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Napster crew installed on a company server. Shawn entered a contest for Quake players, using the screen name “Napster.” Of the hundreds of people playing, it’s unlikely anyone suspected that he really was who he said he was. Shawn played with the same focus he had brought to his file-sharing program, keeping at it until he was number one, and then he quit. Shawn also tried to spread good cheer internally, requesting a Ping-Pong table for the office and a basketball hoop for outside, just like other well-funded Valley start-ups.

Parker and Ritter were having a much harder time. Parker’s e-mails turned him into a scapegoat, not an appealing mascot like Shawn, and his public appearances were curtailed. “Hank was never able to forgive me for those remarks,” Parker said. “If I had a chance of finding a meaningful role inside the company before that, I didn’t anymore.” Shawn said that Barry just wanted Parker to find “a job where he could do something tangible.” But that would have been hard for Parker even without his fall from grace. After the first months, Parker had never done much that was concrete at Napster, and the tolerance for that kind of meandering was gone. “He was young and kind of immature, I guess just inexperienced,” Shawn said. “Parker’s more of a strategy guy, a vision guy, and he was still learning how to influence the direction of the company with his ideas.”

Parker went off for a vacation in August, trying to reassess what he could do to be most useful at Napster. When he came back, Barry made it clear that he would be most useful out of the company. Parker was followed around the office like a walking liability. Devastated that he was unwelcome at the company he had helped create, Parker saw it was obvious that he would be fired. He resigned in humiliation and tried to think of what to do next. He tried writing, then consulting, but “my whole sense of identity was wrapped up in Napster,” Parker said. “I was incredibly depressed. It took a long time to stop thinking about it day in and day out.”

If the spotlight had been Parker’s undoing, one of Ritter’s gripes was that he had never gotten a chance to be in it; Ritter got almost no public recognition. What he did have was authority inside the company. Since moving west, he had the same rank as Shawn. “He did the client, and I did the server, and we didn’t ask each other’s permission” to make changes, Ritter said. As the company grew, Ritter was insulated from the

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