Shawn Fanning Biography

Shawn Fanning is an American entrepreneur, computer programmer and angel investor best known for been Co-founder and lead software engineer of Napster.

In 2000, Fanning appeared as a presenter at the MTV Video Music Awards. On October, he was featured on the cover of Time magazine. In 2013, Fanning had a cameo appearance as himself in the film The Italian Job. In the film, Seth Green’s character Lyle accused Fanning of stealing Napster from him while he was taking a nap in their Northeastern University dorm room.

In early 2008, he appeared in a Volkswagen commercial directed by Roman Coppola, in which he poked fun at his file-sharing past. In 2013, Fanning and Napster were the subject of Alex Winter’s documentary Downloaded.

Shawn Fanning Age

He was born on November 22, 1980 in Brockton, Massachusetts, United States. He is 42 years old as of 2022.

Shawn Fanning Height

Fanning stands at a height of 5 feet 10 inches tall.

Shawn Fanning Family

Fanning was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, United States to his loving parents Joe Rando(father) and Coleen Fanning(mother).

Shawn Fanning Wife

Shawn has a wife named Jessica Wigsmoen. The couple is blessed with a daughter though not much details are known about his daughter or wife.

Shawn Fanning Net Worth

Shawn has an estimated net worth of $7.5 million dollars.

Napster Shawn Fanning

Fanning developed Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file sharing platforms, on June 1, 1999, and its popularity was widespread and Fanning was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Soon, hundreds of college students at Northeastern were trading music furiously. Sean Parker was the co-founder.

The site in its initial free P2P incarnation was shut down in 2001 after its unsuccessful appeal of court orders arising from its encouraging the illegal sharing and downloading 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, Fanning joined, and invested in a number of early-stage technology startup companies.

Shawn Fanning Snocap

In 2002, Fanning was named as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35 at the MIT Technology Review TR100.

In 2003, he opened a new company, Snocap, along with Ron Conway and Jordan Mendelson (Napster’s Chief Architect). The company aspired to be a legitimate marketplace for digital media, thou their partners and the public did not respond well. The customer support was poor, and technical issues were numerous.

One of Snocap’s primary partners, CD Baby, wrote a scathing account of their relationship. In late 2007, Snocap laid off 60% of its workforce.

ValleyWag then wrote an article saying that Fanning had long left Snocap and began to work on another venture, Rupture. The article stated that the failure was largely due to Snocap’s CEO Rusty Rueff and that of former VP Engineerng Dave Rowley, who “made a mess of engineering before he was fired”.

Snocap was looking to sell itself and fast, and in 2008, they found a buyer; imeem acquired Snocap in a fire sale.

Shawn Fanning Rupture

Fanning developed Rupture in December 2006, 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.

In 2007, The Rupture project was announced with seed funding, and CrunchBase notes the date Shawn officially became CEO of Rupture was October 2, 2007.

Rupture was later acquired by Electronic Arts for $15 million. Fanning’s career at Electronic Arts lasted only fo a short time as a round of layoffs in November 2009 included him and his team at Rupture

Shawn Fanning Path

Few months after Fanning was laid off from Electronic Arts, he started a new company called Path.com. In January 2010, Dave Morin an American entrepreneur, angel investor, announced he was leaving Facebook, where he was a Senior Platform Manager, to join Fanning and become CEO at Path.

Shawn Fanning Airtime

In 2011, Fanning reunited with Napster Co-founder Sean Parker to found Airtime.com. Other investors are Michael Arrington, Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher. Fanning serves as CEO and Parker as executive chairman.

Airtime was 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.”