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unlimited opportunities for hackers and hucksters alike. After months of demonstrating and explaining Napster to rich strangers, Shawn and his team had won funding for his fledgling company, now with about ten employees, some of them Silicon Valley pros. And the number of Napster’s users was snowballing by as much as 50 percent in a single day. If that kept up, Napster would become the fastest-growing business in history.

It had been a blur to Shawn. Two years before, he was just one of a hundred seniors at Harwich High School on Cape Cod, where he was well liked but best known for the purple BMW Z3 that his uncle gave him. After Shawn learned to program computers and started tinkering with ways to find digital music files faster, Napster had sprung to life and spread rapidly by word of mouth well before Shawn could get all the bugs out. Shawn had moved to California the previous month at the insistence of Napster’s first outside investor. In a whirlwind of cash wire transfers and quick decisions, he brought along Napster’s nineteen-year-old cofounder, Sean Parker, now just as dazed as Shawn by everything that was happening around them. Driving one day in a car that an older employee had rented for them, Shawn had looked over at Parker. “What are we doing in California?” he asked.

The rave was a major break from their hectic routine, and the two teenagers would remember it as one of the high points of their breakneck adventure. Sponsoring it was a characteristically Parker idea. A hyperenergetic and business-oriented programmer from Herndon, Virginia, the severely asthmatic Parker had met Shawn on a chat channel for aspiring hackers while both were in high school. “He was one of the few people that would talk to me about stuff that wasn’t technical—the meaning of life, consciousness,” Parker said. Later, Parker was one of the first Shawn told about Napster. Parker used every business connection he had to get the project funded. It was an insane process, filled with double crosses and a sort of high-speed poker with investors, but Parker set the events in motion that finally brought the company its first, magical quarter-million dollars. Now most of Parker’s time was spent strategizing, predicting what Napster needed to do next to keep growing and taking in money from investors. But while Shawn was busy writing code, Parker was more interested in making time for fun, and he was a longtime fan of electronic

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