| Net Worth: | $100 Million |
| Date of Birth: | Nov 22, 1980 (40 years old) |
| Gender: | Male |
| Profession: | Programmer, Entrepreneur, Businessperson |
| Nationality: | United States of America |
Shawn Fanning Net Worth: Shawn Fanning is an American computer programmer, serial entrepreneur and angel investor who has a net worth of $100 million dollars. Shawn Fanning is probably best known for creating Napster, the file-sharing platform that was very popular around the turn of the century. He was born on November 22, 1980, in Brockton, Massachusetts. It was in 1998, while attending Northeastern University, that he created one of the first popular peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file sharing platforms. Once a preliminary beta program became available on June 1, 1999, hundreds of college students at Northeastern were up and trading music furiously. Shortly after, Shawn moved his company from his headquarters in Hull, Massachusetts to a more spacious location in San Mateo, California and even hired new employees to improve on the Napster Program. Napster was so popular that earned him a place on the cover of Time magazine. Napster was ultimately sued into oblivion. His co-founder Sean Parker went on to be an early advisor at Facebook and eventually earned a multi-billion personal fortune.
After Napster, Shawn Fanning joined, and invested in, a number of early-stage technology startup companies, including Snocap, Rapture and Path. He set up Snocap along with Jordan Mendelson and Ron Conway in 2003. Even though the company aspired to be a legitimate marketplace for digital media, it ended up firing 60% of its workforce by late 2007. This made Fanning leave Snocap to work on another venture, Rupture. The project came to light in late 2006, and Shawn officially became CEO of Rupture on October 2, 2007. Rupture’s future seemed bright as it was soon acquired by Electronic Arts for $15 million, but Fanning’s team at Electronic Arts was sacked in November 2009 in a round of layoffs. Only few months later, he started a new company called Path.com.
Uber Investment: Uber launched in San Francisco in June 2010. It was a huge hit with customers, but investors were not exactly beating down Uber’s doors to invest in the fledgling startup at the time. In late summer 2010, Uber raised a $1.25 million seed round from First Round Capital, investor Chris Sacca, and Shawn Fanning. Shawn ponied up $25,000. Fast forward to May 2019 and Shawn’s stake, assuming he hasn’t sold any of his shares, was worth $125 million after Uber’s IPO.
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