Sean Parker Leaves Founders Fund (techcrunch.com)

He's rich, which is even better than doing anything, for newsworthy purposes.

He did Airtime, which received $33 million in funding and bombed. The project was rebooted/pivoted into an Airtime for Mobile.

“Visionary leadership”: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2004-04-17/

He's an eclectic genius playboy with arcane knowledge and impeccable fashion taste, surrounded by rumors of drug fueled sex parties, and who has repeatedly charmed his way into iconic companies, with finesse seemingly his primary work product.

He's what half the bros in Silicon Valley want to be. I suppose that makes him newsworthy to many.

He seems to be good at identifying emerging trends and selling himself to the trendsetters/pioneers to allow him to get involved.

For better or worse, if you create software that plays a key role in a tectonic shift in a massive industry (Napster) and later become president of one of the fastest growing and most impactful companies of the past decade(Facebook), then the things you do are inherently newsworthy.

But, to answer your question (for better or worse again), it seems to me that what he does primarily is start and invest in tech companies. And at least once, get married in a forest.

"it's newsworthy because it's Sean Parker"

Newsworthy to Techcrunch? Anything related to a "celeb" in this business to Techcrunch would be newsworthy. But I would say this would be of interest even to the WSJ because it fall under infotainment.

Likewise, something involving a top commenter on HN would be newsworthy to HN. But not elsewhere. Maybe maybe to some blogs if there was a good story to tell.

Something about PG would be newsworthy on HN, Techcrunch, and if it was particularly unusual, say if PG was detained in Mexico, it would be newsworthy in many places whereas if it were you that was detained, it probably wouldn't be.

So the question really is in many cases to what extent is someone a celeb in a business that "normals" care about. Or important enough that normals might care about it (like if a top guy at Volvo was arrested for drug dealing that would make the news almost certainly because many "normals" know about Volvo).

He is a celebrity and a professional cheerleader.

Wikipedia is a good start: "By his senior year of high school, Parker was earning more than $80,000 a year through various projects, enough to convince his parents to allow him to skip college and pursue a career as an entrepreneur" seems like the mark of someone who might go on to something interesting.

If this was a genuine question and you were expecting some informed answers, consider writing it in a different way. It hasn't attracted very high quality responses.

depends... if you want to raise capital that's one less rockstar to look for. if you're kicking up the next big disruptive startup that's one more guy you should look out for..

Not since Game of Thrones has there been that much male nerd interest in weddings.

It's not irrelevant. The kind of conspicuous consumption is the pot of gold at the end of the tech rainbow. It's also shown how the negative PR Parker received might be associated with Founders Fund.

Either h^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HHe's a genius or^H^Hwho always seems to be in the right place at the right time.