When you graduated, did you have any experience in the New York art scene? None. I was really idealistic—I was hoping to plug right into the gallery/artist scene [laughs]. So did you show up with a little portfolio under your arm and knocking on doors? No, I saved myself that shame and embarrassment. I got some really good advice from a friend in the art world. He suggested that I work at an art gallery to see the business side of things, so I did. What was your experience like at the gallery? I worked as a gallery intern, actually. I was surprised to realize soon after I started that I had a sincere interest in business. The gallery was also ahead of the curve with their technology. They had just bought the system directly from IBM for a tremendous amount of money. It was a bold move for a small business in 1993. While I was there, the server crashed and so the gallery was in a bind. OK, what operating system was the server running? It was running Novell 3.1, and I had never, ever seen a Novell operating system. The hard drive had crashed, the server was down, and no one could fix it, so I saw an opportunity. I was already spending way too much time in computer shops in Chinatown, so I went down and bought some parts. I was locked in the gallery with the artwork from Saturday night until Monday morning, and managed to fix the server.
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