Sean Parker. Early life[edit] Education[edit] 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.[12] 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.[12] As a result, towards the end of Parker’s senior year at Chantilly, he was mostly writing code and starting companies.[12] He graduated in 1998. While still in high school, he interned for Mark Pincus (the former CEO of Zynga) at Pincus's Washington D.C. startup FreeLoader.[13] 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] Ventures[edit] Napster[edit]
With a Little Help From His Friends. In early 2001 he tried to launch his own Internet company, and to redeem himself. “It had to have the potential to be as big as Napster,” he says. “Otherwise it wasn’t interesting to me.” He realized his electronic address book was getting out of date. Maybe everyone could use help keeping theirs current. Could that be a company? But the idea took a while to gestate, and even longer to finance.
“I lived on couches for something like six months,” Parker says. Eventually, Parker and some partners managed to land some seed money from Sequoia, the prestigious Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. He began to hang around with some of his newfound San Francisco friends, including night owl Jonathan Abrams, a programmer who had launched Friendster in 2002, in part to help people hook up. One day—in a scene fictionalized in The Social Network—Parker saw Thefacebook, as it was then known, on the computer of his roommate’s girlfriend, a student at Stanford. “Why do we all put up with it?” Stylish Technology Entrepreneurs: Sean Parker. Sean Parker has recently shot to fame because of The Social Network.
Being portrayed by an actor in a movie is one thing but if that actor is none other than Justin Timberlake you can be assured of a lot of attention. And Parker deserves it. Often described as genius and one of the most promising entrepreneurs in the Internet Industry. His dress sense: smart, clearly expensive, often seen in a pinstripe suit and waiste coast, whatever the occasion. So Sean Parker is wealthy, successful and interesting enough to be played by Timberlake. Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson for Vanity Fair Although Parker describes the Social Network as a complete work of fiction with the quote “I wish my life was that cool” his life is actually pretty cool. You can find more info on Wikipedia or check out his profile on Facebook. Finally a video of Parker at DLD. Who else has made the ‘Stylish Technology Entrepreneurs’ cut? Image credit to Dustin Curtis.
Sean Parker: Agent Of Disruption. French article. Sean Parker on Quora. Social Network. Facebook Should Not Have Won, MySpace Blew It. Is Privacy the New Celebrity? Why companies like FB will determine the future of the world. Answer to Seth Godin about blogging. Causes and Chatroulette. Sean Parker, scourge of record labels, calls the bottom of the music industry.