Tony Shay is an American Internet entrepreneur, programmer, businessman and millionaire. Co-owner and CEO of Zappos, founder of the LinkExchange banner exchange network.
early years
Tony Shay was born on December 12, 1973 into an ordinary family in the large American state of Illinois. Tony spent his childhood in San Francisco, where he studied at school.
Education
After leaving school, the young man entered Harvard University, where he studied computer science. In 1995 he became a bachelor. During his studies, Tony worked as a manager of a small cafe, and after graduation he got a job at Oracle (a software corporation), Tony was not happy with the new job, so after almost six months he decided to quit. Then he got carried away with the creation of his own LinkExchange corporation.
Career and later life
At 23, Tony Shay has already created the LinkExchange banner exchange network. The network was created with the aim of creating advertisements by displaying banners on personal websites. The number of customers grew very rapidly: in three months, LinkExchange used more than 20 thousand pages, the number of impressions of the created advertising is even more: it amounted to 10 million. Within 2 years, the site was used by 400 thousand people and companies, about 5 million ad impressions were produced every day, but a little later, Tony Shay decided to sell LinkExchange to Microsoft for a large sum, $ 265 million.
Tony Shay didn't stop there. After selling LinkExchange, he started working on a venture fund called Venture Frogs (a name coined by Shane himself and his close friend). The fund has been investing money in various large projects.
After that, Tony's acquaintance Nick Swinmern suggested that Neck invest in a supermarket selling shoes. Tony Shay doubted the profitability of the deal, but nevertheless invested a large sum in a project called ShoeSite.com, and later renamed Zappos (which means "shoes" in Spanish).
Zappos grew and developed not very rapidly, but by 2001 the company's annual turnover amounted to $ 8.6 million, so it was decided to expand the company. Shay and partners acquired an order processing center, which took Zappos to a new level of sales. So, in 2003, the turnover increased to $ 70 million. Zappos stopped working with other firms and became a completely independent and independent organization.
For 5 years, income increased several times and amounted to $ 1 billion, but a year later Zappos was bought by the Amazon division on such conditions that Shay, as well as other owners and employees of the company, received and continue to receive money and shares from sales.
Tony Shay's personal life is not covered. It is known that the billionaire lives in a trailer park, his neighbors are other talented programmers. Known to have a pet. This is an alpaca named Marley.
Awards
Shay is the World Champion in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest of Harvard University (1993), has the 2007 Entrepreneur Award.
