The remarkable life of Sean Parker has been filled with incident and infamy. By the time he was 25 he’d been convicted for hacking major companies, turned down a CIA recruiter, and helped to set up two of the most famous companies of the internet era in Napster and Facebook. Parker’s notoriety has led to his early exploits in the Internet industry being immortalized in film, but he hopes to be remembered for what happens next, as he has eschewed the world of Internet technology and is instead devoting his life, resources, and nose for innovation to the search for cancer treatments and vaccines.
Hacking the planet
Sean was born in 1979 in Virginia, and throughout his childhood he struggled with serious nut allergies and asthma, which would lead to frequent hospital visits and caused him to miss large chunks of high school. Although Sean was highly intelligent, his studies also suffered for reasons besides his health problems. When he was seven years old, his father bought an Atari 800 computer and taught Sean the fundamentals of BASIC programming. His son never looked back, and by the time he was of high school age Sean was an accomplished hacker, breaking into the online networks of companies and organizations around the globe. He set himself a challenge to hack into a site of every top-level domain type - .com, .edu, .mil, .gov, etc. - in every country, and would keep a log of every network he successfully infiltrated. His intentions were not malicious; he says he “usually” alerted the sites’ sysadmins of the vulnerabilities he exploited to break their defenses and he did no harm to their networks. He would stay up into the dead of night hacking far-flung systems and ultimately this would be his downfall, as his nocturnal schedule caused further harm to his education. One fateful night, his father caught him on the computer deep into the early hours and, citing Sean’s failing grades, confiscated the computer’s keyboard. Sean was distraught; he was illegally logged in to the network of a Fortune 500 company at the time and without his keyboard he would be unable to log out cleanly and would surely be caught. His worst fears were realized a few days later when a teacher informed him that his father had arrived at the school to collect him for an orthodontist appointment. Sean didn’t have an orthodontist, much less an appointment, and he immediately knew what had happened. The FBI was waiting for him at home.
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The remarkable life of Sean Parker has been filled with incident and infamy. By the time he was 25 he’d been convicted for hacking major companies, turned down a CIA recruiter, and helped to set up two of the most famous companies of the internet era in Napster and Facebook. Parker’s notoriety has led to his early exploits in the Internet industry being immortalized in film, but he hopes to be remembered for what happens next, as he has eschewed the world of Internet technology and is instead devoting his life, resources, and nose for innovation to the search for cancer treatments and vaccines.
Hacking the planet
Sean was born in 1979 in Virginia, and throughout his childhood he struggled with serious nut allergies and asthma, which would lead to frequent hospital visits and caused him to miss large chunks of high school. Although Sean was highly intelligent, his studies also suffered for reasons besides his health problems. When he was seven years old, his father bought an Atari 800 computer and taught Sean the fundamentals of BASIC programming. His son never looked back, and by the time he was of high school age Sean was an accomplished hacker, breaking into the online networks of companies and organizations around the globe. He set himself a challenge to hack into a site of every top-level domain type - .com, .edu, .mil, .gov, etc. - in every country, and would keep a log of every network he successfully infiltrated. His intentions were not malicious; he says he “usually” alerted the sites’ sysadmins of the vulnerabilities he exploited to break their defenses and he did no harm to their networks. He would stay up into the dead of night hacking far-flung systems and ultimately this would be his downfall, as his nocturnal schedule caused further harm to his education. One fateful night, his father caught him on the computer deep into the early hours and, citing Sean’s failing grades, confiscated the computer’s keyboard. Sean was distraught; he was illegally logged in to the network of a Fortune 500 company at the time and without his keyboard he would be unable to log out cleanly and would surely be caught. His worst fears were realized a few days later when a teacher informed him that his father had arrived at the school to collect him for an orthodontist appointment. Sean didn’t have an orthodontist, much less an appointment, and he immediately knew what had happened. The FBI was waiting for him at home.
As Parker was still only 15, he was tried as a minor and only sentenced to community service.This allowed him to continue his prodigal computing career. At 16, he won prizes at the Virginia State computer science fair for designing one of the first web crawlers, and, according to a Forbes profile, this led to him being approached by a CIA recruiter, who he rebuffed. He chose instead to intern at various tech startups, and by the time he graduated high school he had already earned $80,000 from various roles and enterprises. He had also met a like-minded teenager called Shawn Fanning on an online bulletin board, and while Sean’s father was keen for him to start college, Sean and Shawn had other ideas.
Parker and Fanning reunited in 2012
The pair founded Napster - the first widely successful music sharing service - in the summer of 1999, and in the process changed the face of the music industry forever. Fanning handled the technology while Parker ran the business, and found himself the focal point for every furious lawyer in the music industry - and all of the lawyers in the music industry were furious about Napster. He learned a lot about business in those early skirmishes, and now legal students are learning from them in turn, as he later discovered: “Some of the emails I wrote when I was just a kid who didn’t know what he was doing are apparently in [law school] textbooks.” While he won many battles, the war proved unwinnable, and in 2002 the music industry finally succeeded in shutting down the two upstart teenagers and their incredibly popular service. Parker now considers his time at Napster to be the equivalent of a college education, referring to it as “Napster University''. He’d changed the landscape of recorded music forever but was only just getting started.
He then founded an early social networking site called Plaxo, which quickly built a substantial user base but annoyed at least as many people as it signed up thanks to its promotional activities, which relied heavily on users spamming automated referral requests to their email address books. Parker was also annoying people at this time, in particular the financiers of Plaxo who objected to his unconventional approach to business, frequently late for meetings and often not turning up at all. After two years, Parker was ousted from his own company by the board but this did not help Plaxo in the long term. Without Sean’s influence the firm slowly sank into obscurity.
Partying with Mark Zuckerberg and Snoop Dogg
Parker was becalmed for a while, broke and sofa surfing in the homes of Silicon Valley friends, but it didn’t take long for him to bounce back. He saw a website on the computer of his roommate’s girlfriend, a student at Stanford University. This website intrigued him, so Parker reached out to the site’s owners and within months he was named as the first president of what came to be known as Facebook. Parker is credited with being a major force in the site’s early success and rapid growth, bringing in Peter Thiel as the company’s first major investor and having a heavy influence on the site’s groundbreaking user interface and design. Unfortunately for Sean, his reputation for fast living got him in trouble again. In 2005, he was arrested at a party in a rented house where the police had found cocaine. He was never charged with possession, but nonetheless Facebook’s investors asked him to leave and he reluctantly agreed, although he continued to advise Mark Zuckerberg in an unofficial capacity for many years, which may have been a factor in why Facebook avoided Plaxo’s fate.
The True Superhero of cancer funding
As Facebook grew, so did Sean’s wealth, and he continued to make shrewd investments in promising startups - most notably as an early backer of Spotify - but his attention was beginning to move away from web technology and towards biotech. By the time of the release of The Social Network in 2010 - in which Justin Timberlake plays Parker as a greedy, vain and mercenary playboy - the real Parker was beginning to make substantial philanthropic investments to fund medical researchers.
Among the first was another of our True Superheroes, Jim Allison, whose groundbreaking research into cancer immunotherapy altered the landscape of cancer treatment. In 2012, Parker provided a $10m grant to fund Allison’s ongoing research, and this was swiftly followed by more donations; in 2014 he gave $24m to Stanford University to set up the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research, and the following year he announced he was setting up the Parker Foundation, with an initial donation of $600m. The Foundation’s goals centered on three areas; life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement, and promised a radical interdisciplinary approach typical of Parker’s style. This broad initiative was then followed in 2015 by the formation of a more targeted organization, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), with the ambitious aim of “forging a future without cancer”.
PICI began with a $250m donation from Parker, and in the words of researchers who have worked with Sean, “The field [of cancer research] has never seen anything quite like him.” Cancer research has had enormous amounts of money thrown at it in the last 70 years, going back to the days of Mary Lasker and the War on Cancer, but PICI’s broad, multifaceted approach is new, with the Institute performing many different roles: a startup incubator, a drug developer, a control room for clinical trials, and much more. In its first six years, PICI has funded 3,250 research papers, run 10 clinical trials involving more than 300 patients, supported 142 research projects and over 150 new inventions and startups, and also facilitated vital collaborations between the various projects and researchers under its wing. This versatile, many-sided approach is shaking up the world of oncological research and is already getting results. Parker is a True Superhero on a mission, and with his track record of identifying and collaborating with innovators would go on to revolutionize their fields, it would not be a huge surprise if Parker and PICI were to achieve that mission.
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