There's a lot of bad news going on right now so it seems a little weird to focus on one person, but genuinely gutted to hear about Tony Hsieh.

I never met the guy. But the way he just went out there & decided to do right by the people you're doing things for, instead of having an adversarial relationship with customers, was a Big Deal for me.

Thanks in part to Hsieh's work with Zappo's, I started asking "What if we approached agriculture that way?"

What if instead of fussing about how their customers don't understand them, farmers asked "What do people want & how do we make it happen?"

The conventional wisdom in agriculture, just like a lot of online retail at the time, was you win by cutting costs. Period. Not by making friends.

Making sure people had a good experience with you just wasn't really part of the universe.

And like, I get it. Customer service sounds like a basic part of business but it's actually really, really hard.

He didn't back away from that. He dug tf in and got 'er done- when a lot of people thought "giving a good customer experience online" just wasn't doable.

Years ago I was starting to see a lot of the same problems in ag. The fatalism there is even worse than it was in online retail in his time.

Tony Hsieh helped make it possible for me to think "Yeah, we actually can do better than this." That there's a point to giving a shit.

I had a real crisis for a while where I was starting to think I crazy for thinking it could and should be different. Like, DS9 Far Beyond The Stars-level meltdown.

(This is, unfortunately, a common experience for people who work in agriculture.)

Even though he was in a very different field, Hsieh was someone I could point to as having broken the mold by giving a shit- *and it actually worked.* Not a long time ago, but now.

In a way he helped make some things real for me, in a time when I really needed that.

Anyway. In general it's not a great idea to have heroes. But Tony was a real one.

Best wishes to his family in a difficult time, and here's to his work living on.

#tonyhsieh