https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Parker
Sean Parker
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born December 3, 1979 (age 39)[1]
Herndon, Virginia, U.S.
Education William Taft Elementary
Oakton High School
Chantilly High School
Occupation Entrepreneur, investor
Known for Managing Partner at The Founders Fund
Co-founder of Plaxo, Napster, Airtime, and Causes
President of Facebook
Chairman of the Parker Foundation
Net worth IncreaseUS$2.6 billion (August 2017)[2]
Board member of Spotify
Yammer[3]
Spouse(s) Alexandra Lenas (m. 2013)
Children 2
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.
arker 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.[15] 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.[15] As a result, towards the end of Parker's senior year at Chantilly, he was mostly writing code and starting companies.[15] He graduated in 1998. While still in high school, he interned for Mark Pincus (the CEO of Zynga) at Pincus's Washington D.C. startup FreeLoader.[16] He won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing a Web crawler, and was recruited by the C.I.A.[4] 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.[4]
In 2004 Parker saw a site called "The Facebook" on the computer of his roommate's girlfriend, who was a student at Stanford.[5] 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.[4][39] Parker met with Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, and a few months later joined the five-month-old company as its president.[5][39] According to Peter Thiel, Facebook's first investor, Sean 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."[5]
As president, Parker brought on Thiel as Facebook's first investor.[5] 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.[4][5] Additionally, Parker is said to have championed Facebook's clean user interface and developed its photo-sharing function.[40][41] Zuckerberg notes that "Sean was pivotal in helping Facebook transform from a college project into a real company."[4]
During a party in 2005 police entered and searched a vacation home Parker was renting and found cocaine.[5] Parker was arrested on suspicion of drug possession, but was not charged.[5] This event caused Facebook investors to pressure Parker into resigning as company president.[42] Even after stepping down, Parker continued to remain involved with Facebook's growth and met regularly with Zuckerberg.[43] The event was later dramatized in the movie The Social Network.[44]
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.[45]