Entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, who recently sold online shoe and apparel retailer Zappos to Amazon.com in a $1 billion-plus deal, is out talking up Zappos' quirky corporate culture again. In a long Q&A with the New York Times, Hsieh talks about developing Zappos' 10 core values (example, "Create fun and a little weirdness.") He also reveals that the main reason he sold a previous company, LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998 was because he "dreaded" going into the office.

Hsieh says nothing about his new employer, Amazon.com.

He says the "real reason" he sold LinkExchange to Microsoft was that "the company culture just went completely downhill":

When it was starting out, when it was just 5 or 10 of us, it was like your typical dot-com. We were all really excited, working around the clock, sleeping under our desks, had no idea what day of the week it was. But we didn’t know any better and didn’t pay attention to company culture.

By the time we got to 100 people, even though we hired people with the right skill sets and experiences, I just dreaded getting out of bed in the morning and was hitting that snooze button over and over again.

Elsewhere, Hsieh talks about the unique culture he's fostered at Zappos — a place where employees decorate conference rooms like a log cabin. But one Zappos innovation, as described by Hsieh, struck me as a little creepy, and a possible fire hazard:

For example, for our offices in Las Vegas, it’s a big building. We’ve probably got 700 employees in Vegas. The previous tenants had multiple doors where you can exit, and the parking lot is in the back. We made the decision to actually lock all the doors so everyone has to go through the front-entrance reception area, even though that means you might have to walk all the way around the building. The reason for that is to create this kind of central hub that everyone has to pass through to help build community and culture.

The wacky atmosphere at Zappos appears to work wonders. As BusinessWeek noted in a recent article about the company, "pay for call-center operators starts at a modest $11 an hour, and there are no bonuses or 401(k) matching contributions because Hsieh believes the most productive employees work for the psychic gratification in helping others."

The BusinessWeek article also noted that Zappos holds $4,000 seminars for business people on how to recreate its corporate culture. Perhaps Hsieh, who's made some non-committal noises about his future with Amazon, is planning to hit the lecture circuit and become a full-time business guru post-Amazon.

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