Hsieh: Bezos Is Okay with Downtown Vegas Experiment
By Erin Griffith
On September 13, 2012
Jeff Bezos is on board with Tony Hsieh’s ambitious downtown Las Vegas project, even though Hsieh is spending a huge chunk of his time on it while still acting as CEO of Zappos. Says Hsieh: “The lucky thing is we’re a small enough part of Amazon where I think he thinks it’s worth the experiment,” he says.
The real question, though, is how much of that is because both Amazon and Zappos happen to be killing it lately. Zappos has exceeded $2 billion in sales, and after Amazon’s string of hardware announcements this week, Bezos is being hailed as the next Steve Jobs. If things went south, wouldn’t Bezos be less friendly to the Hsieh’s pet project?
“He thinks it’s a really interesting three and a half year experiment,” Hsieh says. Amazon itself has moved its headquarters in Seattle from a suburb to more of a frontier region.
Watch the clip from tonight’s PandoMonthly in San Francisco below:
Erin Griffith covers New York startups for PandoDaily. She's worked as staff writer for Adweek and a private equity blogger for peHUB. Her writing has appeared in VCJ, Time Out New York, Huffington Post, FT.com, and BUST. She plays keyboard in a band called Team Genius and Tweets as @Eringriffith.
