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When Evans called, “he didn't misrepresent himself. He just didn't represent himself” as having any particular role, Ritter said. Evans asked who was running the server. Ritter said he was. Evans asked how stable it was. Ritter said it crashed every ten or twenty minutes. Evans asked how long it would take to get the server to be reliable. Ritter said a month at best, three months at worst. Evans asked how much Ritter was getting paid. Ritter told him zero, for the moment, and Evans laughed. (Fanning soon ordered paychecks sent to Ritter.) Evans called Fanning and used everything negative that Ritter had said for negotiating leverage, and the talks quickly collapsed.

Much of Napster's early life was marked by seasoned investors or managers looking closely at the company, consulting their lawyers, their common sense, or both, and walking away from temptation. A number of them might have set the young company on a different and viable path if John Fanning had let them. Andy Evans, on the other hand, was something completely different. His may be the single instance of an investor who actually could have made Napster's fantastic but doomed campaign into something even worse.

That day at Zero.net, Evans had talked a lot about Gates, who had served on the board of Evans's investment company and was godfather to his three children. What Evans did not talk about was his 1986 conviction for bank fraud. When, in 1993, questions about why Gates was relying on a felon for financial advice became too frequent, Gates broke most of his official ties. But by 1999, Evans was clearly a player in Silicon Valley, investing alongside the top venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in such monster start-ups as Rambus Inc. and getting IPO shares from the top investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Evans started Zero.net in May 1999, and one of its first investments was in discount perfume seller Perfumania's Internet division, which was spun off that September. One of Evans's investment firms bought a majority of the spin-off's shares. As the prices of the shares rose on the constricted supply, Evans's firm transferred them to Zero.net, fattening Zero.net's balance sheet and allowing the incubator to raise more venture capital. Lawsuits soon accused Evans of manipulating the stock and failing to make required disclosures to the SEC. The suits echoed previous accusations leveled at Evans, when he had been forced to sign a

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