15 Facts About Shawn Fanning

Shawn Fanning developed Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer file sharing platforms, in 1999.

The popularity of Napster was widespread and Fanning was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

On June 1,1999, Shawn Fanning released a preliminary beta program of Napster and soon, hundreds of college students at Northeastern were trading music.

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

Shawn Fanning aspired to be a legitimate marketplace for digital media.

ValleyWag wrote an article that Shawn Fanning had long left Snocap and began to work on another venture, Rupture.

In January 2010, Dave Morin announced he was leaving Facebook, where he was a Senior Platform Manager, to join Shawn Fanning and become CEO at Path.

In 2011 Shawn Fanning reunited with Napster cofounder Sean Parker to found Airtime.

Airtime launched in June 2012 at a disastrous public event where Parker and Shawn Fanning paid huge amounts of money to have celebrities present but the product repeatedly crashed and ultimately failed to work.

In 2013 Shawn Fanning founded Helium Systems together with Amir Haleem, and Sean Carey.

In 2000, Shawn Fanning appeared as a presenter at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Shawn Fanning appeared wearing a Metallica T-shirt as the Metallica v Napster, Inc lawsuit had been filed a few months prior.

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

Shawn Fanning had a cameo appearance as himself in the 2003 film The Italian Job.

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