Attention is all you need
Rohan Kumar on using social media for fun and profit
By Aadil Pickle · Jun 2026
Rohan’s job title is “Vice President of Content Strategy” at Night Media. In the streets, though, they call him "the Rick Rubin of brainrot". His day is split between scrolling Instagram reels in conversations, teaching marketing execs what “clipping” is, then looking at their content to see if the vibes are off. He’s a master and a scholar of the game, because his brain is so rotted I couldn’t talk to him for more than 30 seconds at a time. Most of the time he’d get bored, pull out his phone, respond to some texts, then scroll reels for two minutes before moving onto something else. I asked Lenny, his coworker and friend since middle school, if Rohan pisses people off. “Only when he’s on his phone,” he responded. And Rohan did piss me off, but it’s hard to argue with the methods if you look at his results. He was behind the viral stunt with Ramp where they put Kevin from the Office in a glass box for 24 hours to manually process business expense receipts. Over 100 million people saw it on all platforms and they're now the poster child for making enterprise software cool again. He joined MrBeast as the 30th employee to work on short-form videos back when their TikTok only had a million followers, then grew it to over 100 million during his four years there. Most of their viral shorts still follow formats made by Rohan and his team.
Photo: Nick Dybel
You can make something good
Farza Majeed on bringing your ideas to life
By Aadil Pickle · Apr 2026
I was 18 when the pandemic started. Each day, I locked myself in my room playing League of Legends and reading about startups, occasionally coming out for meals and to take a piss. No one at my high school seemed to have ambitions beyond getting into a good university and securing a decent 9-5, so I alienated myself from them. In March I made a Twitter account, hoping for a place to meet other people interested in tech and startups. That’s where I first learned of Farza. He’s best known for starting Buildspace, an alternative school to help people make their dreams a reality. Anyone who’s passed through their program knows that’s not just a marketing line. Someone joined with only $18,000 to their name. Another was driving Uber to support himself. Both of them met at Buildspace, decided to start a company together, and now have millions in revenue.
Engineering Feelings
Donald Jewkes on telling Silicon Valley's stories
By Aadil Pickle · Mar 2026
Silicon Valley is obsessed with storytelling right now. Founders are dropping six figures on launch videos pre-product. A16z new media is hiring the best twitter posters to help their PortCos with comms. AI can write code ten times better than it can a blog post. Building things is cheap, so software engineers are getting laid off, but attention is all you need so LA and NYC creatives are being imported in droves. A filmmaker friend joked that “San Francisco is a patch of grass and I’m a lawn mower.” In this era where attention is currency, there’s no one who thrives more than Donald. He’s an engineer turned filmmaker who's worked with Cursor, Physical Intelligence and Meter. But he’s been behind the scenes for around 20 other startups over the years, influencing their creative direction, brand or launch videos in some way. There’s no point in building the future if you don’t tell anyone about it, so his goal is to decipher the weird yet incredible world of Silicon Valley and spread its stories to the masses. I spent a week with him to tell the storyteller's story. Somehow, he got me to talk most of the time even though I was the one writing about him, and saw him do the same to everyone else. He pulled dialogue out of a camera-shy roboticist with ease and prompted an AI researcher to excitedly rant about why now is the best time to move to San Francisco. He’s really damn good at getting people to talk, but somewhat quiet himself. I couldn’t help but think he was subtly influencing my narrative as I was trying to form it.
You can't lose if you never quit
Declan Gessel on building businesses as an ultramarathon runner
By Aadil Pickle · Feb 2026
You can tell a lot about how someone approaches life by watching them play pickup basketball. Playing with Declan is like having a golden retriever on your team. He jumps for every rebound. Sprints to save the ball any time it's going out of bounds. Shoots the ugliest jump shot and having faith it'll go in. Always asking for tips to improve. Always smiling. He's given me a black eye and sprained ankle during our runs, but it's impossible to get mad at him because he's always so positive. Declan's a quiet force of nature. He owns an antique Porsche but daily drives his Tesla. He lives in a 2b2b apartment with no roommates that I could only describe as a real estate agent's wet dream. He's run multi-million dollar businesses with no outside investment, and currently runs his own company called SLAM. He's also only 23. You'll never hear him brag about any of it, nor is he a niche internet micro-celebrity, because he's too busy making what he wishes existed in the world: a studio that churns out awesome physical products made by people doing what they love.
Do the dirty work
Jasmine Sun on writing and doing everything to win
By Aadil Pickle · Feb 2026
Jasmine is an independent journalist covering Silicon Valley tech and culture. That's the tight one-liner she'll tell you if you ever meet her and ask what she does. What she won't tell you is the million other lives she lives that seem to all perfectly culminate into that one liner. There's writer Jasmine, who spends 2-4 days buried in a post until it's published. "It's going to be really boring following me around. I'm really just at my laptop all day." In the words of a close friend:
Training the Idea Muscle
Riley Walz on creating viral internet pranks
By Aadil Pickle · Dec 2025
Riley describes himself simply as a guy who likes to do things he finds fun. But to the New York Times, he's known as "The Tech Jester Who Pranks San Francisco". He's responsible for projects like: But before any of his projects went mega viral, before he started getting thousands of dollars in Twitter payouts and job offers from the top AI companies in San Francisco, before he had an army of reporters pleading to write about anything he does — he was just a kid dreaming of building B2B SaaS apps. I met him five years ago. My first impression of him, after he showed me his fake Twitter profile that got a blue checkmark by exploiting their verification system's leniency for political candidates, was "Wow, this guy's weird. I like him." Years later, when he showed me a fake street sign he put up outside the Louis Vuitton store, my impression was "Wow, this guy's probably going to jail someday."