Act I · 1970s — 1993
The Farm Kid Who Builds Indiana to Stanford
Where the engineer comes from. Where the curiosity comes from.
A small Indiana farm. Steelworker father in a union family. Coding at age 12 in 1982. Rose-Hulman undergrad. Stanford PhD in design. Internet Media Services, the first commercial site in the Yellow Pages, 1993. The pattern is set early: feel a pain himself, build the thing.
"My mom was always one where she said, if you want to do something, just do it."
Andrew · Origin Story · 08:07
"Then you put the pieces together and you just build it. That's kind of what I think I'm doing with this project, is I'm coming in it from the outside."
Andrew · Origin Story
Material we already have
Farm and family archive shots.
conru.com/andrew.html journey timeline. FFN
corporate/andrew-story.html.
CAFplan/projects/documentary/the-protagonist.html.
Act II · 1994 — 2007
Engineer of Love FriendFinder, 1996 onward
From a free dating site to twice the size of Match.com, run solo under legal siege.
WebPersonals in 1994. FriendFinder in 1996. 700M+ members at peak. The first online shopping cart. The first scripting language for websites. He invented the parts before they had names. Twelve years of running it. Then a sale to a company that turned it into a profit engine.
"We went from completely bootstrapped to twice the size of match.com."
Andrew · Origin Story · 14:39
"Human love should not be a luxury."
Andrew · Documentary planning · the-protagonist.html
Material we already have
Early web ephemera and screenshots.
FFNplan/static/corporate/history.html and
vision.html. The
Unadulterated memoir prologue and Chapter 1.
Act III · 2007 — 2009
Unemployable The crash
The builder with nothing to build, with too much money to take a normal job.
The 2007 sale. The hangover. Burnout that turned into clinical depression he did not name until later. Identity collapse. The thing he loved was connecting people. He watched the new owners turn that into a billing funnel. The film does not dramatize this beat. It sits with it.
"I was unemployable the next day because I had too much money. The thing I really liked was connecting people. Until I started painting."
Andrew · Fellows Dinner Clip 14 ·
play
"When it comes to depression and when it lifts, you don't really notice it until you're in it and like, oh wait, I'm happy."
Andrew · Origin Story · 23:00
Material we already have
Painting process B-roll.
dailyoil.wordpress.com (the recovery, documented in real time). Press kit: "Burnout to Beauty" angle (
conru/personal/media-campaign/press-kit/).
Act IV · 2010 — 2026
Enough Painting, the Foundation, the Prize
A painting a day, then the rest of a life.
365 paintings over a year. Active meditation. Discovers contemporary representational painting and begins collecting. Founds the Conru Art Foundation. Beauty, Truth, Love as an operational mantra, not a slogan. The Art Love Salon. The Seattle Prize. The decision to treat the money as a public trust. The enough principle becomes the rule.
"The opposite of beauty, truth and love is ugly lies and hate."
Andrew · Origin Story · 04:33
"Money is a tool to do good. Writing checks to other nonprofits is not what a builder like me does."
Andrew · Origin Story · 30:02
"When you're in the present, there's no room for regret of the past or anxiety of the future. It's a safe zone."
Andrew · Origin Story · 21:14
Act V · 2026
The Eagle Has Landed 31 days, 20 agents, one rule
The relaunch and the renunciation, on the same week.
2021: Andrew reacquires FriendFinder from the company that bought it. Five years quiet. Then March 2026: a 31-day AI coding sprint. Twenty agents reading a soul document with everything about him in it. Approximately 500,000 lines of code. Eleven hours a day. A platform without ads at five dollars a month. Then, at a dinner on April 2, 2026, he says it out loud: I am not taking another dollar of profit from my company ever again. The film closes on both moves at once.
"Once I fired this thing up, it scared me almost as much as when I first did the internet in 1993."
Andrew · Fellows Dinner Clip 02 ·
play
"I did over 500,000 lines of code in the last 31 days. I told the CEO, 'The eagle has landed.' I've rewritten the entire code base."
Andrew · Fellows Dinner Clip 01 ·
play
"I'm not taking another dollar of profit ever from my company again. The enough principle. I'm so excited that I'm going to take this AI tool and make a machine that provides a service of human connection."
Andrew · Fellows Dinner Clip 18 ·
play
"A combination of YouTube, Match.com, Facebook, without any advertising. Five bucks a month."
Andrew · Fellows Dinner Clip 19 ·
play
Material we already have
The April 2 dinner clips at
conru.com/video/ (clips 01, 02, 14, 18, 19 are the FFN/AI core). Coding and agent B-roll opportunity. The
passion_logo.png brand asset if we lean into the brand name.