Paul Graham's career pivot in his early 30s from Fine Arts & painting to startups

I have no stake in Twitter wars between indiehacker & vc ppl, but hearing PG talk about pivoting from his Fine Arts degree to his first startup is so real & validating that I need to lifelog about it. I’m amending my previous lifelog about PG & art because I just learned all of this on his interview on Social Radars today. If, reader, you already know all this, pls ignore.

After computer science grad school, PG was a painter and got an MFA(? some arts degree if not masters). Then to make money to buy art supplies, he & friends started an app to make art gallery websites called ArtX (a lot like my current product, Mused!).

He discovered that many museums and galleries don’t really care if they have stuff online, in the sense that it’s not a major motivator for them, so he pivoted from gallery websites to code to make online store websites, and changed his product to be called Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo 3 years later.

The whole time it was something he figured he would just do to get back to painting. Lifelog, I am this way. I got an MFA in creative writing, and I’ve only been building to make enough money to get back to writing, if I’m being honest. I’ve never really stopped seeing this part of my life as a weird deviation from my identity as a writer.

So after some years at Yahoo, he went out into the Santa Cruz mountains & intended to restart his life as an artist. He eventually wrote so many essays about startups that he started YC, and it became the celebrated, even mainstream startup pathway we know today.

So I’m latching onto this because his insight that art galleries and physical stores are parallel is important for me, and instead of completely deviating from my previous digital art/heritage work at Mused, I think there likely is a way that I can adapt the existing codebase to service online shopping. I bought a domain name and will try to get a product out this weekend, maybe for next Tuesday WIP-beta launch, and next week Twitter launch.

In the meantime, I’m going to sleep. I flew back to sf last night, lost my keys, & spent today in a bleary halfdazed state unpacking everything & repacking it looking for spares. I barely touched the three.js project I’ve been working on trying to make more perfect transitions for virtual tours, and need a loading state, some final content, and a lot of testing before launching a new virtual tour with an Egyptian excavation team that I’m partnering with.

Outro to Trakl:

Not your dark poisons again,
White sleep!
This fantastically strange garden
Of trees in deepening twilight
Fills up with serpents, nightmoths,
Spiders, bats.
Approaching stranger!
Your abandoned shadow
In the red of evening
Is a dark pirate ship
Of the salty oceans of confusion.
White birds from the outskirts of the night
Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel.