Another book is out detailing the rise and fall of Tony Hsieh, the enigmatic superstar entrepreneur whose $350-million vision to transform Downtown secured his spot in Las Vegas history. Titled Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley, the 384-page volume presents a cautionary tale that’s as fascinating as it is tragic. Joe Schoenmann, who, as a Las Vegas Sun reporter, covered Hsieh during his local rise to fame, talked with the book’s authors Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans for KNPR’s State of Nevada. An excerpt follows, along with a link to the full segment, which also includes a conversation with close Hsieh associate Tyler Williams.
Most people writing about Tony Hsieh jump to the time when he sold Linq Exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in his 20s. But you spend a lot of time in your book covering his childhood and growing up. Why?
Angel Au-Yeung: We wanted to write what we hope will be the definitive biography of Tony Hsieh. And any biography about an individual starts from the very beginning. And there’s a lot about what a person goes through in their childhood that can be seen later on in their adult life, which is another reason why we want it to go so deep into his childhood in a way that I don't think anybody had before.
And when we were reporting out, and after having all these conversations with folks who knew Tony at an earlier age, it was really interesting, comparing some of the information that we would hear from his childhood friends versus the childhood story that he told in (his autobiographical business book) Delivering Happiness … But, you know, I think it was really interesting to see that sometimes the story that we want to tell the public about ourselves can be in some ways different than what the reality actually is.
There’s a point in the book near the end, where Tony whispers into his phone something to the effect of “trust nobody” or “trust no one.” He says it twice. In your reporting, did you get the sense that people around him who benefited from him financially were his true friends? Or do you think it’s possible for anyone to get close to someone who's worth almost a billion dollars?
Au-Yeung: There's a part in the book (where) we interviewed one of his childhood friends, Alex Chu, who told us that it's hard enough for a normal person to sustain real friendships in their life, but add millions of dollars, hundreds of millions dollars to it, and that makes that task even more difficult.
But … for sure had real friends in his life. And we spoke to a number of them in the course of (reporting) this book.
David Jeans: Yeah, what was certainly clear to us is, Tony fostered relationships from such an early age that he did have lifelong friends that stuck with him over his years. We also saw some of his business partners become some of his dearest friends, too. I mean, most clearly there we have Alfred Lin, who he met in college at Harvard and was with him through multiple ventures and (was) effectively his right-hand man, sort of looking over the numbers, making sure they always had it up.
Tony, obviously developed other relationships, especially in Downtown Project. But we also did see some of these friends fall out of Tony's circle for different reasons. And we did see that some of the older friends had less to do with him as they sort of moved on with their lives and had families and did other things that Tony just wasn’t doing at the time.
I think Tony also had different friends that, to put it crassly, sort of served different purposes for him. He had fun friends, he had intellectual friends, he had friends who he generated ideas from. I think we all do this too, you know, (in) our relationships with friends.
There’s a part in the book where you talk about a nurse in Park City, who’s giving him intravenous NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide). It seems like he's getting better. And the book does talk about chemical drug-induced psychosis, and that if you can go 30 days without this drug, you can be cleared of that (psychosis). Do you think Tony could have gotten to that point?
Angel: The overarching narrative of the last year of Tony’s life was a series of successes and failures. And it just never felt like he could ever get to a point where he had a consistent period of sobriety or stability, and what hindered that was just a constant flow of different people coming into his orbit with different intentions and different goals, whether they were to help him or hinder him. What we saw in that particular episode that you mentioned was, there were a few people there who had tried to help him with this drug (dependency). That NAD seemingly made him lucid and that seemed to be a breakthrough. But then … he was getting shipped out on an airplane to go to some Hawaiian getaway for whatever reason, or whatever the motivation was behind that was.
Maybe if he had had an opportunity to continue taking the NAD in a safe environment, where he wasn't being carted around … but it ended up that, in fact (what happened was), “Oh, now we're gonna go to this next distraction,” and it was just a very difficult environment to (in which to) maintain (treatment).
What's the lesson from Tony Hsieh’s story?
Angel: There are so many lessons, and I say this every time somebody asks us this question, but I have a different answer every single time. … It seems like happiness, and how to achieve happiness, was something that he was singularly obsessed with. In (Delivering Happiness), there’s a section where he delves into different theories and philosophies behind that ephemeral state of mind. And it seems that later on in his life, especially when he made his first millions and continued to experience financial and corporate success, to him, happiness meant adding to your life, which for him meant creating a festival, creating Downtown Project, creating the airstream Park in downtown Vegas. And he just kept on adding and adding to his life — adding more events and adding more conferences and adding more people.
But I think that maybe what Tony could have done was to look internally and just see, take stock of what is, and realize that this is enough, this is enough for happiness. And the most tragic part about Tony’s story is that if you talk to any of his friends, anybody who even met him for five minutes, they would have told you that Tony was more than enough.
