Hi Team,

As we embark on another ambitious year for Zappos Technology, let's remember to play our part in moving forward one of the company's most powerful assets and competitive differentiators - OUR CULTURE. Moving our culture forward entails engaging with departments outside technology as much as engaging with teams inside the technology department. Our culture provides the platform for friendships across teams and departments which then enables seamless communication without the bureaucracy found in larger companies. I'm happy to share how Zappos Tech will be owning and driving various cultural events and projects in 2011 – your participation and engagement in these events would be welcomed!

1. The 8000M challenge – I made the mistake of telling Brent that I would actually do the 8000M challenge if he agreed to lead it – well, he's leading it and I will be doing the 8000M challenge. Hope to see many of you participate!

2. The Rube Goldberg Machine – Dave Fong will lead getting the company involved in the creation of a very fun Rube Goldberg machine!

3. The Pinewood Derby – Frank Zaffino and team are leading this and we expect this to be a fun event in March!

This is in addition to various cultural events like Hackathons, Tech Lunch n Learns, Minute to Win-its, the donut eating contests, the breakfast club for Finance, and more…

Additionally, tech will be enabling and/or driving various cultural projects including the evolution of the face game, the next versions of Wishez and moving the zepic hackathon project forward. 

Let's continue to solidify technology's reputation as an incredible innovation, execution and operational team by leveraging our technical skills and our cultural platform to WOW and deliver happiness to everyone around us!!

arun

Hi Team – welcome to the final Technology Newsletter for 2010! WOW - what a year this has been! As we discussed at tech all hands, we've had incredible successes by over-delivering on the roadmap and doing a spectacular job running a robust technology operation. There were many naysayers when we laid out our goals for the year but this team has collectively proven that we DELIVER ON OUR COMMITMENTS regardless of the difficulty or complexity of those commitments! We are in the midst of a very heavy peak season and it is clear that our work has paid off – a rock solid, error free and super fast website (our technology handled a $12.8M day flawlessly!) , an array of website features, unprecedented visibility into our business for merchandising and finance via the EDW, our ability to respond quickly to business changes via tools like Baffin and the Drools Rules Engine, APIs that have enabled us to deliver our ipad and iphone apps in record time, our newly minted category agnostic technology platform (away from a shoe centric platform) aka sizing, that takes findability/customer experience to the next level and so much more…

We go into 2011 with great confidence that we can take on any challenge that comes our way!! Our 2011 roadmap is being worked on by team members from all departments across technology in partnership with business teams – look for this to be published in the coming weeks!

Once again, I want to convey my most sincere thanks to this team that has gone above and beyond to deliver a spectacular 2010 for the Zappos Family– here's to an even more spectacular 2011!

Thank you and HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Arun