
Wonder Boy
Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
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Narrated by:
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Kurt Kanazawa
About this listen
"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.
©2023 Angel Au-Yeung, David Jeans (P)2023 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“In Wonder Boy, Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans have delivered a heartbreaking and extraordinary account of a heartbreaking and extraordinary man. Tony Hsieh was an innovative business leader, but he was also frenetic, generous, difficult, and tormented. His rise and fall is a quintessential American tragedy—one that their thorough reporting captures movingly.”—Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power
“Wonder Boy is a captivating story about the combustible mixture of genius, ambition, ego, empathy, wealth and intoxicants in the turbocharged environment of the technology elite. Au-Yeung and Jeans bring us deep inside the world of Tony Hsieh in a way that is both revelatory and entertaining.”—Alec Ross, author of The Raging 2020s
“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.”—Publishers Weekly, *starred review*
Must read on drug addiction
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The narration was also fantastic. I gave l my 4 stars because there were some prominent mispronunciations, including of the place where Tony grew up—which was a bit odd since one mispronounced place, Marin County, is fairly well-known. Besides that, it was wonderfully read.
Fascinating, well-written story of a tech legend
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Great book that I wish I didn’t listen to …
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I know I’m going to recommend this book for years and years
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The need to stay grounded
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Amazing listen
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Well researched and well written.
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Binged over 36 hours
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Fascinating fall of a successful entrepreneur
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Heartbreaking story
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