The Kingdom of Happiness

Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia

By: Aimee Groth

Narrated by: Angela Brazil

In 2010 Tony Hsieh was introduced to many as a visionary modern business leader. Under Hsieh's leadership, Zappos became the world's largest online shoe company by championing satisfied customers and a valued workforce. After his company was purchased by Amazon, Hsieh turned his energies and considerable fortune toward a much larger goal: building a new and more socially conscious Silicon Valley in the heart of downtown Las Vegas, all within his five-year plan.

Hsieh challenged business and technology journalist Aimee Groth to uproot her life and be a participant in his social engineering experiment. Beginning with couch surfing, moving to a Downtown Project crash pad, and then living in Zappos corporate housing above the Gold Spike bar, Groth had a front-row view of Hsieh's efforts to build his ideal society.

With interviews from insiders on all ends of the Zappos spectrum - like the "broken dolls" who gravitate toward Hsieh's almost cultlike personality and make up his inner circle to the Zapponians who live and work on campus to players in the top echelon of Silicon Valley - Groth offers a unique view of a world few people know much about and sheds a new light on this complex, eccentric man. The Kingdom of Happiness is the story of one man's quest to create his own nirvana in the desert based on his exacting design, with lessons he's gleaned from rave culture and Burning Man. Is it the business model of the future or a cautionary tale of hubris?

©2017 Aimee Groth (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Mildly Interesting Book Marred by a Sub-par Reader

I was listening to an interview on NPR that featured Aimee Groth and her book about Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and Las Vegas's Downtown Project. As a resident of Las Vegas, I found the interview interesting and thought I might find the book interesting. I finally got the chance to listen to it, and it's . . . okay. Nothing special.

Groth focuses a lot on Zappos's business philosophy, holacracy. What starts out as a "ride along" into Zappos's move to Las Vegas and exploration of Hsieh's Downtown Project turns more into an exposé about Zappos's cultish atmosphere and Groth's disappointment in the dream Hsieh has tried to sell.

But at the end of the day, it feels like Groth is trying to create a story rather than just telling one. While I find Hsieh's business model interesting, there is also something that strikes me as a bit pretentious and immature about how that business model operates, almost like, "Look how different and innovative we are," when it ends up behaving in many ways like any other capitalist business model.

But aside from the content of the book (which was more interesting to me as a resident of Las Vegas than I think it would have been otherwise), the biggest flaw with the audio version of this book is Angela Brazil's robotic reading, which distracted incredibly from the book's content. When you overemphasize every syllable of every word, everything becomes unimportant. Why overstress articles and conjunctions? Why. Break up sentences. Into disjointed fragments? You might as well have had Siri or Alexa read this book. There is no flow. It's a disjointed mess. Very disappointing.