Former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Tragically Dies at 46

Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos and a big tech entreprenuer, has passed away this past Friday at the age of 46.

According to medical examiners, Hsieh died from complications of smoke inhalation after he was pulled from a house fire in Connecticut earlier in November.

Per a Hartford Courant report, the Connecticut ME office had said on Monday that the death was ruled as an accident.

Police had told the paper that Hsieh was trapped in a blazing home nine days prior to his death on Friday. He was trapped in a storage area during the early-morning fire at
500 Pequot Ave. on Nov. 18th according to the police.

Officials said that firefighters broke in and pulled an unresponsive Hsieh from the building, and he was then rushed to Bridgeport Hospital.

Hsieh retired as the CEO of Zappos just in August after leading the company for twenty
years. He was also involved in the revitalization of downtown Las Vegas.

Graduating from Harvard, Hsieh had grown up in San Francisco’s Bay Area and sold his first company to Microsoft in 1998 at the age of 24. It was then that he used the money from this sale to start a venture capital firm that invested in a shoe retail site that turned into Zappos. The company was eventually sold to Amazon in 2009 for $1.2 billion.

His company DTP had acquired a huge parcel of under-utilized real estate in Las Vegas and invested $350 million in development, small businesses, startups and healthcare.

The cause of the fire still remains under investigation.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.