The Nature of Companies

A company is not a person. This sounds obvious, but the implications run deeper than most people realize.

When you're building something - a business, a brand, an organization - there's a liberating truth hiding in plain sight: no single person ever has to agree with the whole thing. They don't need to buy into your vision, your values, your mission statement, or your five-year plan. They just need to agree with one specific thing you're offering them at one specific moment.

Your customer doesn't need to love your company. They need to love this product, right now, for their particular use case. Your investor doesn't need to believe in everything you stand for. They need to believe this bet, at this valuation, makes sense for their portfolio. Your employee doesn't need to drink the Kool-Aid. They need to find their role interesting enough, compensated well enough, and aligned enough with their current life situation.

This is profoundly different from personal relationships, where we seek holistic acceptance. We want our friends to know us, to get us, to accept the whole package. We feel hurt when someone likes parts of us but not others. But a company isn't asking to be known. It's offering a series of discrete transactions, each of which can be evaluated on its own terms.

The practical power of this understanding is enormous. You stop trying to convince everyone of everything. You stop needing universal buy-in. Instead, you recognize that a company is more like a constellation than a single star - a collection of individual points of light that different people connect in different ways.

Some people will see your company as the solution to their immediate problem and nothing more. Good. Others will see it as a career opportunity that fits their current chapter. Good. Still others might see it as a mission they deeply believe in. Also good. None of these perspectives is more correct than the others. None of these people needs to see what the others see.

This is why companies can contain contradictions that would tear a person apart. A company can simultaneously serve customers who hate each other. It can employ people with opposing political views. It can have investors with conflicting theories about where the market is heading. Each of these relationships exists on its own terms, evaluated by its own criteria.

The entity you're building exists separately from any individual's perception of it. It's an abstraction, a legal fiction, a collection of agreements and expectations. And that abstraction has a kind of freedom that no individual person possesses - the freedom to be different things to different people, without any of those identities being false.

Understanding this changes how you build. You stop trying to create a monolithic thing that everyone must accept wholesale. Instead, you focus on each individual point of contact, each transaction, each relationship. You make each one work on its own terms. And somehow, from all those individual yeses, an entity emerges that is greater than any of its parts - precisely because it was never constrained by needing to be one coherent thing in any single mind.

The company exists in the spaces between people, in the aggregate of all those individual agreements. No one has to hold it all in their head. No one has to believe in all of it. They just have to say yes to their particular piece. And from those fragments, something whole is built.