Facebook billionaire Sean Parker has donated $600 million to start his own foundation

Sean Parker, cofounder of Napster and former president of Facebook, has announced a gift of $600 million to launch the Parker Foundation.

The foundation will focus on funding programs in three main categories: life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement.

"In the increasingly complex and interconnected world we live in, the problems we're confronted with are systemic ones, and they call for systemic answers," Parker said in a press release.

"In order to achieve scale and leverage, the philanthropists who take on these challenges will need to search for fresh answers to these problems and aggressively implement the solutions they discover."

Parker recently pledged $24 million to develop the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford. He also donated $4.5 million to support a malaria elimination program at the University of California San Francisco's Global Health Group.

"The Parker Foundation will apply the lessons learned from Silicon Valley start-ups to our philanthropic initiatives: we must move fast, make concentrated bets based on our convictions, have the courage to make mistakes and learn from them," Parker said in the press release announcing the launch of the foundation.

Forbes estimates Parker's net worth to be about $2.9 billion.