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Shawn said, he never realized the depths of the problems at his uncle's company. He had to have known some of it: He was close to the embittered employees there, and once he rode his bike to deliver an overdue paycheck to Larry Christiansen, one of the chess champions Fanning hired to play games online. But business strategies and management styles were never very interesting to Shawn. His focus was elsewhere.

When Shawn was around his uncle during Shawn's freshman year in 1998 and 1999, it was mainly to pour out code for Napster. "The dorm was not conducive to work, so I would go back to the office, and then my cousin would have to drive me back to school and drop me off," Shawn said. "I started noticing my weekends would get longer and longer, and I would have to drag myself back to school. And one day, for some strange reason, I pulled up, and I think I had skipped a day where there was something really important, like finishing up something or finding bugs."

It was January 1999, and his cousin Brian Fanning had just dropped Shawn off for the week at Northeastern's campus. Shawn walked up to his dorm's front door and stopped. Then he turned around and walked back to his cousin's car. "I'm not going back," Shawn said. "You're crazy!" Brian told him. Shawn shook his head. "I gotta finish this. I gotta pick." Shawn was torn about the decision. If he had stayed in college, "I was going to do 50 percent of two things, and I wouldn't have ever been satisfied. So I just decided to go for it and left everything at the school and didn't talk to any of my roommates. Because if I had talked to them, they would have said, 'What are you doing, you're crazy,' and convinced me to come back or made me feel bad about it. So I basically disappeared for a few months. And then finally once I had launched it, and they saw what I was doing, they felt a little better about it. I think they could tell I was never happy—well, not not happy about school, but I never felt like I was supposed to be there."

Shawn did tell some people of his move, including computer-science professor Richard Rasala, who understood. "He felt strongly he had something to do in the world and that simply remaining an undergraduate was going to get in the way of that," Rasala said. Several of Shawn's friends, including Loubani, did try to talk him out of quitting Northeast-

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