Шон Паркер: от Napster до Facebook и филантропии.

American entrepreneur and philanthropist
the footballer

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. 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. In his teens, Parker's hobbies were hacking and programming. 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. He won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing a web crawler, and was recruited by the FBI. 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. Within a year, the service had tens of millions of users. 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.

In 2004, Parker saw a site called "The Facebook" on the computer of his roommate's girlfriend, who was a student at Stanford. Parker met with Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, and a few months later joined the five month old company as its president. Zuckerberg notes that "Sean was pivotal in helping Facebook transform from a college project into a real company." However, after stepping down, Parker continued to remain involved with Facebook's growth, and met regularly with Zuckerberg. The event was later dramatized in the movie The Social Network. 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.

In 2006, Parker became a managing partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco based venture capital fund founded by Peter Thiel. Founders Fund is focused on investing in early stage companies, has $500 million in aggregate capital, and has invested in Quantcast, Path, and Knewton. Parker was given carte blanche by Thiel when finding investments. In 2014, Parker stepped down from his role at Founders Fund to focus on other projects. 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.

While working at Founders Fund, Parker had been looking to invest in a company that could further Napster's music sharing mission legally. The pair traded emails, and in 2010 Parker invested US$15 million in Spotify. 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. 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.

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." Parker is the Executive Chairman of Brigade. The initial round of funding was $9.3 million from Parker, with additional sums from other investors. In 2014, Brigade acquired Causes, an online platform for social impact and political activism. Causes had in 2013 acquired Votizen, a political advocacy startup. Parker and The Founders Fund were a part of Votizen's $1.5 million funding round in 2010, 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]."

Since 2005, Parker has been an active donor to cancer research, global public health and civic engagement. In 2012, he pledged a $5 million grant to Stand Up to Cancer and the Cancer Research Institute to create the Immunotherapy Dream Team, uniting laboratory and clinical efforts that will lead to the immunological treatment, control and prevention of cancer. In December 2014, Parker pledged $24 million to create the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford. In 2015, he made a $4.5 million grant to support the Malaria Elimination Initiative at the University of California San Francisco's Global Health Group, and a $10 million grant to create the Sean N. Parker Autoimmune Research Laboratory at UCSF. Parker is an active supporter of groups including Code for America, Stand Up To Cancer, the Cancer Research Institute, Malaria No More, the Clinton Foundation, ONE, and the "charity: water" campaign. In 2007, Parker founded Causes, originally one of the earliest Facebook applications, as a philanthropic service that uses social media to connect charities with their supporters and potential donors and then communicates that connection to the user's network of friends. By 2013, 186 million people had joined Causes, donating over $50 million to 60,000 non profits.

In June 2015, Parker announced a $600 million contribution to launch the Parker Foundation, which focuses on three areas life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to large scale challenges, combining insight, capital, science and technology, organization building, and public policy.