TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Tony Hsieh didn’t want to sell Zappos to Amazon, but had little choice because of Sequoia Capital’s investment:

By early 2009, we were at a stalemate. Because of a complicated legal structure, I effectively controlled the majority of the common shares, so that the board couldn’t force a sale of the company. But on the five-person board, only two of us — Alfred Lin, our CFO and COO, and myself — were completely committed to Zappos’s culture. This made it likely that if the economy didn’t improve, the board would fire me and hire a new CEO who was concerned only with maximizing profits.

That is Sequoia’s choice of course (it is their investment), but it does not mean trying to squeeze every last dollar out of one of the best companies in the last decade is the right thing to do.