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founder Chris Cooper saw it. Cooper had started the company in 1993 with his savings years before he hired Bales. “The only founder was me,” Cooper said. Bales worked at the California company for at least five months. Then, Cooper said, he began to have “integrity questions” about Bales, declining to go into detail. “I had to let him go.” Bales said he was terminated because he held so much stock and because Cooper believed that Bales had told people about Cooper’s 1982 drug conviction. (Cooper said the topic came up only afterward, when Bales “used the threat of spreading negative news about me as leverage to wrangle a settlement.”) Quote.com was later acquired for $80 million during the peak of the Internet bubble, making Bales wealthy. By then, he had moved on to Interwoven, and that firm’s IPO stock also would do him well.

Everywhere Bales went, he made an impression. After Interwoven, Bales began a new venture in 1998 with television reporter and close friend Nina Chen. The pair attended a class on Internet video production given by Csaba Fikker, a Hungarian immigrant living in the Bay area. After class one day, Bales and Chen approached Fikker about turning his postproduction facility into a new firm, and Fikker joined them at News Direct. The firm produced video press releases and then news stories about businesses, posting them online. Funded by Bales and his old boss Amram, who served as chairman, News Direct changed its name to ON24. Subsequent investors included former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, former Times Mirror senior vice president Ed Johnson, and Dataquest Inc. founder Dave Jorgensen, and the company hired Sharat Sharan as CEO. Bales stayed on as the salesman and dealmaker. “Bill is a dreamer, a great businessman,” Fikker said. “But he can get way out of line. He never pays attention to details, timing, what costs what.”

Bales’s single-mindedness got him into trouble when his personal life crossed with the professional. At ON24, he was aggressively flirtatious with female colleagues, paying them excessive compliments on their looks and telling them unappreciated off-color jokes. With one of them, twenty-two-year-old reporter Alona Cherkasky, he may have gone further. Cherkasky was friendly but rejected Bales’s advances. Just after the July 4 holiday in 1999, Bales told her how nice she looked that day. Then, Cherkasky said, he mouthed the words “I want to fuck you.” Cherkasky was upset but in a precarious position at the company, nearing the end of