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Richardson took several months off to recuperate from Napster and the media attack. In late 2001, she reemerged with a Web-services start-up called Infravio Inc. Xtime was one of its first customers.

While still personally wealthy, the third original Napster director's business had taken a turn for the worse as well. Yosi Amram's ValiCert, which went public in July 2000 in a $40 million IPO, had seen its stock fall from more than $27 to less than 50 cents in the Internet downdraft. In 2001, ValiCert lost more than $28 million. It had enough current assets to last one more year; as 2002 drew to a close, Amram resigned.

Bill Bales's Flycode vanished altogether, and so did he. He and his girlfriend, Holly Shin, who had followed Bales from Napster to Flycode, were evicted from their San Mateo apartment in December 2001 for failing to pay their $2,000 monthly rent. Bales moved back to his home state of Georgia.

Jordan Ritter's first stop after Napster, private-financing system Round1, began to sputter, too. He left and founded a spam-filtering start-up called Cloudmark Inc., serving as its first CEO and successfully raising early funding. The firm's SpamNet peer-to-peer system relied on users to flag annoying e-mail as spam: If enough others voted the same way, the e-mail was blocked from reaching more subscribers. Still in beta, it had 173,000 participants by November 2002. Ritter and Jessie Garrehy planned to be married in February 2003.

Sean Parker may have been the hardest hit of all those who left. For six months, he remained obsessed with Napster, reliving the experience by writing a book proposal. Failing to sell the book, Parker consulted at Sun Microsystems and other companies, looking for a way to redeem himself. In 2001, he founded a company called Plaxo Inc. The next year, Plaxo released software that allows users to distribute contact information for themselves, building a mass network. Like Ritter, Parker worked on the project in a brutal financing environment. "Everything I did early on, I wouldn't have known to do were it not for the terrible things at Napster. You have to scrutinize every single hire. You have to have the right balance of power between the company and its investors," Parker said. "They say you learn the most from your mistakes, and Napster made every mistake in the book." He eventually won funding from Sequoia Capital Partners, a top Silicon Valley venture firm.

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