock-downs) and the US (many lockdowns of varying length and enforcment) have suffered the same per capita fatality rate.
> something that gets lost in the concern about COVID
I don't know if I'd describe it as passively as "getting lost". Very visible people have been talking about it, including the outgoing President, who mentioned the mental health costs of lockdown multiple times. Leaving aside the fact that even true things that Trump says are discounted due to his lunacy, most people are too dim to understand the concept of trade-offs, so anything that gives "aid and comfort to the enemy" is systematically downplayed among most of those that are pro-Covid-restrictions (I say all of this as someone who think that restrictions have tragic costs but are necessary).
That is to say, the problem isn't that no one has thought of factoring this into decisions, it's that the discourse upstream of policy is driven largely by the majority of voters that don't actually care about pandemic policy as anything other than another wedge issue to fight pre-existing cultural/religious wars over.
Given the extreme conditions being imposed in certain states, it certainly is not being factored into these decisions uniformly by all governors. There are states that are using reason and common sense. But look at California for example. When you have Sheriffs in virtually every major county directly and publicly refusing to enforce your orders, perhaps you have gone too far [1].
Someone mentioned this here on HN and possibly setting the house on fire but was dismissed as unfounded. I actually realise that they knew something...
It is sad that Tony Hsieh didn’t get the help that he needed and instead tried to self medicate in order to get away from all that.
This recurrent story where extremely intelligent people are battling mental health issues and cannot speak out because the stigma behind this issue is too damaging is why we need to normalize the discourse around mental health if we want to avoid this type of tragedies. I’m not actively suffering (and am not as bright as Tony) but had some bouts of depression and hypomania in the past and know how afraid I was to let anyone official (eg. at work, school) know about my suffering because once out it always trails you like a cloud and will always deem you inferior to others. Luckily I was able to escape the black hole and have been good and calm for about 10 years and learned to never slip into that again. But there’s a remnant fear of a possibility of going back to it. Along with that there is the fear of falling begind, loosing job, becoming isolated and homelessness. This fear is clearly exacerbated in the US where one or a few slip-ups turns everything into an ever accelerating down-spiral. Tony had so much more to loose as his cliff was much higher than an ordinary person. He could have seeked professional help and he probably did but too late in the game. Had we not have this stigma around, he and others could get the help early on when much more could be done.
Self-medication with drugs works temporarily but its abuse is clearly a quick path to compelte madness and early death. I personally stay away from drugs except from an ocasional puff of weed, the once a decade or two experience with LSD and the weekend bottle of beer.
I agree with the sentiment of your comment, but in this case it did appear that he was seeing a therapist so he was getting some professional help.
I think the help that may be missing is friends who are "lovingly firm" with him sooner. But it's easy to assume a billionaire is going to be fine and "tony is just being tony".
> This recurrent story where extremely intelligent people are battling mental health issues and cannot speak out because the stigma behind this issue is too damaging is why we need to normalize the discourse around mental health if we want to avoid this type of tragedies.
Where exactly is the "stigma" of mental health in tech nowadays? We're blasted day and night to the point where apparently every other person is "battling mental health issues".
Maybe there's a deeper issue here than "stigma" and seeing overpriced therapists.
I mean, given the demands of modern society, I wouldn’t be surprised if every other person was honestly battling some kind of mental health issues at some point.
I mean hell, it’s tough enough being sentient and dealing with mortality, throw in social issues, politics, propaganda, conspiracies, lack of health care, lack of social safety nets, caring for dependents, dating, paying bills, social media, “Instagram culture,” and a god damn pandemic. It’s rough out there.
As others have said, people seem comfortable enough to talk about mental health in an abstract way, but less so about their particular needs.
You seem to have a particularly skeptical view though doubting stigma and casting doubt into therapy as well. Your comment is actually a perfect example of stigma.
I’ve struggled with anxiety before and saw a therapist for a while and benefited greatly from it. It was expensive, sure, but not over priced. Less hourly than I make.
I didn’t really talk about it much at work, but I am open about it now.
On top of that, there are less stigma towards certain aspects of mental health and more towards others. I believe anxiety, like I mentioned for myself, is becoming a more commonly discussed topic, but depression or bipolar, for example, still carry stigma that push people into facing these things alone.
RIP. It's really sad. Mental health problems are often dismissed or not caught in time.
I read his book "Delivering Happiness" after I heard about his death and before reading this article about mental health problems. As I read it I saw some interesting stories and ideas about the businesses that he built but I also read stories which put way too much focus (imho) on various nights and parties which don't really relate to entrepreneurship or business. The first thing that popped into my mind is depression, drugs and alcohol overuse.
> The first thing that popped into my mind is depression, drugs and alcohol overuse.
Same. A shadow story that eclipses the text.
"Delivering Happiness" is explicitly about delivering happiness. The subtext or implicit story is about someone who could not find happiness for himself. It's worth re-reading in the context of his passing. RIP.
> put way too much focus (imho) on various nights and parties which don't really relate to entrepreneurship or business.
“Work hard, party hard” is an extremely common aspect of startup culture. I personally suspect that startups tend to draw in risk takers, which explains the prevalence of over-drinking in many (but not all) startups.
How is drinking risk taking? I was in groups that where drinking was super normalized and never ever perceived it to be dangerous. Plus, anxious fearful people do drink too, it makes them feel better.
I mean, I avoided drinking near to some specific individuals (I am woman), but I perceived those individuals to be unsafe. Drinking itself did not constituted risk taking for me.
It seems that Jewel wrote this in a letter warning him about his addiction.
“When you look around and realize that every single person around you is on your payroll, then you are in trouble." [1]
Not only in this particular tragedy, these are words to live by in general. We all need some neutral people around to provide an unbiased perspective so that we can make informed decisions.
As an aside: I hadn't bought anything off Zappos for years, and checked it out when the news hit and surprised that it still basically looks the same as I remember it maybe 10+ years ago. Certainly looks and feels like an eCommerce website from the late 2000s/early 2010s.
I'm curious if this was an intentional choice or a sign the website has been on cruise control since the acquisition. It certainly makes me wonder what Hsieh was doing as CEO as late as this summer either way, which is to say while he was certainly a pioneer in the 2000s I'm not sure what about Zappos in the 10+ years post-acquisition feels cutting edge.
Audible maintainted their pre-Amazon aquisiton site for quite some time as well. Their mobile app still has the same look and feel. Maybe this is a reflection of being aquired by Amazon?
I got a notice from Zappos some years ago about a security breach they suffered where customer information was exposed. In compensation, they offered a discount on next purchase. This offer of course had a relatively short time limit, not the same as a gift certficate or store credit. I never remember reading about this security breach publicly. Maybe I just missed it.
You buy shoes through amazon.com now (with fulfillment by Zappos). That's where all the development has gone. I get the feeling zappos.com is a dead end.
Yeah that makes sense, but then my question is why did Hsieh stay as CEO for that long in what was basically a dead end company within Amazon? It doesn’t seem like that is something someone like Hsieh would ever want to do, and yet he stayed there for a decade post acquisition.
It's the saddest article I have read in a while. Tony Hsieh was an amazing human being. The manner of his passing from the world does not take away from the good he did while alive.
Maybe sharing the circumstances of his death will also do some good if it encourages others with friends or loved ones who have mental illness to do something before it is too late.
One of my friends has been spiraling out of control for the past few months. I have tried and tried to help them. I'm going to keep trying.
Readit News
I came away from that tour with two distinct impressions: 1 - Zappos had an amazing company culture; everyone seemed to get along and really enjoy their work. 2 - Tony Hsieh had a surprisingly large collection of half-empty liquor bottles at his desk.
Tony's death is certainly a tragedy for his family and the communities he helped build. I hope even during this pandemic we can all maintain those key relationships in life that keep us in check.
Not just Tony.
My best friend used to work at Zappos. He used to brag to me that every employee/team gets their own mini-fridge, which is stocked with booze and liquor. He said that a common "bonding" experience for different teams in the company is to exchange different types of liquor. This was in early 2010s.
He said drinking on the job is common, but going overboard is discouraged (for obvious reasons). But even he admitted that Zappos clearly understood that in order to attract customer service people to the company (headquartered in Las Vegas), being able to drink on the job, i.e. during the day, would be a great recruitment tool.
I thought it was very cynical, although it obviously worked out well for them. Too bad about Tony though, I hear he was a great guy.
...and how many new addicts and mental illnesses are being created
quarantine and flattening the curve is important imo, but the way governments go about it is not. there needs to be a parallel campaign educating people about the effects of quarantine - which are well researched. Also I highly recommend reading up on the psychological effects incarceration has on felons.
Quarantined people aren't prisoners but there are parallels due to effects of isolation. Every re-socializing attempt of a prisoner even in the most "progressive" manner, has at its core idea to _first_ rob that person of their own agency.
Isolation opens up minds to new ideas and to cause them question everything. What minds are being fed in such a state is absolutely crucial to how they're reorienting themselves and what they latch on-to. Isolation breaks everyone except the hardest psychopaths, which is why it's used in every society (since earliest civilizations) as an instrument of control.
This lancet research paper isn't talking about felons but there are some hard to ignore parallels, maybe this is why politicians avoid the subject.
It's really not lost at all. Most people know about the secondary effects of the lockdown. Loss of jobs, loss of schooling, mental health effects. It's all front and center.
The math is simple. Without lockdowns, millions die, so we lockdown to some degree.
It's not that government officials are enacting lockdowns in a callous disregard of their negative effects, we simply have no other sane choice.
Around the world, we’re talking about millions of grieving people who have lost parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, .... Millions more people who struggled to stay breathing and may now suffer severe long-term (or maybe permanent) symptoms. Health care workers around the world who will have PTSD from harrowing shifts treating an extremely high load of unbelievably sick people for month after month. Etc.
In places with significant community spread, people are rightfully afraid that anything they do around other people is exposing them to significant risk of severe illness or death. Even people who take every precaution sometimes turn up sick, and the sources can be hard to trace. Dealing with that for months is extremely stressful.
All while a significant part of the population continued to blithely party on as if their actions had no consequences, and “leaders” baldly lie about it day after day, month after month.
If we want people to return to normal life feeling free and safe, then controlling the virus must be the #1 priority. Indeed, in places where the virus was controlled via strong leadership and community solidarity, life is nearly back to normal; in places where leadership was absent, it will continue to be a horror show for many more months.
If I remember right, the authors estimated the scenario as:
* Project 500K-750K excess deaths in the US until mass vaccine availability based on current public health practices (conservative/linear, ignoring exponentials involved)
* Someone dying generally has ~10 people close to them => half will experience ~depression for 1mo, 1 quarter for 2mo
* Something like 10-20% will have severe forms (major/ptsd/..)
* So something like 3 million people across all of above
That's a lot. Not quite as high as # of addicts in the US afaict, but up there. I could have easily got parts wrong, so worth going to the interview+article if you're truly interested.
They also have some articles on depression in elderly and other groups being especially impacted right now. Pretty real.
If it's the former, you should probably find some more reliable information sources. If it's the latter, truth and accuracy are a better counterpoint than taking the opposite extreme of misinformation.
The load of sick people is also not exceptionally high, at least not in the intensive wards (don't have data for normal hospitalizations).
Here in Germany we have daily updates on the number of ICUs in use. It shows Covid is only a fraction of the patients, even now only 10% despite of soaring infection numbers.
https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/zeitreihen
Until recently, I'd it was pretty clear that Sweden (no lock-downs) and the US (many lockdowns of varying length and enforcment) have suffered the same per capita fatality rate.
I don't know if I'd describe it as passively as "getting lost". Very visible people have been talking about it, including the outgoing President, who mentioned the mental health costs of lockdown multiple times. Leaving aside the fact that even true things that Trump says are discounted due to his lunacy, most people are too dim to understand the concept of trade-offs, so anything that gives "aid and comfort to the enemy" is systematically downplayed among most of those that are pro-Covid-restrictions (I say all of this as someone who think that restrictions have tragic costs but are necessary).
That is to say, the problem isn't that no one has thought of factoring this into decisions, it's that the discourse upstream of policy is driven largely by the majority of voters that don't actually care about pandemic policy as anything other than another wedge issue to fight pre-existing cultural/religious wars over.
Deleted Comment
[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/riverside-county-sheriff-sl...
It is sad that Tony Hsieh didn’t get the help that he needed and instead tried to self medicate in order to get away from all that. This recurrent story where extremely intelligent people are battling mental health issues and cannot speak out because the stigma behind this issue is too damaging is why we need to normalize the discourse around mental health if we want to avoid this type of tragedies. I’m not actively suffering (and am not as bright as Tony) but had some bouts of depression and hypomania in the past and know how afraid I was to let anyone official (eg. at work, school) know about my suffering because once out it always trails you like a cloud and will always deem you inferior to others. Luckily I was able to escape the black hole and have been good and calm for about 10 years and learned to never slip into that again. But there’s a remnant fear of a possibility of going back to it. Along with that there is the fear of falling begind, loosing job, becoming isolated and homelessness. This fear is clearly exacerbated in the US where one or a few slip-ups turns everything into an ever accelerating down-spiral. Tony had so much more to loose as his cliff was much higher than an ordinary person. He could have seeked professional help and he probably did but too late in the game. Had we not have this stigma around, he and others could get the help early on when much more could be done.
Self-medication with drugs works temporarily but its abuse is clearly a quick path to compelte madness and early death. I personally stay away from drugs except from an ocasional puff of weed, the once a decade or two experience with LSD and the weekend bottle of beer.
Rest in peace Tony, you will be missed
I think the help that may be missing is friends who are "lovingly firm" with him sooner. But it's easy to assume a billionaire is going to be fine and "tony is just being tony".
Dead Comment
Where exactly is the "stigma" of mental health in tech nowadays? We're blasted day and night to the point where apparently every other person is "battling mental health issues".
Maybe there's a deeper issue here than "stigma" and seeing overpriced therapists.
I mean hell, it’s tough enough being sentient and dealing with mortality, throw in social issues, politics, propaganda, conspiracies, lack of health care, lack of social safety nets, caring for dependents, dating, paying bills, social media, “Instagram culture,” and a god damn pandemic. It’s rough out there.
I tend to agree that the issue isn’t discourse, but that Discourse alone won’t fix the problem.
You seem to have a particularly skeptical view though doubting stigma and casting doubt into therapy as well. Your comment is actually a perfect example of stigma.
I’ve struggled with anxiety before and saw a therapist for a while and benefited greatly from it. It was expensive, sure, but not over priced. Less hourly than I make.
I didn’t really talk about it much at work, but I am open about it now.
On top of that, there are less stigma towards certain aspects of mental health and more towards others. I believe anxiety, like I mentioned for myself, is becoming a more commonly discussed topic, but depression or bipolar, for example, still carry stigma that push people into facing these things alone.
Dead Comment
I read his book "Delivering Happiness" after I heard about his death and before reading this article about mental health problems. As I read it I saw some interesting stories and ideas about the businesses that he built but I also read stories which put way too much focus (imho) on various nights and parties which don't really relate to entrepreneurship or business. The first thing that popped into my mind is depression, drugs and alcohol overuse.
Same. A shadow story that eclipses the text.
"Delivering Happiness" is explicitly about delivering happiness. The subtext or implicit story is about someone who could not find happiness for himself. It's worth re-reading in the context of his passing. RIP.
“Work hard, party hard” is an extremely common aspect of startup culture. I personally suspect that startups tend to draw in risk takers, which explains the prevalence of over-drinking in many (but not all) startups.
I mean, I avoided drinking near to some specific individuals (I am woman), but I perceived those individuals to be unsafe. Drinking itself did not constituted risk taking for me.
To some extend, but startup events generally combine exactly those things (without the drugs, depending on where it is).
“When you look around and realize that every single person around you is on your payroll, then you are in trouble." [1]
Not only in this particular tragedy, these are words to live by in general. We all need some neutral people around to provide an unbiased perspective so that we can make informed decisions.
[1] https://people.com/music/jewel-wrote-to-tony-hsieh-before-hi...
I'm curious if this was an intentional choice or a sign the website has been on cruise control since the acquisition. It certainly makes me wonder what Hsieh was doing as CEO as late as this summer either way, which is to say while he was certainly a pioneer in the 2000s I'm not sure what about Zappos in the 10+ years post-acquisition feels cutting edge.
One of my friends has been spiraling out of control for the past few months. I have tried and tried to help them. I'm going to keep trying.
Dead Comment