Hi there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

Today on the show, The Life and Times of a tech entrepreneur who wanted to reinvent the idea of the happy firm.

When people can be themselves, that's when the real friendships form, not just co-worker relationships.

And that's when creative ideas come out

and that's when employees aren't most productive. But can health, wealth and happiness really be

combined in one company? The story of a man who thought they could. Business Daily from the BBC.

So what is the best recipe for happiness?

Perhaps in a workplace, it might take the form of no bosses, no divisive job titles, just creativity, pure equality.

Sound like a utopia?

Well, perhaps, but that was the idea of one Silicon Valley visionary.

His name was Tony Shea, and he believed it wasn't just the secret of happiness he was going to crack,

but of becoming rich and successful at the same time as well. His remarkable salutary story is our theme in Business Daily today.

And it's retold for us by the British journalist Matthew Syed.

Tony Shea's childhood dream was simple enough.

He wanted to be rich.

Born in Illinois in 1973, Tony's Taiwanese immigrant parents instilled in him values familiar to many Asian-American kids from the 1970s.

He worked hard, he got top grades, he learned several musical instruments, and he watched just one hour of TV a week.

The plan was for him to pursue a respectable white-collar career. But the strict regimen left

Tony pining for freedom. He decided that money was his way to get it. After graduating from

Harvard in 1995, Tony co-founded a software company called Link Exchange. Within two and a half years,

he sold it to Microsoft for $265 million. At the age of 24, Tony had achieved his childhood dream.

Though, as he would tell it years later, he didn't sell for the money.

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