SXSW 2013: 'Downloaded' Stars Shawn Fanning And Sean Parker On The Lessons They Learned Launching Napster

By Mark Graham

March 11, 2013 / 9:15 AM

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The world premiere of Downloaded, the latest entry in the Emmy award winning VH1 Rock Docs canon, went down at Austin's Paramount Theater last night as part of the 2013 SXSW Festival. We were there on the red carpet, where we caught up with the film's primary subjects, Napster co-founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, and asked them each about the single biggest lesson they learned during this equally exciting and chaotic time.

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"The number one thing was just trusting my instincts," Napster's coding whiz Shawn Fanning confessed (which you can watch in the video above). "I was 19 at the time and didn't know much about business. For me, it was a project that was fun, and then it turned into something bigger ... Looking back, I would have told myself to enjoy the experience more because it's one of those things that you can't really compare to anything else."

"Wow, there were so many lessons learned," said the semi-infamous Napster co-founder Sean Parker (who you might remember as being portrayed by Justin Timberlake in the movie The Social Network). "This was basically my first experience —and Sean's first experience— starting a company and raising money. We had no experience in the record industry, we were just two kids from suburbia. Everything we learned about starting companies and Silicon Valley we learned at Napster."

The film, which will make its VH1 premiere in 2013, tells the story of rise and eventual fall of the infamous file sharing service Napster, and was recently named by the Hollywood Reporter as one of 5 documentaries to watch for at this year's festival. You can watch the trailer for the film below, which was directed by Alex Winter.

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[Photos: Getty Images]