“He was more interested in the fun part of [building a] startup,” Masonis said. “He had been at Napster where they got to go backstage at concerts and spend money on concert tours.”

The “he” being referred to in this case is one of Silicon Valley’s most well-known players, Sean Parker. An entrepreneur and investor, Parker came up with Napster, an online music streaming service, and Plaxo, an online address book that updates itself.

Well, kinda.

The problem with Plaxo was that to automatically update the address book, users would actively have to change their own details when the time came and the incessant emails notifying them became so obnoxious it fell out of favour.

Now, Plaxo, which was bought by Comcast in 2008 for somewhere between $150 and $170 million (R2 – R2,3 billion), will officially be dead on December 31.

But its legacy deserves recognition because, as Business Insider explains:

Although it never became as well-known as other now-dead social networks like LiveJournal or MySpace, it may have been even more influential in paving the way for Facebook than Napster, its co-founder, Todd Masonis, told us back in 2015.

It all started because of Parker’s love affair with the good life. Pushed out of his own company by Plaxo’s board in 2004 for the partying mentioned above, he went on to do very well for himself:

There were also rumors [sic], which Parker refuted, that he had provided drugs to some employees. Parker said he was the subject of a “a smear campaign,” and accused board member Ram Shriram of scheming to throw him out and strip him of his stock.

Parker slipped into a depression, Masonis said, but it didn’t last long.

“He got kicked out and then immediately ran into Mark Zuckerberg. That’s how it all went down,” Masonis said.

And soon, Parker was made president of Facebook.

Yup, he was played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network.

He lasted only a year in the position, but while he was there he “used a lot of what he learned at Plaxo to help shape the social network into the behemoth it is today”:

Parker understood viral marketing:

At Plaxo, Parker conceived of viral marketing campaigns, and had no moral qualms in pinging the hell out of members’ contacts until they downloaded the service, too.

Yeah, you can thank him for not giving a damn about annoying you with emails.

Parker helped Zuckerberg maintain control of Facebook:

At Facebook, Parker negotiated an unusual deal with some of the company’s most powerful shareholders — including cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, and other major firms and investors — so that they ceded their voting rights to Zuckerberg, SEC documents revealed. This corporate structure was intended to give Zuckerberg permanent control of the company he founded, so that he can’t be jettisoned the way Plaxo booted Parker.

But this is the best: Parker sought revenge on one of Plaxo’s most esteemed VC firms:

There was bad blood between Parker and the firm. Sequoia’s Michael Moritz was Plaxo’s first major investor, and three short years later, he supported the board’s decision to fire Parker as its president. So when the chance for revenge surfaced, Parker seized it.

Zuckerberg took the meeting with Sequoia, but purposely blew it…He showed up late and wearing pajamas. His PowerPoint deck, titled “The Top Ten Reasons You Should Not Invest,” listed off snarky reasons such as “We have no revenue,” “We will probably get sued by the music industry,” and “Because Sean Parker is involved.”

Needless to say, Sequoia did not invest in Wirehog or Facebook.

But as crazy as Parker appears to be, he continues to makes waves in the Valley.

He recently served on Spotify’s board and helped it lock down deals with US record labels.

He launched and quietly shut down the video chat startup Airtime, and donated $24 million (R323 million) to Stanford University School of Medicine to build the Sean N. Parker Center [sic] for Allergy Research, dedicated to finding a cure for allergies.

And he also had this ridiculous wedding in the wilderness.

Cheers to doing what you want, I guess.

[source:businessinsider]