In The Social Network, Justin Timberlake plays Sean Parker, Facebook's founding president, and an entrepreneur best known for Napster, which he co-founded at age 19, and which influenced the way people think about and share music. Two years later, Parker co-founded Plaxo, pioneering viral technologies that allow users to easily update contact information and stay in touch with colleagues. He served as Plaxo's president until 2004, when he joined with Mark Zuckerberg to develop Facebook. Parker was Facebook's founding president, guiding the company's early growth and formulating strategies that helped it become the world's most popular social networking site. His latest company is Causes, which he co-founded in 2007, and which has become the largest online platform for grassroots activism and philanthropy, and the most popular non-game application on Facebook. In addition to founding and leading emerging companies directly, Parker is a managing partner at Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed companies including Facebook, SpaceX (the company NASA hired to resupply the International Space Station), Quantcast, and Mint.
This is an excerpt from a roundtable entitled "The Allure of the Hive" held at the Philoctetes Center and moderated by David Kirkpatrick author of the definitive book on Facebook, "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World", Sean Parker talks about his strategy at Facebook.
