Lin was born in Taiwan. When he was at the age of six or seven, his parents immigrated to the New York area.[7]
Lin attended the Stuyvesant High School in New York City.[citation needed] He holds a B.A. in applied mathematics from Harvard and a M.S. in statistics from Stanford.[citation needed] While at Harvard, Lin met Tony Hsieh, the future CEO of Zappos.[7] 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.[7] In 1996, Lin dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Stanford to join Hsieh, Sanjay Mandan, and Ali Partovi at LinkExchange as CFO.[2] 18 months later LinkExchange sold to Microsoft for $265 million.[8] 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.[9] Venture Frogs invested in a variety of tech and Internet startups, including Ask Jeeves, OpenTable, Tellme Networks, and Zappos.[10]
From 2005 to 2010, Lin was chairman, COO, and CFO.[citation needed] At Zappos, Lin was responsible for all financial, administrative, and warehouse operations.[11] 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.[3][12][13][14] 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."[15]
TechCrunch has stated that Alfred has the "Midas touch", since "every company he's worked for has been acquired, and the smallest deal was $265 million."[2] Lin later helped Tellme Networks which was sold to Microsoft for $800 million.[17] After that, Lin helped form Zappos to later be acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion. Lin has invested in Airbnb, Achievers, Stella & Dot, Houzz, Humble Bundle, Kiwi, Romotive, Moovit, Styleseat, Uber, and Cardpool (acquired by Blackhawk Networks), AppBistro / MMTG Labs (acquired by InMobi), and SalesCrunch (acquired by ClearSlide).[18][19][20] He specializes in consumer internet, enterprise and mobile companies.[21]
Lin was an early investor in Zipline, a medicine drone delivery company with operations in Rwanda.[22] He also invested in the Palo Alto-based security company Cobalt Robotics, and sits on its board of directors.[23] In 2021, Lin made a failed investment on FTX and represented Sequoia on its Advisory Board.[24][25][26]
