The Lost Boy of Silicon Valley: The Untold Story of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and His Search for Happiness

A Financial Times best business book of 2023

In 1998, at the age of 24, Tony Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for ＄265 million.
In 2009, at the age of 35, he sold his e-commerce company, Zappos, to Amazon for ＄1.2 billion.
In 2020, at the age of 46, he died.

Tony Hsieh revolutionized both the tech world and corporate culture. He was a business visionary. He was also a man in search of happiness. So why did it all go so wrong?

Tony Hsieh’s first successful venture was in middle school, selling personalized buttons. At Harvard, he made a profit compiling and selling study guides. From there, he went on to build the billion-dollar online shoe empire of Zappos.

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 inspired copycats and earned a cult following. Then Hsieh moved the Zappos headquarters to Las Vegas, where he personally funded a nine-figure campaign to revitalize the city’s historic downtown area. But as Hsieh fell deeper into his struggles with mental health and drug addiction, the people making up his inner circle began changing from friends to enablers.

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 his eternal search for happiness and ultimately succumbed to his own demons.

Angel Au-Yeung is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a former staff writer for Forbes. She was born in Hong Kong and attended UC San Diego for undergrad as a cognitive neuroscience major and Columbia University for her graduate degree in journalism. She currently lives in San Francisco.

David Jeans is a staff reporter at Forbes, where he covers tech companies. He has worked in the United States, Australia, and Central America, reporting for the New York Times, the Associated Press, ProPublica, Vice News, Daily Mail, News Corp, and Fairfax Media. He lives in New York City.