Anton Wirjono has been DJing for over twenty years and building businesses alongside it. When I asked him what carries over between the two, he didn’t pause.
“You’re always reading the room,” he said. “That’s the whole job.”
It sounds like a cliche until he unpacks it. A DJ doesn’t just execute a set—they watch. Is the crowd building or flatlining? Are people dancing or checking their phones? The track list is provisional. You throw it out when the room calls for it. The skill is attention, not taste.
Anton brings the same instinct to business. When a campaign or product isn’t landing, he doesn’t push harder—he pays attention to why. He described watching founders stay committed to their original plan well past the point where the feedback was obvious. “It’s the DJ equivalent of playing hard techno to a room that came for R&B,” he said. “You’re technically doing your job. Nobody’s dancing.”
The mixing analogy runs deeper than you’d expect. Individual tracks can be good and still not work together—key clashes, tempo mismatches, energy that doesn’t build. He’s seen the business version of this play out more than once: every function performing well on its own, the whole thing still falling apart because nobody was talking to each other. Product builds something marketing can’t explain. Sales promises what product didn’t make. “You’ve heard that track,” he said.
Timing is the part he’s most honest about. The drop is the obvious example from DJing—too early kills the buildup, too late and you’ve lost the moment. In business, he thinks about timing constantly and still gets it wrong. “I’ve launched too early and I’ve sat on things too long,” he said. No formula, just accumulated judgment and still imperfect.
What strikes me about talking to Anton is that he doesn’t romanticize the parallels. He’s not arguing that DJing secretly teaches you everything you need for business. He’s describing specific situations where the same reflex applied: staying calm when the equipment failed at a festival, figuring out how to work with what he had while three minutes ticked by. Most people in the crowd didn’t notice. He thinks about that when something goes wrong with a client or a launch. You can’t prepare for the exact crisis. You can only build the habit of not falling apart when conditions aren’t what you planned for.
One thing he returns to is the question of identity. He has a sound. It’s not always what a crowd wants. He’s had nights where he could have chased what the room wanted and chose not to. His reasoning isn’t principled in a grand way—it’s practical. Drift far enough from what you’re known for, and you’re nobody’s first call anymore. He applies the same logic to business: he’s turned down work that would have required him to operate in ways that didn’t fit what he’s built. The short-term money wasn’t worth what he’d have to become to get it.
“You dilute yourself,” he said, “and you become nobody’s first choice.”
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