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The ultimate insider look at the newest titans of tech—and what you can learn from their success
In 2007, twenty-one-year old David Karp launched Tumblr, a simple micro-blogging platform, on a whim. By 2012, it had become one of the top ten online destinations, drawing 170 million visitors. By 2013, Yahoo had acquired Tumblr for over $1 billion. Just like that, a kid who hadn’t even earned his high school diploma was worth over a quarter billion dollars. And he’s not the only one . . .
Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires represent a unique and unconventional breed of entrepreneur: young, bold, and taking the world by storm with their extreme speed, insatiable hunger, and progressive leadership. These whiz kids (and, to be fair, a few adults) have the hottest companies in the world. They are all turning just one brilliant insight or hook into money at a rate never before seen in human history—creating companies that, even with no revenue, garner insane valuations.
With unique insider access to the world’s most influential and wealthy entrepreneurs, Forbes has dug in to find what these super-entrepreneurs say about their own success. This book, introduced, edited, and updated by Forbes editor Randall Lane, is the first comprehensive look at who these instant tech billionaires are and how they achieved their quick wins. With sixteen illuminating pieces, including two never-before published features, we get behind-the-scenes examinations of the founders of Spotify, Airbnb, Tumblr, Twitter, and more, including:
- Elon Musk: The billionaire founder of Paypal, electric carmaker Tesla, and private space company SpaceX. His extreme ambition is matched by his preternatural engineering mind; no wonder he was the model for Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Iron Man.
- Evan Spiegel: The twenty-three-year old declined a $3 billion cash offer from Mark Zuckerberg, after making the mountain come to Mohammed (Snapchat’s HQ is in Los Angeles) —an unheard of request from a young gun to one of the biggest players in Silicon Valley. The story of Snapchat’s origin is even wilder than Facebook’s, but Spiegel’s ability to parlay infamy and popularity into revenue is still up in the air, even as Snapchat’s valuation continues to grow.
- Alex Karp: An eccentric philosopher with almost no tech background turned a Peter Thiel backed venture, Palantir, into a data-mining champion, with clients like the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA. Amid heated privacy concerns, Karp continues to grow Palantir like crazy, to $196 million in funding and an estimated $1 billion in contracts in 2014.
You Only Have to Be Right Once is the definitive collection of everything we can learn from these incredible game changers and what their next moves spell for the future of business.
- Sales Rank: #862454 in Books
- Published on: 2014-10-16
- Released on: 2014-10-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x .63" w x 6.25" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review
From "You Only Have to Be Right Once"
Wedged into a corner, Sean Parker sported the removed look of someone at a crowded party who doesn't know many people. Which, at a media soiree at New York's clubby Monkey Bar on October 4, 2011, happened to be the case. Given that two weeks prior, Parker became the first person to adorn the cover of Forbes since I returned as the editor, it seemed right to introduce myself.
It's not that the "Forbes" cover had been a valentine: it revealed the polymath who had helped shape Napster, Facebook and Spotify for all his quirks and faults. But until that story, the world equated him with the villainous character portrayed by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher's movie" The Social Network." Now Parker stood before me as a brash actor in a story that has only a little to do with Facebook and feels a hundred times bigger: how a handful of young digital swashbucklers shrugged off the Great Recession to transform how industries operate and fortunes get made.
The day after my conversation with Parker, Steve Jobs passed away. Jobs had epitomized the "old" new guard, one of a trinity of tech entrepreneurs - with Bill Gates and Michael Dell - who two generations earlier, while themselves in their twenties, proved the disruptive power of technology. This narrative isn't new.
In this round, however, the underlying drivers have accelerated exponentially. This new model of Young Turk isn't merely comfortable with technology--he can't remember a world without the Internet. Accordingly, he's no longer content merely conquering the technology space-"every" industry is now the technology space, whether hotels or music or transportation. And thus ripe for the pillaging.
About the Author
RANDALL LANE is the editor of Forbes and the author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane.
Since 1917, FORBES has provided leaders with strategic insight and information. The largest business magazine in the world, Forbes has 6.1 million readers in the United States and more than thirty international editions.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
“I know exactly who you are,” Parker responded, quickly parrying with a short history of my personal background, Forbes’s position in the marketplace, and my stated goals for the magazine. He then explained his (typical) obsessiveness with a soliloquy that can be summed up in two words: Thank you.
It’s not that the Forbes cover had been a valentine: It revealed the polymath who had helped shape Napster, Facebook, and Spotify with all his quirks and faults. But until that story—viewed more than 700,000 times online and by millions more who saw the print magazine version—the world equated him with the villainous character portrayed by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s movie The Social Network. Even Mark Zuckerberg conceded the movie did Parker factual injustice. Reduced to an evil-businessman caricature, Parker had barricaded himself in LA’s Peninsula Hotel for two months, where he’d gained thirty pounds.
His twenty-two-year-old fiancée had helped him ditch the depression, and the weight. And so Parker stood before me, himself again, as a brash actor in a story that has only a little to do with Facebook and feels one hundred times bigger: how a handful of young digital swashbucklers shrugged off the Great Recession to transform how industries operate and fortunes get made.
The day after my conversation with Parker, Steve Jobs passed away. Jobs had epitomized the old new guard, one of a trinity of tech entrepreneurs—with Bill Gates and Michael Dell—who two generations earlier, while themselves in their twenties, proved the disruptive power of technology. Now Jobs was dead. Gates had become a full-time philanthropist. And Dell’s company, as with Apple and Microsoft, was viewed by this new generation as the bloated prey rather than the hungry predator.
This narrative isn’t new. The first half century of the American computer age has seen perennial waves of the young taking on the old. During my first go-around at Forbes, just out of college in the early nineties, I chronicled tech-savvy Generation X, which valued entrepreneurship over the corporate ladder and fueled the original dotcom boom and bust, carving out a handful of huge winners, notably Google and eBay, in the process.
In this round, however, the underlying drivers have accelerated exponentially. This new model of Young Turk isn’t merely comfortable with technology—he can’t remember a world without the Internet. Accordingly, he’s no longer content merely conquering the technology space—every industry is now the technology space, whether hotels or music or transportation. And thus ripe for pillaging.
Then there’s the cash. History will determine whether this proves to be yet another financial bubble—when a five-year-old taxi-sharing app, Uber, raises venture money at a $17 billion valuation, it’s hard to bet against that. But what’s undeniable is that we’re witnessing the most prodigious wealth machine in human history. Zuckerberg, worth some $30 billion on his thirtieth birthday, may be the poster boy for this new breed, but he’s far from an outlier. Almost a dozen Americans, ineligible by dint of age to serve as president, became self-made billionaires over the past five years. What’s more, no one in this cohort finds that particularly unusual—they pretty much feel entitled to it.
Youth, meanwhile, has officially ceased to be a disadvantage, upending pretty much the entirety of civilized history. Previously, whether you were a blacksmith or a lawyer, wisdom and experience rendered you more valuable as years went on. No longer. For the past twenty years, if your computer broke, you’d prefer that the twenty-five-year-old fix it rather than the fifty-five-year-old. For ten years, venture capitalists favored young “digital natives” over industry veterans, as long as the former got paired with an operational “adult.” We’ve now skipped the adult requirement. The kids are fully running the show.
And unlike the hedge fund managers of the previous decade, who were rightly perceived to have conjured their billions without actually creating anything (other than the complicated financial structures that wound up collapsing everything else), no one resents them for it. Quite the contrary, they glide across the country in their chartered Gulfstreams like folk heroes.
The white hats stem from the perception of meritocracy. The high stakes put a premium on ideas and technical execution, rather than connections and salesmanship. As you turn the pages of this book, there’s a far higher correlation between financial success and a stint as a teen hacker than having daddy’s name on a building at Harvard. The engineers have trumped the salesmen. Sexism remains embedded in the coder-boy set (it’s not by choice that this book is chock-a-block with guys; very few women have launched major tech-enabled start-ups). But just ask Jan Koum or Pejman Nozad or Daniel Ek—the American Dream has never been more vivid. The only nepotism, as best as I can tell, comes from being the catalyst’s roommate, buddy, or frat brother. (In the 2010s, there’s no sweeter title than “co-founder.”) It’s hard to resent someone when you had the same shot at the brass ring.
To me, however, the ultimate commonality across all these chapters, the one that lets them reap adulation, boils down to individualism. The post-meltdown recovery has proven among the most tepid in national history, especially the job market. Where others see a paralysis-inducing world, these guys see a gold rush, and they take action. They’d all rather regret the things they did than what they didn’t do. Jobs and Gates and Dell made dropping out acceptable; among this group, it’s cool, a badge of honor. (Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel dropped out of Stanford in the middle of a class, a month before graduation . . . on principle.)
Failure is an acceptable option. There’s hardly anyone in this book who hasn’t tasted it. Venture capitalists, in fact, view failure as an asset, and fund based on whether you’ve had the good fortune to make mistakes on someone else’s dime. The entire VC ecosystem is based on flops: the idea that a one-in-ten success ratio is fine, as long as that success is a blockbuster. You only have to be right once. The greatest successes come when people aren’t afraid to fail—a decidedly American outlook that explains why almost every innovation of the Internet era has sprung from this country.
Credit belongs to the Forbes writers and researchers who brought forward—and home—this endless parade of digital robber barons: George Anders, Victoria Barrett, Jeff Bercovici, Steve Bertoni, Abram Brown, J. J. Colao, Hannah Elliott, David Ewalt, Tomio Geron, Andy Greenberg, Ryan Mac, Parmy Olson, and Eric Savitz. This book, to a large degree, is yours. Thanks at Penguin’s Portfolio imprint go to Adrian Zackheim, Natalie Horbachevsky, and Will Weisser, who instantly grasped the power and importance of what we’d assembled, and scrambled with the speed of a start-up to get this to market. At Forbes, two people deserve a special call-out: Lewis D’Vorkin, Forbes’s chief product officer, whose return to Forbes four years ago brought a refocus on chronicling people-based entrepreneurial capitalism—he set the stage for the stories that infuse this book; and Bruce Upbin, who as managing editor oversees Forbes’s technology coverage—he was at the genesis of almost all of these profiles.
For the past three years, my job has provided the perfect perch to see the waves swell, as Forbes, scorekeepers of capitalism, emerged as the preferred venue to introduce (or reintroduce) yourself to the world. The large majority of these chapters were born from Forbes magazine features, and the majority of those were cover stories. The facts in every chapter have been updated, resulting in an accurate snapshot of what was going on as we went to press in the summer of 2014. I ordered them in roughly sequential order, based on when the companies began taking off. Even across just three years of profiles, while the core traits remain consistent, you’ll see the numbers swell ever-larger.
Which brings us back to my party pal Sean Parker. The most famous line attributed to him in The Social Network, of course, was his advice to Zuckerberg on their first meeting: A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars. It was, he told me, complete Hollywood fiction. He never said it. And even if he had, as you progress though these chapters, you’ll recognize a second level of folly. In the land of the young tech elite, a billion isn’t cool anymore. Ten billion is.
—Randall Lane, August 2014
@RandallLane
CHAPTER 1
The evolution of the Internet, from unfettered hacker toy to unlimited wealth machine, comes embodied in one Sean Parker. As the teenage cofounder of Napster, the music piracy site that nearly crippled the recording industry, he gained notoriety, even as he flirted with bankruptcy and jail. As the twentysomething president of Facebook, entrusted with giving Mark Zuckerberg some adult supervision, he cemented his digital bad boy reputation, even as he made himself a few billion dollars. But when Steven Bertoni tried to track down the mercurial Parker in 2011, he found proof of the adage about wealth’s ability to buy happiness. Parker, recovering from surgery and a freshly branded villain of the tech world, courtesy of David Fincher’s movie The Social Network, devolved into a hermit, holing up in the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles for two months, a digital Howard Hughes. When he emerged, he invited Bertoni for what was supposed to be a relatively brief sit-down in his new $20 million townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village. That meeting turned into a meticulously chosen sushi dinner, and after two bottles of expensive sake, a trip to the West Coast, via rented Gulfstream, where Parker pinballed around various interests. His passion at the time: Airtime, a video-sharing service that he zealously kept under wraps—and eventually flopped. No big deal. This is a guy adept at identifying problems, and at peace if not every solution works out. He also backed Spotify, a legal reincarnation of Napster—by 2014, it was valued at more than $4 billion.
Pointed toward his eighteen-acre compound in Marin County, Sean Parker ripped through the night fog on the Golden Gate Bridge in a stealthy Audi S6 that masks a Lamborghini engine, one pale hand on the wheel, the other toggling through thousands of songs uploaded on the car’s sound system.
Facebook’s former president had endured a typically busy day. Over the last ten hours he’d interviewed two potential VPs for his new video startup, answered hours’ worth of e-mails about the music platform he was backing, Spotify, and met with a potential CEO for his Facebook charity app, Causes. He had also booked bands and wrangled vendors for his engagement party, scheduled in New Jersey the same night Hurricane Irene hammered the Northeast (with Lenny Kravitz grounded in North Carolina, he eventually subbed in the Cold War Kids). Later, he broke from work to dine with Jack Dorsey, the chief of Facebook rival Twitter and payment service Square. After dinner, at the restaurant bar, he interviewed another potential boss for Causes. By the time he dropped me off at my hotel, it was 11:30 p.m. Parker’s day was about half done.
For the next six hours Parker fired off e-mails, then turned to his private Facebook page. The previous afternoon—or earlier the same day, if you’re on Parker’s body clock—the world had learned that Steve Jobs resigned from Apple. Around 6:00 a.m., Parker posted this Schopenhauer quote: “We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.” It immediately leaked. Gossip site Gawker accused him of dancing on Jobs’s grave. He e-mailed Gawker that the quote was a tribute to Jobs—his longtime idol and more recent rival (iTunes versus Spotify). Just before 7:00 a.m. he went to bed.
Four hours later he was up, ready to do it all again.
Flighty, manic, and unpredictable, Parker grates on investors—he’s been jettisoned from the three companies he helped create, soon after they lifted off. “He’s seen as an unknown quantity, and VCs love for things to be very much in control,” said Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. But VCs also love big ideas, and Parker has those in spades—LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman calls him a “big-ass visionary.” And in terms of boardroom scheming, he’s nothing like his fictional portrayal in The Social Network. “The movie needed an antagonist, but that’s not what he was,” said former Facebook growth chief Chamath Palihapitiya. “He’s really the exact opposite of his portrayal in the film.”
Boiled down, Sean Parker is a human accelerant, an idea catalyst who, when combined with the right people, has fueled some of the most disruptive companies of the last two decades. At just nineteen he blew up the record industry as the cofounder of the music-sharing site Napster. Two years later his address book service, Plaxo, demonstrated the potency of digital propagation, something he took a step further as the twenty-four-year-old president of Facebook, helping the social network become the most important Internet company since, well, maybe ever. Yes, all three companies eventually bounced him, but not before, by thirty-one, he tucked away enough equity to boast a fortune of more than $2 billion. And he was just getting started.
By 2011 he was out to upend music distribution again, bringing the Swedish music platform Spotify to America—and masterminding how the service would work with Facebook’s music efforts. He was also hunting new startups as general partner at venture firm Founders Fund and reuniting with Napster’s Shawn Fanning to create Airtime, a live video site.
Parker’s personal network is astounding, a combination of foresight and fate. Starting as a teenager, when he interned for Mark Pincus (now Zynga’s chairman) Parker has teamed, in one way or another, with the men who now control the modern Internet: Mark Zuckerberg, Mike Moritz, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Yuri Milner, Dustin Moskovitz, Adam D’Angelo, Daniel Ek, Ron Conway, Ram Shriram, and Jim Breyer.
“He can see things most people won’t be able to see for a year or two,” said Palihapitiya. As Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures describes it: “Parker has access to trends and signals that are invisible to many people. For him it’s like hearing a dog whistle.” Parker didn’t disagree: “I find a lot of things relevant that aren’t necessarily relevant to the world when I’m thinking about them.” Parker is drawn to big, universal problems and spends years looking for them. “Most of us kind of agree on the thrust of history. The key is to understand how we get there,” said the young billionaire as he rolled his desk chair closer to me in the office of his recently purchased $20 million Manhattan townhouse. “The transition strategies are more important than understanding what the outcome state will be.”
By focusing on problem selection, rather than rushing out an innovation no one wants, like so many trigger-happy entrepreneurs, Parker put himself in position for the string of blockbusters that his critics blithely attribute to sequential luck. Napster was the transition between CDs and MP3s after the Internet made it possible to strip content from its container. Facebook was a vehicle to create a reliable identity in an anonymous online world. Spotify is an attempt to fix the very music industry that Napster helped break a decade before.
“He thinks about where he perceives the world to be going,” explained Spotify founder Daniel Ek. “If he doesn’t think there is a company that will win, then he builds it himself.”
This deep investigative thinking bleeds into everything else in his life. Ask Parker about the genesis of his former company Plaxo, and he starts with theories of how real viruses spread across populations. Before he shares the name of his favorite sushi restaurant—prior to one dinner we had in New York, he called five to find out which chef was cutting the fish that night—he discusses rice density and the ideal geometric shape for sushi cuts (trapezoids). Question this audiophile about the best brand of headphones and you first learn how sound waves are registered by our tympanic membranes. As the expression goes, ask him for the time, and he’ll tell you how to build a watch.
“We talked for what I originally scheduled for an hour, ended up being three hours,” Reid Hoffman recalled about their first meeting back in 2002. Jack Dorsey had the same experience: “It’s rare to find someone who can have those kinds of conversations. . . . I appreciate any conversation where I can walk away questioning myself and my ideas.”
Thus, Parker’s life becomes impervious to time, a subject friends and business partners acknowledge with a defeated laugh. Peter Thiel calls it Parker’s “absence of dramatic punctuality.” Ek manages Parker by telling him there’s a meeting at 11:00 a.m. and informing others it starts at 1:00 p.m. There’s even a name in Silicon Valley for this phenomenon: Sean Standard Time.
“Making people wait and not fulfilling all your obligations feels bad. I probably feel worse about it than people realize, but I don’t do it with malice,” said Parker. When focused on a task, he blocks everything else out and works himself into a trance. The outside world fades; time slips away. “It requires a lot of rescheduling, but I try to focus on things that are the highest value and get those done perfectly.”
Parker’s definition of “done perfectly” is extreme. On the afternoon of his Forbes cover shoot, Parker summoned three full racks of Italian suits. Twenty dress shirts—still in their wrappings—waited on the wicker couch in his Greenwich Village townhouse. Rows of eyeglasses and sunglasses blanketed the coffee table, piles of suspenders and ties filled chairs, a shoe store’s worth of wingtips, loafers, and boots lined the wall. The shoot was scheduled for 4:00 p.m. Sean emerged at 5:30 p.m., flanked by a proper entourage: a clothes stylist, hairstylist, makeup artist, assistant, publicist, tailor, and his fiancée (now his wife), Alexandra Lenas.
During the shoot Parker changed his wardrobe more often than a Las Vegas headliner. He switched from streamlined suits to three-piece numbers to casual cardigans over designer jeans. He obsessed over the spacing of suspenders and triple-checked that the red in his skinny tie matched the red in his hipster eyeglasses. At one point he broke for a snack. Ten minutes later he was in the kitchen, dressed in a dark Christian Dior suit, whisking a bowl of homemade ranch dip. He was trying to lose weight and was eating only vegetables. The ranch dressing on hand was too runny, so he added sour cream to firm it up. His assistant (one of three) coaxed him back in front of the camera. After hundreds of photos in four locations around the house, the shoot was finished, at 2:00 a.m.—perfect, calibrated Sean Standard Time.
Two nights later I arrived at his house at 11:00 p.m. A chartered G450 was scheduled to fly to San Francisco from Teterboro, New Jersey—wheels up at midnight, sharp. Parker was out meeting Spotify’s Ek. When midnight hit and there was still no Parker, I got a little nervous. Everyone else yawned. Parker strutted in at 2:00 a.m. He still had to pack and shower. At 3:30 a.m. a Cadillac Escalade was loaded with luggage and takeout fried chicken from Blue Ribbon, a late-night, New York chefs’ hangout, and across the Hudson we went.
We took off at 4:00 a.m., a half hour before FAA fatigue laws would have grounded the pilots. When I awoke to a view of the California desert outside the plane window, Parker was sitting across from me, snacking on a piece of fried chicken, his veggie-only diet already over. “Did you sleep well?”
We landed in San Francisco at 9:00 a.m., where yet another Escalade ferried us to Marin County. Everyone parted ways to sleep for a few more hours before Parker, eager to meet with colleagues and pitch potential hires, began a sprint through San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
• • •
PARKER’S PATH TO SILICON Valley began the day his father, Bruce, formerly the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, taught him how to program on an Atari 800. He was in second grade. By high school Parker was hacking into companies and universities (alias: dob, which he chose for its aesthetic symmetry). When he was fifteen, his hacking caught the attention of the FBI, earning him community service. At sixteen he won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing an early Web crawler and was recruited by the CIA. Instead he interned for Mark Pincus’s D.C. startup, FreeLoader, and then UUNET, an early Internet service provider. “I wasn’t going to school,” he said. “I was technically in a co-op program but in truth was just going to work.” Parker made $80,000 his senior year, enough to convince his parents to let him put off college and join Shawn Fanning, a teenager he’d met on a dial-up bulletin board, to start a music-sharing site, which became Napster in 1999.
Parker never did make it to college, but Napster provided an education all its own. “I kind of refer to it as Napster University—it was a crash course in intellectual property law, corporate finance, entrepreneurship, and law school,” said Parker. “Some of the e-mails I wrote when I was just a kid who didn’t know what he was doing are apparently in [law school] textbooks.” Those e-mails, which admitted Napster customers were likely stealing music, would end up as evidence in copyright lawsuits that would eventually shutter Napster. But by that time Parker had already been exiled by management and was living in a North Carolina beach house. “I didn’t understand at the time that when someone asks you to take an extended vacation that’s basically a prelude to firing you.”
While at Napster, Parker met angel investor Ron Conway, who was funding another company in the startup’s building in Santa Clara. Conway has backed every Parker production since.
On our first night in San Francisco, Parker and I visited Conway on the porch of his house overlooking Richardson Bay. We drank Brunello and nibbled on prosciutto. “We’ve gone through hell together,” said Conway, who backed Google, PayPal, Twitter, and FourSquare, among others.
Napster was less a company than an all-hours circus, a strange tangle of people who thought they had joined a renegade social movement rather than a startup. “So much of what I learned at Napster was learning what not to do,” said Parker, as Conway scribbled on a notepad. Conway had learned the hard way to listen to Parker. “When Sean became president of Facebook, he called me and said, ‘You have to look at this company.’ The killer is that I could have been Peter Thiel,” said Conway, referring to Thiel’s investment in Facebook, which made him a billionaire. “But I said, ‘You have to clean up the issues at Plaxo, so don’t introduce me to this Facebook thing.’” He sipped his wine, shook his head and laughed: “These are painful memories.”
Plaxo was Parker’s first attempt at creating a real company—an online service that aimed to keep your address book up to date. It sounds boring compared to Napster and Facebook, but Plaxo was an early social networking tool and a pioneer of the types of viral tricks that helped grow LinkedIn, Zynga, and Facebook. “Plaxo is like the indie band that the public doesn’t know but was really influential with other musicians,” said Parker.
Once you downloaded Plaxo, the program would mine your address book and e-mail every contact with a message, coaxing them to sign up for the service. When the next person signed up, the software would pirate the new address book and spread further. Within a short time millions of e-mail accounts had been hit with Plaxo pitches. “In some ways, Plaxo is the company I’m most proud of because it was the company that wreaked the most havoc on the world,” said Parker. Those experiences later changed the history of Facebook.
There are diverging stories about Parker’s swift exile from Plaxo. His take is that Ram Shriram, a former Google board member recruited to help manage the company, conspired to throw him out and strip him of his stock. “Ram Shriram played this very vindictive game not only to force me out of the company but force me out broke, penniless, impoverished, and with no options.”
Shriram would not speak about this, but cofounders Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring shared a different story: that Parker was essential in creating the company strategy and raising money but grew bored with the daily grind of running it. Masonis claimed that Parker was often absent, and when he was around, he was distracting: “It was the sort of thing where he doesn’t come to work, but then maybe if he does it’s at 11:00 p.m., but it’s not to do a bunch of work, it’s because he’s bringing a bunch of girls back to the office because he can show them he’s a startup founder.”
Whatever the motivation, Parker’s removal was messy. He insisted that investors had hired a private eye to build a case. There were allegations of misconduct and drug use—claims that went unproven. “It happened poorly; we should have done a better job being up front about it and doing it ourselves,” said Ring. “But looking back, it was the right decision for us and for Sean.”
Parker was on his own, isolated from his cofounders and close friends. “I felt a complete loss of faith in humanity, impending doom, a sense that I couldn’t trust anybody,” said Parker. He thought of suing but knew the battle could drag on for years. So he let it go. After all, he had already discovered a new company with potential to get really big.
• • •
WHEN PARKER WAS FIRST shown Facebook by a friend’s girlfriend (not through a one-night stand, as depicted in Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay) he was already a social networking veteran, both because of Plaxo and, more directly, as an advisor to Friendster, the ill-fated Facebook forerunner he stumbled across when reporters asked him if it was connected to the similar-sounding Napster. He knew the larger college market was ripe for its own social network—there were several small sites functioning at individual universities—and Facebook, which had already leapt off Harvard’s campus, gave him a play. He wrote to Facebook’s generic e-mail address and later met Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin over a Chinese dinner in Manhattan in the spring of 2004.
A few weeks later, by chance, he ran into Zuckerberg and crew on the streets of Palo Alto and shortly moved into Dustin Moskovitz’s room at the rented Facebook house. “It’s the only thing the movie got kind of close to right,” deadpanned Adam D’Angelo, Facebook’s early technology chief, whom I met at the Palo Alto headquarters of his company, question-and-answer site Quora.
Just twenty-four, Parker was Facebook’s business veteran. He helped the college-aged Facebook founders network around Silicon Valley, set up routers, and meet benevolent investors like Thiel, Hoffman, and Pincus.
“Sean was pivotal in helping Facebook transform from a college project into a real company,” Mark Zuckerberg said in an e-mail. “Perhaps more importantly, Sean helped ensure that anyone interested in investing in Facebook would not only buy into a company, but also a mission and vision of making the world more open through sharing.”
D’Angelo credited Parker for recognizing that design was as vital as engineering. “Our first employee [at Quora] was a designer, and we knew to do that because we saw how important that was at Facebook.” Together with Aaron Sittig, an early Napster friend who would become Facebook’s key architect, Parker helped drive Facebook’s minimalist look. He was adamant that the site should have a continuous flow and that tasks like adding friends be as frictionless as possible. “We wanted it to be like a telephone service,” said Sittig. “Something that really fades into the background.” Later Parker helped push Facebook’s photo-sharing function. It would be one of his last acts as Facebook’s president.
In August 2005, Parker was questioned in North Carolina after cops found cocaine in a beach house rented under his name. He was never arrested or charged, but the incident swiftly kick-started his downfall at Facebook.
Because of agreements, the principals can’t discuss how or why he was ousted. The Team Parker take was that Accel Partners resented him because he forced the VC to invest in Facebook at a then-high $100 million valuation (Accel has since invested in Spotify, and its star Jim Breyer now says Parker had “exceptional insight”). Parker had many supporters, and the cocaine controversy caused a rift between the founders and the investors. In the end, Parker decided it was best for Facebook if he resigned. He had been pushed out of his third company in five years. He moved to New York in the fall of 2005, crashing with Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, a friend from the Napster days.
Although no longer on the Facebook payroll, Parker continued to advise Zuckerberg on strategy and to recruit key executives like Chamath Palihapitiya. Sittig said he still helped with the site’s design and was a strong outside influence in the development of Facebook’s “share” platform, which allowed users to upload news articles, video, and other third-party content. Still, likely Parker’s greatest contribution to Facebook was his creation of a corporate structure—based on his Plaxo experience—that gave Zuckerberg complete and permanent control of the company he founded.
Parker’s plan fortified Zuckerberg with supervoting shares that resisted dilution during fundraising and armed him with enough board seats to stay in power for as long as he wanted. “Sean was pretty material in setting up the company in a way that Mark retained as much control as he does, both in being able to get high-valuation, low-dilution financing but also in terms of the board structure itself and details of control,” said Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. “He’d been coming off the Plaxo mess and was sensitive to that.”
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Well written and logically researched, this important book clarifies ...
By Morton I. Blankman
Well written and logically researched, this important book clarifies the mysteries ( to me) how the new young turks of enterprise can (and do) create companies that develop insane valuations, even w/out revenue.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent view of "Innovation" in our modern world.
By Edward H. Carleton
Good view of innovation versus improvement. If you are an 'idea" person you need to read this one.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
it still is an interesting read if you like bios about young kids who strike it rich
By Gary F. Roth
Although this book is merely a collection of Forbes Magazine profiles on young tech entrepreneurs, it still is an interesting read if you like bios about young kids who strike it rich.
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