if you can throw a good party, you can start a company.

if you can throw a good party, you can start a company. and knowing how to throw a good party is more critical to starting a company than virtually any other skill. and that's because the magic lies in a specific configuration of people coming together at a specific moment in time with a certain song playing, the right drinks, the right lighting and the right words said. starting a company is an incantation. okay look, we know humans to be tremendously malleable to circumstance, tremendously responsive to circumstance. ie, when you change people's defaults, their preferences change en masse. when you change what you tell people to focus on, they're capable of extraordinary acts of ignorance. a nice man working for an evil corporation will do terrible things, whereas a sociopath in a healthy society will go on to become a life saving surgeon. yet it's weird, right? because the world doesn't feel malleable. if you've ever tried to change literally anything, you've tried to add a bike lane, change the dominant lemonade flavor, you you know what I mean. so how can we reconcile these two things? that people are tremendously malleable when it comes to their environment, and yet the world as a whole seems not malleable at all. i posit they're unified by the people arranger theory. that humans are highly, highly responsive to the institutions around us. humans are like flighty electrons buffeted by the invisible force fields of incentive that institutions create. institutions are mostly people. if you seek to change the world, you seek to change institutions. and if you seek to change institutions, you seek to change people. that means you have to get a bunch of people to fight against the force field, to sail into the wind, against the wind. I don't know how to sail. to go against the incentive structure. you can never really do that long term. you cannot move someone forever. but you can turn their head for a moment. at a specific moment in time. thus, the party. the momentary arrangement of people. that makes change possible. the truth is, the company is like a ship of theseus. if too many people leave and are replaced, it's just a new company. people arrangers are the rarest people. and good and kind pirate captains and people arrangers are the rarest of all.