. Parker’s first exiling came at Napster, shortly before the lawsuit brought by the music industry shuttered it in 2001. Then from Plaxo, the online address book startup he helped found, in 2004. One Plaxo cofounder remembers Parker’s: “It was the sort of thing where he doesn’t come to work, but then maybe if he does it’s at 11 p.m., but it’s not to do a bunch of work, it’s because he’s bringing a bunch of girls back to the office because he can show them he’s a startup founder.
And the most infamous, Facebook. In a little more than 12 months, he discovered Facebook, befriended Mark Zuckerberg, helped secure its initial funding, became its first president and then—poof!—resigned from the startup after North Carolina cops found cocaine in a beach house rented under his name. He moved to New York, where he found solace by crashing with Grateful Dead“When someone asks you to take an extended vacation, that’s basically a prelude to firing you.