NICK SWINMURN

Net Worth : $840 million (2007)

In 1998, 24-year -old Tony Hsieh sold his company, Internet advertiser LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $265 million. A year later, he met an even younger entrepreneur, Nick Swinmurn, who had an idea no investor would touch: selling shoes on the Internet. But Hsieh was intrigued and invested $500,000 in ShoeSite.com. Within six months, he and Swinmurn were running the show together. Early this year, Swinmurn moved on, leaving Hsieh at the helm of a company that had sales of $252 million in 2005.

Nick Swinmurn is a veteran Internet executive with a rare success story to tell. He began his Internet career in 1997 as a marketing manager at Autoweb.com, a leading automotive site, where he learned enough to realize that his destiny lay in creating his own e-commerce site. He became the webmaster at Silicon Graphics the following year, and founded Zappos.com in 1999.

Zappos.com quickly became the most popular shoe store on the Web. Swinmurn was inspired to create Zappos.com by a frustrating shoe buying experience at a mall in San Francisco. In 1999, after spending an hour wandering around a shopping mall in San Francisco, unable to find the shoes he wanted, Nick simply went home and began work on starting his own company -Zappos.com, currently the largest online supplier of shoes in America. Raising US$150,000 in initial capital from friends and family, Nick went out to pursue his dream quickly snaring Fred Mossler, a shoe buyer from Nordstrom – the shoe department store. Once Nick had persuaded Mossler to come on board, other firms soon followed.

However, it was the input of online entrepreneur Tony Hsieh that really jumped started the company. Fresh from the success of selling his company LinkExchange to Microsoft for US$270 million, Hsieh was the perfect investor, though he recently admitted he almost deleted Nick’s initial email.

In a deal worth an estimated US$927.9 million and the ability to work as a separate entity free of the Amazon brand, it is a good day for Zappos for Nick Swinmurn and Tony Hsieh. And to think it started with being unable to find the right pair of shoes…

Nick was surprised to discover that while there were many online stores selling shoes, there wasn’t a major site that specialised solely (no pun intended) on footwear.