Ask PG: If Viaweb hadn't worked out, what would you have likely done next?
I don't think I had a backup plan at the time.  I suppose I would have gone back to consulting and writing books.  Maybe after a while I would have tried to start another company.  That would have been hard, though, because if Viaweb hadn't worked out it would have been hard to talk Robert Morris into trying again.I was pretty excited about Web apps, which were a new thing then.  (We planned eventually to make a whole suite of them; Viaweb Store was just the first.)  So I probably would have worked on those in some way.  Maybe I would have written some sort of general platform for building them, and/or written a book about that topic.