![]() ![]() In 2004 Parker saw a site called "The Facebook" on the computer of his roommate's girlfriend, who was a student at Stanford. Two years after founding Plaxo, Parker was ousted by the company's financiers, Sequoia Capital and Ram Shriram, in an acrimonious exit that reportedly involved the investors hiring private investigators to follow him. Plaxo was one of the first products to build virality into its launch, and that earned it 20 million users. Plaxo was an early social networking tool, which would later influence the growth of companies like LinkedIn, Zynga, and Facebook. In November 2002, Parker launched Plaxo, an online address book and social networking service that integrated with Microsoft Outlook. ![]() Napster has been called the fastest-growing business of all time, is credited with revolutionizing the music industry, and is considered by some to be a precursor to iTunes. Lawsuits by various industry associations eventually shut down the service. Napster was opposed by recording labels, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the heavy metal band Metallica, among others. Within a year, the service had tens of millions of users. Parker raised the initial $50,000, and they launched Napster in June 1999. #Promotional code for logmein pro freeA few years later Fanning and Parker cofounded Napster, a free file-sharing service for music. When Parker was 15, he met 14-year-old Shawn Fanning over the Internet, where the two bonded over topics like theoretical physics and hacking. He considers his time at Napster to be his college education, calling it "Napster University," since he became well-versed in intellectual property law, corporate finance, and entrepreneurship. Several media profiles refer to Parker as a genius. By his senior year of high school, Parker was earning more than $80,000 a year through various projects, enough to convince his parents to allow him to skip college and pursue a career as an entrepreneur.Īs a child, Parker was an avid reader, which was the beginning of his lifelong autodidacticism. He won the Virginia state computer science fair for developing a Web crawler, and was recruited by the C.I.A. ![]() While still in high school, he interned for Mark Pincus (the CEO of Zynga) at Pincus's Washington D.C. As a result, towards the end of Parker's senior year at Chantilly, he was mostly writing code and starting companies. While there, Parker wrote a letter to the school administration and persuaded them to count the time he spent coding in the computer lab as a foreign language class. Parker attended Oakton High School in Fairfax County, Virginia for two years before transferring to Chantilly High School in 1996 for his junior and senior years. ![]()
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