Linked List: November 28, 2020

Saturday, 28 November 2020

Om Malik:

Nick Swinmurn started Zappos in 1999, raised $500,000 in funding from Tony & Alfred. It was originally called Shoesite.com Tony later became CEO in 2000. Swinmurn left the company, in 2006. Amazon bought Zappos for $1.2 billion in 2009.

“Shoesite.com” is adorable. The name alone captures the ethos of that late ’90s “dot com” era. Of course the original name was just “shoesite.com”. And of course it still redirects to Zappos.

“I believe that getting the culture right is the most important thing a company can do.” —Tony Hsieh

I wrote about LinkExchange for Forbes, even though I never met Tony or Alfred till much later in life. My startup was housed in the same office as LinkExchange in SOMA through some strange twist of fate. I later got to know Tony socially through non-tech friends. Quiet, kind, quirky, but always open to the impossible.

With Tony’s passing, I feel something special has ended. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe a certain innocent aspect of the early possibilities of the Internet. Maybe I feel the contrast of those days to a now that is more mercenary, less friendly, and more polarized. Whatever, without knowing Tony as well as I should, I mourn him deeply.

“Zappos is a customer service company that just happens to sell shoes.” —Tony Hsieh

The outpouring of love and admiration for Hsieh from those who knew him is just remarkable.

About the Rosetta Translation Environment ★

Nice high-level overview from Apple’s developer documentation team. One pedantic note worth emphasizing (I made this mistake in my M1 MacBook Pro review) — Rosetta is translation, not emulation, and technically that’s a big deal:

To the user, Rosetta is mostly transparent. If an executable contains only Intel instructions, macOS automatically launches Rosetta and begins the translation process. When translation finishes, the system launches the translated executable in place of the original. However, the translation process takes time, so users might perceive that translated apps launch or run more slowly at times.

The system prefers to execute an app’s arm64 instructions on Apple silicon. If a binary includes both arm64 and x86_64 instructions, the user can tell the system to launch the app using Rosetta translation from the app’s Get Info window in the Finder. For example, a user might enable Rosetta translation to allow the app to run older plug-ins that don’t yet support the arm64 architecture.

Zappos Founder Tony Hsieh Dies at 46 ★

James Hagerty, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Tony Hsieh, who became a frequently quoted and studied management guru by persuading millions of people to buy shoes online through Zappos, died Friday at the age of 46, one of his companies, DTP Cos., said.

Mr. Hsieh died from injuries he sustained in a house fire on Nov. 18 in New London, Conn., said his attorney Puoy Premsrirut.

In response to questions about Mr. Hsieh’s death, Thomas Curcio, chief of the New London Fire Department, said firefighters were called to a burning waterfront home at 3:34 a.m. Nov. 18 for a report of someone trapped. Firefighters forced entry, removed the victim and started CPR, Chief Curcio said.

The victim, suffering from apparent burns and smoke inhalation, was taken by ambulance first to a local hospital before being flown to the Connecticut Burn Center in Bridgeport, Conn., officials said. The Connecticut state fire marshal’s office is investigating.

Just an awful tragedy.