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With a skeleton crew working near Los Angeles in Marina Del Rey, Fanning approved a contract for engineers in San Francisco to write the program for the movie player. The result "was a piece of crap," Fikker said, not nearly good enough to release. But Fanning didn't seem to mind. "He would say one thing today and something completely else tomorrow," Fikker said. "Gerald was the only one who could communicate with him." Far worse was Fanning's idea of how to build the business, Napster-style. He went out and bought a bunch of copyright-protected DVDs at the store and directed the NetMovies staff to duplicate the content and put it on the server, without getting permission from anybody, Fikker said. That certainly would have gotten NetMovies attention, and very likely a lawsuit. But Fanning evidently felt that the same negative attention paid to Napster had done wonders. "The plan was 'Let's have it up on the servers, open the gates, and then we'll figure it out later,'" Fikker recalled. "It was like a lunatic idea." The only reason NetMovies didn't go through with the gambit was that the technology wasn't working well enough, Fikker said.

Bales moved on to Flycode, and a May 2000 article about some of Napster's competition mentioned it and identified early Napster investor Adrian Scott as the firm's chairman. Shawn sent a group e-mail around Napster asking about Flycode's plans. "What's the deal?" he asked. "I believe Bill Bales is the CEO." Ritter responded to the same group: "Once a scumbag, always a scumbag."

AT NAPSTER, THE QUEST FOR VENTURE FUNDING by then dwarfed all of Richardson's other projects. Getting Ron Conway on board in December in the Series B, which raised just over $2 million, had been a good start. But Napster still had no revenue, and it was spending millions of dollars on legal expenses, on servers to handle the still-bulging traffic, and on improvements to the service. And only a venture round would get rid of the last of Fanning's control.

Richardson's first call was in January 2000 to the established firm of New Enterprise Associates on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. Her contact there, the VC and Fortune magazine columnist Stewart Alsop, had good reason to listen to Richardson. She had courted him to invest NEA