Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley

In 1998, on the age of 24, Tony Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million.
In 2009, on the age of 35, he sold his e-commerce company, Zappos, to Amazon for $1.2 billion.
In 2020, on the age of 46, he died.

Tony Hsieh revolutionized both the tech world and corporate culture. He used to be a business visionary. He used to be also a man looking for happiness. So why did it all go so incorrect?

Tony Hsieh’s first successful venture used to be in middle school, selling personalized buttons. At Harvard, he made a profit compiling and selling study guides. From there, he went on to build the billion-dollar online shoe empire of Zappos.

The secret to his success? Making his employees happy.

At its peak, Zappos’s employee-friendly culture used to be so famous across the tech industry that it inspired copycats and earned a cult following. Then Hsieh moved the Zappos headquarters to Las Vegas, where he in my opinion funded a nine-figure campaign to revitalize the city’s historic downtown area. But as Hsieh fell deeper into his struggles with mental health and drug addiction, the people making up his inner circle started changing from friends to enablers.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with a variety of people whose lives Hsieh touched, journalists Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans craft a wealthy portrait of a man who used to be plagued by his eternal seek for happiness and in the long run succumbed to his own demons.