Sean Parker is one of the most interesting entrepreneurs in the world, whose career started during his childhood years when his hobbies were hacking and programming, continued throughout his high school education, when he was mostly writing codes and starting companies and by the end of high school he was earning more than $80,000 a year through various projects. This success so early on convinced his parents to let him pursue a career as an entrepreneur rather than go to college. This was a good decision because this lead to him, as of 2005, being worth $2.1 billion. The key issues to be discussed in relation to Sean Parker are how he made such a success of himself, the strategies he used and certain challenges he faced and overcame and how his career and life can be useful to SME’s in the UK. Through his intuition, genius and charm he has become a billionaire and continues to surprise his contemparies and excite his fans as to where his next big venture will go and if it will change the world as we know it again.
Parker, according to himself, has ‘helped change the world at least three times’ (Barna, D. 2005) but has also faced many challenges before he became such a successful entrepreneur, although he developed the right skills and attributes throughout his childhood with the help of his father, who told him ‘if you are going to take risks, take them early before you have a family’. Parker’s father started teaching him computer programming at the age of 7. In school life, so he could spend more time writing codes and starting companies, he convinced the school administration to count the time he spent coding in the computer lab as a foreign language class. This shows how persuasive and rebellious Parker was even at a young age, and how he knew exactly what he needed to do to achieve his goals. Parker, however, did have some frustrations in school because he was such a perfectionist and also rebellious. He would simply not hand in an assignment and fail, if it did not match his exacting standards. One eventful night, we he was busy hacking into the network of a Fortune 500 company, Parker was not able to log out because his father, being frustrated with Parkers performance in school, took his keyboard. The F.B.I tracked him down and Parker was sentenced to community service. This shows his rebellious side, and the fact that he didn’t want to necessarily listen to people and live a normal life. While he was still in high school, he started working as Mark Pincus’ intern and showed his skills in web developing and how good his skills were as a businessman. Although he was arrested as a hacker at the young age of 16, for breaking into a number of corporations and databases, he has turned into a notorious internet entrepreneur who is known to miss deadlines and appointments, avoid the press and lead a hectic lifestyle. However, he is invaluable for the sheer force of his intelligence, utter genius and charm.
His career as an entrepreneur properly started at the age of 19, when he and Shawn Fanning created Napster, which went on to disrupt the music business and the internet immensely and changed the way music was bought and sold forever. It bought with it a decline in CD sales and angered a great many people who worked in the music business and earnt their living from it. With Napster, a file sharing service, Parker first entered the public eye, he invested the initial $50,000, as he was already earning way above this, and it was launched in 1999. Napster was very successful, even though not a lot of money was made from it as it was a free sharing website. In the end, Napster was shut down as it was deemed illegal, and was sued by many people, most famously Metallica, because their music and earnings were being given away for free basically. This led to Parker and Fanning losing the company. However, this did not stop Parker, he went on to start Plaxo, an online address book, where he was eventually fired because of his
