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and adjusting to their coworkers. Before they showed up in San Mateo for their first day of work, they knew almost nothing about the two central figures who would be running Napster, though they assumed both were successful professionals. They knew that Bill Bales would be a vice president and had the impression he was a Harvard M.B.A. with repeated scores as a Valley business leader. They knew that their CEO was named Eileen. And that was about it.

Steeped as he was in the ways of Silicon Valley, Yosi Amram was far more connected than an outsider like Fanning could ever be. As he wired Fanning the money for his stake in Napster, Amram told his network that he needed a CEO and other managers to take a risk on an Internet music company that was growing rapidly through word of mouth. To help with the recruiting, Amram turned to Bales, an excitable business-development executive Amram had known for years. Bales had worked at Amram's Individual Inc., and Amram had backed Bales when he founded a video news service in San Francisco called ON24 Inc. Bales agreed to work at Napster in exchange for stock and signed on as a vice president, with a six-month mission to bring in more funding and more executives, including a CEO. Bales and Amram soon had a stopgap CEO in mind: an old friend, venture capitalist Eileen Richardson.

As OFTEN HAPPENED IN THE VALLEY, Richardson presented herself by accident. She knew Amram from when both worked in Massachusetts, and she had called him to talk about another technology start-up she was working for, a company so secretive it was incorporated as the Palo Alto Coffee Co. Richardson met Amram for lunch to see if he would be interested in investing. She spent most of the time talking about the pseudo-coffee company, which in reality had developed a system for automated Web scheduling of consumer appointments with dentists, hairdressers, and the like. But Richardson also mentioned that she was interested in other tasks, as a sort of hybrid angel investor and executive. That way, she could gain operational experience and stay close to the beginning of a company, when the energy and the potential financial rewards are greatest.

Near the end of lunch, Amram told Richardson that he was backing a

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