Former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh died from complications of smoke inhalation after being pulled from a house fire in Connecticut, medical examiners have determined.
His death was ruled an accident, the state medical examiner’s office said Monday, according to the Hartford Courant.
The 46-year-old entrepreneur passed away Friday after being rescued from the blazing home in New London nine days earlier.
He was trapped in a storage area during the early-morning fire at 500 Pequot Ave. on Nov. 18, police told the paper.
Firefighters broke in and pulled an unresponsive Hsieh from the building, and he was rushed to Bridgeport Hospital, officials said.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Hsieh led retail giant Zappos for 20 years and retired as CEO in August. He also played a pivotal role in the revitalization of downtown Las Vegas, where Zappos is based.
The Harvard grad grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and sold his first company to Microsoft in 1998 at the age of 24. He used the profits to start a venture capital firm that invested in a shoe retail site that turned into Zappos, which was sold to Amazon in 2009 for $1.2 billion.
His next company, DTP, acquired a huge parcel of underutilized real estate in Las Vegas and invested $350 million in development, small businesses, startups and health care.