Sean Parker plans to spend his fortune disrupting philanthropy

Sean Parker poses for a portrait at his home in Beverly Hills, California, November 21, 2014. Sean Parker poses for a portrait at his home in Beverly Hills, California, November 21, 2014. Photo: Kendrick Brinson Photo: Kendrick Brinson Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close Sean Parker plans to spend his fortune disrupting philanthropy 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

Before he became a billionaire venture capitalist, Sean Parker blew up the music business by founding the file-sharing service Napster. Now he plans to spend his fortune upending another calcified industry: philanthropy.

Parker, 35, told The Chronicle this week that he intends to give away most of his estimated $2.8 billion fortune in his lifetime. He called the Giving Pledge — a public promise made by fellow billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to give away at least half their fortunes — “a good starting point.”

“But the Giving Pledge is not aggressive enough,” he said.

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Parker said he doesn’t intend to park his fortune in a tax-sheltered fund and pass it on to his children to dole out. “One of the goals is to create a foundation that is not intergenerational,” he said.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Parker outlined the philosophy he will take in his philanthropic work. In 2014, the Chronicle of Philanthropy named him the nation’s fifth-most prolific giver for stashing $600 million in the Sean N. Parker Foundation. But he doled much of that out — his biggest donation last year was $24 million to start the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University.

In broad strokes, he explained that he would focus his giving generally in three areas — life sciences, global public health and civic engagement. He didn’t announce any specific new gifts, saying that those will be rolled out over the next few months and beyond.

Instead, he spelled out how he wants to be a different kind of philanthropist, a role model for his generation’s budding cohort of wealthy entrepreneurs turned givers. Parker criticized many of his peers for ditching the aggressive, disruptive mind-set once they get involved in the philanthropic world. Too many entrepreneurs make safe philanthropic donations because they fear failing, Parker said, and risk “tarnishing their brand.”

“So I wanted to do this when I was younger and could take an entrepreneurial approach and create a model for other young philanthropists to follow,” Parker said.

He intends to pursue philanthropy in the same way that a venture capitalist would. He will make concentrated, big bets on ideas and people that have the potential to be game changers, not initiatives that deliver merely incremental progress. He will insist on detailed metrics to see whether his investments are working. If he fails, he will not be shy about saying so, he promised, and move onto the next problem.

“Most philanthropies and foundations sit back and wait for a proposal to come in — like they’re a poorly operated venture fund,” Parker said. “My experience with venture is more proactive. You have to go out and go big game hunting.”

Last week, Parker offered a peek at the type of philanthropic investment he will make when he gave a $4.5 million gift to UCSF to tackle malaria. Even though the World Health Organization said that the number of deaths due to malaria has been cut in half in recent years, the organization estimates that nearly 200 million malaria cases are still diagnosed every year. In 2013, about 84,000 people, mostly in African countries, died from the disease.

Parker will fund a UCSF program that goes beyond the standard strategies to prevent mosquito bites — primarily bed nets and indoor spraying.

Sir Richard Feachem, director of the global health group at UCSF Global Health Sciences, who will direct the new program, said last week that “the focus is on innovation. Sean is a great innovator and disruptive thinker in the field of disease control and malaria. That’s what we need.”

Parker said the goal of the program is to eliminate malaria worldwide, but the initial target will probably be eradicating malaria within 20 years in a more tightly focused geographic area such as Pacific Island countries or across Southeast Asia.

“So often philanthropy or private philanthropies don’t define success. They set them up for a perpetually ineffectual life,” Parker said. Even though Americans gave $358 billion to charitable causes in 2014, Parker said, there “seems to be a lot of waste. It seems like we don’t have enough to show for this.”

Separately from his philanthropic work, he will continue to be a major political donor. Nationally, Parker was among the 50 biggest individual donors during the 2014 midterm election campaigns, sprinkling $3.6 million nearly equally among Republicans and Democrats. He will probably invest in ballot measures in California — likely one of the marijuana legalization proposals — and elsewhere, and in candidates who are not rigidly ideological.

Disgusted by the low voter turnout rates across the country, especially among young people — only 8.2 percent of Californians between 18 and 24 voted in November — Parker wants to get more Americans involved in the civic discussion.

Last week, Brigade, a San Francisco startup dedicated to political engagement that he funded with $9.3 million, offered its first preview. Several upgrades of the site will be released over the next few months in the hope that Brigade can stimulate the electorate during the 2016 presidential race.

So far, Parker said, the reaction has been “really strong, much stronger than we would have predicted. It’s looking very healthy. This is a chance to stress test it and get feedback.”

Joe Garofoli is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli