Facebook co-founder: Entrepreneurial like chewing glass like blood taste

In Silicon Valley, Parker's name is at its zenith, and this year's 32-Year-old is considered a "Allen" from Facebook.

At the age of 19, Parker and others founded the music-sharing web site Napster, subverting the entire recording industry. When he was 21 years old, he founded the Address Book Service company Plaxo, seizing the potential of digital communication. When he was 24 years old, he joined Zuckerberg's team as the first president of Facebook, helping the social networking company grow rapidly, allowing the young Internet company to subvert its original pattern and possibly breed another great company.

If these can make Parker young, then he is not without sacrifice and loss. Yes, these three companies eventually drove him away, in this sense, he is a "vulture", only good at solo, but also a failure of managers, because of the lack of compromise.

But he is by no means nothing, and now he owns the shares of the company's stock market value of about 2.1 billion dollars, which is his next Subversion angel Investment field, continue to the material basis of a chain of business of course, to him, these figures do not have much substance.

Now, the young man who lives in a 20 million-dollar mansion in Manhattan for years, as a partner of the venture Capital Founder's Fund (founders Fund), he has been searching for startups that are worth investing in. At the same time, he worked with Napster's partner Fanning (Shawn Fanning) to create a live video site airtime, but both now have some minor problems.

"Entrepreneurship is like chewing glass, slowly you will like the taste of your own blood." "Shawn Pakro is a summary of his more than 10 years of entrepreneurial experience. Forbes magazine commented he said: "Parker is a human passion for the accelerant, is the creative catalyst, once he and the right people to work together, he can do a big business, he pushed the past 20 years, some of the most breakthrough companies growth. ”

This is like the Allen with Bill Gates, after fading out of Microsoft, the top 50 regulars of the global Rich List, investing in countless reliable or unreliable projects. Parker, like him, has dreams and gifts; Parker is not the same as him, because he does not have so much money, but always embrace the internet, there are plenty of years to realize the dream.

Worry

The Parker of 2012 is a bit more disturbing than in previous years.

The reason is that he and more than 10 years old partner Fanning to start a video chat application airtime about this app, imagine Skype and Facebook and chatroulette together, not as good as they thought.

Airtime is a platform dedicated to helping users and strangers online to communicate with each other, and it has a gorgeous opening, in June, when their new company got 33 million dollars in investment. Although I got the operating capital, I couldn't find the user. In the past few months, there have been only 11,000 active users in airtime months, and growth has been slow. As a result, industry rumors, the company CTO plan to leave the company, Fanning also initiation retreat.

And just when he got the funding, Parker (Justin Timberleck's role in the movie social networking site) sits on the top floor of his own mansion in Manhattan West Village, lounging on the couch, next to his best friend and business partner Fanning. Two people are still full of emotions.

"The successful entrepreneurs I know end up going to the wasteful business of venture capital," he said. "It's frustrating," Parker said, "How can you have the courage to start your next venture as a successful entrepreneur?" He almost asked himself to answer. "Most entrepreneurs don't start a business again. It is too much energy to keep Chine. ”

His subtext is that for the theory that successful entrepreneurs no longer start a business, they and Fanning are a counter case. They created the online music company Napster in 1999. The company overturned the entire online music industry and then collapsed after losing copyright lawsuits. More than 10 years later, the two men joined hands to prove their courage and wisdom.

Of course, there are also some serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, such as Dorsey (Jack Dorsey), who founded Twitter and square. But the usual choice for more great entrepreneurs is to become a corporate operator or to invest in shareholders, and in Silicon Valley they tend to move into the venture capital industry. PayPal's co-founder, Peter Thille, Thiel, for example, invests in other companies ' businesses, such as Facebook and Spotify, through his Founders Fund company.

"There are just so few people who have been doing it again and again, and have long been successful," Parker said. "I thought about it, and the only person I could think of was Steve Jobs, who owned three companies like Apple, Next and Pixar." After leaving Apple, he went on to create Pixar and then back to Apple, where Apple has been very different. ”

In particular, the Founders Fund company, which was mentioned earlier, was associated with Parker because Parker was a partner in the fund and invested in airtime company (Peter Thille).

In Parker's eyes, Airtime is the next generation of Skype, which will redefine how people communicate. But things are not as good as he thought. He is no longer leaning on the couch, but his insistence on serial entrepreneurship is still burning in his heart, "It's a tough time, not just for us, but for Silicon Valley." "Entrepreneurship is like chewing glass, and slowly you will like the taste of your own blood." ”

Because in his view, unlike other entrepreneurs who just want to do something to sell to Google and Facebook, their job is to create an era.

But the difficulty of airtime is not because confidence can be reduced, and the most important is the variables of the people. From Napster to Spotify, Parker's job is simply to steer the product and tap into potential growth opportunities, while the main helmsman is reserved for people who are more adept at leadership and operation. Without Fanning, Mark Zuckerberg, a strategically minded manager, there would be no Napster, no Facebook, no Spotify. Parker also has his own view of the situation: "The instability of people is a normal business for startups, and we are constantly looking for the right people for every key position." For now, it's not the time to be conclusive. ”

"I've only been operating airtime since March, and airtime is only 12 weeks on the market," he said. "For the future, Parker is still confident that he can overcome the difficulties," he said. Think of Steve Jobs and Apple, and you can see his ambition.

Tired

2005 Parker, some just tired.

At the time, he had just retreated from the position of the first president of Facebook and left the company he was founded to become a new generation of internet giants, and he was really tired because it was the third time he had left the founder's position.

The first to introduce Facebook to Parker was the girlfriend of one of his friends, who had been a social-networking veteran who had served as a consultant to Friendster, Friendster a pioneer in social networking before Facebook.

But Parker fell in love with Facebook at first sight, although the start-up company just walked out of Harvard campus. Because he thinks, the broad university student market is ripe, should have own social networking website. He first sent a letter to Facebook's corporate mailbox and met Zuckerberg and Saverin (Eduardo Saverin) in a Manhattan Chinese restaurant in the spring of 2004.

A few weeks later, he accidentally met Zuckerberg and his employees on the streets of Palo Alto, Calif., and soon moved into a Dustin Moskovitz, another co-founder of the company, to live in a Facebook rented house.

Parker helped Facebook establish a minimalist style, mentioning that Allen Sitig (Aaron sittig), who he met at the first venture in Napster, later became a key architect for Facebook. Parker insists that web browsing must be smooth, and that actions such as adding friends should be as handy as possible. "We want to make it look like a telephone service," Sitig said.

Hidden in the background. Parker also helped Facebook promote photo sharing, one of his actions during his tenure as president of the company.

Although at the age of 24, Parker, the founder of Facebook, is a veteran business person. He helped several founders build connections around Silicon Valley, set up routers, and meet investors, including Thiel, Hoffman Cass and others.

But in August 2005, when the North Carolina police found cocaine in a beachfront villa rented by his name, he had nothing to do with it, but the cocaine scandal caused a rift between Facebook's founders and investors, and Parker finally decided to resign and move to New York immediately. He said it was the most advantageous choice for the company. Parker himself believes the VC company's Accel Partners did not do a good job because he forced them to invest at a value of 100 million dollars, a valuation that looked high.

"Parker played a pivotal role in translating Facebook from a university project into a real company," Mark Zuckerberg recalls the company's early experiences, "and perhaps more importantly, he helps us ensure that anyone who is interested in investing in Facebook is not just investing in a company, is to invest in a mission and vision to make the world more open by sharing. ”

Despite being no longer a Facebook employee, Parker continues to offer strategic advice to small ties and to help recommend executives.

And Parker's biggest contribution to Facebook may be based on his experience in Plaxo. Zuckerberg has full and permanent control over the company he founded, so that he does not have to worry about dilution of control during the fundraising process, while allowing him to control enough seats on the board, if he wants to, You can stay in the company as long as you want. "Facebook's architecture ensures that mark retains as much control as possible, Sean played a substantial role, both in his ability to get high valuations and low dilution financing, and in the board structure itself and some details on control," said Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskoviz , "He has been through the plaxo of chaos and is sensitive to the issue of control." ”

Leaving Facebook, Parker joined the Founders Fund fund and has been investing for years, including Spotify and Votizen. In addition, he has worked on the causes website. Causes's business raises funding for various issues and non-profit organizations, raising awareness of these issues and organizations. The company was just muddling along and Parker said he was not fully committed.

In the future, he recalls, most entrepreneurs are "a total escape from investing". "He explains his ideas," You have the whole portfolio, but only the parts of the success, ignoring the failure, you have to try to maintain the player style, in fact, has lost control. ”

To maintain the player style, is Parker is good at, this not only refers to his work, but also his life state.

According to Forbes magazine, he likes driving a luxury car, passing through the misty Golden Gate Bridge in the night, heading straight for Marin, where his 18-acre mansion is situated. The model looks low-key, but hidden inside the power of the Lamborghini engine, Parker White hands are not idle, one hand steering wheel, the other hand fiddling with the car audio system, in his thousands of songs uploaded into the selection of the favorite.

Passion

Some of the Parker of the 1999 are just the passions and dreams that subvert the old order and create a new world.

He was a player at the time, but in the Internet, he was called by another name: a genius hacker.

The son of the chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was programmed by his father with a Atari 800 computer church in his second year of primary school. In high school, Parker had the ability to hack into the company and university systems. At the age of 15, the hacking was brought to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and sentenced to community service. 16 years old, he developed a program that won the Virginia State Computer Science Award.

As a result, the CIA intended to recruit him, but he was not interested, but went to Mark Ping Cass in Washington, D.C., Freeloader internship, and then in the early Internet service provider UUNet to stay for a while. "I didn't go to school," he recalls to Forbes, "In theory I'm going to work on a partnership project, but it's actually a job." ”

Unlike Gates and Parker, who dropped out of college to start a business, he did not enter the threshold of college. In his senior three, Parker had earned 80,000 of dollars, convincing his parents to allow him to stay out of college, working with friends Fanning, who met on the Dial-up Electronic bulletin board system, to create a music-sharing website, Napster, which was launched in 1999.

He sees Napster as his growing university. "It's an intensive course of intellectual property law, corporate finance, entrepreneurship and law school education," says Parker, "when I was a child, not knowing the consequences of what I was doing, knowing that some emails I'd written would appear in law school textbooks." ”

For Napster, Parker met angel investor Rohn Kangwei, and since then Parker's every start-up has been supported by Conway. "We've been through a lot of misery together," said the investor who has invested in several star companies such as Google, PayPal, Twitter and Foursquare. ”

Napster is not so much a company as a 24-hour circus. A group of like-minded people gather together, not thinking of joining a startup, and thinking they're involved in a rebellious social movement. "A lot of what I've learned in Napster is that I can't do anything about it," Parker said. ”

The key point of the Parker Society is not to get into trouble in law. He acknowledged in some of his work emails in Napster that users are likely to be illegally downloading music and may become evidence in copyright litigation that Napster was eventually closed for these lawsuits.

But at the time, Parker had been driven out by the company's management and moved to a beach house in North Carolina State. "The management told me to take a long vacation, and I didn't know that at the time, which is basically a euphemism for dismissal," he said. "This is what Parker has never learned, is to get along with the management team, can not be driven out."

Such stories are repeated in Plaxo. This is the first real company Parker has ever tried to create. It is an early social networking tool that helps users update their contacts in real time, as well as using some viral marketing techniques that follow the development of LinkedIn, Zynga, and Facebook. "Plaxo is like an indie band that, although not known to the public, has an influence on other musicians," says Parker. "In a way, Plaxo is the most proud company I have ever had, because it brings the most innovation to the world," he said. ”

But Parker soon withdrew from Plaxo, and Parker himself said they recruited Google's former director Ram Schriellam (Ram Shriram) to help manage the company, which had conspired to evict him from the company and deprive him of his stake. But Plaxo co-founder Tode Masonis Todd Masonis and Cameron Ling (Cameron Ring) told Forbes: Parker played a key role in the company's strategy formation and fundraising, but did not have any experience in day-to-day operations, "he often does not come to the company, even if the occasional trip It was 11 o'clock in the evening, and instead of doing some work, he brought a group of girls to the office and showed them that they were the founders of the company. ”

Desire

People who have contacted Parker describe him as: volatile, irritable, and unpredictable, it's easy to provoke investors to the best case of support his three companies that he started were quick to kick him out.

His Silicon Valley entrepreneurial experience revolves around the same theme: Sharing and discovery. So he remains a hacker in his heart, and his main motivation is not wealth, but the thirst for innovation.

"Everything is just a matter of probability, nothing is certain, so you never have the satisfaction of being able to control the outcome." You've been spending time defending your reputation, maintaining your network, having little time to think creatively, and having no time to do what entrepreneurs are good at. "he said. This also explains how he is not good at the day-to-day operations of the company.

However, he is very concerned about his network. His connections are amazing, a common result of foresight and destiny. When he was a teenager, he worked as an intern for Mark Pincus, the Mark Ping chief executive of today's social gaming web site, and has since been in various ways connected to a number of people in control of the modern Internet, including the Sequoia Capital partner Mike Moritz (Mike Moritz), the founding partner of DST Milner (Yuri Milner), Adam Deangelo (Adam D ' Angelo), Daniel Ecques (Daniel Ek), and Jim Breye (Jim Breyer) A group of the world's top venture capitalists.

"He is seen as an unknown amount, and venture capitalists want to know everything," said Facebook co-founder Moscouvize. "However, venture capitalists also like great ideas, and that's what Parker's expertise is" Super Dreamer "by the words of Ride Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, the business social networking site. "Parker has the ability to see trends and signals that most people can't see, and for him it's like listening to a dog flute." Parker was dismissive: "When I was thinking, I found many things that were not necessarily associated with the world." ”

Parker is deeply interested in macro-philosophical issues and has spent years looking for answers. "Most of us have no objections to the evolution of history, but the key is to figure out how to evolve." "It was this idea that allowed him to select the starting point for his business rather than rush into an innovation like many blind entrepreneurs, so he was able to participate continuously in the creation of the hottest website even though his critics thought it was sheer luck."

"He perceives the direction of the world and then thinks about it," said Daniel Ecques, founder of Spotify, a music-sharing company He currently invests in, "if he thinks the field is not going to be a successful company, he will create one himself." ”

The biggest challenge for successful entrepreneurs to create new companies, says the

Parker, is that they tend to think too much about risk protection from the very beginning. "It's very dangerous to worry about failure and the loss of reputation it brings to itself," he said. "Expectations do make me feel pressured. I was a little afraid of losing my hand and failing, "he said. "I have to weigh myself not to try the path that few people take, to be an entrepreneur who is willing to go back to the original point and start from scratch." The