Tony Hsieh Net Worth

What was Tony Hsieh's Net Worth?

Tony Hsieh was an American entrepreneur, author, and venture capitalist who had a net worth of $850 million at the time of his death in 2020. Tony Hsieh is best known for transforming Zappos into one of the most influential e-commerce companies of its era and for redefining corporate culture in Silicon Valley. He began his entrepreneurial career shortly after graduating from Harvard, co-founding LinkExchange in the mid-1990s. The company quickly became one of the fastest-growing online advertising networks and was sold to Microsoft in 1998, giving Hsieh both financial independence and credibility as a tech founder at a young age.

After LinkExchange, Hsieh became involved with Zappos, an online shoe retailer that initially struggled to gain traction. He joined the company as an advisor and investor before stepping in as CEO. Under Hsieh's leadership, Zappos shifted its focus away from short-term profitability and toward long-term brand loyalty. He made customer service the company's defining feature, encouraging practices that were unconventional at the time, including free shipping both ways, generous return policies, and call center representatives with no time limits on customer calls.

Zappos grew rapidly and became known not just for its retail success but for its unique internal culture. Hsieh emphasized employee happiness, transparency, and values-based hiring, ideas he later outlined in his book "Delivering Happiness." In 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos in a deal valued at roughly $1.2 billion, but Hsieh remained in charge and preserved the company's independence and culture within Amazon's larger structure.

Beyond Zappos, Hsieh invested heavily in downtown Las Vegas, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to revitalization projects aimed at building a dense, creative community of entrepreneurs, artists, and technologists. His Downtown Project became a bold experiment in urban renewal and social innovation.

Hsieh's career left a lasting impact on both e-commerce and management philosophy. He demonstrated that customer obsession and employee happiness could be powerful competitive advantages, influencing how countless companies think about culture, leadership, and long-term value creation.

Early Life

Tony Hsieh was born in Illinois in 1973, but the family soon moved to California. He attended Branson High School in Ross, California, and then went on to Harvard University, where he earned a computer science degree.

LinkExchange

Tony's first job out of college was at Oracle. He did not enjoy this job and spent most of his time brainstorming a side project.

Tony soon left Oracle to develop an idea for an internet advertising exchange service. The end result was a company called LinkExchange, which he founded with a friend. LinkExchange allowed websites to display ads for other businesses in exchange for their ads being displayed across the web. The more ads a site displayed, the more their own ads would be shown across the LinkEchange network. By 1998, the year the company was acquired by Microsoft for $265 million, LinkExchange had 400,000 members and rotated 5 million ads per day. According to the terms of the buyout, Tony was meant to stay on with Microsoft to earn additional payouts. He famously grew tired of "resting and vesting" and left Microsoft with tens of millions of future payouts on the table.

VentureFrogs

Next, Hsieh co-founded the investment firm, Venture Frogs, with Alfred Lin. Some of the business's investments included OpenTable, Ask Jeeves, and, most importantly, a little-known shoe retailer that would soon be called Zappos.

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Zappos

At first, Hsieh was not convinced that selling shoes online was even a remotely viable idea, but, after learning that the footwear industry in the U.S. (at the time) was a $40 billion market with almost no sales occurring through the internet, he changed his mind.

In 1999, VentureFrogs gave the startup $2 million to launch what was then called ShoeSite.com. Later that year, the company changed its name to Zappos, a reference to the word "zapatos", the Spanish word for shoes.

In 2001, Tony became co-CEO of Zappos with company founder Nick Swinmurn. That year, the company generated $1.6 million in revenue. A little less than a decade later, the company was generating over $1 billion per year. Along the way, Zappos started to earn a reputation for having an amazing corporate culture that focused acutely on employee happiness and providing the best customer service of any retailer.

At Tony's direction, the Zappos corporate headquarters was moved from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, where Tony knew labor and real estate would be significantly less expensive.

Amazon Sale

On July 22, 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos in an all-stock deal. The deal consisted of 10 million shares of Amazon, which equated to $1.2 billion on the day the deal was announced. Tony Hsieh earned a reported $214 million through his personal stake in the company and an additional $100-$200 million thanks to his VentureFrogs stake.

FYI, today, 10 million shares of Amazon would be worth $32 billion. Presuming that Tony received around 3 million Amazon shares through the acquisition, and never sold a share, today that stake would be worth $9.6 billion. Tony must have sold the majority of his stake because his net worth was never officially confirmed as being over $1 billion. At its peak, we estimated Tony Hsieh's net worth to be $850 million.

Tony stepped down as CEO of Zappos in August 2020. He had been involved with the company in some form for 21 years.

Other Ventures

In 2011, Hsieh joined the board of directors of JetSuite.

In 2010, Tony published his first book, "Delivering Happiness."The book became a #1 New York Times bestseller, staying on the list for more than six months.

Later in life, Hsieh was notably for his association with downtown Las Vegas. Hsieh founded the Downtown Project, a $350 million revitalization project aimed at cleaning up the area, bringing in businesses, schools, residences, and tech firms. Hsieh aimed to give Las Vegas a modern urban core. The project's funding is divided between several initiatives: $200 million for investments in real estate, $50 million for health, culture, and education initiatives in Las Vegas, $50 million for tech startups, and the remaining $50 million for small businesses.

Real Estate

During at least part of his time living in Las Vegas, Tony famously lived in a trailer park. This is well after earning hundreds of millions of dollars from the Amazon sale. He also owned a home out in the Vegas suburbs.

In August 2020, Tony paid a reported $56 million for a group of residential properties in Park City, Utah.

Death

Tragically, Tony died on November 27, 2020, at the age of 46 in a house fire while visiting family in Connecticut over the Thanksgiving holiday.

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