Tony Hsieh, co-founder of the online retailer Zappos, has passed away at the age of 46 due to complications and injuries sustained from a fire at his home in New London, Connecticut on November 18th. He died on November 27th while he was being treated for burns and smoke inhalation.
Hsieh was born in Urbana. His parents are immigrants from Taiwan who met while they were attending grad school at the University of Illinois. His family eventually moved to the Bay area, and Hsieh ended up going to Harvard.
Hsieh later worked at Oracle after college, a company created by another familiar name and well-known U of I near-grad Larry Ellison. He went on to be a co-founder of Zappos, which sold to Amazon in 2009 for roughly $1.2 billion. Hsieh retired as CEO of Zappos in August after running the company for 21 years.
You can read all about his career and the incident at Crunchbase.
Top image by Charlie Llewellin.
