Unlikely Place for a Eureka Moment
Shaun Fanning, founder of Napster, Boston University
“My roommate had a bunch of friends from back home come visit. They asked him how he got this insane music collection — he was particularly into obscure rap–and there was no easy way to describe how to do it. It was pretty remarkable how difficult it was to find stuff and retrieve it. I think fundamentally it came down to the idea that the majority of the people that were making these MP3s available were making them available on personal computers, but they were doing so in a clunky way. I understood the potential of peer-to-peer, even if it didn’t have a name at the time. But it was hard to predict. Intellectually, I could see this would be interesting to people, but the explosive growth and excitement around it isn’t something that could be anticipated.”