Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley

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.)