Former Facebook president Sean Parker has a guest post on TechCrunch right now that defends his over-the-top $10 million wedding. 

The post is nearly 9,500 words long and addresses criticism that it damaged the ecology of woods where it took place.

Luckily TechCrunch provides a handy summary:

• The wedding site was chosen because it had been previously developed, so there was no environmental impact. The site was not public property, it was a private, for-profit, campground, which was mostly paved in asphalt and or cleared of all foliage. Development only occurred in cleared dirt and asphalt areas.
• The natural environment was not harmed, despite widespread claims to the contrary. There was no harm done to redwood trees, other plants, or animals. There were no endangered species on or near the property.
• We were conscientious about protecting the environment, locating the site with the help of Save the Redwoods League and soliciting advice about how to avoid harming the redwood habitat.
• Hundreds of articles were written in the days following the wedding, yet only one reporter contacted us for comment. Most of the information contained in these articles was erroneous. No original reporting was done, no interviews were conducted, and no fact checking occurred.
• We voluntarily agreed to cover $1 million in penalties related to the Ventana’s lack of development permits and past violations. We also volunteered to contribute $1.5 million in charitable contributions serving the coastal region of the Monterey Peninsula.

If you have time, buckle up and read the epic story here >

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Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker must not be too familiar with rap music or its stars.

In April 2005, the pair thought they hired a smooth-looking Yankees fan as their first biz dev person and seventh employee at Facebook, TechCrunch reports. Then, each Facebook user was allowed to post just one photo on Facebook, a profile picture.

Kevin Colleran, who the pair actually hired, had a picture of him with rapper 50 Cent. He had been hired by Tricia Black and he had never met Zuckerberg or Parker in person.

From TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis:

Zuck “looked crestfallen” at the mix up. And the next day, Colleran called up Facebook President Sean Parker and asked, “What’s up?” ”Well,” Parker explained, “the meeting went fine. But we both feel a little weird, because we thought you were African-American.”

Kirkpatrick wrote about the mixup in his book, The Facebook Effect:

"Zuckerberg headed to New York to meet with the new ad salesman Tricia Black had hired, Kevin Colleran. Colleran had previously worked in the record industry, and the photo on his profile showed him beaming at a party with his arm around the shoulder of rapper 50 Cent - who was goateed, impudent, and decked in bling. Zuckerberg arranged to meet Colleran in front of the Virgin Megastore on New York's Union Square. Colleran showed up late and was walking toward Zuckerberg when he got a phone call from his new boss. 'Where are you?' Zuckerberg asked. 'Zuck! I'm right in front of you!' Colleran replied. Zuckerberg looked crestfallen. He thought Thefacebook's ad salesman was the tough-looking black guy in the photo."

Tsotsis says 50 Cent is aware of the confusing first encounter with Colleran. Parker later confessed and 50 Cent joked that he "should have taken the job."

We reached out to both Kevin Colleran and Sean Parker for more color about the early Facebook mixup and will update if we hear back.

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Newlyweds Sean Parker and Alexandra Lenas had a magical wedding in Big Sur, California, surrounded by red woods. It could have been lifted from the pages of a fairy tale; guests wore medieval gowns, animal skins were strewn on chairs, and the couple's first song was inspired by Disney.

For their first dance as husband and wife, Parker and Lenas chose Part of your World, from The Little Mermaid. Parker knew every word.

From Vanity Fair's David Kirkpatrick who attended the soiree:

“Look at this trove, treasures untold / How many wonders can one cavern hold?” Sean Parker, the billionaire Internet wizard who helped create Napster and Facebook, knew the lyrics by heart. It was an endearing, corny, and over-the-top moment at an event most noteworthy, perhaps, for how it has been vilified as a symbol of the excesses of tech-industry wealth.

A number of celebrities and executives attended the event including Girls actress Alison Williams, Square founder Jack Dorsey, Mark and Alison Pincus (of Zynga and One Kings Lane respectively), Sex and the City actor Kyle MacLachlan, actress Olivia Munn, Sting, and more.

Although Lenas and Parker swear their wedding wasn't inspired by Game of Thrones, there were hints of the hit HBO show everywhere. Guests were able to watch the wildly popular "Red Wedding" episode that evening, one week ahead of its air date.

Here's a picture of the nuptuals, and some of the important people who attended.

(Image via Conde Nast's Vanity Fair, click to enlarge)

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Former Facebook president Sean Parker has published a new rant against the "venomous,""hateful,""obsessive" critics of his $4.5 million, Lord of the Rings-style wedding in Big Sur, Calif.

His nuptials to singer-songwriter Alexandra Lenas were so extravagant — he built fake ruined castle walls in an ancient redwood forest, and every guest had to wear a special costume— that the State of California fined him $2.5 million for damaging the environment.

On Facebook, Parker blasted Rebecca Greenfield of The Atlantic for her coverage of the event:

The link-baiting world of journalism has sunk to a new low: now reporters are writing headlines that directly contradict the content of their stories. You see, Rebecca Greenfield at The Atlantic absolutely LOVES to write about my wedding and she's written venomous stories about it so many times that I've lost track.

It goes on, ending with threats of defamation suits and "digital" restraining orders.

We say "new rant" because this is merely the latest in a series of outbursts in which Parker has responded to media reports that have suggested that, perhaps, $10 million for a wedding might have been overdoing it. He wrote a 9,500-word treatise for Techcrunchback in June. He also told CNET that he'd had to cancel his honeymoon because "There are crazy people on Facebook typing death threats ... psychopaths are hunting me."

Here's a screengrab of the whole thing:

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Meet Oyster, the book subscription app that wants to do for books what Netflix did for movies and what Spotify did for music; provide an all-you-can-read experience for a monthly fee. 

For $9.95 a month, you can download and enjoy titles from HarperCollins, Workman, Melville House, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Boasting 100,000 titles so far, Oyster is still working to procure more publishing companies to add to its roster. 

Instead of focusing on a tablet experience to compete with other various e-readers, founders Eric Stromberg, Andrew Brown, and Willem Van Lancker shared on the company blog that they're concentrating on making a seamless app for smartphones.

We’re building Oyster as an end-to-end product created specifically for mobile. Everything from recommendations to the in-book experience allows you to easily reach for books at moments of impulse throughout your day— whether on the subway, waiting for a friend to meet you for coffee, or while relaxing in the park. 

Founders Fund, a team of venture capitalists that includes Peter Thiel and Sean Parker, is Oyster's lead investor in their first round of financing.

The app is currently in waitlist mode, a tactic many apps use (remember email app Mailbox?) to build excitement and hype around its launch. It began rolling out invitations yesterday.

You can visit Oyster to get yourself on the waiting list. 

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Last night, Jon Stewart blasted the current goings-on in Davos, Switzerland, as an "orgy of self-congratulatory excess."

Few people here saw the broadcast — at that hour, they were too busy drinking or sleeping. But it's fair to say they would have enjoyed it. Then they would have raised a glass to Jon Stewart and roared, "Dude, get over here, you're missing the party!"

Tonight, in fact, is the anniversary of the hot-ticket party in Davos last year — a "taxidermy"-themed bash thrown by billionaire entrepreneur Sean Parker, Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff, and Ian Osborne of the London-based communications firm Osborne & Partners.

Billed as the "Future Of Philanthropy Nightcap," the party was held in what until recently had been a crappy bar on Davos's main drag. Earlier in the week the bar had been transformed — at a rumored cost of $1 million — into a one-of-a-kind "taxidermy" emporium, with stuffed animals and animal heads on many of the walls.

There was a wine bar in one corner.

And a team of bartenders called "Liquid Chef" had been flown in from London.

John Legend (also flown in) was playing.

There were said to be three levels of restricted rooms below the main level that only certain guests had access to (I didn't). And there was, as you will see, an eclectic mix of guests. I generally feel about two decades too old to fully appreciate parties like these, but last year's guests included some folks who were two decades younger and some who were two decades older than me. 

Here are some pictures. Apologies in advance for the lousy quality. I'll try to get better ones when I go to another Davos-ending bash in the same transformed bar tonight.

What other wild parties are you missing at Davos?

The stage. That's a full-sized stuffed grizzly.

A cape buffalo. With laser beams for eyes.

Remember that scene from The Social Network, when Mark Zuckerberg first meets Sean Parker? And Parker tells him to drop "the" and says $1 billion is cooler than $1 million?

It turns out another big-time entrepreneur was present that evening, Business Insider has learned. That person was Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

Kalanick wasn't at the dinner with Parker and Zuckerberg, but the pair met up with him after in New York. Kalanick and Parker were hanging out a lot back then. Kalanick was running a startup, Red Swoosh, which he'd later sell for about $23 million. Uber is now worth more than $3 billion.

Kalanick and Parker may have known each other from their Scour-Napster days. Kalanick's first startup, Scour, was a file-sharing company for movies, music and more that preceded Napster by about 18 months. One of Napster's co-founders, Shawn Fanning, was an early Scour user. Sean Parker co-founded Napster with Fanning.

After that famous Parker-Zuckerberg dinner, Kalanick took Zuckerberg out to a club. Parker didn't go with them, but Zuckerberg's time with Kalanick ended up being a novel experience for the young CEO of Facebook.

For more on Kalanick, check out his epic entrepreneurial tale here.

Here's the scene from The Social Network, below:

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Two years ago, serial entrepreneur Sean Parker held a star-studded extravaganza to celebrate the launch of Airtime.

The video network that let you talk with strangers who shared your Facebook interests was hindered by technical issues and lack of interest before it eventually shut down.

Parker relaunched Airtime as OkHello last week. This free social networking app lets users create video chats with friends and family and share photos, stickers, texts and more.

It's available for iOS and Android.

This is the welcome screen where you create a new account.

You can manually create a username and password or choose to import info from Facebook.

All you have to do is create a password, and you're all set.

Before he quit to create a venture capital firm, Chamath Palihapitiya was Facebook's longest-tenured senior executive.

That means he has a lot of stock in a company that is now worth $65 billion. He's rich — "live on an island and never look at a computer screen again," rich.

So why is he still working?

Produced by Alana Kakoyiannis. Originally published in May 2013.

NOW WATCH: The Creator Of One Of The World's Biggest And Most Powerful Websites Is Not Rich

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Napster cofounder Sean Parker just paid a whopping $55 million for Ellen DeGeneres' 9-bedroom Los Angeles mansion, according to TMZ.

After only a few months in The Brody House — yep, the house has a name — DeGeneres decided to flip it for $15 million in profit. She reportedly did not intend to flip it, but Parker approached her last month with an offer, and the deal closed in eight days.

DeGeneres, famous for her house-hopping as much as her status as America's nicest funny woman, reportedly laid down $40 million for the house, which is located in the exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, according to TMZ.

Sitting on 2.25 acres next to the Playboy Mansion, the property was commissioned by philanthropists Sidney and Frances Lasker Brody in 1949. The home was impressive in its own right (TMZ calls it "the best house in L.A.), but its unnamed second owner had it renovated in 2010, ostensibly to flip it.

Designer Stephen Stone increased the size of the kitchen, turned the top floor into a second master suite with a study, updated the pool, and added a koi pond. But he did keep the landscaping intact along with some original parts of the house.

Unfortunately, we only have photos of what the home looked like pre-renovation, since it never officially hit the real estate market. But even so, they are pretty remarkable:

Most of the renovations to the house took place indoors. The entryway and landscaping were left intact, only spruced up.

The home still opens to a spacious living area and slatted stairs.

The sprawling ficus, deemed too invasive, in the atrium was replaced with some rare palms.

All the bathroom fixtures were updated from this pre-renovation photo.

Stone installed a new pool in the same space and style of the old one.

The home comes with tennis courts that received a new fence in the renovations.

SEE ALSO: 13 Recent Home Sales That Show How Crazy San Francisco Real Estate Has Become

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Napster cofounder Sean Parker just paid a whopping $55 million for Ellen DeGeneres' nine-bedroom Los Angeles mansion, according to TMZ.

DeGeneres bought the house for $40 million earlier this year, and while she didn't intend to flip it, Parker reportedly approached her with an offer and the deal was inked in just eight days, leaving DeGeneres with a nice $15 million profit.

While we couldn't get our hands on any pictures of the renovated house, we were able to put together a tour of the home, called The Brody House, pre-renovation. We can only imagine what it looks like now if this is what they were starting with.

The house is located in the exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The property was commissioned by philanthropists Sidney and Frances Lasker Brody in 1949.

It sits on 2.25 acres of land.

"Over-the-top" doesn't begin to describe the summer 2013 wedding of Facebook billionaire Sean Parker and singer-songwriter Alexandra Lenas.

Parker spent $4.5 million to transform a campsite in Big Sur, California, into a magical forest paradise, complete with animal-skin chairs, silk flower petals, goats, and a pony. 

All 364 guests — including Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes — were given Tolkien-esque costumes made by Academy Award-winning designer Ngila Dickson to wear during the ceremony. 

Parker faced heavy criticism after the wedding, because the preparation required installing temporary structures in an ecologically sensitive area, and he failed to obtain the proper permits from the California Coastal Commission.

As part of a $2.5 million settlement with the Commission, Parker has agreed to build an app that will help people find and access public beaches in California. The app will belong to the Commission, and Parker will  develop it himself, the Mercury News reports.

According to Sarah Christie, a spokeswoman for the Commission, enlisting Parker's help "gives us access to the most cutting-edge technology," she said. "This is an example of lemons turning to lemonade."

All of California's beaches are public, but private landowners sometimes block access with gates and "No Trespassing" signs. In September, the Commission ruled that Silicon Valley VC Vinod Khosla was in violation of California law when he changed public access to Martin's Beach, where he owns property.

Parker's app, which isn't finished, would help users find ways to find public-access points at beaches in the area. A similar app was built for Malibu beaches earlier this year after entertainment mogul David Geffen blocked a path that led to the beach there. 

Parker will also pay $1.4 million in grants, which will go toward preservation and outreach efforts in Big Sur.

"Alexandra and I are proud to support organizations that promote education, access to and the conservation of the Big Sur coast,"Parker said in a press release. "In working closely with the California Coastal Commission to select the recipients, we believe that these grants build on our long-standing commitment to Big Sur and will help ensure that present and future generations continue to benefit from this American treasure."

SEE ALSO: The 12 Most Over-The-Top Weddings In Tech

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Before he convinced Mark Zuckerberg to drop the "the" and signed on as Facebook's first president, Sean Parker helped launch two other big startups: Napster and Plaxo.

Napster is the one you've probably heard of. The music file-sharing network collected tens of millions of users in its first year, but suffered a slow and painful death at the hands of the Recording Industry Association of America on copyright infringement charges.

Parker's other startup, Plaxo, you may not remember.

The online address book service never found its way into technology lore in the way that LiveJournal, MySpace, and other long-gone social networks have. But its other co-founder, Todd Masonis, says Plaxo paved the way for Facebook.

We recently spoke with Masonis on Parker's and Plaxo's influence.

According to a 2010 article in Vanity Fair, Parker created Plaxo as his redemption. In 2001, the same year Napster got the axe, he dreamt up a software that auto-updated users' email address books when one of their contacts moved, changed companies, or got a new phone number. Users could choose to sync their information with friends.

Plaxo removed the hassle of editing a contact entry, so people could stay better connected. "It was the precursor to social networking," Masonis tells Business Insider.

Parker shared his vision with two recently graduated Stanford grads, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, a friend from high school. They signed on as co-founders and chief architects and built the product.

Despite a slow start, Plaxo was gaining 10,000 to 12,000 members a day by April of 2004. But it gained a reputation as being obnoxious, thanks to the incessant email-requests sent to web users, prompting them to update their entries in their friends' address books.

With success came trouble. Parker, who often slept on Masonis' couch during Plaxo's rough patches, began showing up to work less. His unreliability gnawed away at the company's investors. "He was more interested in the fun part of [building a] startup," Masonis says. "He had been at Napster where they got to go backstage at concerts and spend money on concert tours."

In 2004, the board fired Parker from his own company, citing his erratic schedule and rumors that he had provided drugs to some employees. Parker called these claims "ludicrous" and "a smear campaign," and accused board member Ram Shriram of scheming to throw him out and strip him of his stock. 

Parker slipped into a depression, Masonis says, but it didn't last long. "He got kicked out and then immediately ran into Mark Zuckerberg. That's how it all went down," Masonis laughs.

Parker only lasted as Facebook's president for about a year, although he stayed on for some time after that in an unofficial capacity. But while he was there, he used a lot of what he learned at Plaxo to help shape the social network into the behemoth it is today. For instance:

Parker understood viral marketing. One of the biggest hurdles in creating a social network is that the value only exists for users if their friends are already on it. At Plaxo, Parker conceived of viral marketing campaigns, and had no moral qualms in pinging the hell out of members' contacts until they downloaded the service, too.

By the time Parker linked up with four-month-old Facebook, he had three years' experience figuring out how to get users to join out of the blue.

Parker helped Zuckerberg maintain control of Facebook. At Facebook, Parker negotiated an unusual deal with the company's most powerful shareholders— including cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, and other major firms and investors — so that they ceded their voting rights to Zuckerberg. This corporate structure gives Zuckerberg complete and permanent control of the company he founded, so that he can't be jettisoned the way Plaxo booted Parker.

Parker sought a $3 billion revenge on one of the most esteemed VC firms. In 2004, Zuckerberg began taking meetings with venture capitalists about raising money for his other startup idea, Wirehog, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that linked with Facebook. Sequoia Capital reached out.

There was bad blood between Parker and the firm. Sequoia's Michael Moritz was Plaxo's first major investor, and three short years later, he supported the board's decision to fire Parker as its president. So when the chance for revenge surfaced, Parker seized it.

Zuckerberg took the meeting with Sequoia, but purposely blew it. He showed up late and wearing pajamas. His PowerPoint deck, titled "The Top Ten Reasons You Should Not Invest," listed off snarky reasons such as "We have no revenue,""We will probably get sued by the music industry," and "Because Sean Parker is involved."

Needless to say, Sequoia did not invest in Wirehog or Facebook.

After Parker left, Plaxo faded from sight. Masonis and Ring, the third co-founder, sold the company to Comcast in 2008 for somewhere between $150 and $170 million, according to TechCrunch. Comcast still operates the service today, but it doesn't have a very high profile.

Meanwhile, the duo used their exit money to open Dandelion Chocolate, a bean-to-bar chocolate-making factory in San Francisco's Mission District.

And Parker continues to be one of the most interesting characters in the startup world. In the last couple of years, he helped Spotify lock down deals with US record labels, launched and quietly shut down the video chat startup Airtime, and donated $24 million to Stanford University School of Medicine to build the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research, dedicated to finding a cure for allergies.

Despite the variety of his entrepreneurial interests, Parker continues to serve as an industry catalyst. He spots potential in other people's fledgling companies and turns them to gold, even if they sometimes turn on him later.

SEE ALSO: Step inside the chocolate factory that Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring launched post-Plaxo

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NOW WATCH: Why Bethany Mota Has A Legion Of 10 Million Fans Waiting For Her Next YouTube Video

TheAudience, the entertainment-focused social media and digital content marketing company founded by Sean Parker, Ari Emanuel, and Oliver Luckett, is shutting down in the UK, sources have told Business Insider.

Sources close to the company said that all its UK staff were told they were being axed on Wednesday, and that they would not be receiving a final month's pay.

Liquidators visited the UK office in London on Tuesday, and the company is going into "administration", our sources said. In the UK, going into administration effectively means a company is being taken under management of a court-appointed administrator in order to pay off debts and ultimately wind down the company. The equivalent is bankruptcy in the US.

The company has two other offices: Its HQ in Los Angeles and in New York City.

According to its last full accounts filed in the UK with Companies House, theAudience posted a loss of £716,185 in the 12 months to December 31, 2013. The company generated £2.2 million in revenues and a gross profit of £1.6 million. However, it piled up "administrative expenses" totaling £2.2 million.

Mike Drath, COO & CFO of theAudience, provided Business Insider with this statement: "Yesterday, we made the very difficult decision to wind down our UK business. This decision was made based on unique business challenges in that specific market. theAudience’s business model in the UK has always been quite different and wholly separate from that of our U.S. operations and will have no impact on our domestic business.”

TheAudience's three co-founders were described by TechCrunch in 2012 as "the ideal team to help you navigate the intersection of technology, media and celebrity." Parker is best known as the co-founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook. Emanuel is a well-regarded Hollywood talent agent. And Luckett co-founded social media start-up DigiSynd, which was acquired by Disney, where he later went on to become a senior vice president.

Luckett is the CEO of the company, while Emanuel and Parker are founding investors and are not involved in the day-to-day running of the company.

The company raised $20 million in funding since it was founded in 2011, according to CrunchBase.

TheAudience counts major brands including McDonald's, Paramount, Universal, American Express, and Target among its clients, according to its website.

SEE ALSO: How Sean Parker bounced back from being fired to change Facebook's history

SEE ALSO: Actor's Twitter followings are becoming as important as talent in Hollywood

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NOW WATCH: Warren Buffett is in the new trailer for the 'Entourage' movie

Even the most optimistic of today's big-dreaming tech luminaries — people like Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page — know that living forever is a most-likely impossible goal.

Yet they still want to defeat death.

At the very least, they want to find a way to delay it as long as possible.

The quest for eternal life goes back thousands of years with mostly unimpressive results. But since 1840, life expectancy in developed countries has risen from the low-to-mid 40s to about 80. We're living almost twice as long as we would have if we were born less than two centuries ago.

So can we almost double life expectancy again, to 150?

That's a goal that these Silicon Alley luminaries agreed was "worthy" and reasonable at a 2004 dinner party, held with some of the top scientists interested in prolonging life, according to a fascinating Washington Post profile by Ariana Eunjung Cha.

And these billionaires don't just have money at their disposal, Cha notes in her detailed look at their efforts to defy death, they also have access to modern medicine, genetics, efforts to map the human brain, and computers that can process quantities of information so huge they've never even been conceived of before. We know more about human health than we ever have and have access to tools that didn't exist decades ago.

Cha writes of these "tech titans:"

Their objective is to use the tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.

Here's some of what they've done so far:

• Larry Ellison, Oracle founder, has "donated more than $430 million to anti-aging research" according to Cha, who says he told his biographer "Death has never made any sense to me... How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?"
• In 2013, Larry Page founded Calico, a company that's trying to prevent aging — with $750 million from Google.
• Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs exists to fund the "radical science" and "bold ideas," including projects to grow bones from stem cells, research into ways to repair the cellular damage that occurs with age, and ways to quickly cool organs in order to preserve them.
• Biologist Pam Omidyar and her husband, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, have donated millions to research that tries to figure out why some people are able to bounce back from diseases.
• Sergey Brin of Google, who has a gene associated with Parkinson's, has given $150 million to efforts to use big data to understand DNA. He thinks these efforts could rapidly transform research into Parkinson's (and other diseases), providing the keys to avoiding neurodegenerative diseases that cut life short.
• Some of the biggest science awards of the year are the six $3 million Breakthrough Prizes, funded by Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg along with Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki (who founded 23andMe, the genetic testing company). According to Cha, they created the prizes to support scientists whose discoveries extend life.

Some fear that extending life would only benefit the wealthy or would create a crowded planet filled with elderly citizens and no good way to support them. And others think that our current longer lives aren't necessarily better — more people live until their minds and bodies are ravaged by diseases that only exist in old age.

These tech billionaires, however, are optimists and think all this can be overcome. Thiel thinks that the "great enemy" of humanity is death.

"I believe that evolution is a true account of nature," he told the Washington Post. "But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society."

SEE ALSO: The biggest biotech discovery of the century will make designer babies and genetically edited humans possible

READ MORE: A radical experiment tried to make old people young again — and the results were astonishing

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NOW WATCH: What the Chinese saying 'The ugly wife is a treasure at home' actually means

Sean Parker persuaded artist David Choe to take stock instead of cash for painting the walls of Facebook's first office. Now that stock is worth $200 million.

This exchange happened back in 2005, when Facebook was just a startup. According to an interview Choe had with Howard Stern in 2014, Parker — the founding president of Facebook — had been a fan of Choe's work for some time.

So when Facebook's first office needed decorating, Parker called on Choe.

As a college-focused social network, Mark Zuckerberg's company was everything Choe, who had dropped out of school and had no interest in anything like MySpace or Friendster, hated.

Choe had been charging more and more for his work, but having just come out of prison, he was broke. So he asked Facebook for $60,000 to decorate the whole building. Instead he walked away with stock — and no guarantees Facebook would amount to anything.

"Most people would have said, 'Look, you know the odds of anybody really taking off with an internet company,'" Stern said in his interview with Choe. "Most of these companies come and go all the time, especially back then. So, you must have been half out of your mind to turn down the $60,000."

But Choe said it was his faith in Parker that convinced him to take the stock.

Parker, this "skinny, nerdy kid," told Choe he was going to raise money for Facebook.

"He got a super-sharp haircut, started working out every day, got tan, got a nice suit," Choe added. "I'm like, 'This guy's crazy.'"

But then Parker persuaded PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman to invest in the company.

"I believed in Sean," Choe said. "I didn't care about Face[book]. I'm like, this kid knows something, and I'm going to bet my money on him."

Choe said he was there when Thiel invested in Facebook, so knew the company would be able to pay the $60,000 he had asked for.

But before he even started painting, Choe had agreed to take a chance on the company.

"I like to gamble, you know," he told Stern.

Here's Choe's interview with Stern in full:

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NOW WATCH: Here's what happens when you drop an Apple Watch face down on cement

Last fall, Sean Parker, the technology billionaire behind Napster, Facebook, and Spotify, invested several million dollars into a risky stealth startup, Brigade, which has the ambitious aim of increasing mass civic participation.

“The grandiose vision is to repair democracy; to do that, we have to fix political engagement,” Sean Parker tells me.

He takes comfort in the fact that Brigade’s wide-eyed goal “is a little bit more achievable than it may seem at first blush, because turnout is so low, the average American is so disengaged, that even a few marginal changes  —  a few percentage points one way or the other  — has a huge impact.”

Parker, and the driving force of Brigade, CEO Matt Mahan, think they can inject interest into America’s otherwise lukewarm polis by creating the next great social network around citizens’ civic life. That is, just as Facebook exists for our social lives and Linkedin for business, Brigade aspires to become a significant part of Democracy’s 21st century infrastructure.

Civic identity, explains Mahan, “really does come down to, ‘what do you believe and care about?’ and “what have you done about those things?’”

But, for now, Mahan, Parker, and the Brigade team are starting very (very) small with a simple discussion tool that allows users to share and debate their political beliefs. Eventually users will be able to take grassroots actions (like organizing votes or calling congressmen).

It may seem like an oddly barebones approach to such a big problem. Like the original Facebook, Mahan and Parker are betting that a sophisticated social network grows from a “fun” and “snack-able” set of viral features  —  to use their terminology. Facebook won over the Internet with our penchant for sharing photos; Brigade is hitching a ride on our compulsive need to express our political opinions.

I showed off an early version of Brigade to Michael Slaby, President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 innovation officer. He was tentatively optimistic, “As a tool for grassroots action, a network of like-minded people bound together — as long as they have tools to interact and do things — can be incredibly powerful,”

So, how does Brigade actually work? Beta invites will go out this Summer (sign up here).

Brigade, Beta Version 0.x, A Hands-On Review

The app itself is deceptively simple: the front page of the app is a newsfeed-like vertical scroll of topic issues. For each topic, I can mark “agree”, “disagree” or “unsure” — then I get feedback on how my beliefs compare to my friends and to the wider population of users.

In the screenshot on the left, I can see who agrees with me after I select my opinion. On the right, I can dig deeper into how I compare to my friends and followers.

Despite being a modest conversation tool without anyone knowing Parker’s involvement, it’s initial users nonetheless show healthy engagement. The company secretly tested their app under a stealth name, Accord. Twitter is full of people posting their Accord beliefs to their followers.

“We wanted to go for an immediate visceral reaction to whether this is someone who does think like me or doesn’t think like me,” explained Brigade’s President, James Windon.

Users can also make their own survey questions, create groups of followers around similar issues, comment on hot topics, and even receive an alert when a friend changes their mind on an issue (potentially providing a measure of which friends are most “influential” in their network). 

That’s it for now: pretty simple.

Optimism, American History, And A Graveyard of Failures

Brigade is just one app in a long line of failed companies that have attempted to boost civic engagement. Few people might care, if weren’t for the fact that Brigade’s investor and visionary is a politically active billionaire who has seen the rise of three massive networks (Napster, Facebook, and Spotify).

“This is a space that’s littered with failure,” acknowledges Parker, who combined two previously semi-failed civic startups, Votizen and Causes, to create the Brigade team. Parker’s north star is that America once had arguably the most active democracy on earth, with voter turnout in presidential elections consistently above 80% in the post-civil war Guilded Age.

According to historian Lawrence Kornbluh, American stopped voting after the population exploded and a technocratic bureaucracy was needed to manage the growing assortment of complex national issues. No longer was politics something that was apart of everyday life; so, citizens just tuned out.

“Why hasn’t social media led to a revolution in political engagement?” asks Parker in an exasperated rant.

“We’ve gotten to a point where the population is much larger than we could have anticipated during the founding of the country and where the issues are more complex. So in order to create a better informed citizenry, we need to create better tools.”

To someone with a hammer, everything seems like a nail; to an Internet entrepreneur, every group of people looks like an unconnected network. Brigade is building the first mass database on beliefs. Perhaps even better, the company can tie user’s opinions to their actual voting habits, since they have access to a clean version of the much-coveted “voter roll,” which is a tool typically in the arsenal of wealthy political campaigns. 

“Beyond Facebook likes, the data set that Brigade is collecting doesn’t exist,” says Sina Khannifar, a consultant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has spearheaded two successful campaigns related to NSA spying and consumer cell phones rights. Normally, Khannifar would have to manually construct a network of likeminded activists for each campaign, so Brigade’s database would potentially make online movements easier to get off the ground.

“I think that’s part of what’s exciting about Brigade from an opportunity perspective, because of the asset they’re starting with and the people involved,” concludes former Obama campaigner Michael Slaby. “That also raises expectations, which they’re going to constantly be trying to tamp down — but such is life.”

The Ferenstein Wire is a syndicated news service. For inquiries, contact the editor here.

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Founders Forum released a fantastic video Thursday spoofing what famous tech celebrities would be left doing if the internet never happened.

AOL co-founder Steve Case goes around an office saying "You've got mail!" as he passes out pieces of paper. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales edits books in a library and starts encouraging others to do it themselves. 

Sean Parker first takes a nap (get it, Napster?) then starts taking selfies with a Polaroid camera attached to a broomstick, although we're still not sure how he's pressing the button on that one.

There's many more tech star appearances and hilarious scenes from Arianna Huffington, Max Levchin and Michael Bloomberg so make sure you watch the full six minutes:

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Sean Parker, cofounder of Napster and former president of Facebook, has announced a gift of $600 million to launch the Parker Foundation. 

The foundation will focus on funding programs in three main categories: life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement. 

"In the increasingly complex and interconnected world we live in, the problems we’re confronted with are systemic ones, and they call for systemic answers," Parker said in a press release.

"In order to achieve scale and leverage, the philanthropists who take on these challenges will need to search for fresh answers to these problems and aggressively implement the solutions they discover."

Parker recently pledged $24 million to develop the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford. He also donated $4.5 million to support a malaria elimination program at the University of California San Francisco’s Global Health Group. 

"The Parker Foundation will apply the lessons learned from Silicon Valley start-ups to our philanthropic initiatives: we must move fast, make concentrated bets based on our convictions, have the courage to make mistakes and learn from them," Parker said in the press release announcing the launch of the foundation. 

Forbes estimates Parker's net worth to be about $2.9 billion. 

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A group of tech bigshots led by investor Ron Conway have exposed what Conway says is a "conspiracy" to scuttle an art museum funded by George Lucas in San Francisco.

Lucas offered to fund and build the museum, which was going to include his collection of comic and digital art, in 2012.

However, the Presidio Trust, a government agency that oversees land use in the park where the museum was to be located, unanimously rejected the proposal in 2014. Lucas has since moved the proposed museum to Chicago.

Supporters of the museum believed it would be a huge economic boon to the city. So Conway and 27 others, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Facebook cofounder and billionaire Sean Parker, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, decided to find out why the plan was rejected.

The group submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for emails related to the rejection. The results came back, and Conway says the private emails between various employees of the Trust show a "conspiracy" to kill the museum before it could be built.

In an email to Business Insider, Conway writes, "The Presidio Trust’s rejection of the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum (LCAM) was a rigged process. Trust officials privately ruled out the LCAM bid before the proposal was even submitted, continued to plot against the LCAM throughout the process, and violated their own policies by colluding with a competing group to submit a competing proposal."

For instance, in an email sent in January 2013 — before formal proposals were submitted — a Presidio Trust official named Tia Lombardi emailed a consultant saying "GL's building will NEVER get built."

President Obama appointed three new members to the Trust last month, which could re-open the door to the museum being built. Conway told the San Francisco Chronicle, "Thank God, the president of the United States got out the broom and swept out the trust by removing (board President) Nancy Bechtle and the other colluders." 

Business Insider has reached out to the Presidio Trust for comment and will update this story when we hear back. 

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