The Room Where it Happens

One of my investors and mentors has shared with me before that her goal in life is "to be in the room where it happens." She has achieved a remarkable degree of success by most conventional measures, financial and otherwise, and she doesn't seem particularly interested in what more money would buy her. What she wants is proximity, to watch things happen, and occasionally, to nudge them.

For a long time I heard this as a kind of elegant ambition, just something successful people say after they've already won the other games. This week in Columbus I stumbled into a much less elegant version of it, and found myself in that "room where it happens."

SparkPlug, my startup, works with licensed cannabis dispensaries. We help businesses with trade promotion management, which sits in a weird regulatory crease: technical enough to matter, niche enough that most agencies would rather not think about it. For a few weeks we'd been trading polite emails with Ohio's Department of Cannabis Control that were going nowhere in particular.

So we joined a state trade association and hired ourselves a lobbyist. That, more or less, is how it works. The day after the invoice cleared, a meeting with the agency's superintendent appeared on the calendar.

The trade association is run by a man who, until about eighteen months ago, was the deputy superintendent of the agency we had flown in to meet. He very much seemed to enjoy walking back through the door he used to sit behind, warmly greeting the receptionist who used to work for him.

My cofounder and I prepped like we were defending a dissertation. Research, printed collateral, talking points, and big boy suits so we'd look appropriately serious.

The meeting itself was uneventful in the way important meetings usually are. Small talk, a whiteboard nobody used, some careful language about how the agency was "double clicking" on our category. Everyone very chummy, everyone on a first-name basis with our lobbyist, who introduced us around the room with the ease of a man who used to run the place.

I kept waiting for the part where we had to convince someone of something, but that part never quite came.

The next afternoon the trade association held its monthly event at a nice social club in Columbus. Pizza, cocktails, a standing crowd of regulators and operators debating some arcane labeling rule that was about to come up for comment. The people writing the rules and the people following them, all sharing a drink and asking about one another's kids.

This is what pay-to-play looks like, if you're wondering. It looks like 2pm cocktail hour.

I knew most of this in the abstract, but this week I got to watch it in full color.

Congress writes laws, and the laws are usually broad enough to drive a truck through. The actual regulations, the ones that can fine you or shut your business down, get written later by unelected bureaucrats inside agencies most Americans couldn't name, sitting in buildings most Americans will never go to. A statute might run twenty pages, but the rules implementing it can run two thousand. The law makes the news; the rules run your life.

And those rules get written by people who spend their entire working lives inside one industry, getting very good at a very narrow thing. That expertise is genuinely the point. You want the person writing FAA pilot fatigue rules to know what a red-eye does to a human nervous system. You want the person writing food safety regs to understand what temperature kills salmonella.

The trouble, if it is trouble, is that the expertise is so specialized that the people qualified to write the rules and the people who understand them well enough to operate under them are more or less the same pool of people, trading chairs every few years. After enough laps through the revolving door, the line between regulator and regulated gets a little soft around the edges.

None of this is a cannabis thing. The FDA works this way. So does the SEC, the FCC, the USDA, and every other alphabet-soup agency you can name. Every regulated industry in America has its own version of the Tuesday night I just described, happening under bad fluorescent light in some social club or hotel bar in some state capital, over pizza and martinis.

When people talk about the deep state, I suspect this is much closer to what they're circling than anything actually sinister. Governance got too complicated for elected officials to handle directly, so the work got delegated to unelected career experts who spend decades building relationships with the industries they oversee.

Of course, it's not what you know, it's who you know.

The more interesting question is what happens after the cocktail hour ends. Because somebody, somewhere, does the work. Somebody takes the vibe of a standing conversation at a social club in Columbus and turns it into a sentence in a draft rule. Somebody decides which comment letters to read carefully and which to skim. Somebody decides whose questions get a real answer and whose get a form response.

There is a lot of quiet mediation between "we all seemed to agree this was reasonable" and "here is a regulation you can get fined for violating," and my strong suspicion is that most of it happens between people having Monday night dinners and texting each other memes.

I came out of the week without a clean conclusion, but a much sharper interest in what happens next.

Corrupt is the wrong word. Familiar is closer, maybe. The system works because these people know each other. The system also works for these people because they know each other.

I am now one of those people. An industry insider with an on-call lobbyist. The entry cost was a trade association check and a flight to Columbus.

My investor was right that the room matters, but she didn't mention how fast the door opens once you're willing to pay up.

Up and to the right.