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What Hacker News says
- > > nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania. None of this means that “Wonder Boy” is a bad or dull book—on the contrary, it should be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech.
The Hsieh story is a sad one, but I really find it disingenuous for this article to suggest that Hsieh is representative of “Big Tech”. Hsieh’s story is so bizarre because he got pulled into a vortex of drug addiction and self-destruction, but that’s not the normal “big tech” experience.
It’s getting tiring to read journalist pieces who look at the extreme outliers of tech (Holmes, SBF, Hsieh) and try to tell us that everyone is like this.
- "Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley" by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
- Thankfully, the OP isn't one of those long New Yorker pieces that go on and on and on. It's a short review of an autobiography of Tony Hsieh that focuses less on business-building details than on the psychological/personal evolution of a young Asian American man -- who, despite his growing success and adulation by the media, found himself deeply unsatisfied and dependent on booze and drugs. The review ends with this tidbit, which I found insightful:
> Hsieh, in the end, was a rich guy who, early in his career, used his Harvard connections and some seed money to buy a series of lotto tickets in the tech boom, and then used his expanding wealth and influence to spread a bunch of marketing, in the form of pseudo-psychology, into the world. He slept with his employees and terrorized his closest friends. His descent into addiction and his untimely death were certainly tragic, but I couldn’t find much to admire about Hsieh in “Wonder Boy,” nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania. None of this means that “Wonder Boy” is a bad or dull book—on the contrary, it should be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in big tech. But it did not give much of an answer to the question of how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists.
