📸

Parker grew up in the northern Virginia suburb of Herndon. His father worked as an oceanographer and his mother as a media buyer for infomercials. Parker had two younger sisters and was a strong swimmer at an early age, before his asthma grew worse and he had to carry an inhaler from place to place. In school, Parker described himself as a “highly variable student,” with multiple As and Fs, depending on whether he felt like concentrating on an assigned subject or on something else. At home, he fooled around with his father’s Atari and began learning to program.

Parker was torn about what to do with his life. He wanted to write books, and he was interested in philosophy, “but I was known as a computer guy, and that usually won out.” He learned the computer language Basic, a little C, and some Perl. That was enough to pass as geeky in the high school population, but his entrepreneurial skills developed even faster. Parker tried to start a newspaper at age twelve; later, he grew fixated on the idea that anyone could make money simply buying things wholesale and then marking them up. “I went on a mission to find wholesalers” of anything at all, he said, and found one in the eighth grade that would sell him model planes in bulk. He resold the planes for a couple hundred dollars in profit. Not long after that, Parker started his own Web-design shop, then a security firm he called Crosswalk.

“Most of my productive time was spent either doing computer stuff or entrepreneurial stuff,” Parker said. Some of the unproductive time was spent on Internet Relay Chat, though he chatted far less often than Shawn and Ritter. On IRC, Parker met Shawn and future Napster engineer Jordy Mendelson, both of whom joined Parker’s fledgling Crosswalk. Crosswalk was one of the security groups that published advisories on the “man-in-the-middle” hack, which redirects Web servers to spurious sites that grab visitor names and passwords. It wasn’t a bad hack, but Parker knew he wasn’t the sophisticated engineer that some around him were turning into. “I never was as hard-core a programmer as others,” he said. Instead, Parker was a brilliant talker, using what knowledge he had to spin business ideas.

Those ideas always took precedence, as far back as a Fairfax County science fair for high school students. Parker spent the majority of his preparation figuring out what would get the most attention. “My mom thought I was wasting my time, but I needed to come up with something

📸