Oversee.net announced today that the CEO and of Zappos.com, Tony Hsieh, will be the keynote speaker at DomainFest being held on January 26-28, 2010, in Santa Monica, California.
Zappos.com was founded in 2000 and has grown to a $1 billion-a-year online retailer. The company was recognized by Fast Company magazine as one of the world’s 50 most innovative companies.
Hsieh and his team recently sold Zappos to Amazon.com for more than $850 million. (However, since this was a largely all stock transaction, the price is actually higher, as the shares of Amazon.com are higher than they were went the deal was announced).
Hsieh, a 35-year-old Harvard graduate, built the Web advertising company LinkExchange into a multi-million dollar enterprise before selling it to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998.
He recently purchased Clothes.com for $4.9 million, again signaling his understanding of the connection between Internet real estate, marketing and brand power.
“We’re delighted to have Tony Hsieh join us as keynote speaker at our 2010 event,” said Oversee CEO and President Jeff Kupietzky. “His fresh thinking, insights related to online consumer behaviors and needs, and intelligent risk-taking have set new standards for how to succeed in e-commerce. DOMAINfest has always been a breeding ground for new ideas on how get the most out of a domain name investment, so Tony’s fireside chat will provide our guests with plenty of innovative ideas and inspiration.”
Tony is a real inspiration and will be a treat to hear. A back story: Tony beat Rick Schwartz out of Drugs.com by a hair at a time when he started a venture company to buy domains with the windfall from the Microsoft deal. One day he got a voice message from a guy with a generic named shoe biz, pitching the idea that most people leave a shoe store unsatisfied, unable to find their size or color and that even though naysayers say people won’t buy a product online that they can’t try on, they had found away to offer free shipping both ways on purchase and return and overcome the objection. He quickly flipped drugs.com and applied the proceeds to Zappos. Full story:
http://fragerfactor.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-rick-schwartz-lost-auction-bid-that.html
good info Owen…should be a great keynote.
Just for the record. It was my impromptu idea that morning to organize and bid on Drugs.com but it was on behalf of many of the original Rick’s Board members. I was just in for the most $$$ once the bidding reached those levels.
Tony is speaking at a conference now and a guy is tweeting the speech highlights live- (spoiler alert though)
http://twitter.com/ryanbuch