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waking up in the middle of the night, writing out the initial implementation for the final algorithm in an e-mail to Ali, and promptly went back to sleep,” Mendelson said. “We ended up with a search engine that was small, elegant, and so efficient that we stopped optimizing it because sending the search results to the user took so much longer than performing the actual search.”

By April, Richardson was convinced that the company’s very survival depended on a server-linking system that worked. In the middle of that month, product manager Barber reported to her and to Kessler that the engineering team was close, after thousands of hours of work. He said the project might be completed in just ten to twenty days. Instead of a quicker Band-Aid solution, in which only searches unsuccessful at one server would be bounced to the next, Barber urged the executives to wait for the full solution. “It’s safe to say that Napster as a company is experiencing tremendous pressure from the outside, media, industry, legal and financial concerns making demands, and it’s important to react to them,” he wrote. “However, I think it’s incredibly important to make decisions that will help benefit not only these variables, but our users (read: our business).”

Instead, Richardson demanded the final linking method within days. “We have tried at least two other times with implementations that did not work,” Richardson wrote to Barber and the engineers. “We cannot and will not take a chance like that again. . . . LET ME BE CLEAR: THERE WILL BE NO BUSINESS TO WORRY ABOUT IF WE ARE NOT LINKED BY NEXT WEEK, NONE!” Soon enough, Ritter and Jordy Mendelson did lash together Napster’s servers into two massive clusters. In late May, Ritter told the marketing and customer-service people that he had gone even further, linking together those two clusters. For the first time, if a user was looking to see if a friend was logged on, the user could find him or her. And users could see what songs the friend was sharing through a feature that had worked poorly in the past, called HotList. “You know your friend is logged onto Napster somewhere, and his username is ‘hillary__rosen__sux__cock,’” Ritter e-mailed the group. “All you have to do is add him to your hotlist, and then click his username to see what files he’s sharing. Brilliant!”

Ritter assumed a press release would trumpet the dramatically