Tony Hsieh, who became a frequently quoted and studied management guru by persuading millions of people to buy shoes online through Zappos, died Friday at the age of 46, one of his companies, DTP Cos., said.

The company didn’t provide a cause of death, but the Associated Press cited reports that he had been injured in a house fire while visiting Connecticut.

The Harvard-educated son of immigrants from Taiwan was in his early 20s a co-founder of an online ad company, Link Exchange. He reaped about $40 million when that company was sold to Microsoft in 1998.

The next year he invested in what became Zappos and later became chief executive. Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for more than $1 billion.

Mr. Hsieh (whose name is pronounced shay) recently retired as chief executive of Zappos.

In the early days of Zappos, he and his colleagues had to overcome deep customer doubts about buying shoes without trying them on first. Zappos cleared that hurdle by offering free shipping and free returns.

FROM THE ARCHIVES
Zappos CEO Distances Shoe Retailer’s Culture From Amazon (Oct. 20, 2015)
At Zappos, Banishing the Bosses Brings Confusion (May 20, 2015)
Amazon was so impressed by Mr. Hsieh’s management style that it let Zappos operate as an autonomous subsidiary.

Mr. Hsieh, whose 2010 book “Delivering Happiness” was a bestseller, became known for management experiments that struck some as visionary and others as wacky. Among the company’s 10 core values was “Create Fun and a Little Weirdness.” One of its conference rooms featured a pit filled with small plastic balls.

In 2013, Zappos began experimenting with a management philosophy called Holacracy, in which titles and bosses are eliminated. Many employees found it baffling. When Zappos offered severance in 2015 for those who wanted to leave, 14% accepted the offer.

Mr. Hsieh was born in Illinois, where his Taiwan-born parents were graduate students. When he was 5, the family moved to the Lucas Valley area of Marin County, Calif. His mother was a social worker, and his father a chemical engineer at Chevron Corp.

At age 9, he showed entrepreneurial drive by persuading his parents to pay $33 for a box of dirt containing at least 100 earthworms. His idea was to create a worm farm in his backyard and sell his slithering product to the public. He buried chicken wire in an effort to keep his worms from escaping and fed them with raw egg yolks. After a month, he discovered they had all escaped.

“I was only allowed to watch one hour of TV every week,” he wrote in his memoir, “and I was expected to get straight A’s.” His SAT training began in sixth grade. His parents also required him to take piano and violin lessons. To make them think he was practicing, he recorded practice sessions and played them back early on weekend mornings.

His mother hoped he would go to medical school or earn a Ph.D. He preferred the idea of going into business so he would be free to do whatever he pleased.

As a teenager he delivered newspapers but quit after calculating that he was making only about $2 an hour.

In the magazine Boy’s Life, he found an ad for a $50 kit that could make pin-on photo buttons and persuaded his parents to buy the device. He advertised the service and soon was making about $200 a month through mail orders. The venture persuaded him, he wrote later, that he could run a successful business with no face-to-face contacts.

He later spent $800 for a Boy’s Life ad offering to sell magic-trick kits for $10 apiece. He received one order and wrote the venture off as a lesson in humility.

In high school, he signed up for a Pascal computer-programming course and hung out in the computer lab. Soon he was making $15 an hour from a programming company. To get more free time, he wrote, “I started making deals with my teachers in which they agreed to let me not attend their classes as long as I did well on their tests.” When one teacher assigned him to write a sonnet, he decided the iambic pentameter form was too complicated and instead wrote 14 lines in Morse code. The teacher gave him an A+.

At Harvard, he studied computer science and generally tried to do the smallest amount of school work required for decent grades while earning money through computer programming and managing a student diner. He signed up for Mandarin because he already knew how to speak it.

After graduating, he joined Oracle Corp. in 1995 and was trained in database programming. Five months later, he quit to focus on a business he and a Harvard classmate, Sanjay Madan, had started to create websites for companies. Quickly bored by that business, they transformed it into the Link Exchange internet ad service, based in San Francisco, and attracted funding from Sequoia Capital.

Within two years, Mr. Hsieh was bored by that business and agreed to sell it to Microsoft. To celebrate, he took about 15 friends on a three-day Caribbean cruise.

Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


(No link as the article is behind a paywall)

no matter what we have - or don't have - we're all living on borrowed time

RIP Mr Hsieh

I respect the heck out of guys like that. Plenty of people can have 'one Act' of success and never achieve that level again.

He sounds like the kind of guy who figured out a way to 'win' in most of his endeavors -- but learned a lot from the few that didn't pan out.

The American Dream.

-----------------------------------------

HOLY SHit@!

My youngest daughter worked for Zappos in its infancy.

I honestly thought it the dumbest thing on the internet until she explained to me, she could order five pair of shoes, have them delivered, wear them each for an hour or so to verify fit and, return what she doesn't like.

As my daughter put it, it's a girl's best dream.

Waiting for details as my texts messages have been blowing up.

I knew him of him and got to know the first handful of Zappos employees back in the 90's when they operated out of the house on 9th Ave between Irving and Judah in San Francisco. They grew fast, moved a bit and had their ups & downs, especially with their distribution center; they got things straightened out and eventually sold it to Amazon. Some of my friends now are nearing 20-years with the company and have been compensated very nicely.

Hsieh liked to party, the Vegas move was natural, he loved his Grey Goose vodka, he should've been sponsored; every trip to their offices you ended up having to detox with the amount of drinking they did. All their buyers were solid, party-hard, business-hard was their thing, great to do business with. They'd have several big parties every year, each one was epically huge, big name acts, crazy themes...good times. Its strongly rumored that the opening tiger scene in the movie The Hangover, was inspired by a Zappos penthouse party where they had penguins roaming around the partiers.

Interesting guy and company. Knew one of the lead HR Recruiters there circa 2010. They were doing the management style noted above. It also included a one time offer of severance at the six month or year mark. It was a significant lump sum offer. Theory being they only wanted those fully drinking the kool aide to stay.
Tony did a lot of good for the old downtown Vegas area.
Bit of a Socialist mentality but he did move the company from Kali to Nevada. I suspect largely for tax reasons.
Strange death. I’ll be interested to see if any additional details emerge.

Sounds like the fire itself got him. No idea how or why though.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/f...es-at-46-11606572300

During my time as a cop, there were several fatal fires on my beat. Some of these fires looked to be survivable so I looked into the autopsies for true causes of death.
Alcohol was a factor. Too intoxicated to escape.
I had an uncle who died in this exact way.
I obviously cant say if that was a factor in this death but given what has been said about how he lived, it is a possibility.
Amazing drive for success! R.I.P.

Live hard, die hard.

If the shoe fits, wear it.

I read his book quite some time ago. I respected him.

Wow, same age as I am. Way too early.

Pretty cool guy with some impressive accomplishments.

What a great run he had. We need more like him, not less. The Vegas project was visionary. A lot of young men would have all but retired with that Zappos money. Sad to see that ending. Anyone have details on the Connecticut house fire?

quote:

Originally posted by jimb888:
What a great run he had. We need more like him, not less. The Vegas project was visionary. A lot of young men would have all but retired with that Zappos money. Sad to see that ending. Anyone have details on the Connecticut house fire?

Article I saw says it happened 11-18 at 3 am. House belongs to a friend/coworker.

I was in the shoe business. We were one of the first major brands to sign up after working with Tony directly. When we met him we knew he would accomplish great things.

An an interesting aside, Tony lived full time in an Airstream camper.

RIP

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Interesting thanks for sharing.

Zappos would offer all new hires one months pay to quit. Tony felt this insured employees that passed on the offer were dedicated. Pretty revolutionary.

AS VEGAS -- There are growing questions about the death of former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

He passed more than a week after being pulled from a burning Connecticut home and new images from the scene are adding to the mystery.

Pictures from the Dailymail.com show no damage to the front of the home.

In the back, there was no major damage seen to the storage unit where the first responders found the billionaire entrepreneur trapped.

The only sign of a fire was darkening on the top corner of one of the storage unit doors.

A first responder can be heard on radio saying, "Reporting fire in a building. one person stuck inside."

The fire happened in the early morning hours of November 18.

According to police, Hseih was locked inside the storage area at the back of the home when firefighters arrived.

On radio, a first responder said, "The male is barricaded inside, and he is not answering the door. Everyone else is outside the house; they're trying to get him to open up."

Another responder said, "We got a report of a person trapped. Make sure our paramedics are responding."

Hseih was rushed to a hospital with severe injuries before being transferred to a burn center.

The medical examiner ruled his death an accident, attributing it to smoke inhalation. The cause of the fire still under investigation.

Hsieh was known as "the most unconventional boss in America."

He lived in a 240 square foot trailer in downtown Las Vegas with his pet alpaca, Marley, with the Zappos headquarters just blocks away.

In 2009, the Harvard grad sold the online shoe retailer to Amazon for $1.2 billion, but remained on as CEO until this past August.

https://6abc.com/tony-hsieh-za...o-dead-died/8444200/

Yeah.....Tony liked his Grey Goose and then some, very much. I'm not surprised that he would be dabbling with party drugs, especially after attending several Burning Man and SXSW festivals; I heard he had taken a liking to whippits.

He was forced out of his position as an Amazon executive around August I believe, he basically stopped showing up and participating. He didn't give a shit, he had 9-figures worth of value to his name.

^^^^^^^^^^
Speculation. Of course this is possible, but too predictable of a genius. This man would make an interesting psycholgical study. I am hoping an indepth study of people who were close to him over the years, not some TV movie. Suffering severe burns is a hell of a way to die. I think we are all guilty of having things wrapped up in a few lines of print and blaming drugs and alcohol for someone's demise.