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publication, and to the rest of the VC establishment. It put Infrasearch on its cover in December 2000 with a headline blaring that the tiny firm would be “bigger than Napster.” The article noted that Infrasearch had no revenue to date, little technology that others couldn’t imitate, and a swarm of competitors in the exploding post-Napster field. But by then, media and VC frenzies had erupted over peer-to-peer, and the corporate world was paying close attention to all of it. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than Red Herring crowning a Napster successor so early was what Sun Microsystems did about it. Urged on by cofounder and chief scientist Bill Joy, a legendary engineer for two decades, Sun in March 2001 swapped about $10 million worth of stock for Infrasearch, hiring Kan and his car-happy colleagues in the bargain.

Joy had been working on a system of ground rules for peer-to-peer transactions, dubbed Jxta and pronounced “Jucksta.” He folded Infrasearch into the project and launched Jxta weeks later. There would be no charge to download Jxta and join in its searchable network. And Sun made the project open source, releasing the code for others to improve as long as Sun approved. Dozens of companies agreed to participate in the effort, and thousands of software writers downloaded the code. But more than a year later, the technology was still far from ubiquitous, and it wasn’t clear how anyone could make any money from it. Kan, however, got a pile for himself and his employees, and they got to work on things that interested them at Sun. Asked later why more hadn’t happened with Infrasearch and Jxta, Kan pointed to the book Accidental Empires, by Robert Cringely. The moral of some of Cringely’s technology stories is the same as that in Clayton Christensen’s subsequent bestseller The Innovator’s Dilemma: Innovation comes from those with no stake in the status quo, which necessarily means smaller companies. When big companies take over efforts at innovation that were successful elsewhere, they assign the projects to managers unskilled in innovation. The managers lack that ability because they have risen using a contrary set of skills, those needed for surviving in a corporate hierarchy full of entrenched systems. The effort to keep innovating almost always fails. Tragically, Kan also incorrectly saw himself as a failure. After a long battle with depression, he killed himself in June 2002.

Napster had started everything. It had proven that its technology

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