This has been a highlight of this second day at LeWeb 2009.

Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com, blew away the crowd this morning at LeWeb with an inspiring speech about meaning/purpose and happiness. A long applause followed his presentation.

Sebastien compiled a write-up of Tony’s talk here, some tasty bits on the real success factors in business today.

Zappos _ profits, passion, purpose

Citing from him again, go to his post for a more elaborate list, highlighting by me:

  • Hsieh says Zappos takes most of the money they would have invested in marketing and invests it in customer experience
  • The corporate culture is the number one priority. Zappos hires for culture [...]
  • They worry about customer happiness, employee happiness, vendor happiness
  • What separates great from good companies? Culture: committable core values [...]
  • Everyone should take a step back and ask what is your goal in life and the reasons why it’s your goal? and then you should ask why you answered that? and try it again.
  • [...] Meaning / higher purpose is the most sustainable way to reach happiness

[EN] Nothing that new for the regular “technology interested internet person” – but a nice list of topics, issues and predictions, especially on the real-time web, user-generated information and participation. See Eric Schmidt in this video:

Fine then that this year’s central theme of LeWeb ’09 is the real-time web. I am returning to LeWeb as an official blogger (that’s a disclosure, folks) and feel very honored to be part of this. And there’s a nice agenda too, great speakers (Danah Boyd!, Laura Fitton!, Marissa Mayer! et al.) – so I am looking forward to seeing old friends, and talking real-time about the real-time web.

If you want to join me at LeWeb, use the discount code BLOG09 for 10% off …

[DE] In 5 Wochen startet in Paris die mittlerweile sechste LeWeb, mit dem Schwerpunktthema Real-Time Web. Die Konferenz sieht vielversprechend aus, die englischsprachige Agenda ist hier, die Übersicht über die Speaker hier.

Wer auch dabei sein möchte kann mit dem Code BLOG09 einen 10%-Rabatt auf sein Ticket bekommen.