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wasn’t much of a difference between John Fanning and some of the venture capitalists with whom he would be dealing. “The unfortunate part of the story has to do with mania,” Rando said. “Unfortunately, Shawn got taken along for that ride.”

In THE SUMMER OF 1997, Shawn practically lived at Chess.net, sleeping on the couch in the living room of the crew’s rented house as the firm grew to about a half-dozen employees. “He did more listening than talk-ing,” Chess.net colleague Brian McBarron said. “When he gets interested in something new, he dedicates all of his resources to mastering it, and then he goes beyond that. He just has a single-mindeness that made him proficient.” Ali Aydar and Tarek Loubani both said they had seldom seen anyone as focused as Shawn. “I don’t think people can appreciate how hard he worked. This was his way out of the ’hood, out of every-thing,” Loubani said. Shawn gave up sports and pretty much everything else to program, blowing off steam only by playing the computer game Quake 2 with his friends. It was a life of full-time hacking with few frills or even decent meals. “We ate at Burger King four or five times a day,” Loubani said. But Shawn was having a blast. Looking back on that summer, both Shawn and Aydar remembered what was probably just a coincidence and not a sign from God: Aydar drove Shawn to a Borders bookstore in Braintree, Massachusetts, and bought him a manual on pro-gramming in C++, the language he would use to build Napster. On the way home, thunder and lightning struck so fiercely that the two had to pull off the road in the shelter of an underpass.

At the end of the summer of 1997, after the last of the Carnegie Mellon crew had graduated and worked at least a few months at Chess.net, the group scattered. Dakhnovsky went to Moscow, Aydar to Michigan, and McBarron to Ohio. Aided by its promotion deal with America Online, Chess.net membership had been doubling every year. But the marketing went slowly; it was hard to convince the chess players to pay for lessons or other premium offerings. And the management was an obvious disaster. “I felt like we blew it,” Aydar said. “I felt like John had no clue, and I’d been taken for a ride.”

Because he stuck to programming when he interned at Chess.net,

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