I don’t remember what I ordered at Ray’s Pizza—whether I even ate—but I remember Rob.

By then I had been spending months building ArtNet on my computer high above lower Manhattan. The bulletin board system was beginning to attract people. Most arrived through the modem, left a few messages, and disappeared. A handful stayed longer. Rob Murphy was one of those.

After a few exchanges online, we decided to meet in person.

We chose Ray’s Pizza in Little Italy.

At the time I had no idea that a simple lunch would grow into one of the most important creative partnerships of my life.

What I remember most is how easy it felt.

There was none of the jockeying for position that often happens when artists first meet. No need to establish credentials. No competition over who was smarter, more connected, or more visionary. We simply started talking.

Rob understood immediately what I was trying to do.

ArtNet was still little more than an idea wrapped around a piece of software called ResNova. I had built the first interface myself, but I knew it wasn’t very good. It functioned, but it lacked elegance. Rob saw that immediately. More importantly, he saw what it could become.

Within weeks we were working together to redesign the entire environment.

What amazed me was how naturally our skills fit together.

I was always looking outward. How would we grow? How would we survive? How would we attract artists? How would we explain this strange new thing called the Internet?

Rob looked inward. He cared about the experience. The structure. The words. The visual rhythm of a page. He understood that design wasn’t decoration. Design was meaning.

Most partnerships involve negotiation.

Ours felt more like recognition.

We rarely argued about direction because we seemed to be looking at the same horizon.

Rob was studying museum-studies at NYU, but what I noticed first was his artistic sensibility. I loved his paintings. I loved the way he layered color, fire and the iconography of words. AND, I loved the way he wrote. Even his casual observations often carried a kind of quiet poetry.

ArtNet wasn’t being built by technologists. It was being built by artists. The technology was simply the material we happened to be working with.

There were differences between us, of course.

Rob was openly gay, something I recognized immediately and never thought much about. New York was full of people from different worlds, and what interested me wasn’t who Rob loved. What interested me was how his mind worked.

There was also a fragility about him.

Even then he seemed to live close to the edge. Rent was often a problem. Stability was never guaranteed. Opportunities appeared and disappeared with alarming speed. More than once I found myself helping him stay afloat.

Yet somehow he carried it lightly, never letting it dim the magic of those moments.

What he wanted was the work. The ideas. The conversations. The possibility that we might be creating something truly new.

Looking back, I realize I trusted him unusually quickly. Trust is strange. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes it arrives over the course of a single afternoon.

By the time we left Ray’s Pizza, I knew I wanted Rob involved in whatever ArtNet was becoming.

I don’t think either of us fully understood where it would lead.

There was no storefront yet. No Internet Reading Room. No Cyber Fair. No PORT MIT.

Those things were still somewhere in the future. What existed that afternoon was much simpler. Two artists sitting across from one another in a small pizza shop, discovering that they were already heading in the same direction.

The modem had introduced us. The friendship began at Ray’s.