Sean Parker, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Sean Parker comes up
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 56:23 Ben Gilbert Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Parker, Sean Parker, who we'll talk about who comes in, called it the trance.
- ▶ 1:09:11 David Rosenthal That person is the co-founder of Napster, Sean Parker, who would have a brief but very, very large impact on the company.
- ▶ 1:09:21 Ben Gilbert So before we tell the Sean Parker chapter of the Facebook, now is a great time to talk about our presenting partner, JP Morgan Payments.
- ▶ 1:12:11 Ben Gilbert Sean Parker enters the picture.
- ▶ 1:12:14 David Rosenthal So Sean Parker had, of course, started Napster with Sean Fanning back in the late 19 nineties.
- ▶ 1:12:20 David Rosenthal And after the whole Napster saga, Parker ended up starting the email contact list company called Plaxo, which was kind of its own proto-social network and pioneered email address book exploitation and exporting.
- ▶ 1:13:05 David Rosenthal Sean and his co-founders at Plaxo raise money for Plaxo from venture capitalists, and not just any venture capitalists, the best venture capitalists from Sequoia Capital.
- ▶ 1:13:24 David Rosenthal Anyway, after a couple years, Sean Parker ends up getting kicked out of the company by the board.
- ▶ 1:13:32 David Rosenthal Now, Sean wasn't exactly the most, like, reliable employee, and, uh, definitely was, um, quirky.
- ▶ 1:13:40 David Rosenthal But the result of this is Sean's
- ▶ 1:14:02 David Rosenthal Sean is living in Palo Alto, and one of his housemate's girlfriends, who's, I believe, a student at Stanford,
- ▶ 1:14:19 David Rosenthal Sean is like, holy crap.
- ▶ 1:14:26 David Rosenthal And Sean, I believe, had actually been an advisor to Friendster as well.
- ▶ 1:14:52 David Rosenthal So, Sean, being the enterprising person that he is, he cold emails the company's business email address and asks to set up a meeting, and Eduardo Saverin replies to Sean, he's like, oh, cool, you're the co-founder of Napster, yeah.
- ▶ 1:15:07 David Rosenthal They set up a dinner in New York City, this is while the spring semester is still going on at Harvard, and Mark and Eduardo and Sean all get dinner together, and
- ▶ 1:15:18 David Rosenthal Mark and Sean really bond.
- ▶ 1:15:50 David Rosenthal Sean is also walking down the same street in Palo Alto, sees them, and is like, hey, it's the Facebook guys.
- ▶ 1:16:02 David Rosenthal And at this point, Sean Parker was living in a different house, specifically the house of his girlfriend's parents.
- ▶ 1:17:00 Ben Gilbert Sean Parker had a very detailed pixel sprite.
- ▶ 1:19:01 David Rosenthal Yes, and I think Sean, as bitter as he was about his own experience, I think he probably also recognized that and recognized that the Facebook and Mark had the potential to start a new paradigm of how to do this differently.
- ▶ 1:19:18 David Rosenthal So Sean says to Mark, look, if you just go out on your own, that's what's gonna happen.
- ▶ 1:19:56 David Rosenthal I mean, Sean was also in a position to take advantage of Mark and the company, and he didn't.
- ▶ 1:20:15 Ben Gilbert Now granted, it's technically Mark's board seat, but, you know, Sean's the one sitting in it.
- ▶ 1:21:01 David Rosenthal The other thing that Sean does, by all accounts, is he makes sure that everyone in the house that summer gets equity in the company.
- ▶ 1:21:14 David Rosenthal I really would love to know what Sean thought when Mark and the crew told them about Wirehog.
- ▶ 1:21:50 David Rosenthal While they're talking about this, Sean Parker actually comes up with a name for the product, uh, and is like, oh, if you launch this, you should actually call it Dropbox.
- ▶ 1:22:35 David Rosenthal So to the investors that Sean goes out and helps them find, Sean at this point knows basically everybody in Silicon Valley, and he's like,
- ▶ 1:23:05 David Rosenthal One is Reid Hoffman, who Reid had been running LinkedIn, and Sean had been in this early social networking thing.
- ▶ 1:23:18 David Rosenthal So Sean calls up Reid, and he also calls up Mark Pincus.
- ▶ 1:23:24 David Rosenthal Had been Sean's boss at an internship that he had in high school.
- ▶ 1:23:44 David Rosenthal So, Pincus and Reed meet up with Sean and Mark, and they're just
- ▶ 1:24:14 Ben Gilbert How is Sean not the one being like,
- ▶ 1:24:20 David Rosenthal I mean, amazingly, a couple years later, you know, Sean, being so open-minded, I mean, he was the, one of the ones who really helped Spotify get going.
- ▶ 1:29:37 David Rosenthal And certainly at this point, the combination of Sean, Peter, Reed, Mark Pincus, all
- ▶ 1:30:07 David Rosenthal Sean, like we said, his impact on the company was huge.
- ▶ 1:30:14 David Rosenthal Mark having full control over the company as we are going to see time and time and time again as we go through the story here makes all the difference in the world, and that is 100% because of Sean Parker.
- ▶ 1:30:27 Ben Gilbert So how long is Sean at the company?
- ▶ 1:30:39 David Rosenthal Sean ends up leaving the company after charges get filed against him as a result of some drug incidents at a house party during a trip to North Carolina.
- ▶ 1:30:58 David Rosenthal He immediately joins, where else?
- ▶ 1:31:03 David Rosenthal Which Peter, partially on the back of this Facebook investment, has now set up and raised officially, and like we said, Sean goes on to find and fund and really help nurture Spotify through his role at Founders Fund.
- ▶ 1:31:51 David Rosenthal That was one of Sean Parker's final impacts on the company is he actually negotiated the domain name purchase of facebook.com.
- ▶ 1:32:35 Ben Gilbert Well, Sean Parker introduced Mark to Western Technology Investment, WTI.
- ▶ 1:37:40 Ben Gilbert Three million went to Mark, Dustin, and Sean as a secondary in this deal.
- ▶ 1:55:04 David Rosenthal Thanks to Sean Parker, he doesn't have to sell.
- ▶ 5:54:12 David Rosenthal I think that is right, and I think it is doubly so with Meta because of Sean Parker and because it was set up from the very, very beginning that nobody could ever get rid of Mark.
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg) · Acquired
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek · Acquired
- ▶ 1:09:45 Ben Gilbert You might remember that one of the early breakout moments for Spotify was a 2009 email that Sean Parker sent to Daniel talking about how he loved the idea for Spotify.
- ▶ 1:09:55 Ben Gilbert He wanted to invest.
- ▶ 1:09:56 Ben Gilbert He saw social media, specifically Facebook, as the distribution channel.
- ▶ 1:10:01 David Rosenthal Sean Parker at the time was uniquely qualified to opine on this because he was mostly Sean Parker of, you know, Napster fame.
- ▶ 1:10:34 Ben Gilbert Browsing PitchBook jogged my memory about the early Facebook strategy that Sean Parker then at Founders Fund invested in 2009 and 10, again, found both in PitchBook, which led to a lot of the discussion on this episode about the importance…
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 14:01 Jason Calacanis Mayfield for a year, and then Sean Parker introduced him to, um, Zuck, and Zuck needed, you know, like a Chamath.
- ▶ 2:03:56 Jason Calacanis Sean Parker does Moritz.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 2:25:39 David Rosenthal Well, so we know Sequoia is out for Facebook because of Sean Parker, the pajama pitch, you know, all that, the bad blood.