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“We didn’t have any money, and we didn’t have Coke left, and I was literally trying to finish this,” Shawn said. “And I looked at the Red Bull, and I’m like, ‘It has caffeine in it!’ I literally went through most of a case that time, and I was up two or three days. . . . The strange thing about Red Bull is that it has this really weird ability, and it’s not just the caffeine, to keep you really sharp and focused, even though you’ve been up for two or three days. Usually [on caffeine] you get hazy and you’re wired but you’re tired, mentally not functioning. But [on Red Bull] you can focus, and you can think logically and clearly. You get tired, but usually it just gets you tired to the point where you’re not likely to get distracted. You’re just kind of a zombie, but you can focus and think, and it helped to do massive amounts of programming where I had thought of the design before, and I just had to do the programming.” Red Bull abuse also has side effects, Shawn learned. “By the end of it, I called the cops because there was a car across the street the second night and I thought it was going to do something bad.” Not people in the car, mind you, or even the people who owned the car, wherever they were—the car itself. “I was slightly hallucinating by then,” Shawn said. “I remember calling the cops, and they said something about it not being in their jurisdiction, call somebody else. And then I realized I was kind of going crazy.”

Shawn often worked alone, leaving fewer astonished witnesses to his intensity. In something that would seem strange to anyone but an IRC devotee, he never even met Ritter in person for two months after Ritter joined Shawn’s cause, though they lived just a few miles apart. Finally, after an August evening of hitting parties, Shawn came by Ritter’s apartment. Shawn’s hacker friend, who would later join Napster, had been drinking too much to be deemed presentable, and Shawn made him wait in the car as he went upstairs. Shawn and Ritter chatted about the program, and Shawn said he would be moving west, to start the business. He asked Ritter to come. “How do I know this is real,” Ritter thought. “Who is the management team? How are we going to sell it?” He was skeptical about other things as well, and he decided not to chuck his job and adult life. “I had lots of issues. He didn’t really have answers.” But Shawn’s enthusiasm was boundless. “It’s going to be fucking huge,” he told Ritter.

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