WONDER BOY

A somber rags-to-riches, genius-to-madness story.

Tony Hsieh (1973-2020), the founder of Zappos, was a born capitalist, making $200 per month in middle school with a machine that made pin-on badges. A natural introvert, he was committed to overcoming isolation and prejudice, emerging before his Harvard classmates as “a young man who was full of adventure and curiosity and was destined for greater things.” Some classmates stayed with him as he launched his first tech firm, a complicated brokerage for internet advertising that was successful enough that he was able to sell it to Microsoft for $265 million. He might have walked away and spent the rest of his life enjoying the wealth. However, as Wall Street Journal reporter Au-Yeung and Forbes investigative reporter Jeans write, Hsieh wanted to do something more, sinking most of his fortune into an endeavor based on the premise that, given the opportunity and the option of easy returns, customers would buy shoes online without trying them on for size. That led to Zappos, “first a customer service-oriented company, a shoe seller second—an ethos its new values set in stone.” After Amazon came calling, buying the company for $1.2 billion in 2009, Hsieh spun off into an effort to remake downtown Las Vegas into a business incubator while falling into a cycle of drug and alcohol abuse, shedding old friends and surrounding himself with people who were content to watch his self-destruction as long as they got a piece of the action. Said Hsieh to one old friend who tried to caution him, “If you don’t question me again, I’ll give you half my net worth.” The story has an inevitably tragic end, though the authors offset the self-doomed, mentally ill Hsieh’s downward spiral with his generosity and well-intentioned efforts to do well by doing good.

A readable, sobering study of entrepreneurial brilliance laid low.