{"id":30895,"date":"2020-11-30T16:36:18","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T21:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=30895"},"modified":"2020-11-30T16:36:18","modified_gmt":"2020-11-30T21:36:18","slug":"tony-hsieh-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/30\/tony-hsieh-rip\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Hsieh, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Katie Abel<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Tony Hsieh, the brilliant and big-hearted Zappos.com luminary who revolutionized the shoe business and built one of the most innovative companies in modern history, has died. He was 46.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

After Zappos co-founder Nick Swinmurn latched onto the idea of selling shoes online, he left a voicemail with Hsieh’s San Francisco venture capital fund, Venture Frogs, hooking him with one factoid: “It was the fact that 5 percent of a $40 billion shoe business was already being done through mail order,” Swinmurn told FN during a 2009 interview<\/a>. “That was my big statistic. People were already buying shoes without trying them on.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Om Malik<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Tony’s passing has taken me down a memory lane to the earliest days of the Internet when we were all very young and innocent. Tony, then, only 23, had started work on LinkExchange, an early banner ad-exchange network that launched in early 1996.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

With Tony’s passing, I feel something special has ended. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe a certain innocent aspect of the early possibilities of the Internet. Maybe I feel the contrast of those days to a now that is more mercenary, less friendly, and more polarized. Whatever, without knowing Tony as well as I should, I mourn him deeply.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Tony and Zappos’ biggest achievement was that it showed long before everyone else: you can build an Internet company anywhere. Unlike so many pundits and Twitterati, it didn’t take a pandemic for Tony to have that insight. Zappos was also an example of how tech companies could care about their customers and not treat them as data.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The outpouring of love and admiration for Hsieh<\/a> from those who knew him is just remarkable.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katie Abel (via Hacker News): Tony Hsieh, the brilliant and big-hearted Zappos.com luminary who revolutionized the shoe business and built one of the most innovative companies in modern history, has died. He was 46.[…]After Zappos co-founder Nick Swinmurn latched onto the idea of selling shoes online, he left a voicemail with Hsieh’s San Francisco venture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-11-30T21:36:22Z","apple_news_api_id":"40f2aac7-ce9d-4022-aed5-2896fbbc2309","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-11-30T21:36:22Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AQPKqx86dQCKu1SiW-7wjCQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[354,19,101,208,509,96,2020],"class_list":["post-30895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-advertising","tag-amazon","tag-business","tag-rip","tag-shopping","tag-web","tag-zappos"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30895"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30896,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30895\/revisions\/30896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}