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ster was finally out of money, and now it was running out of funding options as well.

One of the last VC firms to keep the door open was Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, which had made an initial offer that spring valuing Napster at more than $100 million. Fanning had his usual problems with the deal, principally that there wasn't enough money in it, and the talks dragged on for months. As they did, Angel Investors chief Ron Conway was getting nervous. Conway went to the annual Webby Awards in San Francisco, a campy but star-studded gala where winners from websites judged the best in a variety of categories are limited to five-word acceptance speeches. There Shawn collected an award and the only standing ovation of the night. Conway cornered Shawn and Parker at the party afterward. The two teens had been well out of the loop in all the talks with the venture firms, but they knew something was going wrong. "We were going to run out of money. It was complete chaos," Parker said. "We had been forced to the sidelines. Shawn was in his own little world, and I was dealing with legal stuff." Now, Conway got their attention. Time was running out, he said, and he needed them back in the mix.

"If Hummer Winblad doesn't invest, the company is going out of business whenever the next payroll is," Conway told them. "We have to solve this, and we have to solve this quickly. If this funding doesn't happen, there are no more backups." Shawn tried not to take it too seriously. "He's just a big kid," Shawn said of Conway. "He was just so dramatic. It was a serious time, but we were just trying to figure out what he was all about." What Conway was saying echoed the exasperation Shawn saw in Richardson's face. "Eileen had planned on coming in and being the interim CEO. She was getting frustrated with the process of interacting with the labels, of trying to establish a business model," Shawn said. "She was constantly looking for someone to take her place and help build the company."

Conway met with Richardson as well, and he lobbied Hummer Winblad partner Ann Winblad, warning her that she was going to miss out on the biggest Internet company of all time. Winblad listened. In April,