Venture capitalist Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing store.  Zappos was founded by Nick Swimmurn who, in 1999 approached Hsieh with the notion of selling shoes online.  Hsieh was so uninterested at the prospect, he nearly deleted the voice mail. But he reconsidered when Swinmurn informed him that the American footwear market at the time, was valued at $40bn, 5 percent of which was through mail order catalogues. So, with Alfred Lin, Tony Hsieh invested through Venture Frogs, thereafter becoming company CEO.  Nine years later, with Hsieh at the helm, company revenues reached $1 billion.  In the same year, Amazon.com bought Zappos.com for around $1.2 billion.   Hsieh apparently earned at least $214 million from that sale. On how he feels about the company, Hsieh states that “our whole goal is we want to build the best brand of customer service. Hopefully, 10 years from now, people won’t even realize that we started selling shoes.”

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