FAST COMPANY: Why do businesses fail?
SEAN PARKER: mySpace never would have existed if Friendster had been a properly managed company. Most of my friends were investors, I was advisor to the CEO, we were all screaming the sky is falling, no one was doing anything about it, classic case of where a company just blew it. And mySpace is another case where a company just blew it. Facebook had not chance to win, we should not have won the market, the network effects at mySpace were so powerful, the only reason we won was because of the gross incompetence of mySpace, systematically, over many years.
Why do businesses fail?
Sean Parker is a serial entrepreneur and a managing partner at the Founders Fund. As one of the two founders of Napster, Sean helped architect and manage the peer-to-peer file sharing application to become one of the largest on the net.
Parker subsequently helped found and manage Plaxo, a VC-backed contact management application company. More recently, Parker worked as the Founding President of Facebook before moving on to join up with Peter Thiel at The Founders Fund, a seed-stage venture capital firm. Parker also recently led the move to launch Causes, a new developer application that organizes individuals’ charitable giving on Facebook as well as contributing as an investor at Spotify.