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Hello hot people- if you are receiving this, it is because you signed up for/attended a Drinks First event. If you’re lucky, I send this out once a month (it’s usually less lol)… Give me a chance before you choose to unsubscribe, and if you do- I’d love to know why you hate me and want to see me fail xx <3 p.s. you can pay to support my work (aka health insurance) xx
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FINAL SUMMER TENNIS PARTY
We are so excited for our final installment (this summer) of our beloved tennis party with Advantage Tennis and LVBL. Think open bar, tennis (for all skill levels), music, and new friends. We accept all levels and provide equipment!
Sign up for text updates if you don’t want to miss our ticket drop
SEPTEMBER…
Mark your calendars and sign up for texts (or text us at +1 424.498.8700) because we are dropping our next BIG nightlife event (invite only) for September 1st… it’s going to be a good one ;)
Anthropic is paying up to $400,000 for a marketing events lead. OpenAI is offering $250,000 for an enterprise field events lead. a16z’s New Media arm wants an events partner for $250,000. Nvidia is paying $431,000 for a developer community manager.
The highest-valued companies on earth, the ones building the technology that’s supposed to replace human labor, are paying more for people who can get a room full of strangers to actually talk to each other than they are for a lot of engineers.
That’s not an accident and it’s not going away.
AI can write the copy, build the deck, generate an outreach list, and summarize notes. What it can’t do is walk into a room and make forty strangers feel like they’re at the right party. It can’t read a room going flat and fix it in real time. It can’t build the kind of trust that makes someone say yes to showing up somewhere they’ve never been, with people they’ve never met, based on nothing but a vibe you created. As the internet gets more automated and more synthetic, the thing that stays scarce is a human who can produce a real room. That scarcity is what’s showing up in these salaries.
Here’s what’s funny about it- companies are throwing quarter-million-dollar offers at “events lead” like it’s a new job category. It isn’t. It’s an old skill wearing a new job title, and most of the people qualified to do it were never on anyone’s radar because they were doing it for free, or for a cut of the bar, or because they were the person who always ended up planning the thing.
I had been doing it for free, and now I do it for money, for a real adult job. I was the kid that snuck out to a club in the meatpacking district at 17, the girl who was social chair of the party sorority in college, and after a 5-year long stint in tech- I went full time on Drinks First 2 years ago. I’ve been running a community for seven years and producing events professionally for five. Drinks First is a bootstrapped, profitable, six-figure business that took off because of events specifically. I’ve thrown nearly 100 events at this point. There’s a theory that it takes 10,000 hours to become genuinely good at something, so consider me an expert at this point- or rather the term my friends lovingly call me… “Party Barbie”.
I bring this up because the events and community boom happening right now. A $400K salary is a strange thing to see next to the word “events” and many will assume that the job is picking a venue and a playlist. It isn’t. It’s understanding why a room works or doesn’t, what makes a stranger stay past the first drink, and how to build something people will pay to be part of again. That’s not a skill you pick up because the job market shifted. It’s a skill you build by throwing the party nobody paid you to throw, then the one that barely broke even, then the one that finally worked, over and over, for years.
There is also a difference between an event producer and someone who curates a room. A producer can book the venue, manage the AV, load in the furniture, and get you a beautiful, functional space. That’s a real skill and I’m not knocking it, but it’s closer to what a wedding planner does: execute a single, contained, one-time thing well. Curating a room is a different job. It means you’re responsible for the people in it, not just the setup around them. You’re reading who needs an introduction, who’s about to leave because they don’t know anyone, who’s the connector in the group and should be seated near the door instead of hidden in the back. You’re managing a community that changes every time it gathers, not a static guest list. Nobody teaches that in an events certification. You learn it by doing it badly a few hundred times.
There’s a version of this you only understand once you’ve thrown enough events yourself: you can’t go to anyone else’s party anymore without seeing the seams. You clock the moment the energy drops and know exactly which decision caused it. You notice the seating that accidentally isolated three people, or the one detail, a fan, a snack, a chair in the shade, that mattered more than the six-figure production around it. I wrote about watching that play out at Cannes:
where brands spent millions on spectacle and lost to a company handing out $135 fans. Once you’ve run the room yourself, you stop watching events like a guest. You watch them like a guest-centric operator, which means you’re always asking whether the person at the edge of the room is having a good time, not just whether the room looks good in photos.
That instinct is also where the actual differentiator lives, and it’s not something you can hire an AV company or a venue to replicate. It’s being a connector (not in the linkedin sense) in the literal sense of noticing two people in a room who have no reason to know each other exist and putting them together anyway.
I was at someone else’s party this summer, talking to an older woman standing alone at the bar who turned out to run marketing for an NFL team. She wasn’t the obvious center of the room. Earlier that night I’d also been talking to someone doing art direction for Bad Bunny who mentioned in passing that she wanted to get more into sports. Later that night, I put the two of them together when I caught them in the near vicinity. Neither of them would have crossed paths otherwise, and now they’re working on a project together.
That instinct doesn’t turn off outside of work either. My childhood best friend and my college best friend, two people from completely different parts of my life, ended up living together and are incredibly close because I introduced them. Inside Drinks First specifically- I’ve watched people meet at our events and end up married. I’ve watched our events become the reason two people’s relationship started at all. Even I have met people romantically, business-wise, and friendship-wise through my own events. None of that is something you can put in a job description, but it’s exactly the thing that makes a room worth paying for. Anyone can rent a space and hire a bartender- being the person who can read a room full of strangers and know who should be talking to whom, is the part that’s actually rare. Combine that with someone who can also produce, host, and hold a community together over years- and that’s what is worth a $400k salary.
That’s also why Drinks First stopped being just nightlife a while ago. The parties are still there, and I still know how to throw one that works. But you have to meet people where they are at- and as we grow older and our interests change, so do the ways we want to meet people. That’s what pushed us into wellness and into building an actual retreat this year. It wasn’t a pivot so much as an admission that a single night out was never the whole appetite. People don’t just want a room for two hours. They want an ecosystem they can keep buying into: the happy hour mixer, the tennis party, the 3000 person nightlife event, the weekend away. Planning a multi-day trip is a different order of difficulty than planning a party. A bad party ends and everyone goes home to their own bed, a bad trip means you’re stuck managing group dynamics, logistics, and everyone’s expectations for three straight days with nowhere to retreat to. If you can hold a room for a weekend, you can hold a room for anything.
Frankly, that range is also why companies started paying me for my brain instead of my guest list. Over the past couple of years I’ve quietly consulted for a handful of companies trying to figure out their own version of this: a venture fund, a dating app, a lifestyle and beauty brand. The pattern is the thing worth noticing- these are companies with real budgets and real marketing teams still came to someone who’s spent years actually running a room, because saying you want community is not the same as knowing how to build one. I will say though, the differentiator between me and another event producer is typically my background in tech. There is tremendous value in understanding how a corporate environment works and is structured, while also having the ability to work with flexible agility from being a founder. P.s. interested in our consulting? email guestlist@drinksfirst.co
My first Drinks First event wasn’t a strategy. It was a panel at Ludlow House, right as New York was climbing back out of COVID, built on favors and a handful of influencer friends who said yes. Ludlow House liked it enough to ask us back. That’s it, that’s the founding moment. Not a business plan, not a market analysis, just a room that worked once and got invited to work again.
Getting asked back is the whole business. If you strip away everything else- every format we run now exists because some version of it worked once and someone wanted more of it. The dinners exist because a table of twenty single strangers turned out to be a better format for actual conversation than a room of a hundred. The bigger nightlife parties exist because sometimes people don’t want intimacy, they want energy, and you have to know which night calls for which. Spark Sessions exists because I noticed people wanted a space outside of alcoholic settings to connect. None of that was obvious in advance. It came from paying attention to which rooms people didn’t want to leave and building more of exactly that.
Sponsors started showing up once the formats stopped being one-offs and became something repeatable, something they could put their name on more than once and trust it would land the same way twice. That’s the part that actually makes this a business instead of a very consuming hobby. Anyone can throw one good party off pure instinct and adrenaline. Being asked back, again and again, for five years, by venues and brands and the same people who keep buying tickets, means the instinct became a system. That system is the actual product. It’s just invisible until you’ve watched someone try to build it from scratch and fail, because they hired a producer when what they needed was someone who understood the room.
So when I see a company willing to pay $400,000 for someone who can do this, I don’t read it as a surprising headline. I read it as the market finally pricing in something that people like me have been doing for free… then for a few hundred dollars a head… then (for the lucky few) being able run it as an actual business- years before anyone thought to put a job title and a salary band on it. The skill was never rare because it’s new. It’s rare because almost nobody sticks with the unglamorous, expensive, and often-embarrassing process of learning it long enough to get good.
Tennis part 6
We had to kick people out of the bubble and then everyone was at bars until 3am on a thursday… so yeah, that’s all. be sure not to miss our next and final one of the summer:
things I actually care to push because I genuinely like them.
*I may make some commission if you use my link/code*
MYODETOX
I have gone through quite a few injuries in my lifetime- including tearing my ACL earlier this year. I opted not to get surgery, and instead have gone a holistic route. What does this mean- I have gone through months of PT, massage, chiro, acupuncture, contrast therapy, etc. And the best PT/Chiro I have experiences has been at MYODetox. They believe in “Future Proofing” your body. I can’t tell you it’s cheap, but if you are suffering or looking to improve- I can’t recommend it enough.
Use my code ARIANA50 for $50 off here.
MEALPAL
I literally eat lunch out everyday and MealPal has made it so easy for me to eat healthy and for way less money (also I get to try new places!)
Here is my referral
OTHERSHIP
You may already know how much we love Othership.
Use code “DRINKSFIRST” for a 15% discount
A SPECIAL DRINKS FIRST MEMBERSHIP (2x a month for $84)
For first timers: a 2-for-1 special
BLADE
The other day I saw it cost over $300 to get to JFK in the rain. Skip all that- take a BLADE helicopter - use code “ARIANA” for $50 off.
THERAPIE
Therapie Clinic for Med Spa Needs (I go for Laser Hair Removal): Code- ARIANA10 and use this link to check out other offers!
OPEN
I am NOT a woo woo wellness girly but I’mm so bought in to Open. I did a breath and sound class @op_e___n in Santa Monica / Venice in Los Angeles and it took me on a JOURNEY!
If you cant make it to their studio- im truly obsessed with their app. use my code ARIANAOPEN30 for a free 30 day trial.
KINDRED
So many people ask how I travel so much. The answer is Kindred- a members only home swapping app. If you have your own place, I highly recommended checking it out. I know it cant be nerve wrecking to host someone in your place- so use my code “ARI.NAT” for expedited review and 5 free credits.
FORA
I went on a side quest to become a travel agent earlier this year, now I do all my (and my close friends vacation bookings). It costs nothing to use a travel agent, and you get the best rates and perks. If you have something you want to book- email ariana.nathani@fora.travel or if you’re interested in the industry, check out Fora using my link ($50 off your membership).
SPENCER’S SPA
This chic as hell spa in SoHo is one of the best resets you can do for yourself. I loved the 60 min facial and the massages always hit. Try it for yourself- use code DRINKSFIRST for $50 off.
SHOPMY
Just my favorite products (travel, beauty, etc.)
BENTO
I rent my clothes from BNTO and I love the styles they have, I always get complimented on what I’m wearing. Use code “NNQSUK” (expires aug 31) for $20 credit!
EMPOWER
You’re still paying full prices for Uber? Please… This weekend when it was monsooning I paid $18 on empower to go to tribeca when uber was $70. Here’s my referral code: 5MW6WQ
<3 That’s all for you freeloaders xx
Now… enough of all that serious talk. Paid subs- Time for my rapid fire recs:
These are the things, places, etc. I’m loving right now.
Date Night: Dandelion
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