I grew up on a ten-acre farm in northern Indiana. My dad worked the line at a steel mill. My mom raised five of us in a house we mostly built ourselves. The work was outside. The tools were old. Nothing in that house was theoretical.
I learned to code on a Commodore 64 in high school. What I loved was not the machine. It was that I could think of something at night and have it exist by morning. The same act has been the spine of my life for forty years.
In 1994, at Stanford, I built one of the first online dating sites. It was a side project. I wanted to see if engineering could help people find each other. The university asked me to take it down because the traffic was eating their bandwidth. I moved it off campus and kept it running. In 1996 it became FriendFinder.
For thirteen years I ran it from a small office, mostly alone at first, eventually with a team. By 2007 it was twice the size of Match.com, with a tenth of the staff. Then I sold it, for reasons the memoir explains, and lost most of who I was for a while. Two weeks after the sale I was on a stepladder in my garage with a rope around my neck. I came down. That part of the story is in the book too.
The years after were quieter. I painted, mostly. I took long walks. I tried to figure out who I was without the company. In 2021 I bought it back, because I missed building it. I started rewriting the codebase. AI arrived, and a job that would have taken me two years took twenty-five days. That part still surprises me every morning.
While the engineering came back, the other half of me wanted somewhere to put what I had learned about connection. I funded a publication that asks hard questions in the open, with citations. The Guardian wrote a story about that decision. There is a receipt file at conru.com/aporia/ for anyone who wants to inspect the work themselves.
The rest of my time I spend in Seattle. I bought the old Coliseum Theatre downtown and am turning it into a public space for art. I run a salon in an Occidental Park gallery on First Thursdays. I am building Summer of Awe, a season of programming for the city's biggest international summer in years. None of it is reputation work. It is the most fun I have had in a long time.
The frame I keep coming back to is Beauty, Truth, and Love. They are not abstractions. Beauty is the public art in Seattle. Truth is the willingness to ask hard questions out loud, with receipts, when very few publications still will. Love is the system I built first and am building again, a place where people can find each other in every form love takes.
If you only know me from one fragment, the others can look strange next to it. The dating-site builder, the art patron, the funder of an uncomfortable magazine, the farm kid who paints birds. They are one life. The thread is the same. I have spent three decades trying to make rooms where people meet, and trying to understand what happens in those rooms after they do.
I am still learning. I would rather be useful than admired. I would rather build the next thing than defend the last one. If the work is honest, most of the rest sorts itself out.
That is who is behind the rooms.
— Andrew Conru, May 2026