Artix

It was painting that led to both the means and the ideas behind Y Combinator. In January of 1995, needing money, Graham convinced his best friend, Robert Tappan Morris, to start a company with him called Artix that would put art galleries on the web. Morris was a Harvard graduate student with the impeccable hacker cred of having been the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, after he accidentally unleashed the first computer worm. The code behind the new company worked brilliantly. But the business idea, they soon realized, was idiotic.

Art galleries did not have the faintest desire to put their wares online for anyone to see. They wanted to preserve the illusion that the small slice of their merchandise that they were displaying was special, rather than inventory that had been kicking around in storage for years. Gallerists viewed the art market’s inefficiency and opacity as a feature, not a bug.

Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future, New York, 2025, p. 66