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the right age, and I knew it could only be good,” Coleen said. “I know Shawn gets a lot of his good qualities from me,” she said, laughing at herself. “But he gets a lot from the other side too.” Still, when she first saw the two of them together, she couldn't get out of the car, she was so shocked. It was just that they looked so much alike, right down to the loping way they walked. Shawn and Rando hit it off, and they stayed in touch during all the craziness that Shawn was about to go through.

Rando had done well for himself, earning a degree in physics and an M.B.A. He worked in fiber optics and tried his hand at running small software firms before settling in as a real-estate developer specializing in shopping malls. Rando discovered that he preferred working for himself to laboring at big companies or under the control of powerful investors. An Internet skeptic, Rando gave his son one major piece of business advice about Napster: to take the money as soon as he could. “I always told him, ‘If you can cash out, cash out,’ because the valuations I was seeing were mind-boggling,” Rando said.

For more day-to-day guidance, Coleen continued to steer Shawn toward his uncle. Even though Coleen and John weren't close, John Fanning had ambition that she wanted Shawn to experience up close. “He's like Shawn in a different way,” she said. “He wanted out of that situation he started in. It was the motivation to succeed that I wanted Shawn to pick up on.”

John Fanning lived an hour away in blue-collar Hull, a 350-year-old fishing town halfway back to Boston from the Cape that was trying to survive on the tourist trade without offering much in return. Shawn saw his uncle's office, the home of his latest venture, Internet firm Chess.net, as a refuge. He worked summers there, learning to program and often sleeping on the couch. Fanning loved playing games, and he developed a serious habit with a computer video game called StarCraft. His favorite opponent was Shawn. Even when Shawn's hacking hobby started to look like a serious business, Fanning wanted to play. More than once, when Shawn's friends and collaborators needed him to work, he told them he couldn't: His uncle wanted to keep playing StarCraft. If he didn't keep playing with him, Shawn told them, Fanning wouldn't give him money for dinner. Shawn's friends believed that Shawn wasn't kidding, and that if his uncle was kidding, the humor was much darker than what they were

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