Shawn Fanning (born November 22, 1980) is an American
computer programmer
A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software.
A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...
,
entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...
Napster
Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Sh ...
, one of the first popular
peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...
("P2P") file sharing platforms, in 1999. The popularity of Napster was widespread and Fanning was featured on the cover of ''Time'' magazine.
The site in its initial free P2P incarnation was shut down in 2001 after the company's unsuccessful appeal of court orders arising from its encouraging the illegal sharing of copyrighted material. A paid subscription version of the site followed, and was purchased by Rhapsody on December 1, 2011. Following his involvement with Napster, he joined, and invested in, a number of early-stage technology
startup companies
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an Entrepreneurship, entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses t ...
.
Computer career
Napster
On June 1, 1999, Fanning released a preliminary beta program of Napster and soon, hundreds of college students at Northeastern were trading music.
Sean Parker
Sean Parker (born December 3, 1979) is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and serving as the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also c ...
was the co-founder. They got the name from Shawn's Harwich High School nickname "Nappy", in reference to his Afro. Shawn played on the Harwich Tennis Team.
Technology Review
''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...
TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2003, he opened a new company,
Snocap
SNOCAP was founded by Shawn Fanning (best known for creating the Napster music service), Jordan Mendelson, and Ron Conway. Other SNOCAP employees included music lawyer Christian Castle, the company's first General Counsel, and Ali Aydar, the com ...
, along with Jordan Mendelson (Napster's Chief Architect), and Ron Conway. The company aspired to be a legitimate marketplace for digital media. However, their partners and the public did not respond well. Customer support was poor, and technical issues were numerous. One of their primary partners,
CD Baby
CD Baby, Inc. is an online distributor of independent music. The company was described as an "anti-label" by its parent company's Chief Operating Officer Tracy Maddux. The CD Baby music store was shut down in March 2020 with a statement that " ...
, wrote a scathing account of their relationship. In late 2007, Snocap laid off 60% of its workforce. ValleyWag wrote an article that Fanning had long left Snocap and began to work on another venture, Rupture. The ValleyWag article stated that the failure was largely due to Snocap's CEO Rusty Rueff and that of former VP Engineering Dave Rowley, who "made a mess of engineering before he was fired". Snocap was looking to sell itself and fast. In 2008, they found a buyer;
imeem
The online service imeem was a social media website where users interacted with each other by streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos. It operated from 2003 until 2009 when it was shut down after being acquired by MySpace.
The c ...
acquired Snocap in a fire sale.
Rupture
The Rupture project was announced in 2007 with seed funding.
In December 2006, Fanning, along with Co-founder
Jon Baudanza
Jon is a shortened form of the common given name Jonathan, derived from "YHWH has given", and an alternate spelling of John, derived from "YHWH has pardoned".Rupture, a social networking tool designed to handle the task of publishing gamers' individual profiles to a communal space and facilitating communication between ''
World of Warcraft
''World of Warcraft'' (''WoW'') is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. Set in the ''Warcraft'' fantasy universe, ''World of Warcraft'' takes place within the world of Azeroth ...
'' players. Rupture was later acquired by
Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted th ...
for $30 million. Fanning's career at Electronic Arts was short-lived as a round of layoffs in November 2009 included him and his team at Rupture.
Path
A few months after Fanning was laid off from Electronic Arts, he started a new company called
Path.com
Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched in 14 November 2010. The service allows users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family. Based in San F ...
. In January 2010, Dave Morin announced he was leaving
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...
, where he was a Senior Platform Manager, to join Fanning and become CEO at Path.
Airtime
In 2011 Fanning reunited with Napster cofounder
Sean Parker
Sean Parker (born December 3, 1979) is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and serving as the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also c ...
to found
Airtime.com
Airtime is a group video, audio and text chat app available on iOS, Android, and Desktop. Users have the ability to communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in public or private group chats called "rooms". I ...
Ashton Kutcher
Christopher Ashton Kutcher (; born February 7, 1978) is an American actor, producer, entrepreneur, and former model. He is the recipient of various accolades, including a People's Choice Award, and nominations for two Young Artist Awards, a S ...
. Fanning serves as CEO and Parker as executive chairman.
Airtime launched in June 2012 at a disastrous public event where Parker and Fanning paid huge amounts of money to have celebrities present but the product repeatedly crashed and ultimately failed to work. Greg Sandoval of CNET commented, "To launch his new start-up, Sean Parker should have spent less of his billions on celebrity guests and more of it on fixing his technology."
Helium Systems
In 2013 Fanning founded Helium Systems together with Amir Haleem, and Sean Carey. In December 2014, the company announced that it had raised $16 million in funding led by
Khosla Ventures
Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most succe ...
Marc Benioff
Marc Russell Benioff (born September 25, 1964) is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, an enterprise cloud computing company. In September 2018, Benioff acquired ''Time''.
...
,
SV Angel
Ronald Crawford Conway (born March 9, 1951) is an American venture capitalist and philanthropist. He has been described as one of Silicon Valley's "super angels".
Early career
Conway graduated from San Jose State University with a bachelor's de ...
, and Slow Ventures among others.
In popular culture
In 2000, Fanning appeared as a presenter at the
MTV Video Music Awards
The MTV Video Music Awards (commonly abbreviated as the VMAs) is an award show presented by the cable channel MTV to honour the best in the music video medium. Originally conceived as an alternative to the Grammy Awards (in the video category ...
. He appeared wearing a
Metallica
Metallica is an American heavy metal band. The band was formed in 1981 in Los Angeles by vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, and has been based in San Francisco for most of its career. The band's fast tempos, instru ...
For Whom the Bell Tolls
''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As a dynamiter, he is assigne ...
" played in the background. When asked where he got the shirt, Fanning stated, "a friend of mine shared it with me."
Lars Ulrich
Lars Ulrich (; ; born 26 December 1963) is a Danish musician best known as the drummer and co-founder of American heavy metal band Metallica. The son and grandson respectively of tennis players Torben and Einer Ulrich, he played tennis in his ...
was sitting in the audience, and his reaction was shown as feigned boredom.
In October 2000, Fanning was featured on the cover of ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, t ...
'' magazine.
Fanning had a
cameo appearance
A cameo role, also called a cameo appearance and often shortened to just cameo (), is a brief appearance of a well-known person in a work of the performing arts. These roles are generally small, many of them non-speaking ones, and are commonly ei ...
as himself in the 2003 film ''
The Italian Job
''The Italian Job'' is a 1969 British comedy caper film, written by Troy Kennedy Martin, produced by Michael Deeley, directed by Peter Collinson, and starring Michael Caine. The film's plot centres around Cockney criminal Charlie Croker, r ...
''. In the film,
Seth Green
Seth Benjamin Green ( ''né'' Gesshel-Green; born February 8, 1974) is an American actor, producer, and writer. Green's film debut came with a role in the comedy-drama film '' The Hotel New Hampshire'' (1984), and he went on to have supportin ...
's character Lyle accused Fanning of stealing Napster from him while he was taking a nap in their Northeastern University dorm room. Although other characters see this as mere bragging, a scene shows Fanning in fact creeping over Lyle's sleeping body and stealing a
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...
.
In early 2008, Fanning appeared in a
Volkswagen
Volkswagen (),English: , . abbreviated as VW (), is a German motor vehicle manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1937 by the German Labour Front under the Nazi Party and revived into a global brand post ...
commercial directed by
Roman Coppola
Roman François Coppola (born April 22, 1965) is an American director, screenwriter, producer and the son of Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola. For the 2012 film '' Moonrise Kingdom'', he and co-writer Wes Anderson were nominated for the ...
, in which he poked fun at his file-sharing past.
Fanning and Napster were the subject of Alex Winter's documentary '' Downloaded'' in 2013.