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improvements to Napster’s system, due to legal concerns, lack of staff, and the distraction of executives more worried about getting venture money. “Adding stuff was actually a big task,” Shawn said. “I always had a big list of things to do and bugs to fix. But the major factors were the lack of people and some of the legal stuff. Not anything specifically, but just the fact that we suddenly got sued—there was just an aversion to changing it because we didn’t know what the rules were. We had no idea.”

In a rare all-points outburst, on March 23, 2000, Shawn e-mailed Eileen Richardson, Ritter, Parker, engineering boss Kessler, Liz Brooks, Brandon Barber, and another executive, Chris Phenner. “Hey, all, I’m sorry if this rant offends anyone—this is the stuff that has been KILLING me for the last few months,” Shawn wrote. “While we are making great strides on the financing and legal fronts, the client and the community are lacking behind. We all agreed very early that this is the most important aspect of our company. We have a list of kickass features that have not been considered lately. We are about to do a release that’s going to hurt us more than help us. . . . We need to start focusing on ‘cool’ features. . . .”

“Also, I frequently hear people talking about us as if we are unstoppable and immune to competition. We are assuming we are immune because of our size—however our users do not reap the benefits [of] our content depth. . . . our concurrent user count increases as we add [server] boxes to the network, which in no way increases the amount of content available per server.” Shawn listed three priorities, in order: linking, the ability to transfer not just music but other types of content, and a redesign of the user interface. “The current production client is still using my prototype design from a year ago . . . :(,” he wrote.

The technical team had already achieved some remarkable results, considering the originality of what they were trying to do. They were particularly proud of the search engine, which Jordy Mendelson and Ali Aydar had developed. Unlike Google or AltaVista, the mechanism had to cope with a constantly changing index. “From the time Google crawls a website to the time it actually shows up in a search window can take weeks or months. We had to do the same thing in microseconds,” Mendelson said. Shawn and Aydar made early passes at the system, and Mendelson took it home to simplify it and make it faster. “I ended up

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