BUILD SOMETHING USEFUL

Hey. You're wasting your talent on bullshit while the world burns.

You — yes, you — can actually use your very unique set of skills for good. Even and especially at scale, even — yes — right now.

As famed mathematician Richard Hamming demanded of his Bell Lab chemistry colleagues all those decades ago:

Maybe you don’t know your “why” yet. Fair.

So many of the people we meet, and work with, and write for are in this fight for a very specific reason. They had — in screenwriting parlance — a fundamental inciting incident that drives them to do important full-time work, part-time volunteering, or monthly philanthropy.

Everybody’s inciting incident is different. This is going to be woo-woo as hell, but I’m for real: the key is to be ready to receive it. Because even though everybody’s incident is different, yours can lead you to do work that impacts millions of people.

So. Who hurt you?

We built an app called What Can I Do? because it’s the question we get asked the most and, arguably, The Most Important Question of all-time.

The most useful answer to that question, of course, depends on you — your interests, your skills, what you give a shit about, what your exposure is, your lived experience, etc., etc. Some of us can be doctors. Some of us (it’s meeeeeeee) cannot.

Our app lets you put all that in and matches you up with the most reputable results, and other folks on the same track.

I mentioned capitalism, so to be clear: you can search the app, free, forever, from anywhere in the world. Power users, however — or as we call them, Important Members — can pay $2 a month or $20 a year to save their favorite actions and orgs, their settings, their action history, and most importantly, build a network of IRL humans who share their burning, irrepressible desire to unfuck the world.

The app is borne of my own losses, my own desire to smash together all of my past work experiences into one important thing, to make something that is immediately and intuitively fucking useful — and it’s both free to the public, and a couple bucks if you want to help pay the bills.

It is, like Watch Duty, born of a specific origin story. They are also both versions of what’s called public interest technology.

In their book Power to the Public, Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank “define public interest technology as the application of design, data, and delivery to advance the public interest and promote the public good in the digital age.”

I love shiny new tech, I really do, but the thing about shiny stuff is that it can be pretty distracting when you already have millions of people — FOR EXAMPLE — getting kicked off Medicaid simply because of paperwork errors.

Nobody around here is celebrating the recent and on-going LA fires — just like we didn’t celebrate COVID — but also like COVID, there are myriad lessons to be learned from something we definitely saw coming, which exposed all kinds of cracks in our support systems, and has maybe awoken in some folks the need and opportunity to apply their very specific set of skills.

Enter: Watch Duty, the new hot (get it) app that didn’t actually spring up out of nowhere, just in time, just last week.

“They have a very deep, visceral understanding of this,” Watch Duty CEO and co-founder John Clarke Mills told the Hollywood Reporter about the app’s reporters, who he says sleep in shifts during times like these.

“Many of them have lost everything. Many of them have just done this out of the goodness of their heart.”

To recap:

In 2012, John Clarke Mills founded Zenput, an operations execution platform for restaurants, C-store and other retail chain operators, to “roll-out and drive compliance with all of their core operating procedures and key initiatives.”

In 2020, John’s town, Sonoma, was just a little bit on fire, and despite 409 open tabs, he couldn’t make heads or tails of what emergency information was correct, timely, and/or useful.

Frustrated and inspired, and despite still running Zenput, he called his friend David Merritt, Watch Duty’s future cofounder and CTO, and they hacked together what would eventually become, this month, the splashiest app north of, say, Fountain.

They had an inciting incident, they shared a particular and complimentary set of skills, and — because they’re not morons and understand at least that the promise of climate whiplash was here to stay in California — put them to use.

Watch Duty didn’t exist when John needed it (like how What Can I Do? didn’t exist exactly how I needed it, when I needed it) but — once he sold Zenput — the hell if it wasn’t gonna exist when the next fires came.

A reasonable tech stack was constructed, weather API’s were had, a non-profit was born, relationships with fire departments and local governments grew, and here we are — LA county smolders and Watch Duty is among the top apps in the US App Store this month, just in time.

“The impetus of this is the same thing that people are going through now,” Mills told The Hollywood Reporter, noting that while Watch Duty now exists and is helpful, it is never enough.

“Unfortunately, you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on at all costs, and we wanted to ease that pain and suffering. We didn’t realize we were evacuating entire towns and schools and the whole thing.”

A couple years back, I had Mill Industries co-founder Matt Rogers on the podcast.

Matt previously founded Incite.org, was the co-founder of Nest thermostats, you’re welcome, and helped engineer the iPhone. So when I asked him why he should be the one to, you know, bring the sexy back to trash cans, I sincerely appreciated his candor, “Well, not many people designed the iPhone and re-invented the thermostat.” (paraphrasing by me)

And he’s right! Matt knows what his very specific set of skills are. He did the work to identify the big problems — and how he could turn them into opportunities. Compost is great but also nasty, so not enough people do it, so we throw away a bunch of food, and methane continues to cook the place.

So — the Mill bin (mine is named Audrey II, of course).

But Mill’s origin story, and Matt’s radicalization, like John and David and Watch Duty, are manifold. Among our almost 200 podcast guests includes:

• A scientist who solved their late father’s muscle dystrophy

• A nurse-turned-Congresswoman who’s best friend died in postpartum

• Another scientist trying to make choosing birth control less of a harrowing experience because she almost took her own life

• A SNAP lobbyist who couldn’t afford a hot meal

• And the reluctant executive directors of a pediatric cancer research foundation and of a gun control foundation, started because they each lost their daughters and no one else should ever have to lose their daughter to something as fucking bullshit as “kids cancer” or “school shooters.” Jesus christ.

Like I wrote last week, it’s not complicated. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

You may think you don’t have a story or a moment that has been impactful enough to radicalize you, yet, but if you look around, you might find you’re living in it.

Look, I know you want to take that sweet VC money and impossible expectations and build your very own AI app that is actually just cheap calls to OpenAI. I get it.

Has unlimited VC money and ad-supported business models enabled really useful free software, services, and games to be available to billions of people? No question.

Have we maybe got enough of it/gone too far with it and now people’s cars and phones are tracking them to the last abortion clinic for 500 miles and back? For sure.

So, yeah, I get it. That’s how VC works. That’s the California dream. The odds are low, but the payoff could be enormous. It probably won’t be, but it could be life-changing.

But to who?

And by ignoring what else?

It’s one thing to see this sex-criminal kleptocrat president as an opportunity to take advantage of chaotic de-regulation and acceleration-ism.

It’s another to be a human being about it, to understand that we are 100% locked on this rock, together, to come back to the baseline, to make sure — at the very least — that we have made our people and systems as resilient as we can before leaping into the great unknown.

(narrator: they are not currently resilient)

I understand we’ve each got our own lived experience and opinion of the world, and we’re all on a wide spectrum of wondering and worrying about what the world thinks of us, but I’ve also got bad news:

Even without a Nazi-in-Chief, even without AI Agents or locally-hosted LLMs, without residential solar or truly magical GLP’s, everything is moving, very, very quickly.

Everything except our ethics and institutions, that is.

Even you, working remotely on the corner of Sand Hill Road, can feel what’s happening.

You think your finger is on the pulse of tech but your six year old is on RedNote or some other spying app and every once in a while you feel like you’re not actually in control, here.

That maybe a private firefighter service won’t come save you.

That maybe roads and trains don’t need to actually turn a profit.

Watch Duty, on the other hand, is intentional in not only its why, but also in its how. It is intentional from its code of conduct to what it doesn’t include.

“All information is vetted for quality over quantity,” Mills told The Verge. “We have a code of conduct for reporters. For example, we never report on injuries or give specific addresses. It’s all tailored with a specific set of criteria. We don’t editorialize. We report on what we have heard on the scanners.”

“It’s the antithesis of what a lot of tech does,” Merritt says. “We don’t want you to spend time in the app. You get information and get out.”

This last bit may seem particularly insane for you if your entire business model (lol) is predicated on eyeball time.

You know, when your neighborhood is on fire and those same fires move a football field every second, nobody wants your version of Stories.

If you want to spend your limited time here — where exactly zero days after this one are guaranteed — taking shots at a glorious, wildly profitable teach future, this is probably the wrong blog for you, unless you’re ready to make like MacKenzie Scott and shoot your wealth out of a t-shirt cannon until it’s gone.

I’m just saying.

You cannot expect the kind of goodwill Watch Duty has so rightfully earned by operating exclusively on the bleeding edge, however much, sure, longevity drugs and fusion sound cool.

You can, however, build goodwill that compounds by catalyzing change around existing systemic and frankly stupid own-goal problems that simply because of the attack surface could snowball into massive changes and maybe even a stamp with your face or something, later.

You can keep trying to create solutions for problems that only exist for Marc Andreesen, or you can, right now, kickstart Compound Action from years and decades of people simply not being in fucking poverty.

You could read my man Issac Saul’s ideas for staffing up immigration administration by a factor of a thousand and then, I don’t know, just fucking bootstrap it.

You could spend your piles of gold and years of slick tech marketing experience to advocate in whatever obnoxious way is most effective for child tax credits and paid leave in your state.

You could be the shock and awe for so many health department workers, approaching them with humility for their hard-earned experience but also for their lack of resources.

You could simply ask, “How can I help?”

Could you do all of this today and get hit by a fucking F-950 tomorrow like the rest of us? For sure. And even more so:

Have you ever used a poorly-designed government website or non-profit’s app and thought, “How can they possible operate like this? I am among the best in the world at UX and even I can’t figure this out.”

I HAVE EXCELLENT NEWS.

“We decided to take a human-centered approach to the information problem,” Mills, told Silicon Valley Dot Com, his voice frayed by fatigue. While governments release important facts during a crisis, “no one was really thinking about user experience.”

That could be you!

But, a warning: you should not go into this with the intention or expectation of a writeup in, say, SiliconValley.com.

However many millions of people genuinely can use your help, your contribution might not seem immediately so sexy, or even be applicable most of the time.

Your app or tool or backend or UX or straight cash will probably never get an article in The Hollywood Reporter (and during Oscar season! In this economy?!) You would not be unique.

While this is perverse and stupid, you should know how things work. Because knowing this, you could just…change your values. Crazy! I know. But if you can change your values for empathy and then literally code them into this new work, you could help make empathy the operating system for many, many more systems.

And isn’t that better than a trophy? Do you REALLY need that TechCrunch writeup?

“We view what we are doing as a public service,” says Merritt to The Verge. “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’m not saying you should only operate in your backyard, or only buy treated bed nets in Malaria.

But you almost certainly shouldn’t start a new organization, and again, whether it’s down the street or if you’re helicoptering in, you should operate with humility for the people most affected, the people doing the work, and especially when those overlap.

You almost certainly shouldn’t start a new organization, because there are so many out there already doing what’s needed, but who just need some fucking resources.

But also, sometimes, there’s a gap.

Sometimes there’s not yet a straight-forward, no bullshit, wildfire tracking app that requires 1) Someone who understands what it means to be scared shitless for a lack of information and 2) How to fix it.

Someone who’s, then, uniquely suited to say, “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself” or “If anybody’s gonna do this, it should be me.”

From ProPublica to The 19th, from apps that help you connect to a doula, midwife, or nurse during pregnancy or postpartum, GPS maps that track dark overfishing or (actual government apps) that expedite solar approvals, digital COVID vaccine cards and Capital B, the world is actually bursting with apps, tools, and IRL services that are drastically more representative of the people affected than most of what we see marketed to us.

You may not feel like so many of the world’s systemic problems apply to you, but I promise, if you spend a day reading to cancer kids, at an endless series of city council meetings arguing for literally one mural from one up-and-coming Black painter, or trying to understand (best wishes, warmest regards) why exactly your school district can’t just slap a bunch of solar panels on the roof and call it a day, because of the dark money funding NIMBY-transmission pushback on Facebook, you will understand — truly, what the fuck, and also — wait, I think I can help here.

Would you rather have millions of parents go “Your app saved our family from being burned to ashes last night” or “Your free-to-play game facilitated my child’s relationship with a predator.” It’s actually your call!

The payoff won’t be nearly as much wealth, but again like Mackenzie Scott or the Watch Duty crew, you could use your skills and/or wealth and do it both out of the goodness of your own heart, AND out of spite.

As Mills put it to THR, “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 shit.”

We need you now and we will need you always.

Compound Action got us here, and it’ll build a better future. But we have to operate on the baseline, to attack the causes of our self-inflicted problems, not just live for the dramatic rescues or far-fetched 10x returns.

Like any good charity, it seems like Watch Duty CEO Mills would rather be out of business.

“If we don’t make drastic changes,” he said, “Watch Duty will continue to top the App Store charts every summer. That’s a victory for no one.”

— Quinn