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work with,” Scott said. “But in those first few months, you need to get momentum going among investors. You’re selling them on how big something can be when you have nothing more than an idea and a few people. You have to create the perception that they’re going to get pushed out if they don’t get in now. That takes a huge amount of energy and nerve. You can’t be focused too much on reality, because you’re selling a dream.”

WHEN NAPSTER MOVED to San Mateo to take its shot at the big time, Shawn and Parker weren’t the only ones in the dark. Amram didn’t know about John Fanning’s or Bales’s legal problems, and he hadn’t read Seth Greenstein’s lawsuit-defense memo before investing. Richardson didn’t know anything about Fanning, and she knew far less than she should have about her friend Bales. She didn’t know about the people who had looked at investing in Napster or why they had passed. And perhaps most regrettably, she didn’t know much about the law.

Richardson said that her first question to Amram had been about the state of copyright law. Anything as powerful as Napster, that took away so much music without paying any money to the labels, had to be illegal, she worried. Amram assured her it wasn’t, and he told her about the Greenstein memo. And that was enough to convince her. She was foolish for not doing at least a modicum of due diligence and speaking to a lawyer on her own. But it’s also true that CD burners were rare at the time—they would soar in popularity later, precisely because of Napster. So to Richardson, downloading music onto her computer meant it stayed there, playable only through the low-quality speakers that were then typically sold for desktop PCs. Most likely, you would take only a song or two from a given artist, she thought. If they were good enough, you would go out and buy the CD.

Richardson bought 333,000 Napster shares from John Fanning at 30 cents each and joined him and Amram to form a three-member board of directors, with Fanning as chairman. Then she subleased some adjacent office space in San Mateo from John Lee’s Xtime, where she still planned to work some days. With Napster, Richardson decided that she had to keep nearly as quiet as Xtime did about its plans. The office space was appropriately anonymous, on the upper floors of an aging off-off-white