Sean Parker Leaves Founders Fund

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/06/sean-parker-leaves-founders-fund/

by whbk • 12 years ago

35 25 12 years ago

What exactly does Sean Parker do, anyway? Everything I see about him seems to imply that it's newsworthy because it's Sean Parker rather than specific things he does.

smackfu• 12 years ago

He's rich, which is even better than doing anything, for newsworthy purposes.

minimaxir• 12 years ago

He did Airtime, which received $33 million in funding and bombed. The project was rebooted/pivoted into an Airtime for Mobile.

bredren• 12 years ago

I feel Airtime was an unnecessarily large failure and in my opinion tarnished Founders Fund. Doesn't mean it directly had to do with his departure, but it is important.

byoogle• 12 years ago

“Visionary leadership”: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2004-04-17/

_dztf• 12 years ago

Yep, that is the best description!

crystaln• 12 years ago

He's an eclectic genius playboy with arcane knowledge and impeccable fashion taste, surrounded by rumors of drug fueled sex parties, and who has repeatedly charmed his way into iconic companies, with finesse seemingly his primary work product.

He's what half the bros in Silicon Valley want to be. I suppose that makes him newsworthy to many.

imjk• 12 years ago

He seems to be good at identifying emerging trends and selling himself to the trendsetters/pioneers to allow him to get involved.

mattgreenrocks2• 12 years ago

This is what I thought. He really knows how to get in on the ground floor of things.

awwstn• 12 years ago

For better or worse, if you create software that plays a key role in a tectonic shift in a massive industry (Napster) and later become president of one of the fastest growing and most impactful companies of the past decade(Facebook), then the things you do are inherently newsworthy.

But, to answer your question (for better or worse again), it seems to me that what he does primarily is start and invest in tech companies. And at least once, get married in a forest.

anon808• 12 years ago

Did Parker create the napster software. I recall Fanning wrote napster and Parker helped fund raise.

larrys• 12 years ago

"it's newsworthy because it's Sean Parker"

Newsworthy to Techcrunch? Anything related to a "celeb" in this business to Techcrunch would be newsworthy. But I would say this would be of interest even to the WSJ because it fall under infotainment.

Likewise, something involving a top commenter on HN would be newsworthy to HN. But not elsewhere. Maybe maybe to some blogs if there was a good story to tell.

Something about PG would be newsworthy on HN, Techcrunch, and if it was particularly unusual, say if PG was detained in Mexico, it would be newsworthy in many places whereas if it were you that was detained, it probably wouldn't be.

So the question really is in many cases to what extent is someone a celeb in a business that "normals" care about. Or important enough that normals might care about it (like if a top guy at Volvo was arrested for drug dealing that would make the news almost certainly because many "normals" know about Volvo).

rhizome• 12 years ago

He is a celebrity and a professional cheerleader.

nswanberg2• 12 years ago

Wikipedia is a good start: "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" seems like the mark of someone who might go on to something interesting.

If this was a genuine question and you were expecting some informed answers, consider writing it in a different way. It hasn't attracted very high quality responses.

boomzilla• 12 years ago

Agreed. Sean Parker is a great early trend spotter. One could argue that he got lucky, but not everyone could identify the early trends and then bet the farm (literally everything he had) on it. He's also socially polished (for better or worse) and understood the Silicon Valley game very well.

Aloha• 12 years ago

Why should I care?

qvikr• 12 years ago

depends... if you want to raise capital that's one less rockstar to look for. if you're kicking up the next big disruptive startup that's one more guy you should look out for..

tptacek2• 12 years ago

Love the totally irrelevant dig at the end of this article about the guy's wedding plan. That's Techcrunch (and VentureBeat and PandoDaily and all these other publications) neatly wrapped up for you right there.

nswanberg2• 12 years ago

Not since Game of Thrones has there been that much male nerd interest in weddings.

gargarplex• 12 years ago

It's not irrelevant. The kind of conspicuous consumption is the pot of gold at the end of the tech rainbow. It's also shown how the negative PR Parker received might be associated with Founders Fund.

tptacek2• 12 years ago

No. You're confused. You think the story about Parker's wedding isn't irrelevant. Fine. But that's not what this story is about. Here, it's just an irrelevant potshot.

argumentum• 12 years ago

What? This is the Founders Fund headed by Peter Thiel who is constantly in the news for his very strident libertarianism. They've never shied away from controversy in the least.

steerj92• 12 years ago

Just going to put this out there.. I'm not a fan of Sean Parker, but he's done pretty well for himself so far. Either he's a genius or always seems to be in the right place at the right time

n6mac41717• 12 years ago

Either h^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HHe's a genius or^H^Hwho always seems to be in the right place at the right time.

Sean Parker Leaves Founders Fund

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