Shawn Fanning

Shawn Fanning
Born	November 22, 1980 (1980-11-22) Brockton, Massachusetts
Residence	San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Citizenship	United States of America
Alma mater	Northeastern University (Dropped out in 1999)
Known for	Co-founder and lead software engineer of Napster
Notable work(s)	Napster, Snocap, Rupture, Path
Net worth	US$7.5 million (2009).
Website
twitter.com/shawnfanning

Shawn Fanning (born November 22, 1980) is an American computer programmer, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor. He developed Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer ("P2P") file sharing platforms, in 1998. 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 1st, 2011. Following his involvement with Napster, he joined, and invested in, a number of early-stage technology startup companies.

Napster

Fanning was born in Brockton, Massachusetts. He worked summers at his uncle, John Fanning's Internet company, Chess.net, where he spent much of the time sleeping on the couch. "I was just getting into programming, so I spent a lot of my time just fiddling with projects and hanging out." During this work, Fanning spent months writing the code for Napster, a program that could provide an easy way to download music.

After graduating from Harwich High School in 1998, Fanning enrolled at Boston's Northeastern University. Shawn spent Christmas break working at the Hull, Massachusetts offices of Chess.net with his uncle John, pushing himself to get the Napster system completed. In early 1999, the system was launched. Later he appeared on the cover of Wired Magazine and rose to fame. Soon after, however, Napster was the target of several music industry-backed lawsuits, which ultimately led to the end of the service. Roxio purchased the logo and trademark effectively changing its name to Napster, LLC. Best Buy later purchased the company.

Snocap

In 2002, Fanning was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2003, he opened a new company, Snocap, 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, 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 CTO 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 acquired Snocap in a fire sale.

Rupture

The Rupture project was announced in late 2006 with seed funding, and CrunchBase notes the date Shawn officially became CEO of Rupture was October 2, 2007. In December 2006, Fanning developed 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 players. Rupture was later acquired by Electronic Arts for $15 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. In January 2010, Dave Morin announced he was leaving Facebook, where he was a Senior Platform Manager, to join Fanning and become CEO at Path.

In popular culture

In 2000, Shawn Fanning appeared as a presenter at the MTV VMAs. He appeared wearing a "Metallica" T-shirt, and when asked where he got it, stated, "a friend of mine shared it with me." Lars Ulrich's reaction was shown as yawning and feigned boredom.

In October 2000, Fanning was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

In 2003, Fanning had a cameo appearance, playing himself, in the film The Italian Job (2003). In the film, Seth Green's character accused Fanning of stealing Napster from him while he was taking a nap.

In the spring of 2008, Fanning appeared in a Volkswagen commercial directed by Roman Coppola, in which he poked fun at his file-sharing past.

External links

• 1up article about the new service
• Rupture site
• Path site