From a farm in Indiana to a life in art
I grew up on a small farm in northern Indiana, where I learned to fix things, solve problems, and serve my community. Those values carried me to Stanford, where I earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering just as the World Wide Web was being born.
In 1994, I created one of the first online dating sites. Two years later, I founded Friend Finder Networks, which grew to serve over 700 million registered users. I've launched about a dozen companies over the years, each guided by the same principle: build things that help people connect. The foundation is my latest project, and in some ways the most personal.
After years of building at full speed, I hit a wall. Burnout and depression nearly broke me. What pulled me back was something I never expected: painting. I challenged myself to create a work of art every day for a year. 365 paintings later, I was a different person.
I'm not just funding art. I make it. Oil painting is how I process the world. I've completed hundreds of paintings since I started, mostly portraits and figures. Some of them are terrible. That's the point.
I believe beauty is a human need, not a luxury. It creates the awe and wonder that remind us we're alive. Art does what argument can't. It bypasses our tribal defenses and speaks directly to what we share.
When I'm not painting or working on the foundation, you'll find me hunting for antiques on road trips, studying history, or watching YouTube at absurdly high speeds. I wrote over a million lines of code in my career (about 60 books worth), but now I mostly let AI do that part while I focus on the things only humans can do. I have been building this way for a long time. My 1997 thesis was about humans working with autonomous AI agents.
These days I spend most of my time on art, education, and the creative community here in Seattle. If you want to see what I'm thinking and what I build, I share some of it in my posts.
