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business plan for Gigabeat and won a competition with it, at the same time winning funding for the plan.

For Turner, the prospect of a deal with Napster was thrilling. Napster had all the users, and Gigabeat had good technology without an audience. It seemed like a great fit for Gigabeat, and "from Napster's perspective, they realized they had taken off so fast that the ship was shaking and barely holding together," Turner said. The two companies began a long series of meetings between each other's engineers, executives, and shareholders. Turner even met John Fanning at Palo Alto's Café la Dolce Vita, where the pair had chocolate cake and Fanning explained why Napster was worth $1 billion. Afterward, he went to his Jaguar to get Turner a Napster T-shirt.

Richardson and Turner agreed on the outline of a deal designed to protect Kleiner in the event the lawsuit went the wrong way. According to Turner's e-mails from that time, the investment was to go into an escrow account, which could have been returned to Kleiner if Napster lost the looming fight over a preliminary injunction. "Our legal team was not optimistic," Turner said. "They anticipated Napster potentially paying damages." Another scenario would have simply subtracted a stream of those payments from the company's future revenue. Those amounts might be huge, the lawyers told Turner. In her notes from the meeting, she wrote: "OPEC vs. Jed Clampett."

The investment deal could have helped Napster, at least, by providing a legitimate music-discovery service akin to what Richardson had long been promising. And a new CEO might well have taken a friendlier tack with the record industry, since Kleiner had concluded that it would be backing a losing legal position.

Richardson returned from a meeting with Turner late one night with good news for Amram and a plan. The two companies would combine, with Napster stockholders getting two-thirds of the resulting firm, and then Kleiner would invest $15 million. The deal would value the merged firm at more than $150 million. Napster would get the Kleiner stamp of approval, and it would get a $100 million valuation—not bad for a six-month-old firm with fewer than thirty employees. Richardson e-mailed Amram that she wanted to huddle first with him, then with Mackenzie at