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ning. “I completely trusted Yosi. I took his word for that,” Richardson said. “I wasn’t going to fly to Boston to check him out. I didn’t think Yosi would get involved if the guy was psycho.” Richardson didn’t stop to think about how big Amram’s equity stake was, and if that might influence his judgment. She also didn’t consider Amram’s history of rash investments. And Bales’s presence should not have reassured her. Farber had fired him from Interwoven for failing to remember where meetings were being held and for showing up to give sales presentations with nothing more than a crumpled piece of paper, according to both Lee and Ong. (Bales said he was fired because Farber believed he had spilled the beans about Farber’s unprofessional conversations with Richardson. In a subsequent interview, Bales said he wasn’t fired at all, but resigned.) And the thirty-four-year-old Bales had been forced out at two other companies, including one he founded, his fellow executives said. Within his first months as Napster’s dealmaker, Bales would prove to be a divisive force there as well.

Even in San Francisco and neighboring Silicon Valley, where alternative lifestyles are embraced and neckties are scarce as snow, the rumpled and dark-haired Bill Bales was unusual. Outwardly laid-back much of the time, he could collapse in tears at a mistake or grow so frantically excited that he would slap himself to calm down. Bales loved the pace of the wheeling and dealing in the Valley, an atmosphere that could not have been more different from that of his days playing Little League baseball in rural Thomson, Georgia. Bales dropped out of the University of Georgia to work at a brokerage in Atlanta, but he was already thinking about how to make a serious splash. “I’ve always wanted to do something big in business. That’s what had motivated me,” Bales told Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle in July 2000.

If Bales’s southern accent made it clear he didn’t hail from the usual background, he also didn’t act much like the others once he had arrived. At Amram’s Individual, Bales made overtures on behalf of the Massachusetts firm to buy Silicon Valley start-up Quote.com, which gave up-to-the-second stock-trading information even to users with slower modems. The deal didn’t go through, but Bales later joined Quote.com as VP of sales. Later, he would identify himself as a cofounder of Quote.com, and he was described as such by the media. That was not, however, how