📸 Photo

a friend was okay; taping a record in order to sell hundreds of copies was not. Napster's board figured that its legal chances were best if it stayed profitless for the time being. Fortunately for that approach, the stock market and venture funders were more tolerant of red ink than ever before.

SINCE USER GROWTH WAS HAPPENING by itself, Richardson and Bales set hiring and fund-raising as top priorities. Their first hire in California was Ali Aydar, the twenty-four-year-old former Chess.net engineer, who happened to be working just a mile away at his third struggling start-up. John Fanning called Aydar first, and Aydar didn't believe him when he said Shawn had won funding for his idea. But Aydar called Shawn, who said it was all true, and he met Shawn and Parker for dinner the next evening. "At first, I didn't get how big it could be," Aydar said. "But Sean Parker is a great pitch guy, one of the best I've ever met." Parker and Shawn ran through how they planned to grow, then face the labels and make a deal. Suddenly, Aydar did get it. He lay down in the booth and looked at the restaurant ceiling. "Oh my God," he said then. "I knew at that moment it was going to be huge. I was like, 'I will do anything to be part of Napster.'" Soon Aydar sat down with Richardson on a bench outside Napster and told her that he had one big concern. He knew John Fanning better than anyone, including Shawn. "Are you sure you can handle him?" Aydar asked her. She said she was sure, and he joined the company.

Aydar was a rarity on Napster's fledgling engineering team. He was a bona fide college graduate with traditional training, and he didn't go around stealing software or breaking into other people's computers. He was also less boisterous than Jordan Ritter, who was still helping from Boston, and slower to complain, perhaps because he'd been in the business world longer. Closer to the Napster norm was talented twenty-year-old engineer Jordy Mendelson, an enthusiastic participant in "warez" groups on IRC trading pirated software and a friend of both Shawn and Parker. "Jordy is eccentric and phenomenally brilliant, like [mathematician] John Nash," Aydar said. "He could go through a pile of papers by college professors and understand more in two hours than I could after a month."