Amazon.com's announcement that it will acquire online shoe retailer Zappos was quickly followed by reports of tension between Zappos investor Sequoia Capital and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh over the fate of the company -- with Sequoia reportedly pushing for a sale and Hsieh wanting to keep the company independent. Now Hsieh has put out a statement calling those reports false, saying, "Nobody was forced to sell to Amazon."
Here's Hsieh's full statement via the Wall Street Journal Venture Capital Dispatch:
The articles and rumors of Sequoia forcing us to sell are simply not accurate. Nobody was forced to sell to Amazon. The Zappos board was united in believing that joining forces with Amazon would be in the best long term interests of our employees, customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders. The Amazon deal got us the best of all worlds: we can continue to run independently and grow the Zappos brand and culture, our small and larger investors are getting rewarded for all their contributions to Zappos over the last decade, and we don’t have to deal with the headache and overhead of running a public company.
A Zappos spokeswoman earlier declined a TechFlash request to interview Hsieh, citing the "quiet period" mandated by the SEC. She said the company isn't providing additional information beyond the email that Hsieh sent to employees the day the Amazon acquisition was announced.
The Zappos deal is the largest acquisition in Amazon's history. The mostly stock deal at one point yesterday looked like it might hit the $1 bilion mark in the wake of an Amazon share surge, but Amazon stock has come down following its Q2 earnings announcement yesterday, putting the Zappos deal at just under $900 million. Amazon reported a 10 percent drop in second-quarter profit and said sales were up 14 percent from the same quarter a year ago.
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