Tony Hsieh had a happy childhood. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, easily entered Harvard University, majoring in computer science, and obtained a bachelor's degree in computer science from 65438 to 0995.
After graduation, Tony Hsieh went to Oracle Bone Inscriptions Company as a programmer. Only five months later, he left Oracle Bone Inscriptions with 1996, and Tony Hsieh started his business in a two-bedroom apartment with $20,000 as the starting capital. In addition to Sanjay Madan, he has gathered more than a dozen colleagues, many of whom, of course, are unpaid.
Their project is LinkExchange. In the early days of Internet development, the promotion of websites was a problem. Of course, large websites have enough advertising budgets, and what Tony Hsieh wants to do is the business of "speaking for the silent", which was once a popular advertising transaction.
1May, 1997, Sequoia Capital, which had benefited a lot from Yahoo before, realized the potential opportunity and injected $3 million into this project. Since then, LinkExchange has more than 800,000 member websites and 65,438+000 employees.
1998165438+10 In October, Microsoft announced that it would acquire LinkExchange with shares worth $265 million. Tony Hsieh won the first pot of gold, which provided sufficient funds for the establishment of an online marketing empire. Afterwards, in an interview with the media, Tony Hsieh said that he was "very excited", but when people praised him as "the second Yang Zhiyuan", he didn't make too many comments.