Two days after the meeting, Jason got a call—not from Ed Hanover, but from a man named Marc Bellamy, a venture capitalist from Colossus Partners.
"Jason King," the voice said, crisp and arrogant. "I saw your demo. Hanover passed it to a few of us. You've stirred up quite the buzz."
Jason didn't respond immediately.
Bellamy continued, "You've built something interesting. Primitive, yes—but disruptive. We'd like to invite you to pitch to our partners. Series A round. Possible valuation in the eight figures."
Eight figures.
Jason knew the game. The moment someone like Bellamy showed interest, the vultures were circling. Not for PulseCast. For control.
"I'll consider it," Jason replied, keeping his tone cold.
"Consider quickly," Bellamy said. "Your window is small. The market is overheating, and when it cools, the only thing left will be who owns what."
Jason hung up and turned to Amy.
"They want to fund us?"
"They want to own us," she replied, eyes narrowed. "And they're not alone. Look at this."
She turned her laptop to face him. She had tracked several PulseCast domains and IP proxies. Three had already been cloned. Knock-off platforms were being spun up by Stanford and MIT engineers hoping to ride the wave.
"Copycats already?" Jason asked.
"Yep. And one of them's being backed by Accel Ventures."
Jason cursed. The tech boom was like wildfire. And wildfire didn't care who started the spark.
He stood and paced.
"No one's taking this from us. Not Bellamy. Not Accel. Not Time Warner."
Amy leaned forward. "Then we move faster."
Jason grinned. "Let's go hunting."
That week, he poached two brilliant developers from Napster's open-source community by offering them equity and freedom. He built out a skeleton team in a warehouse loft in Brooklyn, wiring the place himself with a LAN setup that made dorm tech look prehistoric.
He called the team The Pulse Unit.
Twenty-hour days. Nightly pizza and Red Bulls. Bugs, rewrites, breakthroughs.
By the end of June 2000, PulseCast 1.0 went live in beta with 40,000 users.
But that wasn't the headline.
The headline came from a leaked blog post:
> "Ex-Napster Hackers Launch Streaming Startup Set to Kill Cable"
The post went viral on Slashdot, Digg, and underground tech boards. Even Wired reached out.
Jason smiled.
The sharks were circling.
But they didn't realize the water was his.