Once in a while you see something so new, rare or unfamiliar that you struggle to process its very existence. That’s how I felt reading a Hollywood Reporter story about Watch Duty, the nonprofit wildfire alert app, and got to the part where its co-founder said the app was not for sale and he was not interested in selling it.
The app, which provides wildfire alert reports in real time, has been a blessing to public safety during the Southern California catastrophe. Between Tuesday and Friday of last week, the app “onboarded twice as many users as it’s ever had,” according to its CEO and co-founder John Clarke Mills. He says the app was created because, as a resident of Sonoma County, he has been “bombarded with nonsense alerts, alerts that don’t say anything, or no alerts at all,” and wanted something that would provide useful, timely facts without informational clutter. The staff of Watch Duty is small compared to the amount of information that the app generates. There are 200 volunteers, 15 of them paid, plus seven paid reporters and another 15 volunteer reporters. Their ranks are made up of “first responders (wildland fire and dispatch), children of fire service workers and more.”
That’s remarkable. But so is the fact that Clarke didn’t just state that he had no plans to sell the app, but seemed appalled by the idea. Because he sold his last company, a retail food service software firm, to Chipotle and Sweet Greens, “I don’t need the money right now,” he told Hollywood Reporter. “I’ll get paid again later. I don’t want to sell this. To who? No one should own this. The fact that I have to do this with my team is not OK. Part of this is out of spite. I’m angry that I’m here having to do this, and the government hasn’t spent the money to do this themselves. So, no, it’s not for sale. No, I’m not open to change all of a sudden, and I just don’t give a s—.”
When’s the last time an amazing thing that was created independently for genuinely good reasons wasn’t sold off to a conglomerate or hedge fund or venture capital group at the first sign that it could make a lot of money?
I’m sure standing on principle happens all the time in business, but we never hear about it. We usually only hear about the big sales, the cronyism, the greed, the contempt for the same customers that generate the profits in the first place and who are systematically neglected and mistreated as owners try to squeeze out even more profit.
We hear about the big money deals. And now, perhaps, we sigh, even die a little bit inside, knowing that bigger owners tend to bring useless and sometimes outright terrible ideas to make the thing more “efficient” or “profitable” and end up hurting it. Sometimes the new owner doesn’t even care to try to tangibly improve the thing; they just strip it for parts, so to speak, and sell it for pocket change after the user base has started to desert it because it stinks now. (See: Twitter and Meta (and Instagram, which Meta owns, and which now has a competitor.)
Certain things shouldn’t be for sale. Certain things (services, mainly, but also entire institutions) should be operated, ideally, by the public, i.e. the government. But government tends to be underfunded, incompetent or (increasingly, these days) corrupt, so the public is on its own.
According to a story published at The Verge, “The idea for Watch Duty came to cofounder John Mills while he was trying to protect his off-grid Sonoma County home from the Walbridge fire in 2020. He realized there wasn’t a single source for all the information people needed to protect themselves from the blaze, which ultimately killed 33 people and destroyed 156 homes. John and his friend David Merritt, who is Watch Duty’s cofounder and CTO, decided to build an app to help.” Clarke added, “We view what we are doing as a public service. It is a utility that everyone should have, which is timely, relevant information for their safety during emergencies. Right now, it’s very scattered. Even the agencies themselves, which have the best intentions, their hands are tied by bureaucracy or contracts. We partner with government sources with a focus on firefighting.”
I share Clarke’s frustration that something as remarkable and necessary as Watch Duty had to be created because the need wasn’t being filled. And I’m stunned and grateful that he’s publicly stated in multiple interviews that he doesn’t think it should be a profit center.
Collectively internalizing the notion that not everything is for sale would go a long way towards beginning to repair a broken country.
