Sean Parker
Sean Parker (born December 3, 1979) is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and was the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also co-founded Plaxo, Causes, Airtime.com, and Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement.[2][3][4][5][6][7] He is the founder and chairman of the Parker Foundation, which focuses on life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement.[8] On the Forbes 2022 list of the world's billionaires, he was ranked No. 1,096 with a net worth of US$2.8 billion.[9]
For the footballer, see Sean Parker (footballer).
Sean Parker
Early life[edit]
Parker was born in Herndon, Virginia, to Diane Parker, a TV advertising broker, and Bruce Parker, a U.S. government oceanographer and chief scientist at NOAA.[2][3][10] When Parker was seven, his father taught him how to program on an Atari 800.[2] Parker's father, who put his family before his entrepreneurial dreams, told Parker, "if you are going to take risks, take them early before you have a family."[11] In his teens, Parker's hobbies were hacking and programming.[3] One night, while hacking into the network of a Fortune 500 company, Parker was unable to log out after his father confiscated his computer keyboard.[3] Because his IP address was exposed, FBI agents tracked down the 16-year-old.[3] Since Parker was under 18, he was sentenced to community service.[3]
Education[edit]
Parker attended Oakton High School in Fairfax County, Virginia for two years before transferring to Chantilly High School in 1996 for his junior and senior years.[12] While there, Parker wrote a letter to the school administration and persuaded them to count the time he spent coding in the computer lab as a foreign language class.[12] Consequently, towards the end of Parker's senior year at Chantilly, he was mostly writing code and starting companies.[12] He graduated in 1998. While still in high school, he interned for Mark Pincus (who would later become the CEO of Zynga) at Pincus's Washington, DC startup FreeLoader.[13] He won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing a web crawler, and was recruited by the FBI.[2] By his senior year of high school, Parker was earning more than $80,000 a year through various projects, enough to convince his parents to allow him to skip college and pursue a career as an entrepreneur.[2]
In his childhood, Parker was an avid reader, which was the beginning of his lifelong autodidacticism.[3][14] Several media profiles refer to Parker as a genius.[15][16][17][18][19] He considers his time at Napster to be his college education, calling it "Napster University", since he became well-versed in intellectual property law, corporate finance, and entrepreneurship.[20]
Ventures[edit]
Napster[edit]
When Parker was 15, he met 14-year-old Shawn Fanning over the Internet, where the pair bonded over topics such as programming, theoretical physics and hacking.[3][21] A few years later, Parker and Fanning, a student at Northeastern University, cofounded Napster, a free file-sharing service for music.[5] Parker raised the initial $50,000, and they launched Napster in June 1999.[22] Within a year, the service had tens of millions of users.[3] Napster was opposed by recording labels, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the heavy metal band Metallica,[10] among others. Lawsuits by various industry associations eventually shut down the service.[23][24] Napster has been called the fastest-growing business of all time, is credited with revolutionizing the music industry, and is considered by some to be a precursor to iTunes.[25][26][27][28][29]
Plaxo[edit]
In November 2002, Parker launched Plaxo, an online address book and social networking service that integrated with Microsoft Outlook.[30] Plaxo was an early social networking tool, which later influenced the growth of companies LinkedIn, Zynga, and Facebook.[31] Plaxo was one of the first products to build virality into its launch, and that earned it 20 million users.[32][33] Two years after founding Plaxo, Parker was ousted by the company's financiers, Sequoia Capital and Ram Shriram, in an acrimonious exit that reportedly involved the investors hiring private investigators to follow him.[34][35]
Facebook[edit]
In 2004, Parker saw a site called "The Facebook" on the computer of his roommate's girlfriend, who was a student at Stanford.[3] Parker had experience in the social networking industry as an early advisor to Friendster and its founder, Jonathan Abrams, for which he was given a small amount of stock in 2003.[2][36] Parker met with Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, and a few months later joined the five-month-old company as its president.[3][36] According to Peter Thiel, Parker was the first to see potential in the company to be "really big", and that "if Mark ever had any second thoughts, Sean was the one who cut that off".[3]
As president, Parker brought on Thiel as Facebook's first investor.[3] In the initial round of funding, he negotiated for Zuckerberg to retain three of Facebook's five board seats, which gave Zuckerberg control of the company and allowed Facebook the freedom to remain a private company.[2][3] Additionally, Parker is said to have championed Facebook's clean user interface and developed its photo-sharing function.[37][38] Zuckerberg notes that "Sean was pivotal in helping Facebook transform from a college project into a real company."[2]
During a party in 2005, police entered and searched a vacation home Parker was renting and found cocaine.[3] Parker was arrested on suspicion of drug possession but was not charged.[3] This event caused Facebook investors to pressure Parker into resigning as president.[39] However, after stepping down, Parker continued to remain involved with Facebook's growth, and met regularly with Zuckerberg.[40] The event was later dramatized in the movie The Social Network.[41]
In 2017, during an interview with Axios, Parker expressed concerns about the role of Facebook in society, saying that it "exploit[s] a vulnerability in human psychology" as it creates a "social-validation feedback loop". Parker stated that he was "something of a conscientious objector" to using social media.[42]
Founders Fund[edit]
In 2006, Parker became a managing partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture-capital fund founded by Peter Thiel.[43] Founders Fund is focused on investing in early-stage companies, has $500 million in aggregate capital, and has invested in Quantcast, Path, and Knewton.[44] Parker was given carte blanche by Thiel when finding investments.[45] In 2014, Parker stepped down from his role at Founders Fund to focus on other projects.[46] Parker has also hosted The TechFellow Awards, a partnership between TechCrunch and Founders Fund that annually gives 20 entrepreneurs $100,000 each to invest in startups.[47][48]
Spotify[edit]
While working at Founders Fund, Parker had been looking to invest in a company that could further Napster's music-sharing mission legally.[3] In 2009, a friend showed him Spotify, a Swedish music-streaming service, and Parker sent an email to Spotify's founder Daniel Ek.[49] The pair traded emails, and in 2010 Parker invested US$15 million in Spotify.[50][51] Parker, who was on Spotify's board until 2017, negotiated with Warner and Universal on Spotify's behalf, and in July 2011, Spotify announced its U.S. launch.[52] At Facebook's f8 conference that year, Parker announced a partnership between Facebook and Spotify, which allowed users to share their Spotify playlists on their Facebook profiles.[52][53]
Brigade Media[edit]
In April 2014, Parker announced his backing of a new initiative called Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement to "combat a lack of political engagement and interest in all levels of government across America."[54] Parker is the Executive Chairman of Brigade.[55] The initial round of funding was $9.3 million from Parker, with additional sums from other investors.[56] In 2014, Brigade acquired Causes, an online platform for social impact and political activism. Causes had in 2013 acquired Votizen, a political advocacy startup.[57] Parker and The Founders Fund were a part of Votizen's $1.5 million funding round in 2010,[58] and Parker was on the board of directors. He has stated, "Politics for me is the most obvious area [to be disrupted by the Web]."[59]
Political donations and activism[edit]
Parker has made substantial donations to both sides of U.S. party politics; his allegedly "nonpartisan" approach favors contributions to "elected officials who have shown themselves willing to work across the aisle".[87] He favored Democrats and progressive causes such as campaign finance reform[88] and gun control;[89] he has spoken out in favor of higher taxes, particularly for the "wealthy and super wealthy", and in favor of higher capital-gains taxes.[66] Parker has also supported middle-of-the-road Republican candidates and super PACs, favoring "economically moderate" conservatives and candidates with a demonstrated interest in compromise and deal-making. In Washington, DC, he has met with Republican lawmakers about ways of encouraging economic investment in struggling areas of the country.[90][91] He has also supported cannabis law reform[92] and in 2010, following the example of donations by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (totaling $70,000) donated $100,000 to the 2010 California Proposition 19 campaign to legalize marijuana in that state[93] and $400,000 to the Democratic Party backed 2016 California Proposition 63 campaign to require background checks for all ammunition purchases.[94] Parker will donate $250 million to launch a new institute aimed at developing more effective cancer treatments by fostering collaboration among leading researchers in the field.[95] For the 2016 presidential election, Parker created a social ballot guide for voters to help each other pledge to vote.[96]
Parker was also a driving force behind the Opportunity Zones provision in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which are designed to incentivize investments in struggling American communities.[97] In 2015, the Economic Innovation Group, which Parker co-founded, published a whitepaper on the idea of opportunity zones, and in 2017, a bill passing them into law was shepherded by a bi-partisan coalition involving Senator Cory Booker and Senator Tim Scott.[98][99]
In popular culture[edit]
Parker was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in the 2010 film The Social Network.[3] The movie is an account of Facebook's founding and early days.[100][101][102]
Although Parker praised David Fincher as a director, many have remarked on the differences between Parker and his portrayal by Timberlake.[2][3][103][104] Former Facebook growth chief Chamath Palihapitiya noted that Parker is "really the exact opposite of his portrayal in the film".[2] Parker called the character a "morally reprehensible human being", although he noted, "it's hard to complain about being played by a sex symbol".[14][105] Additionally, Parker took issue with the movie's version of Eduardo Saverin's exit from Facebook as it paralleled his own exit from Plaxo.[2]
In 2011, Parker was a guest on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, featured on the cover of the Forbes 400 issue, and was profiled in Vanity Fair.[3][106][107]
In 2020, Parker appeared in The Social Dilemma.