His drug use, once confined to festivals, came into plain view. As he aged, his friends were getting younger, and less able to say no to him. In his 30s, he announced a $350 million project to transform a corner of Las Vegas into a tech utopia, and persuaded friends to move with him into a kind of urban commune, a collection of Airstream trailers in a vacant lot, where nights ended with campfires and jam sessions.īut there was a flaw in Hsieh’s social engineering: He was trying to create community by distributing money in giant gobs.
He plunged into a study of the science of happiness, an idea that had taken hold in Harvard’s psychology department, and looked for ways to engineer it.
He threw off grandiose ideas like sparks, scribbling them on Post-its as his subordinates scrambled to keep up. In those days, the brilliant, off-the-wall founder was the brand, holding court at panel discussions before an audience of M.B.A.s and plutocrats who lived far more careful lives. In the 1990s, investors liked their founders to be risk-takers, a little extreme. San Francisco’s rave scene introduced him to club drugs like MDMA and Burning Man, fatefully, to ketamine.Īu-Yeung and Jeans, who covered Hsieh’s death for Forbes magazine, want to tell another story, though, about the dark side of the tech boom. In his 20s, partying became wrapped into his work persona. Only when he got to Harvard did he fall in with a close-knit circle of friends, enjoying a warm flush of belonging that he would spend the rest of his life trying to recreate. The child of Taiwanese immigrants, Hsieh spent his early years under extraordinary pressure to succeed. Lying on the freezing ground on a filthy blanket, he suffered smoke inhalation that would kill him.Īt its heart, this is a story about addiction. The assistant did as he was told, and Hsieh, inebriated, started a fire. At 46, traveling with a crowd of personal assistants and hangers-on, he locked himself into a friend’s storage shed and asked an employee to bring him nitrous oxide, marijuana, a lighter, pizza and candles. If this moment in Hsieh’s story is suffused with dread, it is because we know how the story of this man, who so valued friendship, ends. “Trick-or-treating in middle school with a group of my closest friends made me happy.” “Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy,” he writes. So he sits down to write a list of the happiest periods in his life. But he is unaccountably sad - aware, suddenly, that what he has is not enough. At 24, he is fabulously rich and one of the rising stars in the tech firmament. WONDER BOY: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley, by Angel Au-Yeung and David JeansĪ few chapters into “Wonder Boy,” Tony Hsieh sells his first company to Microsoft for $265 million.
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