Personal Business

Charles Broskoski of the Are.na team posted a lovely article yesterday titled Personal Business.

"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."

You should read the whole thing (and then watch You've Got Mail, which as it happens we did last year).

This is the sort of business we're trying to run. It feels slower. There are probably things we could do to grow more aggressively; frankly, to make more money. But whenever I think about those things, it just doesn't feel like who I am. So I don't do them.

And then I realise that I quit my job two years ago because I didn't enjoy it. So if I also end up not enjoying this job, what would have been the point?

So here we are. A personal business.

Are.na

Lucy has had her eye on it for ages. Honestly, I'm not exactly sure what it is. But it looks cool and they sound like good people.

She signed up this morning.

100% human. 0% AI. Always.