In Wonder Boy, Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans have delivered a heartbreaking and extraordinary account of a heartbreaking and extraordinary man. Tony Hsieh was an innovative business leader, but he was also frenetic, generous, difficult, and tormented. His rise and fall is a quintessential American tragedy—one that their thorough reporting captures movingly.”
—Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power
“Wonder Boy is a captivating story about the combustible mixture of genius, ambition, ego, empathy, wealth and intoxicants in the turbocharged environment of the technology elite. Au-Yeung and Jeans bring us deep inside the world of Tony Hsieh in a way that is both revelatory and entertaining.”
—Alec Ross, author of The Raging 2020s
“Wonder Boy is so much more than a biography. Sure, it tells the story of Tony Hseih’s life, but 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
“Au-Yeung and Jeans’s empathetic portrait is as enthralling as it is achingly sad, combining rich research with a propulsive novelistic style. Readers will have a hard time putting this down.”
—Publishers Weekly, *starred review*
“A somber rags-to-riches, genius-to-madness story…of entrepreneurial brilliance laid low.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Authors Au-Yeung and Jeans crafted [Tony Hsieh’s] life story from 150 interviews and various other materials. This book tells of a boy who, from a young age, was obsessed with making money, becoming a young man who took Silicon Valley by storm…until his mysterious and untimely death. Readers will find his story captivating and inspiring.”
—Booklist
★ 02/20/2023
Journalists Au-Yeung and Jeans debut with a nuanced, sympathetic biography of Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, tracing his life from Silicon Valley wunderkind through his spiraling addiction and death in 2020. Hsieh was raised in Northern California by Taiwanese immigrant parents, and from an early age he showed a penchant for moneymaking schemes that included starting his own newspaper while he was in middle school. After a Harvard career marked by intense study and sobriety, he created LinkExchange, which brokered the sale of advertising space on small businesses’ websites, and began partying. The authors cover Hsieh’s founding of Zappos in 1999 and his decision to move the company to Las Vegas and later sell to Amazon, but the most affecting material covers Hsieh’s worsening addictions and mental illness. They suggest Hsieh’s childlike earnestness and desire to be a “man of the people” disintegrated into grandiosity and delusion as he began using ketamine and became insulated from the interventions of friends and family by yes men on his payroll, until he died in a fire at age 46, when the Connecticut storage shed where he’d holed up burned down. Au-Yeung and Jeans’s empathetic portrait is as enthralling as it is achingly sad, combining rich research with a propulsive novelistic style. Readers will have a hard time putting this down. (Apr.)
06/02/2023
Wall Street Journal reporter Au-Yeung and Forbes investigative reporter Jeans have written a convincing account of the life and work of the late Tony Hsieh. Based upon the hundreds of interviews they conducted, along with other sources, their book paints a complex picture of Hsieh, best known for his online shoe store Zappos, his effort to revive downtown Las Vegas, and his book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, which discusses his distinctive—revolutionary at the time—business philosophy. He believed making employees happy would compel them to make customers happy, who would keep returning for more. As a result, Zappos became one of the most sought-after places in which to get hired. In 2013, Hsieh moved the Zappos headquarters from Henderson, NV, to Las Vegas, where he tried to apply these same principles. This meant, in part, partying hard and using alcohol and drugs. He eventually fell prey to drug addiction, mental illness, and struggling with sleep deprivation and loneliness before his death in 2020. VERDICT Recommended for business collections and to those considering entrepreneurship or applying Hsieh's business philosophy.—Shmuel Ben-Gad
Kurt Kanazawa presents this absorbing story of the initial success and later downward spiral of Tony Hsieh, tech founder and former CEO of Zappos. Kanazawa's youthful tone and vocal energy connect with Hsieh's wealth and celebrity status without glossing over his descent into drugs, alcohol, and mental health problems. The authors have a gift for colorful scene descriptions, astute character portrayals, and keen insights about Silicon Valley culture. They capture the angst of the challenges Hsieh faced in the U.S. as the oldest son of demanding Taiwanese parents, raising questions that make listeners think rather than providing pat conclusions. Listeners will also appreciate the authors' understanding of Hsieh's outsider status and his lifelong pattern of alternating slick efforts to fit in and creative rebellion against American social and institutional conventions. T.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kurt Kanazawa presents this absorbing story of the initial success and later downward spiral of Tony Hsieh, tech founder and former CEO of Zappos. Kanazawa's youthful tone and vocal energy connect with Hsieh's wealth and celebrity status without glossing over his descent into drugs, alcohol, and mental health problems. The authors have a gift for colorful scene descriptions, astute character portrayals, and keen insights about Silicon Valley culture. They capture the angst of the challenges Hsieh faced in the U.S. as the oldest son of demanding Taiwanese parents, raising questions that make listeners think rather than providing pat conclusions. Listeners will also appreciate the authors' understanding of Hsieh's outsider status and his lifelong pattern of alternating slick efforts to fit in and creative rebellion against American social and institutional conventions. T.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
2023-01-19
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.
