Sean Parker is an American serial technology entrepreneur and investor currently serving as a managing partner of a San Francisco based venture capital investment firm Founders Fund.
He is the co-founder of VC-backed contact management
application company ‘Plaxo’, a revolutionary peer-to-peer file sharing Internet
service ‘Napster’, an online fundraising application in Facebook ‘Causes’, and
Airtime and prior founding president of Facebook.
Parker’s
entrepreneurial dream was nurtured by his father who’d often tell him to start
taking
risks pretty
early in life. As a teenager, Parker grew learning programming and hacking.
His
obsession with hacking landed him in trouble when, at the age 15, he was found
guilty of hackin
a Fortune 500 company and was sent to community service.
Parker enrolled at Oakton High
School in Fairfax County, Virginia for about two years and then got transferred
to Chantilly High School in 1996. His teachers as well as fellow students remember
him as an exceptional student and often regarded him as a genius. In 1996,
Parker was invited to work as an intern for Mark Pincus, the person who later
founded Zynga, and together they worked on a startup called FreeLoader. At the
age16, he participated in the Virginia state computer science fair and won it
for developing a Web crawler prototype and was hired by the CIA. According to Forbes, he was making over $80,000 a year
even before he completed his high school.
Plaxo, which was launched in November
2002, was funded through venture capital and was taken over by Comcast in 2008.
In the same year in 2008, the website claimed 20 million users.
Today, it is the biggest online
platform across the world for activism with 100 million installed users and has
raised more than $30 million for nonprofits causes.
Parker, currently serving on the
board, invested $15 million in Spotifyy in 2010 to make Napster’s music
sharing system legal. As of now, the catalog of Spotify had approximately 15
million songs and approximately ten million registered members. Spotify has about
3 million paid members who pay around $5 to $15 per month to access premium
version features.
Airtime, a live video sharing website, was
co-founded by Parker in 2011, along with prior co-founder of Napster Shawn
Fanning. He is the company’s executive chairman while Fanning is the CEO.
Parker never attended any college
and he doesn’t regret his decision!
