Description

Wonder Boy is a riveting investigation into the turbulent life of Zappos visionary Tony Hsieh, whose radical business strategies revolutionized both the tech world and corporate culture, based on rigorous research and reporting by two seasoned journalists.

Tony Hsieh’s first successful venture was in middle school, selling personalized buttons. At Harvard, he made a profit compiling and selling study guides. In 1998, Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million. About a decade later, he sold online shoe empire Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion.

The secret to his success? Making his employees happy.

At its peak, Zappos’s employee-friendly culture was so famous across the tech industry that it became one of the hardest companies to get hired at, and CEOs from other companies regularly toured the headquarters. But Hsieh’s vision for change didn’t stop with corporate culture: Hsieh went on to move Zappos headquarters to Las Vegas and personally funded a nine-figure campaign to revitalize the city’s historic downtown area. There, he could be found living in an Airstream and chatting up the locals. But Hsieh’s forays into community-revival projects spun out of control as his issues with mental health and addiction ramped up, creating the opportunity for more enablers than friends to stand in his mercurial good graces.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with a wide range of people whose lives Hsieh touched, journalists Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans craft a rich portrait of a man who was plagued by the pressure to succeed but who never lost his generous spirit.

Publisher Review

A story of the extraordinary business success of Tony Hsieh. In this cautionary tale, reporters Au-Yeung and Jeans unsparingly shed light on what went wrong. -- Financial Times * Best Summer Books of 2023 * A heartbreaking and extraordinary account of a heartbreaking and extraordinary man. Hsieh was an innovative business leader, but he was also frenetic, generous, difficult, and tormented. His rise and fall is a quintessential American tragedy. -- Max Chafkin * author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power * A captivating story about the combustible mixture of genius, ambition, ego, empathy, wealth, and intoxicants in the turbocharged environment of the technology elite. Revelatory and entertaining. -- Alec Ross * author of The Raging 2020s * Wonder Boy is so much more than a biography... it's full of lessons for anyone interested in psychology, business, or social dynamics. Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans approach their subject as investigative reporters, yet they remain full of empathy and compassion. -- Dan Alexander * author of White House, Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business *