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A crucial hire was the man who would supervise the young troupe. Eddie Kessler joined as vice president of engineering on October 6, 1999. Kessler was a pleasant and bookish forty-year-old who had taken a wandering path to a technology career. As a Harvard undergraduate, he concentrated in psychology and music, graduating in 1981. At Stanford, his next stop, Kessler did graduate work in psychology, focusing on music perception without finishing his degree. Beginning in 1988, he worked for Frame Technology of San Jose for five years, ending as vice president of software development. He had a string of short-term jobs and consulting tasks until he was named vice president of engineering at Infoseek, the Web portal later bought by Disney, staying eleven months at that job. His claim to fame came more than a year after that, when Kessler cofounded ReplayTV, leading the engineering team that came up with the advanced VCR. Once again, he lasted only a year, departing in 1998 well before the first product shipped. "Eddie is a great engineer," said ReplayTV's principal founder, Anthony Wood. "We just kind of had different opinions and started to have some personality conflicts."

Kessler's official biography on Napster's website mentioned only ReplayTV and Infoseek. Among the omissions was a brief stint at Quote.com, where Bales had also worked. That's understandable: Kessler had been dismissed from Quote.com because the technical staff didn't respect him, said firm founder Chris Cooper. (Kessler said he clashed with others at the firm and then quit, though he acknowledged that Cooper "was definitely ready to get rid of me.")

Bales knew Kessler from Quote.com, and he introduced the engineer to Yosi Amram before Napster moved west. Kessler and Amram had a series of meetings about one business and another. When Amram and Bales described Napster, Kessler was reluctant to join, in part because he was alarmed that John Fanning had sold some of his personal shares to Richardson and others. Normally, founders are the last to cash out. "That was the thing that really bothered me," Kessler said. Kessler asked Fanning about it, and Fanning said not to worry, that the rest of the company would be worth $10 billion one day soon. And Fanning passed along Greenstein's white paper on the company's legal defenses. "My reading on John was that he was a sales guy, unrealistically optimistic to the point of exaggeration, and very in-your-face," Kessler said. Amram, Bales, and