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Fanning had met Amram years earlier in Cambridge, playing chess in Harvard Square at the tables outside the Au Bon Pain café. Fanning loved all kinds of chess, often playing multiple games simultaneously. Amram favored blitz, a kind of lightning-quick chess in which each side is allotted a total of about five minutes for all its moves. In blitz, the regular rules of chess can be broken, as long as the player doesn't get caught before the next move. “You have to make quick decisions,” Amram said in explaining his taste for the game. “To me, it's like the real world. Time is a fundamental part of life—you can't take time off to go and think about it.” Most people probably don't see their lives as being quite so rapid-fire. But if there is a more exact metaphor than blitz chess for Silicon Valley in 1999, it hasn't been made public. And like the Valley's soon-to-be-obvious missteps in that period, Amram had already been tripped up by his penchant for the quick-as-a-blink deal.

Overall, Amram had been very successful. His worldview was part of what made him a strong investor; he also had serious smarts, a real technical education, and a wealth of contacts. Raised in Tel Aviv, the son of a chief financial officer and a schoolteacher, Amram did his three years of universal military service in the Israeli Air Force in the late 1970s. He rose quickly to the rank of sergeant major. Amram wanted to be involved in technology and to be an entrepreneur, and he headed to MIT in Cambridge, where he earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science in four years. Amram said he recorded a straight-A average at MIT, and those who know him don't doubt it. Deciding he liked business better than engineering, Amram went to Harvard Business School, graduating in the top tenth of his class in 1984.

Amram's first job after business school was in product marketing at Rational Software Corp. in Cupertino, California, where he held a variety of positions over three years. Returning to Boston so his wife could accept a professorship at Boston University, Amram set up shop at a venture fund, pursuing possible investments and trying to see if he could come up with his own idea that the firm's partners would back. The idea came to Amram soon, though the partners' funding did not. Amram went ahead anyway, founding Individual Inc. in his Boston bedroom in 1989. “I went about nine months without a salary, living off my savings, before the first angel investor came in,” Amram said.

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