Personal Business

This piece was published in collaboration with the digital culture newsletter Dirt.

The last time I watched You’ve Got Mail, I shed a tear. Not for the love story (definitely not), but for the large portion of the movie dedicated to the respective businesses of Kathleen Kelly (played by Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (played by Tom Hanks).

If you haven’t seen You’ve Got Mail, I’m really very happy to outline it for you.

Kathleen Kelly runs a small independent bookstore she inherited from her mother called The Shop Around the Corner (a reference to a 1940 movie of the same name, which You’ve Got Mail is based on). The Shop Around the Corner is a children’s bookstore with large windows, good lighting, and at least four employees. It has an enthusiastic customer base and a strong community, where everyone knows each other’s name. Kathleen Kelly sees books — and, by extension, her shop — as a vehicle to help people discover who they really are. 

Joe Fox runs a different variety of book store called Fox Books, which is more like a combination of Barnes & Noble and Walmart, in so far as it’s a big corporation controlled by a single family. The word “discount” is thrown around a lot, but they also talk about cappuccinos and big comfy chairs. There’s a scene where Kathleen Kelly, in an effort to see what the competition is like, enters the store and witnesses a customer inconvenience an employee with a fuzzy query about a book. As the employee struggles to answer, she steps in with expert guidance. Joe Fox, in contrast to Kathleen Kelly, seems to not really care about books in particular. For the Fox family, books are just a vehicle for profit. Their goal is not just to become the biggest bookstore, it’s to become the only bookstore.

Much is made of the fact that this movie is set in a time of early internet communication, but as far as I’m concerned, the email aspect is just a plot device. It only serves to keep Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox, who are having an anonymous online flirtation, from knowing that in the physical world they are business rivals. The movie treats email, Starbucks, and large chain discount bookstores all kind of the same way because, in 1998, all of these things were signifiers for an imminently changing way of life.

Eventually, The Shop Around the Corner succumbs to the pressure of Fox Books and shuts down. This is where I shed a tear. This is also where Kathleen Kelly delivers my favorite line of the movie. Feeling guilty about his victory, Joe Fox explains that it was just business, it wasn’t personal. To which Kathleen Kelly replies: 

I’m so sick of everyone saying that. That just means it wasn’t personal to you, but it was personal to me. It was personal to a lot of people. What’s so wrong with being personal anyway? Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.

** 

In You’ve Got Mail, Kathleen Kelly is positioned as virtuous but naive, a hopeless romantic stuck in the old way of doing things. But I agree with her, I think more businesses should be personal. In 1998, her proclamation could be seen as proto-nostalgia for a soon-to-be bygone time, but now that we've actually experienced the Joe Fox vision of the future, the line simply reads as solid business advice. 

Nearly 30 years later, there seems to be both an increasing intolerance for the impersonal and insincere, and a sharper collective radar for the people and companies that fake sincerity. The companies that stand out are the ones who have a particularly high-quality way of doing things. That quality can be traced back to the people who run and work for the company having a deep personal connection to what it is they do. When I started running Are.na with friends 14 years ago, it often felt like having such a personal stake in what we were doing would be a liability. Today it’s often perceived as an asset. I’m not especially pro-capitalism, but I am pro doing something really hard that you care about desperately and unabashedly.

Let’s term these types of businesses a Personal Business (after Kathleen Kelly). A Personal Business is run by people who are truly into what they are doing, and invested enough to offer products, services, and/or experiences that are both high-quality and idiosyncratic. The type of business that both sustains and is sustained by a community. Think of the bodega down the street that will accept your packages for you, or restaurants that have been in operation for as long as you can remember, or a store that you stop in just to chat. These particular attributes aren’t strategic (though they are strengths). Rather, they arise from the people who run it, who are cool and love what they do. Maybe most importantly, a Personal Business is properly scaled. It doesn’t have to be small, but it should grow at a pace that optimizes for its own resilience rather than to dominate a market. 

By contrast, a Fox Books would represent an impersonal business. In today’s world, it would probably be funded by VC or private equity. The Fox Books-type business is one focused solely on an outcome, whose team might not really have any skin in the game, and whose product might be slick but not particularly human. 

Fox Books is what we get when we overly prioritize convenience. Fox Books-type businesses teach us (wrongly) that business can only be done by a certain type of person, a person who will literally do anything to make their business succeed, no matter how much they end up compromising their original intent or how much damage they might leave in their wake. These are businesses that, after accepting investment, accumulate pressure from their investors, which results in essentially two choices: scale rapidly or die. These are types of businesses that, as far as I’m concerned, are here for the wrong reasons.

It would be nice to see more personal businesses everywhere, but I see a particular lack of personal businesses online. You might argue that people today need less software than ever, and I might be sympathetic to that argument, but I would argue that what people actually need less of is VC-backed software. 

Part of what prevents people from starting their own software company is the pervasiveness of a singular popular narrative: the idea that money is the primary reason to do so. That the way to make software profitable is to scale, and the way to scale is to get investment from VCs. Software, for better or for worse, plays an increasingly primary role in determining how we view the world, which in turn determines how the world actually works. There should be more than just one prominent funding model facilitating those experiences. There should be more businesses that represent a diversity of people and potential outcomes. It would be a much better internet if there were. 

As someone who has grown up not just on the internet but with the internet (I have very important memories of using one of the first browsers, Mosaic, as a 12 year old), I have a tendency to not see the internet as it is currently but as a trajectory. Part of my nostalgia is rooted in optimism. I still have hopes that it could retain, bolster, or even cultivate the aspects that make it most interesting.

There are people who are establishing new ways of doing things (a few people I know personally come to mind are Pirijan Ketheswaran from Kinopio, Johannes Breyer at Dinamo, Justin Duke at Buttondown, Elliott Cost at special.fish, Austin Robey at Subvert, Yancey Strickler at Metalabel, Laurel Schwulst at Ultralight School) but more are needed to expand our collective imagination for what’s possible. For those of us who grew up with attachments to certain platforms (thinking of the heartbreakers like Livejournal, Tumblr, del.icio.us or even Twitter), our connection to these places were deeply personal. Why wouldn’t we expect the people that build these platforms to have the same kind of relationship?

**

When we started working on Are.na, over 14 years ago, the world was mostly in a phase of being enamored with social networks and the potential that they represented. It took a lot of effort at that time to articulate any kind of critique of these new types of businesses (we’ve sold a mug on our online store that reads “Fuck an algorithm” for over 10 years). Now, there’s hardly a single person that wouldn’t admit that the experience of being on most social media leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a broad understanding that “social media might lead to unhealthy outcomes,” but what’s less understood is one of the major forces that led us to this state: the type of funding that requires businesses to (again) scale rapidly or die.

With all this said, I can admit that it’s both terrifying and ridiculously hard to get something off the ground without a major capital infusion. Even with some help in the beginning, it’s taken quite a bit of time to get Are.na to a place of true stability. After our crowdfunding campaign in 2018, there was a period where my budget allotted me essentially two slices of cheap pizza a day. After that, I took up part-time freelancing, which I did until about four years ago, when Are.na’s revenue had grown enough to pay me a livable salary.

My motivation throughout the ups and downs was not that Are.na would one day make me rich, it was that we had to keep Are.na alive because it, the service itself, was part of how I understood (and still understand) myself. Similar to how Kathleen Kelly thought about books, we do not consider Are.na to be a vehicle for profit, we consider it to be a vehicle for self-understanding.  

My point is that my reasons for working on Are.na are personal. Our endurance for continuing this work comes from it being personal. Our strength as a business comes from it being personal. And the rewards that I get from this work, and deciding to continue this work, are personal.

For some people, in considering this possibility, the question naturally arises: “That sounds nice, but how is a tiny software company supposed to compete with huge and well-funded companies?” The answer is that you don’t really have to. You just have to get an understanding of the proper pace and scale of whatever your endeavor is. Get there, and you can outlast anyone. The strength is in being yourself, being human, being accessible, being able to talk on a one-to-one basis to the people who patronize your business and making something that you want to see in the world but don’t currently. Your strength is in choosing to work on something because it’s genuinely fun and interesting and you know you could be interested in it forever. This requires that you take it all personally.