Las Vegas is a city that leaves little to sentimentality. He then continued to run the company, and used the proceeds of that work to focus on his next big project: urban regeneration. His leadership helped catapult it to huge growth: by 2009 he had sold Zappos to Amazon for around $1.2 billion (a truly giant sum for an e-commerce startup at the time). As Zappos’ CEO, Hsieh moved the company from the Bay Area to the outskirts of Vegas in 2004 to build out a bigger customer service operation, run under a particularly strong ethos of flat management aimed at empowering and inspiring employees. Hsieh was entrepreneurial in his investing instincts and subsequently took a more hands-on role in the startup, which eventually rebranded to Zappos. One of his early investments there was, founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn at a time when the latter could see a shift happening in how people were shopping for footwear, doing a lot more of it online. Using some of the proceeds from that, he formed a venture capital firm called Venture Frogs. Growing up in the Bay Area, he sold his first company - a marketing tech firm called LinkExchange - to Microsoft when he was just 24, in 1998. Hsieh was a brilliant, offbeat, and - to many people, often very directly - kind-hearted person who was regularly described as a visionary. The news has sent shock waves in the midst of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and through a community in a city - heavily dependent on tourism - that has been hit extraordinarily hard by the Covid-19 global health pandemic. The full statement from DTP Companies, which ran the Downtown Project (Hsieh’s mammoth initiative to regenerate the very run-down, older part of Las Vegas) is below. We will update this as and if we learn more. The ultimate cause of Hsieh’s death is still under investigation. It’s not clear if anyone else was injured. He was with his brother in Connecticut at the time of the fire.

The cause was injuries he sustained from a house fire, a spokesperson for Hsieh confirmed to TechCrunch. Tony Hsieh, the former head of Zappos who catapulted the shoe company into the big leagues with a sale to Amazon and then used the proceeds of his success in a huge project kickstarting regeneration of a run-down part of Las Vegas, Nevada, with tech and wider business investments, has died at the age of 46.

Tony hsieh jenn lim