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top by more and more layers. Napster’s innovation continued to stagnate. Most incredible to him, Hummer Winblad’s leadership didn’t seem any better than Richardson’s. Barry brought badly needed money and a misguided belief that Napster would win in court. But he had little to say to the hacker staffers and barely tried. He was stiff in company meetings, and his occasional companywide messages were often sent from the mountaintop via his favorite toy, a BlackBerry wireless pager. Barry clamped down on the company’s public relations, hiring President Clinton’s deputy communications director from the 1992 campaign, Washington strategist Ricki Seidman, who monitored Barry’s and Shawn’s media contacts from afar. Barry also warned staffers that an outside law firm would investigate press leaks. “With Eileen, at least someone was out there with an opinion,” Ritter said. “It may not have sounded intelligent, but at least it was a representation of the beliefs I thought the company was founded on.”

Ritter had nearly quit back in April 2000, when his first six-month contract ran out and Kessler had been less than enthusiastic about paying Ritter’s bonus. That was also the time when the venture deals kept falling through. “Eileen could not get John [Fanning] out of the company,” Ritter said of that era. “All these things were coming to a head. There’s a cliché that engineers always think they’re the center of the universe, and they never are. But I look at Napster, and it had no business model, a bad legal strategy, and no value in the management. All it had was the technology.” Back then, Ritter had talked to Ali Aydar about coming with him to start another firm, figuring that the two of them together could get Shawn to follow. One day after lunch, the two walked for blocks, hashing through the problems at Napster, and Ritter tried to convince him that leaving was the only logical thing to do. Aydar seemed to agree, then wavered and did nothing. “I could never get him stable enough to go to Shawn with it,” Ritter said.

So Ritter, too, had stayed. Since then, he had seen Napster get both much bigger and much closer to extinction. Near the end of the summer came another blow. John Fanning accidentally sent someone inside Napster an e-mail disclosing that Napster was in talks for an investment by Bertelsmann. The e-mailed documents included the terms under discussion and an embarrassing laundry list of disclosures Napster had to make

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