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the program cut costs by 10 percent, according to Intel vice president Doug Busch. Intel alone poured millions of dollars into peer-to-peer research, and other blue-chip firms such as Sun Microsystems worried that they were missing something huge. They began a rapid search for the next logical step after Napster.

In Sun's case, the search led to a fresh UC-Berkeley graduate named Gene Kan, whose improbable rise to success on the peer-to-peer bandwagon was at once faster, easier, and far more lucrative than that of his friend Shawn Fanning. When Gnutella first burst onto the scene from Nullsoft, the Napster team had been surprised to see Kan quoted more than anyone else, including publicity-averse Justin Frankel, the lead writer of the software. If Kan had truly become the lead developer on the project, Napster's engineers thought, maybe they could relax: Just months earlier, Kan had asked for a job with Napster, and he had bombed by dint of personality.

Kan had applied at Napster as a server engineer, boasting in a group interview about some of his previous technical accomplishments. When Jordy Mendelson pulled out a calculator and reported that the math in one of his claims didn't make sense, the obviously talented Kan grew defensive. He declared that he had been a software developer for a dozen years and knew what he was talking about. Since Kan appeared to be in his early twenties, Ritter was incredulous, impulsively asking how old Kan was. Kan immediately warned that the question was illegal and that he could sue. One of Napster's personnel chiefs pulled Ritter out of the meeting and told him that Kan was correct, that Ritter had unknowingly put the company in danger. So the team decided to keep the interview going just to build a case for not offering Kan a job on other grounds. That wasn't difficult to do. The engineers sent Kan to see supervisor Daphne Dembo, who gave many job candidates brainteasers to see how they were at problem solving. When she posed one to Kan, he said he wouldn't answer it because it was insulting, and that was that.

Kan's route to fame and fortune began later, at a lunch for car enthusiasts in Sunnyvale. He emerged from the meal to find a young man leaning on Kan's treasured and heavily modified Mazda RX-7. The posture first struck Kan as offensive, but it was intended to show respectful interest. The young man, who appeared to be in his late twenties but was

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