I've seen several really smart people self-destruct under the stress of their lives in my lifetime to date. Each exhibited the same pattern of awesome-burnout-intoxicate-destruction as Hsieh is described as having here, but none were founders, so they had to do it more cheaply. The drugs they each used varied wildly, but every single one was trying to disassociate from burnout long enough to reach their goals — to escape, to get rich, whatever.
I can understand why the list of what they fell prey to varies so wildly, because the typical top two most common drugs, alcohol and marijuana, have essentially no intoxicating effect on my brain at all — they do one time per year, but the 'addiction' curve for me is far sharper than other people, and they won't work again for months after that first time. It's always been like this for me, before and after I was diagnosed and prescribed medication for ADHD.
Every one of them started with alcohol and/or marijuana, and after a very brief period of time, those had minimal or no effect whatsoever, so they escalated to a wide variety of more potent disassociative drugs. My mental list is: LSD, cocaine, nitrous, other inhalants. It isn't even a surprise anymore to see that someone with charisma and a really interesting view of the world end up failing as they try as hard as they can to get a break from their thoughts. I don't blame them. If I hadn't watched one of my friends self-destruct and die over this as a teenager, I'd probably have burned out my brain decades ago by now.
So I go through my life with no known intoxicants that work on me — of the set of intoxicants that are considered 'safe', anyways — and, bluntly, I would never wish this on anyone. I have an unusual brain that can interrupt addictive cycles with willpower, but until I learned this lesson, I repeatedly found myself caught in the same Hsieh-like loop of "if I just double down, I can finally disassociate enough to get an evening's rest from my thoughts and worries", thinking that maybe if I just consumed more, it might be enough. It never was, and I am lucky beyond belief to now be able to interrupt that cycle without external intervention, before I do harm to my life and body.
The pandemic has put crushing pressure on me, and strained my ability to bear reality to the limit, and I still worry that someday I'll end up like Hsieh, trapped in a cycle of addiction because I just wanted a one-day vacation away from it all and couldn't find it. I'm not a startup founder, and most of my friends weren't either. When I find myself wanting an escape from life for a day, it's not because my life is terrible, it's because my life is intense like the noon sun is bright. (Like Lantern, if you Know.)
It turns out that burnout is the one thing that's guaranteed to push my ability to bear the intensity of life to my limits, and in that I think there's a critical warning for founders, for workers, for anyone in our industry with the tendency to drink caffeine to calm down and to do the entire project the night before it's due. Managing burnout is your number one priority for staying alive, after the bare minimum of bodily basics, because when your burnout level overflows, it can easily and trivially send you into severe addiction and possible death, as happened to Hsieh here.
If you suffer the same kind of brain issues that I and those I knew did, if you think that ADHD may apply to you — even just if coffee slows you down - then I beg of you: Beware burnout. It is your greatest enemy, it can undermine your willpower and your defenses against escapism and futility, it can't be cured with money or intoxication or hard work towards a goal, and it can lead to you sucking your life away from a small metal canister in the blink of an eye, just trying to get a single instant away from it all.
Footnote: The desire to escape can find outlets in religious and cult-like experiences as well; one friend with severe burnout fell prey to "self help" seminars trying to heal from it. I wonder sometimes if this offers a glimpse into the rise of personality "cults" in our modern world.
Disclaimers: Yes, everyone has different experiences. Yes, not every ADHD brain is the same. Yes, burnout can affect normal people in this way too. But I'm not speaking to those circumstances here today. No, I don't have secret information about Hsieh, and maybe he spiraled in a familiar way for an unfamiliar reason. This is a reply to the story, not gossip about Hsieh.
To be fair Hsieh’s story doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with “pressures of being a founder”.
I mean his “work 100 hour weeks to achieve success” days were long over. He was basically quasi-retired, and clearly had been checked out of his Zappos management role for some time.
This is much more a story of someone who has already achieved all the success in the world and seemed to turn to drugs as many do as an escape or search for greater meaning in his life to his detriment.
As I tried to note in the final paragraph (I would clarify in hindsight), I'm not trying to say exactly why Hsieh fell — I'm trying to warn others who might fall in a predictable (to me) manner, by drawing parallels to elements that are familiar from Hsieh's story.
Two or three of those I've seen fall are exact fits for "I went from working hundred hour weeks to quasi-retirement", and they did not treat their burnout with the respect and healing I feel it requires. When they took away the overwork, the unhealed burnout smoldered and eventually caught fire and burned them, weeks or months later.
Is this what took down Hsieh? I haven't a clue, and it's unlikely I'll ever know, and I certainly don't intend to bother anyone to learn more about his circumstance. His friends are having a bad enough time as it is and I empathize too strongly to press for more knowledge.
Is Hsieh's story familiar from personal experience? Yes, absolutely. In the couple of press articles I've read, and a couple of quotes from a letter from a friend to him in one of them, there is certainly material enough to remind me of others I've known who worked themselves to the bone, sold it all and rested, and then a while later (a few months to a couple years) self-destructed.
Ok but I don’t think it had anything to do with being burnt out at any point either due to founder stress.
He had always been into the rave scene. His entire instagram page was like one big love letter to Burning Man. He had a new tour titled the “Rabbit Hole.” I think clearly there was some interest on his part with psychedelics or dissociatives that went too far, and made worse by surrounding himself with people too afraid to confront him about it.
Perhaps his story his relatable from afar but to paint this as something to do with “getting over burn out from overwork” is not what I’m seeing when I read this piece.
I do not intend to paint Hsieh's story as "overwork led to burnout led to self-destruction". I am absolutely using the parallels I perceive to tell a different story that I hope will help at least one other avoid what I've seen happen to so many.
I understand that he poured a lot of money into the Las Vegas startup ecosystem in an attempt to mimic the success of Silicon Valley and had borrowed some concepts from what was happening in with Silicon Slopes.
I got the impression that he was a lone Atlas pushing a rock up a hill in Vegas, and the startup ecosystem he envisioned never really caught on. It doesn't surprise me that he moved to Utah at the end. They seemed to be accomplishing what he had been trying to do alone.
I didn't like the way Utah was moving though, and I left right before he got there.
I lived in Provo. I saw John Curtis run several large businesses out, and most relocated north. Then he became a representative for the whole region.
I feel that he is a deeply corrupt individual who makes backdoor deals with his buddies. I also don't trust the judges there.
I went to the FBI with evidence of some of the corruption I uncovered, but was told point blank that corruption in Utah was so deeply entrenched that there was very little they could do about it.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good people there. There are also some very convincing liars and slick talking con artists. (There is a reason why Utah is home to so many sales based companies)
I started to feel like there was no room to breathe there. Real estate prices were skyrocketing, and I couldn't see a path forward for several of my projects that required large spaces.
There was a huge influx of venture capital that was supporting these inflated prices on real estate and talent, but I never wanted to go that route, so I was priced out.
I fund everything I do with family money, and keep 100% ownership.
TL;DR: It's hard to get ahead when you feel the game is rigged.
What's your perception of why the pandemic has caused a shift in pressure for you?
I ask because, like you, I feel much more stressed, but I can't really put my finger on why because my job has mostly stayed the same (besides going remote). Is it all just because of a reduction in in-person social contact? Or is it something else? In the beginning of the pandemic I got into a sort of manic mode of "do more faster" which was clearly not sustainable and caused me to almost burn out. The funny thing is there was nothing external pushing me to go faster, just my own brain and patterns. Are you experiencing something similar?
In essence, I am not experiencing something similar, no. While we're both experiencing similar general outcomes from quarantine such as social isolation, the exact cause of why those outcomes put such pressure on me is both precisely identified and vanishingly rare. It is definitely unrelated to the above story and to your experiences. (I don't intend in any way to diminish you or your experiences with this reply, and I wish I were more able to be of use.)
In my 10+ yrs in this industry, it's astounding how many founders we've lost trying to hack Maslow's hierarchy. I'm not against drugs, I'm against addiction because it is terrible, destructive, and so short-term.
Founders, you're not Peter Pan, your shadow stays with you no matter how many lost boys you surround yourself with. Such a tragedy that he was taken away from us too soon
I'm very interested in the "shadow" concept, am always curious what people really mean when they mention it.
If you could elaborate on your mention of "shadow", (perhaps "Explain Like I'm Five"-style), I'd appreciate it. But I'd understand if you don't care to.
I parsed "shadow" in this context as things that challenge you emotionally as person.
Personal difficulties that you'd rather pretend to not exist like a drug addiction. People who run from their shadow avoid having an honest conversation with their self. An honest conversation requires one to confront personal difficulties head on, in order to final a (lasting) solution to their negative effects.
At the bottom you have suffering and physical pain. At the top you have drug addiction, depression, and psychological pain. There really is no escape no matter which direction you move. It's a cruel world indeed.
There is escape, and there is hope. We can increase our resilience to life's trials. You're right that it is a cruel world. But there is still joy to be had. Lots of it.
Not that I dont believe you, but why dont you share what the options are? The problem is that if you say something along the lines of "family and friends" there are millions of people who for different reasons dont get to enjoy good experiences in that front or any experience at all. Same with health, travel, food, jobs, peace, company, love, justice or hope.
I don't think there's one answer for this. Life on its own is ultimately a tragic story for everyone. So once we have our basic necessities met, it's the job of each of us to try to layer on top of that tragic story a personal story of meaning, a story explaining why the pain mattered somehow.
That layered story can take many forms. The most time-tested one is having children. But there are many other ways to write the story too.
There's also no law saying we have to layer any story of meaning at all, but human brains seem to really crave it and don't seem to do well without one.
You're right but I don't want to put stress on anyone in a difficult situation by adding a "job" of finding meaning. Sometimes the only thing you have to do is survive the night. That's enough.
If you can survive to live another day, eventually joy will find you, or you will find joy. Just keep surviving. One of the hallmarks of suicidal depression and ideation is a feeling of increasingly severe constraints until there's only one way out. In all but the most unlikely situations these are not real constraints but are the product of a malfunctioning mind.
I never met him, so take this with a grain of salt, but I always got a bit of a weird vibe from Tony’s obsession with “happiness”, like he was faking it or overcompensating or something.
I think the Forbes story is well-done and important, but I also don’t blame HNers for flag-killing that comment. Not because it was disrespectful and/or “too soon”. But because it was essentially a “just trust me” assertion by an anonymous user, who also admitted they heard this second-hand. Without additional context, the only basis for accepting the assertion is faith that anon-HN users wouldn’t be so malicious.
Contrast the exzappos comment with its top (grandchild) reply - which asserted firsthand knowledge and provided context with references to past public reports: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25236958
(it obviously helps that the replier is non-anonymous, but I’m not criticizing u/exzappos for being anonymous)
There were just as many people all over that thread that attempted to rationalize the unusual circumstances of this death by pointing to how quickly fire can spread, why someone would be awake or in the basement or difficult to reach by firefighters at 3am with zero evidence as well.
Point is, I found it just as baffling as to why so many felt compelled to explain away the strange elements of the initial story as I would if someone said something totally outlandish with no evidence as well.
Or maybe people believed it but found it to be in poor taste and lacking any proof aside from a burner account and a smug whiff of, “trust me.”
It’s really important to talk about addiction and to help loosen the stigma around it. It’s also gross to flippantly gossip without any context or details, hours after someone has died, in a forum where people who were affected by the person are grieving. Both things can be true. The gossip in the comment can be true and it can get flagged for being in poor taste.
We can honor a man’s accomplishments and contributions to the world while being frank about what he suffered and potentially died from.
Furthermore, we could probably cope with addiction and other forms of mental illness better if we continue to talk about it more openly. It’s no better or worse than suffering from purely physical conditions like diabetes or cancer or obesity. There are things we can and should do to try to be healthy, but there are also other genetic and environmental factors that are out of our control. I think the article was good to be not judgmental of it, and hope others in similar situations do not fear that others will judge either.
Agreed. It is heartbreaking this happened, but something we can learn from. The silence due to the stigma of addiction and mental illness only serves to worsen it. Thousands die from these conditions every day. Why should we not talk about it?
Modern particle-board (cheap material houses) provide significantly less time to get out in case of a fire than much older, sturdier wood construction however.
"Research shows that 30 years ago, you had about 17 minutes to escape a house fire.
Today it's down to three or four minutes. The reason: Newer homes and the furniture inside them actually burn faster."
Because they didn't cut down all their trees centuries ago like most places that don't have lots of current wooden houses. It's still cheap and durable to build wood framed houses in America.
Wood is abundant (in America and many other new-world countries) and well-suited for building dwellings. You build with what's cheap and robust. Even in the 21st Century, economics rules.
Typical Forbes hit piece on an unorthodox thinker. Tony was a little to 'anarchistic' for Forbes. Key phrase:
"He experimented with a revolutionary—some would say anarchistic—version of a “holacracy” management philosophy, where no one at Zappos reported to anyone nor carried any titles. (It didn’t work: One out of seven employees took a buyout.)"
It didn't work? Really? Company was and is doing fine after 17% took advantage of a nice buyout.
The bias in the article is obvious - some clips:
"while Hsieh remained an extremely rich Peter Pan", or
his "fatal trait" of "not wanting to be alone"
Sure, it sounds like Tony was off the rails, and it ended in tragedy. But this hatchet job is not necessary. Just the facts please.
I feel as though I closely missed out on a friendship that could have meant a lot to both of us.
In September 2011 a group from Utah went to Vegas to start an entrepreneurial effort called "LaunchUp" I was going to go, but for some reason didn't.
A friend met Tony there and was recruited by Tony to head the Las Vegas startup ecosystem there.
I kept looking for a reason to meet him, and spent a month in Vegas back in 2017. I hung out on Fremont Street a lot, toured Zappos, and tried to contact him through every avenue I could, but couldn't meet him.
I became disheartened by the business and startup ecosystem in Utah, and began moving everything from Utah to Arkansas right at the time he was moving in.
It feels like we had a bunch of near misses and I can't help but think that things could have been different if we had connected.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxqeOwVl0IQ