(really, i'm just noodling around here)
A couple of conversations I've had tonight have solidified some more of my thinking about how I've been thinking about Dreamwidth-the-business (as opposed to Dreamwidth-the-project), and a couple of things connected in my head about why, precisely, things felt familiar, and I guess it's time for some drugged-up rambling through my own personal life and history and how it applies to the business we're starting (and why I knew, walking into this, what I was getting into and exactly how much work it was going to be).
(This is not any kind of DW-related news or announcement or anything. Just me thinking out loud about my connections with my own personal history, and my thoughts about the nature of small businesses that are aiming to get big vs. small business that intend to be community businesses throughout. You can safely skip it if you're just here for DW announcements; this is me writing about a thing-in-my-life, not me speaking ex cathedra as a news update. And I am looking forward to having DW with its "this person is staff and speaking as staff right now" little icon that we have planned, so as to make these disclaimers unnecessary...)
I may have mentioned a few times here and there that my parents were self-employed when I was growing up. We had two businesses: the small diner/restaurant that had been in the family for about 80 years at the time, and the construction business my dad started up when I was 12 or so. I grew up in the restaurant; in our family vernacular, it was just "the store". I think I started working there when I was about sixish, but even before then I'd been spending time there; they used to stick me in a playpen at the edge of the counter, and my play area wasn't the backyard of the house, but the back room of the store.
You know that Dave Matthews Band song? "Work yourselves, fingers to the bone, suck the marrow, drain my soul, pay your dues and your debts, pay your respects, everybody tells you, you pay for what you get"? That was my parents in a lot of ways when I was growing up; after a certain point my father would wake up at four in the morning, be behind the counter by five, work there until nine or so, hand the reins over to my mother, and then go and put in a full day doing his one-man construction business until five or five-thirty PM. My mother would work from nine to three in the store, then come home and take care of me and my sister after school and handle dinner and housekeeping chores. It was brutal, and we weren't getting rich by any stretch of the imagination; we were okay, but we weren't rolling in money, either.
I grew up knowing that you support your family and yourself by hard work and unstinting effort, and sometimes all you can do is tread water while sometimes things get unexpectedly awesome for a while, so it's best to plan for the peaks and the troughs as they come. I grew up watching my parents as businesspeople, as entrepreneurs, as people who had to solve insurmountable problems with limited resources and a fuck of a lot of backbreaking labor.
I learned a hell of a fucking lot from my parents, and they're still two of the people I respect most in this world. I learned everything I know about managing people, about managing process, about managing costs and paperwork and business structure, from watching them build and run two successful businesses for years. (The restaurant, we sold in my late teens when changing demographics in the area meant that the business couldn't continue as-it-was without even more hard work they didn't want to do; the construction business my dad gave up when he just physically couldn't do it anymore.)
I always said, when I was growing up, that I never wanted to be self-employed, because the uncertainty is killer. But I think in a lot of ways I'm programmed for it, written deep in the DNA. You don't go into business for yourself because you want to slack off and work the forty-hour work week, because there's no such thing as the forty-hour work week when you're self-employed. There's no health insurance, no guaranteed paycheck, no certainty. There's a certain amount of flexibility, but not much. There's no paid vacation. There's no passing the buck to someone else.
But there's also the knowledge that what you're building is yours. That you get to make the decisions. That you don't have to kowtow to someone else's idea of the way things should be. That your fuckups are yours and yours alone, with nobody to blame but you. (This is a mixed blessing, but I'm of the temperament that says this is mostly a good thing.)
I've been thinking a lot, lately, about our vision for Dreamwidth, Mark's and mine, and I realized tonight that a lot of how I'm building it, in my head and in all the processes we're designing, is sort of an internet-version replication of the diner I grew up in. Which makes me wonder if it was always vaguely inevitable that I'd come up with it again somewhere, since it's what I grew up with and what I found familiar.
It was the kind of place where it had been in the family for eighty years. Where people who had come in at age six to buy penny candy with their allowances were now, past retirement, sitting at the counter all morning with a newspaper and a cup of coffee. Where people had come in every day, without fail, for so long that they knew where they'd sit when they walked in. Where the customers were so close to family that it wasn't a holiday without somebody from the store at our house for the family meal. Where, when you'd settled down at the counter with your newspaper and your coffee, and you needed a refill and the waitress (ie, my mother) was busy, you'd just get up and get your own refill, and pour a fresh cup for anyone else at the counter who wanted one while you were at it; where, when we needed extra help for an hour or so, someone sitting in would just quietly get up and do whatever needed to get done.
Our customers were there when I was born (literally -- my father stopped off at the store to deliver coffee filters and English muffins while he was taking Mom to the hospital), there when I learned to walk, there when I learned to read, there when I started school. They were there when I was learning about politics and how to think about the world (and shaped my philosophies in a lot of ways, in the political kaffeeklatsch that was always running). The same faces, day in, day out, in a continuity of experience that you just don't see as often anymore these days.
The neighborhood bar, the neighborhood deli, the neighborhood corner store. That's what I want Dreamwidth to be. I want it to be a place where anyone who's been hanging out there for long enough feels comfortable getting up to get their own coffee refills. I want it to be a place where everyone knows me, everyone knows Mark, everyone knows that we're us and not some nameless faceless corporate spokesperson. I want it to be a place where you know your neighbors, and you know that we're all in this together, and you know that it's okay for you to feel like this place is a little bit like home, because it is.
My parents ran that business for about twenty-five years, and it supported them, us, in a reasonable fashion. They didn't get rich, but they got by, and they provided us with everything we needed. It was a comfortable place -- a place customers could call home, a place where they could come and find a cup of coffee and a decently-priced breakfast and an hour or two of calm companionship. People felt welcome there. People felt comfortable and settled, like they had a place to just sit down and enjoy themselves.
That's what I want Dreamwidth to be. I want to be one of those businesses that my parents owned. I want to be one of the businesses that knows it's never going to be a Wal-Mart or a Google, but is perfectly content to be what it is: the mom & pop store on the corner that's trying to do awesome things as cheaply as possible and is looking to earn enough cash to keep the business afloat and pay the operators a living wage. I want to support other businesses like that through our choices of providers. I want to reject the notion that everything has to turn into a multibillion-dollar empire in order to be considered 'successful'.
I want to make enough money to support myself, doing what I love, and in the process make a place where you feel like you're walking into that corner store where you know everyone who turns to see who just walked in the door. It's not really a new realization, but I hadn't quite explicitly realized how much I'd been imagining the same kind of vibe as the place I grew up in until just now...
(This is not any kind of DW-related news or announcement or anything. Just me thinking out loud about my connections with my own personal history, and my thoughts about the nature of small businesses that are aiming to get big vs. small business that intend to be community businesses throughout. You can safely skip it if you're just here for DW announcements; this is me writing about a thing-in-my-life, not me speaking ex cathedra as a news update. And I am looking forward to having DW with its "this person is staff and speaking as staff right now" little icon that we have planned, so as to make these disclaimers unnecessary...)
I may have mentioned a few times here and there that my parents were self-employed when I was growing up. We had two businesses: the small diner/restaurant that had been in the family for about 80 years at the time, and the construction business my dad started up when I was 12 or so. I grew up in the restaurant; in our family vernacular, it was just "the store". I think I started working there when I was about sixish, but even before then I'd been spending time there; they used to stick me in a playpen at the edge of the counter, and my play area wasn't the backyard of the house, but the back room of the store.
You know that Dave Matthews Band song? "Work yourselves, fingers to the bone, suck the marrow, drain my soul, pay your dues and your debts, pay your respects, everybody tells you, you pay for what you get"? That was my parents in a lot of ways when I was growing up; after a certain point my father would wake up at four in the morning, be behind the counter by five, work there until nine or so, hand the reins over to my mother, and then go and put in a full day doing his one-man construction business until five or five-thirty PM. My mother would work from nine to three in the store, then come home and take care of me and my sister after school and handle dinner and housekeeping chores. It was brutal, and we weren't getting rich by any stretch of the imagination; we were okay, but we weren't rolling in money, either.
I grew up knowing that you support your family and yourself by hard work and unstinting effort, and sometimes all you can do is tread water while sometimes things get unexpectedly awesome for a while, so it's best to plan for the peaks and the troughs as they come. I grew up watching my parents as businesspeople, as entrepreneurs, as people who had to solve insurmountable problems with limited resources and a fuck of a lot of backbreaking labor.
I learned a hell of a fucking lot from my parents, and they're still two of the people I respect most in this world. I learned everything I know about managing people, about managing process, about managing costs and paperwork and business structure, from watching them build and run two successful businesses for years. (The restaurant, we sold in my late teens when changing demographics in the area meant that the business couldn't continue as-it-was without even more hard work they didn't want to do; the construction business my dad gave up when he just physically couldn't do it anymore.)
I always said, when I was growing up, that I never wanted to be self-employed, because the uncertainty is killer. But I think in a lot of ways I'm programmed for it, written deep in the DNA. You don't go into business for yourself because you want to slack off and work the forty-hour work week, because there's no such thing as the forty-hour work week when you're self-employed. There's no health insurance, no guaranteed paycheck, no certainty. There's a certain amount of flexibility, but not much. There's no paid vacation. There's no passing the buck to someone else.
But there's also the knowledge that what you're building is yours. That you get to make the decisions. That you don't have to kowtow to someone else's idea of the way things should be. That your fuckups are yours and yours alone, with nobody to blame but you. (This is a mixed blessing, but I'm of the temperament that says this is mostly a good thing.)
I've been thinking a lot, lately, about our vision for Dreamwidth, Mark's and mine, and I realized tonight that a lot of how I'm building it, in my head and in all the processes we're designing, is sort of an internet-version replication of the diner I grew up in. Which makes me wonder if it was always vaguely inevitable that I'd come up with it again somewhere, since it's what I grew up with and what I found familiar.
It was the kind of place where it had been in the family for eighty years. Where people who had come in at age six to buy penny candy with their allowances were now, past retirement, sitting at the counter all morning with a newspaper and a cup of coffee. Where people had come in every day, without fail, for so long that they knew where they'd sit when they walked in. Where the customers were so close to family that it wasn't a holiday without somebody from the store at our house for the family meal. Where, when you'd settled down at the counter with your newspaper and your coffee, and you needed a refill and the waitress (ie, my mother) was busy, you'd just get up and get your own refill, and pour a fresh cup for anyone else at the counter who wanted one while you were at it; where, when we needed extra help for an hour or so, someone sitting in would just quietly get up and do whatever needed to get done.
Our customers were there when I was born (literally -- my father stopped off at the store to deliver coffee filters and English muffins while he was taking Mom to the hospital), there when I learned to walk, there when I learned to read, there when I started school. They were there when I was learning about politics and how to think about the world (and shaped my philosophies in a lot of ways, in the political kaffeeklatsch that was always running). The same faces, day in, day out, in a continuity of experience that you just don't see as often anymore these days.
The neighborhood bar, the neighborhood deli, the neighborhood corner store. That's what I want Dreamwidth to be. I want it to be a place where anyone who's been hanging out there for long enough feels comfortable getting up to get their own coffee refills. I want it to be a place where everyone knows me, everyone knows Mark, everyone knows that we're us and not some nameless faceless corporate spokesperson. I want it to be a place where you know your neighbors, and you know that we're all in this together, and you know that it's okay for you to feel like this place is a little bit like home, because it is.
My parents ran that business for about twenty-five years, and it supported them, us, in a reasonable fashion. They didn't get rich, but they got by, and they provided us with everything we needed. It was a comfortable place -- a place customers could call home, a place where they could come and find a cup of coffee and a decently-priced breakfast and an hour or two of calm companionship. People felt welcome there. People felt comfortable and settled, like they had a place to just sit down and enjoy themselves.
That's what I want Dreamwidth to be. I want to be one of those businesses that my parents owned. I want to be one of the businesses that knows it's never going to be a Wal-Mart or a Google, but is perfectly content to be what it is: the mom & pop store on the corner that's trying to do awesome things as cheaply as possible and is looking to earn enough cash to keep the business afloat and pay the operators a living wage. I want to support other businesses like that through our choices of providers. I want to reject the notion that everything has to turn into a multibillion-dollar empire in order to be considered 'successful'.
I want to make enough money to support myself, doing what I love, and in the process make a place where you feel like you're walking into that corner store where you know everyone who turns to see who just walked in the door. It's not really a new realization, but I hadn't quite explicitly realized how much I'd been imagining the same kind of vibe as the place I grew up in until just now...