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“I hear you guys are great.” Shawn and Parker were polite, shook hands with her, and scurried off. The third time they ran into her, someone else called out “Eileen,” and the woman turned. In the next second, Shawn and Parker whipped their heads around to look at each other. Whoops, their eyes said in chorus. This is our CEO.

Their first encounter with Bales had been one surprise. Now meeting the CEO by accident was a second. By the end of the first week, as the surprises kept coming, Shawn and Parker began referring to them by name: the “what the hell is going on” moments. Most surprising of all, the stunners didn’t abate with time—they grew more common. “The frequency of those moments was increasing at a geometric rate, in tandem with the growth of the user base,” Parker said. “We didn’t have any real-world experience to process what was happening to us. It really felt like we were in a movie, even back then. Something crazy would happen, and we’d say, ‘That’s going in the movie.’”

Had Parker been more experienced, he would have realized that the next thing that was supposed to happen in the movie was the formulation of a plan for how Napster would make money. But for different reasons, neither Bales nor Richardson seemed to think that mattered much. Bales, Parker said, was “gung ho but undirected,” adopting new business approaches and discarding them as often as once a week. He was interested in raising money and hiring executives, including someone more experienced to replace Richardson. And Richardson wanted to leave the decisions about the right business model to the experts, the big-league venture capitalists she hoped to approach in a few months. They would have the best connections and their own ideas about how to proceed, she figured. It would be a lot easier to have John Doerr approach Edgar Bronfman Jr. at Universal Music’s parent firm than to do it herself.

That’s not to say there were no early debates about direction: There were plenty, and they were chaotic. Parker would call strategy meetings and use the whiteboard to explain what he thought the company’s next steps should be. “I would put on a presentation for Bill and Eileen, and halfway through, she would start screaming and running around the office, saying, ‘We have so much to do!’ Bill would say, ‘That’s brilliant! We’re going to be a $10 billion company!’ And I would say, ‘Wait, I’m not finished yet.’”