📸 Photo

He said he would check with the intellectual-property lawyers and get back to her. After some days passed, Richardson tried again but learned that Wilson Sonsini wasn't interested.

She was floored. How could they turn down such a hot business, especially when Fanning already had a relationship with Bridges? She asked Amram and others if they knew had gone wrong and found out that one of the very first articles written about Napster, appearing on the ZDNet technology-news website in August, reported that Fanning had "hired the firm of Wilson Sonsini," even though Bridges had turned Fanning down. When the article appeared, Fanning called Bridges to deny having made the statement. Bridges thought the whole thing was unprofessional. Richardson blamed Fanning for the ZDNet story and felt she had looked foolish in approaching the firm without knowing the background. "That was the first time I ruined my reputation for Napster," Richardson said. "That's when I should have quit." Napster ended up with a decent law firm, Fenwick & West. But there would be no Andrew Bridges.

As the hiring spree rolled on, Napster's board moved on its other top priority: raising money from angel investors. The obvious place to start was Ron Conway, head of Angel Investors LP and a Silicon Valley celebrity. Amram got the ball rolling with an October 7 e-mail to Conway and his partner, Bob Bozeman. "Napster, with its proprietary Music-Share technology, is pioneering a new way for music listeners to reliably find, share and download digital music over the Internet. Recently, 'MP3' has replaced 'sex' as the most searched-for term on the Internet," Amram wrote. After recounting the past problems with broken links and the breakthrough of having one giant, continuously updated mass library of music, Amram wrote that Napster already had two hundred thousand registered users offering 3.5 million files. All of that, without having spent a dime on marketing. "I think this would be an exciting opportunity for Angel Investors. The angel round seems to be highly oversubscribed, but if you move quickly I would like to try and get Angel Investor's [sic] in." It was a pitch perfectly geared for Conway—the company is growing fast, it's on the Internet, and other investors want in. Better move fast.