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put in $250,000 for a sizable stake. Since Amram had been burned investing in the games company, he set three conditions: The company would move to northern California, where he could keep an eye on it. Fanning wouldn’t be CEO—Amram would pick one instead. And there would be a three-person board: Fanning, Amram, and the new CEO. For the top job, Amram named Richardson, an old friend who had never met Fanning and had no idea what she was getting into.

At the time of the rave, John Fanning was thousands of miles away. Officially, he wasn’t in charge, and he wisely kept himself out of the media circus that would surround Napster. But soon he would start meddling in every significant decision the company made. It was John Fanning, still the biggest shareholder, who decided that legal victory was a virtual certainty and that the company didn’t need to negotiate with the record industry. It was John Fanning who vetoed venture-capital deals that might have transformed Napster into a legally sound business. And it was John Fanning, more than anyone else, who profited from Napster’s meteoric but unsustainable rise. He kept a significant chunk of Amram’s initial investment for claimed expenses back East, and he sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of his shares as more investors poured in.

Soon after the rave, power struggles would erupt as users of the Napster service soared into the tens of millions and made it the best-known brand on the Internet. Shawn would emerge as a household name and a generational icon, gracing the cover of Time magazine and testifying before Congress. He would also be crushed by court rulings that closed the door on the biggest theft of intellectual property in history. Much of Napster’s wild trajectory can be traced to that early division of power, between a young hacker who wanted to see if he could solve an interesting problem and an uncle who recklessly aspired to riches. Yet the two depended on each other, personifications of the twin forces behind the dot-com explosion. For before even such a brilliant innovation could rise so far so quickly, it needed a hustler who could capitalize on the era’s investor greed and naïveté.

Two years down the road, every member of the core team at the rave had departed Napster but Shawn, who quit briefly himself in a dramatic final showdown over the company’s survival. He returned to help reshape Napster into a legal distributor of authorized music, only to see the com-

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