Who is Andrew?
Engineer, entrepreneur, painter.
A farm kid from Indiana who wrote his first games at 12, earned a Stanford PhD on people working with software agents, helped invent online dating, paid robots to paint, and then picked up the brush himself. Today he puts it all into art in Seattle.
The tech path
From a VIC-20 to software agents
He grew up on a small farm in northern Indiana, the son of union steelworkers. At 12 he got a Commodore VIC-20 and wrote games “that could beat me,” including The Old West, a trail game about guiding gold prospectors west.
He studied engineering, wrote robot simulators, and in 1997 finished a Stanford PhD on one person designing alongside a team of software agents.
The entrepreneur: FriendFinder
While the thesis crawled along, the web arrived. He built websites from 1993, put WebPersonals live in October 1994, one of the first online dating sites, and in 1996 started FriendFinder, which grew to tens of millions of members.
“Andrew used to work really late,” Lars remembers. He put a bed under his desk rather than drive home.
He ran FriendFinder like an engineer: a new feature live every two weeks, and the numbers checked “first thing every morning.”
The ad optimizer
In 1995 he co-founded Focalink, one of the first banner-ad services: sites pasted in “just three lines of HTML code” and it handled the rest. For AT&T's WorldNet his team then built AdOptimizer, which picked the banner each visitor saw from what had been clicked.
“I was doing collaborative filtering by 1996. I could predict what you're going to like by how similar you are to other people. Which is now everywhere.”
RobotArt
Robots that paint
In 2015 he founded RobotArt, a competition for robots that paint with a real brush, with $100,000 in prizes. Any robot could enter; working artists, critics and technologists judged alongside a public vote. Three contests ran, from 2016 to 2018, with 16, 38 and 19 teams.
He wrote the code too. “Part of my motivation for painting this year was in preparation for a robotic project where the goal is to get it to paint,” he wrote in 2015. By 2018 his painter library split a picture into regions and planned the brush strokes for a robot arm.
His verdict: the best robot paintings weren't as good as a human master's, “but they were good enough to show it was possible.”
The robot's commission
The robots got very good at brushwork; what they lacked, as one judge put it, was emotion. So he flipped the question: let AI imagine the picture, and have a person paint it by hand. “I use it as a virtual model, and to find the image I want to paint. Then I paint it by hand, because I like the muscle of doing it manually.” That idea is now the AI-Assisted Award at the Rehumanism Prize.
His art
My works
“Learn something worth remembering,” a friend told him in 2015. He had never taken an art class, so he learned from YouTube and posted a painting every day for a year on his blog, DailyOil, then one a week.
Reva (aka Mom), 2023
He painted his mother against a deadline, with a flight booked to be with her in her final days. “My mom inspired me with her ‘can do’ attitude.” She is seated with the family farm behind her; the heart-shaped pothos leaves are a sign of a mother's love.
The painting became so precious to her that she chose to be buried in the outfit it shows.
The story of the painting →Head Turner, 2026
The “Distracted Boyfriend” scene, recast with a Pre-Raphaelite beauty and a Picasso for the one left behind. The composition came from an AI composite; the painting is oil on linen, by hand, built up over weeks.
From DailyOil
The Foundation
Rooms full of art and people
The Conru Art Foundation puts his work into Seattle: free spaces for art, fellowships for painters, and prizes for work only a person can make.
The book
Unadulterated
A memoir by Andrew Conru
The whole story in his own words, chapter by chapter: the early web, building FriendFinder, selling it and losing his way, then buying it back and rebuilding it with AI, for its members.
Read the book →