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    Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
    Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
    Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
    Audiobook11 hours

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

    Written by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans

    Narrated by Kurt Kanazawa

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    "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."-- AudioFile

    Wonder Boy     is a riveting investigation into the turbulent life of Zappos visionary Tony Hsieh, whose radical business strategies revolutionized both the tech world and corporate culture, based on rigorous research and reporting by two seasoned journalists.

    Tony Hsieh’s first successful venture was in middle school, selling personalized buttons. At Harvard, he made a profit compiling and selling study guides. In 1998, Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million. About a decade later, he sold online shoe empire Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion.

    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 became one of the hardest companies to get hired at, and CEOs from other companies regularly toured the headquarters. But Hsieh’s vision for change didn’t stop with corporate culture: Hsieh went on to move Zappos headquarters to Las Vegas and personally funded a nine-figure campaign to revitalize the city’s historic downtown area. There, he could be found living in an Airstream and chatting up the locals. But Hsieh’s forays into community-revival projects spun out of control as his issues with mental health and addiction ramped up, creating the opportunity for more enablers than friends to stand in his mercurial good graces.

    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 the pressure to succeed but who never lost his generous spirit.

    A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateApr 25, 2023
    ISBN9781250882424
    Author

    Angel Au-Yeung

    Angel Au-Yeung, co-author of Wonder Boy, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a former staff writer for Forbes. She was born in Hong Kong and grew up in California, the youngest of three sisters. She attended UC San Diego for her undergraduate studies as a cognitive neuroscience major and Columbia University for her graduate degree in journalism. She currently lives in San Francisco.

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