Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh was the visionary CEO of Zappos who turned a struggling online shoe store into a $1.2 billion acquisition by Amazon, not by selling shoes but by relentlessly selling happiness - to customers, employees, and a disbelieving corporate world. A Harvard computer science grad who sold his first company (LinkExchange) to Microsoft for $265 million at 24, Hsieh spent two decades proving that culture isn't a perk but the entire product. He wrote the bestselling 'Delivering Happiness,' bet $350 million on reviving downtown Las Vegas, and died in November 2020 at age 46, leaving behind a philosophy that still shapes how companies think about their people.