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 serving as 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.

He is the founder and chairman of the Parker Foundation, which focuses on life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement.

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.

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.

When Parker was seven, his father taught him how to program on an Atari 800.

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."

In his teens, Parker's hobbies were hacking and programming.

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.

Because his IP address was exposed, FBI agents tracked down the 16-year-old.

Since Parker was under 18, he was sentenced to community service.

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.

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.

Consequently, towards the end of Parker's senior year at Chantilly, he was mostly writing code and starting companies.

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.

He won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing a web crawler, and was recruited by the FBI.

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.

In his childhood, Parker was an avid reader, which was the beginning of his lifelong autodidacticism.

Several media profiles refer to Parker as a genius.

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.

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.

A few years later, Parker and Fanning, a student at Northeastern University, cofounded Napster, a free file-sharing service for music.

Parker raised the initial $50,000, and they launched Napster in June 1999.

Within a year, the service had tens of millions of users.

Napster was opposed by recording labels, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the heavy metal band Metallica, among others.

Lawsuits by various industry associations eventually shut down the service.

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.

In November 2002, Parker launched Plaxo, an online address book and social networking service that integrated with Microsoft Outlook.

Plaxo was an early social networking tool, which later influenced the growth of companies LinkedIn, Zynga, and Facebook.

Plaxo was one of the first products to build virality into its launch, and that earned it 20 million users.

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.

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.

Parker met with Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, and a few months later joined the five-month-old company as its president.

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".

As president, Parker brought on Thiel as Facebook's first investor.

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.

Additionally, Parker is said to have championed Facebook's clean user interface and developed its photo-sharing function.

Zuckerberg notes that "Sean was pivotal in helping Facebook transform from a college project into a real company."

In 2004, Parker saw a site called "The Facebook" on the computer of his roommate's girlfriend, who was a student at Stanford.