Nick Swinmurn
American businessman
Nick Swinmurn is an American entrepreneur and investor who is best known as the founder of the online shoe store company Zappos. He started the company in 1999 and left in 2006, before it reached $1 billion sales in 2008 and was sold to Amazon. He is also an investor in a number of sports teams in the United States and Europe.
Early life and education
Swinmurn was born in England and moved to the United States at the age of seven, growing up in the Bay Area of California. His father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher. He graduated from Los Altos High School and proceeded to earn a degree in Film Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995.
Career
After college, Swinmurn initially worked in ticket sales for the San Bernardino Stampede minor-league baseball team and then for the San Diego Padres.
He then returned to northern California and worked at Autoweb.com, saying he was inspired by the 'anything is possible' attitude of the founders. He left Autoweb in 1998 and considered other options such as running a portal for students before finally deciding to start Zappos.
Swinmurn worked as a contractor for Silicon Graphics in order to raise funds for an online shoe store, initially called Shoesite.com.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nick Swinmurn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.