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groups, most of them bad, and toured constantly, hitting after-hours spots to unwind and then flopping in hotel rooms. Seven years passed, and Barry still wasn’t a rock star. One day he awoke and smelled his clothes from across his hotel room. It wasn’t the kind of life he wanted to be living when he was thirty-five. Barry decided it was time to change course dramatically. He returned to college with a much greater focus than most of his young classmates, then entered Stanford Law School at twenty-nine.

Barry gravitated to entertainment law, keeping his hand in what had been his great diversion. But when he headed to New York for his first job at a big firm, it took only a few weeks before he realized that most entertainment law consisted of haggling over details in contracts that all looked the same. He returned west for a shot at some technology work in the mid-1980s, when Silicon Valley had perhaps five hundred practicing lawyers. Barry worked on mergers, technology contracts, and copyright deals, where his clients included record giant A&M—the record label that by virtue of the alphabet would serve as the lead plaintiff in the landmark lawsuit against Napster. Barry was unusual at his last firm, the top-drawer Wilson Sonsini, because he did both intellectual-property and transactions work, where the stimulation was greater. “He liked being closer to the actual business decision makers,” a colleague at the firm said. “There was more action, and he was a very good dealmaker. He liked being in the limelight.” Barry worked furiously as the venture boom expanded, and it began taking a toll. By 1999, there were three thousand lawyers in the Valley, all working flat out. In return, they were getting decent salaries—but not the pots of gold that were popping up all around them. Barry was drafting IPO deals for people who were about to make tens of millions of dollars, when all he stood to gain was tens of thousands in legal fees.

Two venture capitalists Barry knew asked him to join them at Hummer Winblad, and Barry accepted. On September 9, 1999, by coincidence a week after Napster moved to San Mateo, Barry joined Hummer as its fourth full partner. He had led just one other investment for the firm in the seven months before Napster made its pitch; he was still learning how to do what he did. What Barry saw in Napster was what everybody else saw—a terrific application with an incredible rate of adoption, something

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