I meet Hsieh on the 23rd floor of a brand-new apartment building that overlooks the future Zappos headquarters. Hsieh moved here in May and rented 25 apartments, at a rate of roughly $35,000 per month. He has taken three of the apartments for himself, knocking down the walls to create a single, 5,000-square-foot residence; turned two into an office for the Downtown Project; and kept the other 20 to put up visitors he is pitching on Las Vegas. (The week before, he had flown in the education entrepreneur Sal Khan on one of the JetSuite planes and put him up gratis to try to persuade him to open a school downtown.)
Hsieh has made a number of improvements to his own living quarters. He hired an urban gardener to cover every square inch of wall space in a living room with plants. ("We have to see if this smell lasts," Hsieh says, referring to the lingering scent of fertilizer.) He also installed, apparently for parties, a machine that spits out pancakes at a rate of one every few seconds and another that produces instant mashed potatoes.
When I arrive, four young people from Hsieh's favorite band, Rabbit, are eating TV dinners and messing around with the mashed-potato machine. The band, which hails from Mount Dora, Florida, is getting ready for an acoustic show at Zappos's offices for the two dozen or so employees working the graveyard shift in the company's call center. After more than a decade of business success, a best-selling book, and hundreds of millions of dollars of accumulated wealth, Hsieh can call on favors from celebrities-;he's friendly with Tyra Banks, Ivanka Trump, and Tony Robbins-;but his favorite band hasn't been anywhere near a major music festival or TV talk show. Rabbit's biggest fans, besides happiness-obsessed multimillionaires, are children under 7. (Sample lyric: "And we'll laugh and run/ 'Til the whole day is done/ I'm having way too much fun/ With my imagination.")
We board a luxury bus with the logo of his book, Delivering Happiness-;a giant smiley-face emoticon-;and head out to the Zappos offices in Henderson for the show. (Hsieh bought the bus, which was previously used by the bassist for the Dave Matthews Band, for his 2010 book tour and hasn't had the heart to give it up.) After an introduction from Hsieh-;he informs the crowd that it is in the presence of the band responsible for Zappos's hold music-;Rabbit plays four songs, and then most of the graveyard shift piles onto the bus to head downtown to continue the festivities.
Hsieh has put on dozens of similar events, at his own expense, to try to get his employees excited about the move downtown. "I look at the move as a challenge and an opportunity," says Augusta Scott, 61, who started answering phones in the Zappos call center in 2007 and now serves as the company's in-house life coach. Scott had never spent much time downtown, but she began exploring after the move was announced. In October, she and her Chihuahua, Holli, left their suburban home and moved into an apartment on the same floor as Hsieh. "People say it must be stressful being right down the hall from Tony," says Scott. "I don't see it like that. It's like being with my family."
If Zappos employees are beginning to come around to Hsieh's plans, it is less clear if Las Vegas, in all its transient, libertine glory, is ready for Zappos. "Some part of me doesn't trust what he's doing yet," says John Curtas, an attorney and part-time restaurant critic who lives a mile and a half from the new Zappos headquarters. Curtas, who has watched the city of Las Vegas attempt and fail at one redevelopment project after another, worries that Zappos will overwhelm the nascent pockets of urban activity, turning downtown into a glorified corporate campus. Still, Curtas admits, "as much as I'm afraid Zappos is going to Disney-fy the area, it's got nowhere to go but up."
Hsieh's sudden embrace of the city seemed to come out of nowhere, even to those who had spent years trying to develop the struggling downtown. Andrew Donner, the founder of Resort Gaming Group, the real estate concern that has agreed to purchase city hall and that will serve as Zappos's landlord, told me that he found Hsieh mystifying when he took him on a tour of downtown. "He said, 'It'd be cool to put a ski slope there,'" Donner recalls. "I'm like, 'What are you talking about?' But he wasn't laughing." Eventually, Donner came around, if not to the ski slope, at least to the idea that Tony Hsieh's imagination and sizable bank account might be good things for the city.
Rabbit was to play another show at the Downtown Cocktail Room the following evening, a Friday night, but a few hours before, I found Hsieh hanging out alone in his apartment. He was thinking about the corner of Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard, which does not, as yet, have a tenant. "I think this place needs more daytime hubs," he says, standing on a south-facing balcony. The hazy, fantastical mass of lights and spires that is the Strip was visible in the distance, but he directed my gaze downward, to a drab two-story structure with papered-over windows and a "For Sale" sign. "Some people think it'd be a great live-music venue, which it would be," he says. "But strategically, I just think that the first couple of years a bookstore would help the area more." He doesn't know who would run the bookstore or who would pay for it, but he isn't worried about that. If he can't find someone who is passionate about bookstores, he'll do it himself.
We turn around and go inside, facing the wall of Post-it notes. I ask him which idea he's most excited about. "It's not any one thing," he says. "I guess what I'm most excited about is integrating it and bringing people together and making it easy for people who are passionate about it to make it happen. I'd rather just help arrange the different pieces together."
Hsieh brings up a $50 million apartment complex he's hoping to build, which he says will be inspired by a college dormitory. It's going to be within walking distance from where we are standing-;to take advantage of rock-bottom real estate prices-;and, he says, "filled with friends."
"Do you think your whole career has been about trying to re-create college?" I ask. Hsieh often speaks with nostalgia about one of the first businesses he started, making and selling pizzas out of his Harvard dorm.
He pauses and thinks about the question. "Maybe in some ways," Hsieh says. "It's less about trying to re-create that period of my life. It's just that college is the only example I can think of where you have that social connection and where someone can just come up with an idea-;to start a club or whatever-;and just do it.
"People," he says, "lose that sense of anything is possible when they grow up."
