Enough

There's a point where you have enough. Most successful people pass it without noticing. I decided to notice.

My parents were union steelworkers in Indiana. They taught me hard work and fairness, and my mother had one rule: “Never do anything half-assed.”

I'm a guy who made his money on the internet. Thirty years ago I helped invent many of the technologies it runs on. I know exactly where that money came from: millions of ordinary people. And I'm grateful.

I once called selling my company the biggest mistake of my life. I'd built my identity on being useful. The joy was never the money; it was building something people actually used. When I sold, I lost that, and it took me years to understand that was the real mistake. Giving back and being useful again is where the joy came back.

So this isn't charity; it's a correction. A few of us did extraordinarily well from everyone else's time and attention, and some of that should come back to the people and places that made it possible.

The Conru Art Foundation is where that lesson lives now. I've put about $20 million into it so far, all my own money, including what came through my donor-advised fund. I take no salary. The galleries and events are free, and artists keep 100% of what they sell. I'm an engineer, not an art-world insider, so I run it like one: try things, see what works, fix what doesn't. And this is just the start: I plan to keep building it, year after year.

I've long worked where technology meets art. From 2016 to 2018 I ran RobotArt, offering $100,000 in prizes for robots that paint with a real brush. Lately I've been thinking about AI, meaning and the future, and I write about it at humanist.com/ai.

More rich people need to say “enough.” I'll go first.

“The money was never really mine. I was just holding it.”