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owned what kind of music and what songs they were seeking next. Richardson figured that the industry would accept very small payments for their digital copyrights in exchange for being able to market new bands to those users who were statistically most apt to go out and buy those bands’ CDs. It’s very expensive to acquire an end user, Richardson told potential investors. Napster takes that problem away.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was the pick of the litter on Sand Hill Road, having backed Sun Microsystems, Netscape, and Amazon.com. It heard Richardson’s retooled pitch first and assigned partner Doug Mackenzie to weigh the deal. Mackenzie wasn’t impressed by the argument that the lawsuit was a good thing. Doug assessed it and concluded that they were liable, said top Kleiner partner John Doerr. They were breaking the law, and it wasn’t a prudent risk. Worse, Mackenzie concluded that Kleiner itself—and even Kleiner’s limited partners—might be found liable as well. It could go back to our limited partners, the Stanford endowment, Doerr said. We didn’t want to put Stanford at risk.

But the opportunity was so big that Kleiner couldn’t bring itself to walk away completely. Doerr liked Richardson, and Kleiner had backed Amram once before, at Individual Inc. At the end of the pitch meeting, Doerr gave Richardson a hug. This is so exciting, he told her. Soon, Richardson asked for a more concrete show of support if Kleiner wanted to stay in the running—a bridge loan of $1 million. She got the check the same day. But at the rate Napster was burning through money, that wouldn’t last even until June. Just as Alsop had done for his partners, Mackenzie agreed to look deeper.

When he did, Mackenzie thought he saw a way out of the jam that Napster was in, and he suggested that Richardson talk to another small Kleiner-backed firm called Gigabeat, which was working on a system for recommending songs to customers. Richardson loved that idea—it was similar to what she had tried to do with Firefly, years before in Boston. Her heart set on Kleiner, Richardson redoubled her efforts. She met with Gigabeat’s young CEO, Erin Turner, and began to discuss a merger. Turner was a rising star in the Valley. She had been working toward a master’s degree in engineering at Stanford when she met two doctoral candidates and they began talking about digital music. Turner drew up a