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Wonder Boy: The Rapid Rise And Tragic Fall Of Tony Hsieh

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Silicon Valley boom and bust stories have a similar trajectory and feel, from a supercharged product launch to the latest misfortune, or even jail time. They lend themselves more and more to creepy screen adaptations. Wonder Boy, it will also reportedly get the feature film treatment. But where the tales of excess in, say, Theranos either We work had elements of comedy, the story of businessman Tony Hsieh should play like a tragedy.

That was the opposite of his intention. From his earliest business ventures, Hsieh (pronounced “shay”) set happiness, rather than wealth, as his goal. Even so, by the time he was 25, he had put down $32 million from the sale of a start-up company. Suddenly, and as it turned out fatally, he had the means to go after his target on a grand scale.

The first half of his story is about promise, hard work, risk-taking, and success, particularly as Hsieh directs his talent, wealth, and attention to building shoe retailer Zappos. He sold the business to Amazon in 2009 for $1.2 billion and delighted Jeff Bezos with his utter devotion to customer service and his happiness at work. Hsieh kept his CEO job and said the acquisition would leave his culture unchanged. He then went on to make it his mission to regenerate downtown Las Vegas, where Zappos is headquartered. And yet, her fame and success drew to her—men, enablers, con men, groupies, and gurus—and she died in 2020, aged 46, from injuries sustained in a preventable house fire while under the influence of the drugs.

Angel Au-Yeung (now at the Wall Street Journal) and David Jeans, the duo who investigated the aftermath of Hsieh’s death for Forbes, are not the first to explore what Hsieh was seeking to accomplish. Two Journal reporters, Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, wrote happy at any pricewhich covers similar ground and was published last year, while Aimee Groth focused on the failures of Hsieh’s Downtown Las Vegas Project in the kingdom of happiness (2017). Wonder Boy acknowledges a debt to both titles, as well as Hsieh’s much-publicized Delivering Happiness (2010).

Cover of the book 'Niño Maravilla'

Even as the world read glowing accounts of the revolution in workplace joy at Zappos (where Hsieh hired “engineers” to create parties and extravagant events for staff), its architect’s mental health was failing. Friends and family could not wean Hsieh off his dependence on alcohol, particularly shots of caustic Italian. digestive Fernet-Branca, as well as ketamine and, later, nitrous oxide. To compound the danger, Hsieh was working under the illusion that he was part of the “1 percent of people who can use these substances.”

Even some of the non-chemically induced highs were illusory. The success of Delivering Happiness It wasn’t all it seemed. A manic promotional tour of the US eventually brought some of Hsieh’s staff to the brink of burnout, and Au-Yeung and Jeans write that Hsieh used a company that helps authors reach the top of the charts. of best-selling books.

In the hard-to-read final chapters of Wonder Boy, Hsieh, and a selfish entourage hide out during the pandemic in Park City, Utah, in a sprawling nine-room ranch. Greedy supplicants cling to their far-fetched promises to finance ever more outlandish schemes, while the entrepreneur’s grip on reality loosens under the influence of a nitrous oxide addiction. “His bedroom looked like a homeless shelter,” Hsieh’s brother said later in a court statement. “There was feces on the floor. Plants in their bathrooms. Broken glass, broken dishes all over the floor. Rotten food under the bed. Rotten food on the walls. . . That was disgusting.”

Hsieh looks down from a podium in his chat with Newsom

Tony Hsieh and California Governor Gavin Newsom talk at a conference in Beverly Hills in 2012 © Danny Moloshok/Reuters

Hsieh had what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur. He was a precociously brilliant student. He was able to inspire friends, colleagues, and relative strangers simply by asking them, “If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?” He was not afraid to experiment with management methods, from a flat hierarchy, using the controversial method known as holacracy — to the benefits of “flow”a focused state of concentration.

Once it got out of hand, however, Hsieh took these radical but not uncommon ideas to dangerous extremes. He used his fortune to bribe people to follow his schemes and to exclude those who saw danger ahead. Wonder Boy makes a strong case that during Zappos’s heyday, such dangers were mitigated by input from two colleagues and close friends, who had formed a strong management “trifecta” with Hsieh, “keeping Tony’s chaos in check.” By 2014, both had left the company.

Hsieh once dreamed that Amazon would fall under the happiness spell he had cast on Zappos. Wonder Boy skimps a bit on that business relationship, which is covered in more detail in last year’s report happy at any price. What is clear, however, is that since Hsieh’s death, this magic seems even less likely to happen. Amazon has begun to take tighter control of Zappos, harmonizing some business practices and cutting jobs. Among those who departed, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, was the original Zappos fungiller.

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the myth of happiness in Silicon Valley by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans, Torva £16.99, 384 pages

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