Tony Hsieh’s Mathematical Approach to Building an Incredible Network

Charlie Llewellin from Austin, USA / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)

Tony Hsieh isn’t your average entrepreneur.

He has started and sold a few companies, one of which was Link Exchange which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million back in 1998.

He was then the CEO of Zappos for 21 years, recently stepping away in August of 2020. During his tenure, he led the company to have one of the highest customer satisfaction rates and best corporate cultures.

But these accomplishments aren’t what make Hsieh an amazing entrepreneur. What truly sets him apart from so many other leaders is his unparalleled ability to make connections.

Most entrepreneurs spontaneously and sporadically meet new people. Their network grows almost accidentally. A smaller fraction of entrepreneurs have systems to help build their networks.

But Hsieh? He’s got a formula, a mathematical approach that elevates his ability to network to an almost unfathomable level.

He calls it “collision tracking,” and it’s a large piece of the reason why Hsieh and his businesses have been so iconic.

Collision hours

When Daniel Coyle, author of New York Times Best Seller Culture Code, went to Las Vegas to interview Hsieh, Tony took him around his renowned Downtown Project.

Coyle writes that while walking around, what impressed him most about Hsieh was his ability to move through groups of people and connect as he went.

“He had a connection with everyone, and more impressively, he sought to build connections between others. In the space of forty-five minutes, I saw him connect a movie director, a music-festival producer, an artist, the owner of a barbeque place, and three Zappos workers with someone they should talk to, a company they should check out, someone who shared their hobby, or an event they might be interested in.” — Daniel Coyle, Culture Code

For someone on the sidelines who has heard of Hsieh’s near-legendary ability to connect others, you might chalk up his success to characteristics like a great memory, high-extroversion, or a deep sense of humility.

Hsieh has these characteristics to some extent (he’s less extroverted than many people think). But what set’s apart his ability to network and connect with others isn’t any of these skills.

It’s his mathematical pursuit of what he calls collisions.

“Collisions — defined as serendipitous personal encounters — are, he believes, the lifeblood of any organization, the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion.” — Daniel Coyle

Hsieh doesn’t randomly hope to get into these collisions. That’s where his mathematical approach comes in.

He sets goals of how many collisions he wants to have each year and he tracks it, to the hour. Most years, his goal is to experience or have one thousand “collision hours.”

This metric has pushed Hsieh to make decisions that might seem counter-intuitive to most entrepreneurs. He doesn't try to isolate himself to stand out.

Instead, he fixates on the areas where he can facilitate overlap between people, organizations, and ideas. When he is able to create those spaces, those moments, that is when he is thriving and most alive.

Greenhouse effect

What makes Hsieh’s ability to network and connect so notorious is the way he makes people feel when he’s in the process of connecting them.

Matt Hunckler, CEO of Powderkeg, spent time with Hsieh at the Downtown Project and summed up his experience by saying: “It’s a magical experience to find yourself in a pocket of people who are passionate about what they are building.”

People walk away from spending time with Hsieh and are convinced that he cares more about their future possibilities than he does his own.

Daniel Coyle captured this idea when he interviewed Lisa Shufro, a Downtown Project staffer. She said,

“It’s kind of impossible to explain. You connect with all these people, and you don’t feel it in your head, you feel it in your stomach. It’s a feeling of possibility, and he (Hsieh) creates it wherever he goes.” — Lisa Shufro via Daniel Coyle, Culture Code

Hsieh creates this feeling of possibility not only by sticking to his mathematical approach of tracking “collisionable hours,” but also by keeping his mindset fixed on his ultimate purpose — what he calls being “the architect to the greenhouse.”

There are a lot of great leaders who create networks based on what they can do for people and what people can do for them. It’s the natural give-and-take method that most networks are built on.

Hsieh, however, sees it a tad bit differently.

During his time at Zappos, he viewed his role as constructing a greenhouse, a place where where other people can be planted, can find their happiness, and can thrive.

Hsieh focuses less on what he can take and more on what he can give. He doesn’t want to be the “the plant that every other plant aspires to.” He wants to architect his space so that others can expand their connections and develop their own burgeoning and overlapping networks.

As a result, he ends up getting more authentic connections than he would if he went out and just focused on networking on his own.

Incredible networks champion people

Neil Patel writes that “Zappos is all about happiness — happy employees and happy customers.”

In order to do this, Hsieh knew that his people and his culture would need a few key things: perceived control, perceived progress, future vision, and most importantly, connectedness.

Through his collisionable hours, Hsieh makes hundreds and thousands of people more informed, more inspired, and more incentivized to continue making connections.

His network is built from the ground up, and over the years, it has become one of the most immaculate examples of what selfless investment in others can bring about.