📸 Photo

a match made in heaven. Andy Evans was a San Francisco venture capitalist who was starting an incubator called Zero.net to nurture emerging companies. He was smart as hell, and his own connections could be summed up this way: He had managed money for Bill Gates, the richest man and one of the shrewdest businessmen in the world. Fanning, Carmody, Shawn, and Parker flew out to meet him in August 1999. It was the first trip to San Francisco for both teenagers, and they were in awe of nearly everything. “I was really excited. We were showing [Napster] to somebody who might be putting money into the company and help us buy servers,” Shawn said. Evans’s office was low-key, in the new-media style of the day. Evans himself was much less low-key. He bragged about running Gates’s investments in the mid-1980s and about his multiple Ferraris. “Miraculously,” Shawn said, the Napster demonstration went smoothly. Beyond that, he said, “I had no idea what was going on. It was a weird experience.” Evans heard the Napster pitch, and suddenly he was thinking several steps ahead. Of course Evans would fund the company, he said, but then he might want to set up an alliance with another small firm that did market testing of new musical groups. After that, Napster could approach the record companies about an alliance.

Evans was so excited that he insisted that Shawn and Parker stay in California at a hotel he would pay for. He would wire investment money the next day. Fanning and Carmody, Evans said, could return east. The gambit sent up all kinds of warning flags for Fanning, who vetoed the idea. Even the deal-hungry Parker agreed. “There was something not right about him,” he said. And Evans had misread Shawn. When it became clear that the Napster crew was going to head home that night, Evans called for a stretch limo to take Shawn to the airport. At that point, such conspicuous consumption only embarrassed Shawn and made him uncomfortable.

Evans still might have invested in Napster were it not for Jordan Ritter. Evans wanted to learn so much about the company that he asked to speak with the guy administering the back end. The Fannings called Ritter at his office at BindView and told him that Evans would be phoning and to answer his questions. But they neglected to tell Ritter that Evans was debating whether to invest. Ritter, thinking that Evans had already invested or was otherwise in the fold, held nothing back.