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weeks of negotiations, he took the plunge. On this night at the rave, he was glad he had. Improving Napster’s design so elegantly that it could withstand tens of thousands of users without requiring more computer hardware than NASA was the challenge of his career. All three of them might get rich and famous. And in the meantime, he could hardly object to the rave.

Sean Parker had managed to convince Napster CEO Eileen Richardson that a sure way to get the attention of the company’s natural constituency of young music fans was to blow $7,000 on a rave. Looking like a club diva herself, with a streak of magenta dyeing her wavy brown hair, Richardson loved a good party and loud music, and she was surprisingly easy to persuade. She wanted the Napster kids to have fun. And it made a certain amount of sense to market the brand at a rave. To Richardson, the best thing about Napster was that music fans could discover songs that they couldn’t find in stores, and electronica was particularly hard to come by. “A rave is perfect,” Richardson thought. “The kids there love this music, and it’s impossible to get.” Now she was beside Parker in the booth, her pupils dilated. Adorned with temporary tattoos in the spirit of the evening, they shouted at the sweat-soaked kids wandering by that Napster was giving away Rio portable MP3 players: Just put down your e-mail address to get in the drawing.

Richardson was thirty-eight, the grown-up in the outfit. But she was the sort of elder a teenager might pick for himself: “a den mother,” said Parker. As a rising venture capitalist in Boston, Richardson led an investment in a company called Firefly, a service that recommends music based on user taste. Now living in the heart of Silicon Valley, Richardson heard about Napster from the company’s first benefactor, investor Joseph “Yosi” Amram. “Oh my God,” she said as she played with the service at home for the first time. If Firefly was an on-ramp to new tunes, Napster was the Autobahn. She agreed to join for six months as interim chief executive, working the line between Shawn and his young collaborators and the world of big-time Silicon Valley wheeler-dealers, the billionaires who had bankrolled Netscape and Yahoo!, Amazon and eBay.

Richardson loved her job. Instead of just investing in companies and coaching them from a distance, she was building a firm herself. For once, her teenage son understood what she did for a living. The kids at the

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