Alfred Lin

Lin was born in Taiwan. At the age of six, his parents immigrated to the New York, where Lin attended Stuyvesant High School. He then graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and earned a master's degree in statistics from Stanford University.

While at Harvard, Lin met Tony Hsieh, the future CEO of Zappos. Hsieh first recognized Lin's business acumen while running a student-owned pizza parlor at Harvard. Lin, his best customer, was buying whole pizzas, splitting them into slices, and selling them for a profit. In 1996, Lin dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Stanford to join Hsieh, Sanjay Mandan, and Ali Partovi at LinkExchange as CFO. 18 months later LinkExchange sold to Microsoft for $265 million. Later, before joining Zappos, Lin was the VP of Finance and Business Development of Tellme Networks (MSFT). With Tony Hsieh he also co-founded Venture Frogs, an incubator and investment firm. Venture Frogs invested in a variety of tech and Internet startups, including Ask Jeeves, OpenTable, Tellme Networks, and Zappos.

From 2005 to 2010, Lin was chairman, COO, and CFO. At Zappos, Lin was responsible for all financial, administrative, and warehouse operations. He was also responsible for company growth and scaling, bringing the company to its first profitable year in 2006 and to Amazon.com's acquisition of the company in 2009 for $1.2 billion. According to TechCrunch, "Hsieh made at least $214 million; Lin made at least $18 million, with the Venture Frogs shares netting an additional $163 million."

Lin left Zappos in 2010 to join the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital as a partner.