The last company Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker started together was Napster, over a decade ago. Now they are teaming up again to create a new startup called Airtime (previously codenamed Supyo). The two have completed an $8.3 million series A financing from Founders Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am, Scott Barun, and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.
Fanning will be CEO and Parker will be executive chairman. Parker will be spending more time in California to take an active role in the company, and changing his position at the Founders Fund from Managing director to a general partner. "I had to figure out a way to step back from the venture fund in order to dive full time into this," he tells me. Parker also has a "quasi-operating role at Spotify," where he is a board member and helps with everything from product design to negotiating with the music labels and its recent Facebook integration.
Inspired by Chatroulette, Airtime will be random, realtime and include a live video chat component. Fanning and Parker are still vague on specifics, but don't expect it to look too much like Chatroulette. Parker originally helped recruit Fanning from Path, where he was CEO, to work on Chatroulette at the behest of Yuri Milner, who is now one of Airtime's investors. "They lacked a clear vision and a management team. Yuri asked me where would you take this thing and who should run it," says Parker.
The collaboration with Chatroulette's young founder Andrey Ternovskiy didn't work out, but it got Fanning and Parker thinking about a larger problem. "With all due respect to Andrey," says Fanning, "it was just scratching the surface of what it could be-a universal host that is introducing people, smashing people together."
"It was fascinating to watch in the sense that it was not a virally engineered product," says Parker. "Here you have a product growing through organic word of mouth. It looked like Napster in 1999." Chatroulette also eliminated the anxiety of meeting new people by randomly pairing users. It ended up being too extreme and attracting a lot of naked dudes, but there it was obviously tapping into something essential.
"We are trying to address the problem of what has happened the last 10 years of social media," says Parker, who was the founding President of Facebook. "Your social network has become more rigid and constraining." Airtime, it seems, will be more about meeting new people. "Facebook is about identity, the people you already know," says Parker. "It has little to do with people you don't know."
The new stealth project by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. It is believed to be in the video chatting space. Originally codenamed Supyo, it will launch as Airtime.
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,...
Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1998 while attending Northeastern University. He is currently the GM of Rupture at Electronic Arts. Fanning has since founded SNOCAP, a B2B Music Distributor, in 2002, and Rupture, an MMORPG social network in 2006. Both companies were sold in 2008 - SNOCAP to imeem, and Rupture to Electronic Arts.
