Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors, we’ve learned.
Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50, recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client. We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications.
As the core concepts behind Yammer are quickly becoming features that others in the enterprise space are realizing they will need to compete with, Parker’s guidance should help the company maintain an advantage, and push forward.
Parker is currently serving as the Chairman of Causes, one of the most popular social networking applications, and is a Managing Partner at the VC firm, Founder’s Fund. He is perhaps best known for serving as Facebook’s President during the time it was founded. That role is about to get the Hollywood treatment in David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the early days of Facebook.
Parker also served as an expert panelist at this year’s TechCrunch50 a few weeks ago.
Mr. Parker joins George Zachary, Keith Rabois, Adam Ross, Adam Pisoni, and David Sacks on Yammer’s board. The latter two serve as Yammer’s VP of Technology and CEO, respectively.
I think Yammer guys are lucky to have him in the board. Congratulations!
Why did Napster fail?
Very nice. That dude is a genius!
Wow, this is a huge pickup for Yammer. In my view, Sean is one of the brightest people out there, with a track record of involvement with great companies in their very early stages.
quite the resume. wonder if he’d be interested in my daily fix of senseless crap, http://www.mandymoorehol.com
lol
MG any update on when exactly we might see the Yammer iPhone update?
only word is “soon”
Yammer’s traffic has been going down for the last 8 months. Without Techcrunch, Yammer would have been in the deadpool long time ago.
Sean Parker need to part the Red Sea to make something happen.
don’t understand last comment. there is no direct corallation(sp) between pure traffic and profitability in the current business.
Jan,
Let me help you out and make it a little more simple for you.
1) Not as many people visit the Yammer site as much as they used to
2) Without the free advertising from Yammer loving techcrunch, the business would probably be bankrupt
3) Sean Parker will need to work miracles to help Yammer survive
———-
Although this is what Mike D was suggesting, just in simpler words, I want to make it clear that I do not agree with him. I personally think twitter will buy these guys for a couple million and call it a day.
no. we’re hard core yammer users, and pay for the service, and i never visit the site. it’s all over their Air app and mobile for me. There’s no correlation between site traffic and use/revenue for them. Everything I’m hearing is that the service is going gangbusters.
Google wave is likely to crush yammer and private twitter clones.
This guy’s life is like a fairy tale.
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