Sean Parker

Parker was interested in computers from an early age; his father, an oceanographer for the U.S. government, first taught him computer programming when he was 7 years old. At the age of 16 he was tracked and discovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for hacking into the computer network of a major corporation and was sentenced to perform community service. He graduated from Oakton High School in Vienna, Virginia, in 1996.

American college student Shawn Fanning, a friend of Parker’s, devised a program that allowed users to share MP3 copies of music stored on their personal computers over the Internet. Parker, along with Fanning’s uncle, convinced Fanning that the file-sharing program could form the basis of a company, and in 1999 the three founded Napster. In 2001, as a result of a lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America, Napster was shut down for illegally distributing copyrighted materials.

The following year Parker and entrepreneurs Minh Nguyen, Todd Masonis, and Cameron Ring founded Plaxo, a website hosting software that served as an online address book. Parker was fired from Plaxo in 2004 for his erratic engagement with the company.

Interested in the possibilities of social networking, he was intrigued by Thefacebook (later to become Facebook), a social networking site for college students cofounded by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg. Parker encouraged Zuckerberg to drop out of Harvard to devote himself to the social network and helped negotiate financing for Facebook from Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel and the venture capital firm Accel Partners. By securing Facebook’s financing, Parker was able to negotiate terms that allowed Zuckerberg to retain majority control over Facebook’s board of directors. Parker became president of Facebook in 2004.

In 2005 Parker was arrested for cocaine possession in North Carolina. No charges were filed, but he was forced to step down as president of Facebook (though he continued to own a minority stake in the company worth hundreds of millions of dollars). He joined the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm cofounded by Thiel, in 2006 as a managing partner. In 2007 he and activist Joe Green founded Causes, which developed an application for Facebook users to mobilize groups of people for the purposes of advocacy and to solicit donations for philanthropic purposes. (Causes was also a client of the Founders Fund.) In 2010 the Founders Fund invested in Spotify, a Swedish digital music service in which access to its music library was free to users on personal computers but was available on a paid subscription basis to users on mobile devices. Parker received a seat on Spotify’s board and sought to expand the service within the United States, thus challenging Apple’s iTunes in the American digital music market. In 2011 he cofounded Airtime, a social video-calling service that went live the following year but struggled. Parker left the Founders Fund in 2014 and relaunched Airtime in 2016.

In 2015 Parker cofounded the Parker Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on initiatives in the life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement. The following year it provided the funding for the creation of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.