Napster was founded and designed
by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, and co-founded by John Fanning. The company began in June of 1999 as a simple
peer-to-peer file sharing program, mainly MP3 music files. Although there were many other similar
programs at the time, theirs was overwhelmingly faster than anything else
online. Despite copyright infringement
allegations from musicians and record labels, the service exploded beyond
possibilities anyone could ever imagine, with roughly 80 million registered
Napster users at its peak. Shawn Fanning
was 19 and Sean Parker was 20 years old.
Mark Zuckerberg has a somewhat similar story, and Sean Parker would go
on to help Zuckerberg launch Facebook just years later.
Albeit Napster eventually closed
down its service by court order due to copyright infringement, these
entrepreneurs still represented that youthful determination to push something,
enhance it, and drive to inspire the overall abilities of the individual and
the group with clear and conscious diligence.
Emile Haddad touches upon these
sentiments quite often in his writing, stating, “Asking difficult questions of
yourself and your peers requires skills that include mutual respect,
encouragement of all ideas and the recognition that in every idea, even the
least significant, lays a kernel of wisdom worth inquiring about and worth
teasing out of the collective wisdom of the group.”
Image Source: howto-expert.com
Contemporary times call for
contemporary approaches to business development and operations, and having the
courage to dive in headfirst and lean more on bravery than caution can instill
a core of ideals that hold true and reap the rewards your willingness helped
forge and acquire.
