Ritter attended college at Lehigh University on scholarship, starting as a sophomore and pursuing a double major in music and computer science.

During his tenure, Ritter discovered and published several serious security vulnerabilities, including an anonymous, remote administrative privilege escalation in Washington University's FTP server.

[7][8][9] Since Fanning initially refused to allow inspection of the source code, members took this as a challenge and began reverse-engineering various aspects of the service.

[7] Ritter moved to Silicon Valley in September 1999, initially sharing an apartment with Fanning and Sean Parker at the San Mateo Marriott Residence Inn.

[8] Ritter was directly responsible for many of the key evolutions of the backend service architecture during Napster's period of hyper-growth, including its novel load-balancing system, MySQL and subsequent Oracle database integration, and transparent full-mesh server linking.

Named Spilter, the software was originally an open-source system that ran on UNIX-compatible messaging infrastructure such as Sendmail, Postfix and Qmail.

Following the success of the product's first release, Ritter was convinced to pursue it instead as a commercial enterprise, which led him to close-source the software and begin mapping out a business plan.

Prakash later proposed using the name of Cloudmark instead, which is a planet-sized, inter-galactic messaging router featured in the book A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.

Ritter was introduced to Columbia Music Entertainment (CME) CEO Sadahiko Hirose in early 2006 during a business trip to Tokyo.

[citation needed] In 2007, Ritter hired Ejovi Nuwere into CME, and together they began building a Japanese-based, competition-oriented promotional platform for new artists called Otorevo.

The premise of the project was to prove a more cost- and time-efficient model for discovering viable artists to join the label, while at the same time establishing the first foothold for what would become CME's digital media platform.