Exactly one week ago, in the early morning hours of the day after Thanksgiving, Hsieh died from his exposure to a shocking house fire in Connecticut, where he had been staying. At 3:34 a.m. on November 18, first responders arrived at a New London, Connecticut, home, which Hsieh, generous to the end, reportedly purchased for a former Zappos colleague, Rachael Brown, with whom he maintained a very close relationship. ShoeSite, later renamed Zappos, came to define Hsieh’s career, as he ultimately invested and then took control of the company. (She could not immediately be reached for comment.) “He gave me the courage to jump,” Brooks says. Nick Swinmurn. And the amount of N2O you are doing is not natural. “In the end, he was so disconnected,” says a longtime senior Zappos employee who is still with the company. He was just 46. Erika … This took shape in many ways. He experimented with a revolutionary—some would say anarchistic—version of a “holacracy” management philosophy, where no one at Zappos reported to anyone nor carried any titles. • The company was founded by Nick Swinmurn in 1999 under the domain name Shoesite.com. Follow me on Twitter at @davidjeans2 and email me at djeans@forbes.com, © 2021 Forbes Media LLC. Amazon bought Zappos for $1.2 billion in 2009. But in 2009, it made another approach, and Hsieh agreed to sell the company for $1.2 billion in stock, while remaining at the helm. Introduction: If you like shoes and shop online, you probably have heard of Zappos.com. But Swinmurn intrigued Hsieh with two facts: First, footwear was a $40 billion industry in the United States. It was a parking lot, and now it’s a verdant, 9,000-square-foot off-leash play space for dogs.”, Mossler, pictured with Hsieh, said he was never interested in shoes. Whereas we would be in bed by 9:30.”. “I need to tell you that I don’t think you are well and in your right mind. But Swinmurn intrigued Hsieh with two facts: First, footwear was a $40 billion industry in the United States. “You never saw challenges, you only saw opportunities.” Lin wrote in a poignant “final letter to Tony Hsieh,” published by Forbes earlier this week. Soon after arriving, Jewel played a private acoustic set for around 50 residents of the community Hsieh was building there—a reprise of sorts of the city-within-a-city of artists and entrepreneurs that Hsieh had famously created in downtown Las Vegas. The coroner has already declared his passing accidental. What he was passionate about, Hsieh said, was customer service and company culture. “You are in trouble, Tony.”. The company grew at a rapid clip, going from single-digit millions early in the decade to sales of $252 million in 2005. Toward the end of 2014 he stepped away from leading the Downtown Project and moved from his high-rise condo into an Airstream park, complete with an LED-lit stage and a roaming alpaca. Swinmurn, 43, is Hillsborough resident who said he was inspired to start the restaurant after a business trip years ago to a steak house in Atlanta which offered a popular plate of nachos. "Today is a sad day," former Zappos Chief Operating Officer Alfred Lin said on Twitter. But his brainchild also appeared to carry a dark side. All Rights Reserved, This is a BETA experience. Nick graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1996 with a degree in film. It should have been a magical moment, according to a person who was there, with the Grammy nominee seated in front of a fireplace and views of the Wasatch Mountains framing the performance. "We recognize that not only have we lost our inspiring former leader, but many of you have also lost a mentor and a friend.". While working at Oracle, Hsieh and a college roommate created a business called LinkExchange to help companies buy advertisements on websites. It doesn’t seem that Tony Hsieh, someone who inspired millions with his zest for life, had any intention of dying. Numerous longtime friends tell Forbes that they suddenly found themselves unable to reach Hsieh. “We are so deeply grateful for the outpouring of love and respect shown in the wake of Tony’s passing,” says his father, Richard, in a statement to Forbes. I'm a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where I was a Toni Stabile Investigative Fellow. Match.com founder Gary Kremen, Method co-founder Eric Ryan, and Nick Swinmurn, founder of Zappos.com, provide advice on raising capital at Wall Street Journal's How I … That’s when an even younger entrepreneur, Nick Swinmurn, left a voicemail on his phone, with the idea to start an online shoe retailer—a wild thought at the time to assume customers would buy something unseen that they needed to ensure fit properly and looked good on them. Amazon denies that they pushed him out, despite rumors. The parties were nearly constant, and Hsieh even had his own signature drink—shots of a herbaceous Italian spirit, Fernet—that he would imbibe anytime, with visiting clients, journalists or seemingly anyone. “Each of us had to admit we hadn’t seen much of him lately,” says one venture capitalist who knew him for more than a decade. Megan Fazio, a spokeswoman for Hsieh's side venture, DTP Cos., told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that Hsieh died from injuries sustained in a house fire in Connecticut. In July 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos in an all-inventory association well worth around $1.2 billion at that factor. Years later, she bumped into Hsieh at a conference and complained that she was feeling without purpose or direction. While several people escaped the main house, Hsieh had reportedly locked himself, either intentionally or by accident, in a storage area. During a job at Autoweb.com in 1998, the idea for Zappos.com hit. The meetings tothat point had been held in fancy offices with people that either doubted the reality of the potential opportunity, my … Let’s say a new cell phone service provider, East Bay Wireless, wants to enter the highly competitive mobile phone marketplace in Northern California. Swinmurn had been working on his own startup ideas since he was in college. By then, the company had relocated from the Bay Area to Las Vegas. Hsieh graduated from Harvard University in the mid-90s with a degree in computer science. I previously reported for The Real Deal, where I covered WeWork, real estate tech startups and commercial real estate. "The world has lost a tremendous visionary and an incredible human being," Zappos CEO Kedar Deshpande said in a statement. Newly Established Partnership Aims to Connect Worldwide Soccer Enthusiasts through Metaverse for Sports Fans LOS ANGELES, CA - December 16, 2020 - GreenPark Sports, fan-focused publisher and developer of mobile games and social experiences, has announced a global partnership with world-renowned Spanish soccer league LaLiga. Former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, pictured at a 2015 event in Laguna Beach, Calif, died Friday at the age of 46. But now the California-based startup wiz—who was once told no one would ever buy shoes without first trying them on—is turning … And that’s not how you should go down or be known,” she wrote in her letter to him. “If the world could see how you are living, they would not see you as a tech visionary, they would see you as a drug addicted man who is a cliche. Growing up in San Francisco as the son of Taiwanese immigrants, the oldest of three boys, Hsieh picked up a combination of problem-solving (his father was a chemical engineer) and empathy (his mother was a social worker) that would become his hallmark. - Tony Hsieh Just before it hit, Hsieh had attended the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and resolved to recreate an element of his Vegas utopia there. According to Justin Weniger, who is chief executive of the Life is Beautiful music festival and who stayed with Hsieh over the summer, Hsieh began focusing on biohacking—a practice that aims to change the body’s functionality—including cold baths and runs in the snow. “He fostered so much human connection and happiness, yet there was this void,” the close friend continued. “Chase the vision,” Hsieh told Forbes in 2008. But within a day, Jewel abruptly left. “He fostered so much human connection and happiness, yet there was this void. And even if we saw him at TED, he would skip the talks and host the late night. "The world lost a pioneer of company culture, the shoe industry, Downtown LV, web advertising, and also a gentle soul who gave a part of himself to countless people. And Hsieh, in turn, tried to amp up the stakes in terms of the impact he could have. Twitter; WhatsApp; SMS; Email; Print; Save; Linkedin; Nick Swinmurn. Nick Swinmurn wanted to take initiative in trying to solve the personal problem of having hard time finding shoes he liked, this proves that he is proactive. Cathy Brooks, a former journalist, once interviewed Hsieh for a podcast. He genuinely delighted in making anyone and everyone happy. He was 46. As a business evangelist, the 2010 title of his New York Times number one bestseller said it all: Delivering Happiness: A Path To Profits, Passion and Purpose. One day, he got a voicemail from the founder of Zappos, Nick Swinmurn, who had an idea for selling shoes online. • In a all-stock $1.2 billion agreement, Amazon took over the company in 2009. In some ways, count him as another Covid-19 victim, except that instead of succumbing to the disease itself, the virus appears to have accelerated some wrenching internal battles and a series of terrible external decisions. Nick Swinmurn: I was fresh out of college. . He split time between Las Vegas and Park City across the spring, and then appears to have fully moved to the latter over the summer. Jewel, for one, expressed concern directly to him. Jewel echoed those sentiments this week, serenading Hsieh in a tribute video that she posted on her social media accounts on Wednesday. As a freelancer, I've also written for The New York Times, Associated Press and other outlets. During this transition, he began making his double-your-best-salary offer to new members of his circle if they relocated with him. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Images, Youtube and more on IDCrawl - the leading free people search engine. “It was difficult for him to be alone.”, Ultimately, that may have been a fatal trait. By 2017, Hsieh's company had a portfolio of about 90 properties there, according to the Review-Journal. Hsieh made clear from the beginning that it wasn’t just shoes they were selling. Similar stories abound in Vegas. It all started with a failed trip to the mall. Whereas we would be in bed by 9:30.” Nick Swinmurn, whose idea Hsieh transformed into Zappos, said that he had fallen out of touch with Hsieh and not spoken to him since last year. d1xvdtpa0005; Submit search. According to numerous sources with direct knowledge, Hsieh, always a heavy drinker, veered into frequent drug use, notably nitrous oxide. View Nick Swinmurn’s profile on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional community. Over this period, many of Hsieh’s longtime peers found themselves on a divergent path from him. GreenPark and LaLiga will work . And he began his efforts to turn his Downtown Project in Las Vegas into his utopian canvas, drawing worldwide attention. It was originally called Shoesite.com Tony later became CEO in 2000. Get DIRECTV 1-888-777-2454 . And in recent days, his family discovered that despite more than half a billion in estimated assets, he hadn’t left behind a will. Hsieh could point to his self-imposed digital detox  as an excuse for his sudden reclusiveness, though that now seems a convenient excuse to avoid those who, like Jewel, might not approve of his latest reinvention. In pioneering, at Zappos, the concept of an online store fueled by a customer-first, no-questions-asked return policy, Hsieh arguably had a bigger effect on online retail than anyone short of Bezos himself. “The money and profits will come.”, “If the world could see how you are living, they would not see you as a tech visionary, they would see you as a drug addicted man who is a cliche.”. He invited her to come to Vegas and to bring her dog. “He told me that his friends kept getting younger and younger,” Swinmurn wrote in a Medium memorial post. "It seemed like the poster child of bad Internet ideas," Hsieh said: Who would actually buy shoes without seeing them in person? Generally speaking, the bigger the hexagon is, the more valuable Nick Swinmurn … I got out of college, worked for the San Diego Padres for a year. In investing $350 million into downtown Las Vegas, he lovingly turned a seedy part of town into an arts, cultural and tech hub, with a community of Airstream trailers, one of which Hsieh lived in for years. You will not hack sleep and you will not outsmart nature.” She added that he risked crossing the line “from eccentric to madness.”. Reconciling their accounts, one word rises up: tragedy. He spent the next 20 years leading the shoe seller to enormous success as CEO. Introduction • This presentation was prepared by Xuehan and Ziwe. By August, he was out at Zappos, after over 20 years at the helm. “Anyone else would be considered callous and sociopathic. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is stepping down after 21 years at the helm. Such a company culture was almost unheard-of then, but it worked—people proved open to buying shoes on Zappos because the company made it so painless to return them, giving customers up to a year and accepting them with a smile. In The Norman Transcript report, Swinmurn said the company hopes to open a new concept in spring 2020. Across the span of 18 months in 2013 and 2014, three founders of startups linked to the Downtown Project died by suicide. “People took that deal from somebody who was obviously sick,” encouraging his drug use, either tacitly or actively. Nick Swinmurn, whose idea Hsieh transformed into Zappos, said that he had fallen out of touch with Hsieh and not spoken to him since last year. Nick Swinmurn started Zappos in 1999, raised $500,000 in funding from Tony & Alfred. “I think Tony saw happiness as a problem he was trying to solve, an algorithm he was trying to crack.”, “Each of us had to admit we hadn’t seen much of him lately. Comments. In the days since, the outpouring of grief has rivaled any for a business leader since the passing of Steve Jobs a decade ago. Friends and family members, understanding the emerging crisis, attempted interventions over the past few months to try to get him sober. The result was an online shoe store ahead of its time when it came to selection and online customer service. San Francisco Football Club owner Nick Swinmurn announced Tuesday his team pulled their application to join the United Soccer Leagues professional league in 2019. Nick Swinmurn built his fortune at Zappos, the online shoe store he founded and that later sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion. Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle.