Attention is all you need

Rohan Kumar on using social media for fun and profit

Photos by Nick Dybel

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 shorts¹ still follow formats made by Rohan and his team.

Everyone we met asked him how to grow their social media. We’d run into microcelebrities and each chat ended with “yo, we gotta shoot soon!” He tweeted about leaving MrBeast last year and had his DMs flooded with crypto companies offering multimillion-dollar contracts, but he just didn’t want to work with them. Being ex-MrBeast in media is like being ex-Jane Street or ex-OpenAI in tech. Everyone wants to work with you, and no matter what you charge, the company hiring you is getting a good deal.

Mandated MrBeast military service

I met Rohan on the bus to an investment firm’s retreat for the chronically online. He mentioned he was on four hours of sleep. I thought he still seemed energetic. “You know that special gene Donald Trump has where he can sleep five hours a night and still function? I just pretend I have that.”

He probably picked up that gene working at MrBeast. 120-hour weeks seemed like the expectation for anyone close to Jimmy, the CEO. He told a client, “It’s the most boring place in the world, so all you do is work. But you get to work on the coolest things ever.”

He met Jimmy through Colin and Samir, two guys who advise some of the world’s biggest YouTubers. Rohan originally wanted to model his career after Samir, since “he was another brown guy consulting brands on media” and interned for them throughout college. “They basically paid me $500 a month to scroll naturally and write down trends I was seeing. I was like their GenZ consultant.”

He had a contract in front of him to join full-time, but Samir had just met Jimmy and thought Rohan would learn more by working at Beast. So Rohan flew to Greenville, North Carolina for the interview during peak Covid, then had to quarantine for a week until Jimmy called him up.

“We talk for a bit then he asks me what I want to do. And I’m kind of thinking, “wait, you called me here. What do you need done?” But I realized he wanted an answer, so I basically told him his TikTok presence was shit. This was before people knew Tiktok would be big, like it was still kind of cringe at this point.”

“It’s funny I’m like the only person in this business who’s never been a creator. I just proposed a couple of ideas, said why I thought they would work, we shot and filmed some of them, then posted that week. They did alright and then he hired me.”

It was a little more complicated than that, but Rohan chronically undersells everything. Even when working with clients, he’ll never promise results. He’ll always say: “this is what we’re gonna do, this is why we think it’ll work, and it’ll do as well as it can.” I heard his colleague criticize another agency for promising someone 500k followers in six months. “You can’t guarantee stuff like that. It’s all up to the algo gods.”

Sometimes, Rohan describes his time at Beast like he was in the army: very structured and regimented, travelling the world yet never really getting to enjoy it, and his boss could blow up at any time. There was always the stress of, “why aren’t we growing faster? Why did we only get 1 million followers last month? Why wasn’t it 10 million?”

But it did open doors. I could see the dollar signs flash in his clients’ eyes when Rohan casually drops that he worked at Beast for four years. They instantly understand he’s one of the top 500 people in the world at getting people’s attention. If he can get someone to fly to Paris for a baguette and get 1.7 billion views on it, any brand stunt is doable.

Ask for what you want

Rohan’s always sliding into someone’s DMs. At Beast, they’d come up with video ideas by putting together rooms of college students and random people off the street to brainstorm for $20/hour. To network in college, he’d message at least ten people a day. One of his Instagram followers recognized him when we were at Erewhon.

A new-grad employee at Night Media asked him how he got to know so many people. Later he told me:

“I hate questions like that. Like, if you want to know more people, go talk to more people. Anything you want you can ask for it.”

A week earlier, Rohan saw a viral tweet (which I happened to tweet but he didn’t realize) for a tinned fish party:

Rohan was working on producing his own party the week I was there. I’d only ever thrown a party before; this was the first time I’d seen one produced. It felt similar to the work he did for clients, except he was the brand this time.

He had his chef friends making side dishes and sauces. He had his producer friends securing tableware and decor. He posted about it every day even though the guest list was already full and for friends only. Then he messaged 30 brands on Instagram with a Notion doc of what he was doing while namedropping which influencers would be attending. One brand gave him $500 and a bunch of free fish, another gave him a few bottles of wine, and a third gave him wholesale pricing on their caviar.

“Closed mouths don’t get fed!” Rohan yelled while filming a video about the sponsorship.

It looks like so much of Rohan’s success comes from just asking for it. I never thought I could just ask companies to pay me to throw a party with my friends. Maybe it’s only because Rohan’s friends are influencers and the party was in a mansion, but I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know what would happen if I tried the same thing, because I’ve never tried.

You gotta know a guy

Most of Rohan’s work is based off knowing a guy. I peeked at his screen once and saw 15 people named Sam² in his contacts. We counted 107 people on his Find My Friends and 84 in his iMessage that day. Watching him hop on calls, check the status of what his producers were doing, then giving next steps, I got the same feeling as watching an engineer in San Francisco delegating work to AI agents.

I kept suggesting he could use AI for research and outreach, but he said he’d rather just hire someone to use AI for him. His job revolves around knowing the right people and making them want to help him. It’s not like he has any particular technical skills in media; he could barely focus while editing a TikTok for 20 minutes. But he seemed to effortlessly get along with everyone we met. He didn’t study consumer trends in college, but by scrolling memes for 10 years, he has a reference for every client campaign.

Rohan understands that everyone has an invisible sign on their back that says “make me feel special” and moves through the world accordingly. Understanding that a friend was burnt out from pre-med and would enjoy being in video production isn’t something you can figure out with a few prompts, but that’s how Rohan hired his Production Assistant. He’ll get a chef friend to cater his party for free and have the chef thank him for it, because to them, it was a chance to practice running the operation instead of being a line cook.

“I’m both really good at knowing lots of people and also keeping people around for a long time. I’ve been working with AZ and Lenny for five years now.”

“I feel like people follow me because I’m really good at understanding the flow of money in the world so no one else has to worry about it.”

I got the feeling that Rohan maintained a lot of transactional relationships. I even wondered if he agreed to this profile just to have a “writer friend” in his pocket, or test-drive what it’d be like to have a personal assistant. But I don’t think he frames his relationships as transactional or non-transactional, they just are.

In fact, I don’t think he reflects on his life at all. Whenever I tried to dig at the deeper reason he was doing everything like money or fame, he’d get bored of the conversation and start scrolling. All I got out of him was, “If I don’t do stuff for a while I get bored. I love JRPGs. I quit Beast last year and played Fire Emblem for a month. Everything’s a video game, and I just like playing the game.”

Rohan has no hidden objective. He’s completely straight up about everything. If he’s not giving you his full attention, you can see it because he’s on his phone. When he’s talking with brands, he’ll pitch a budget that’s honest about how much it’ll cost, maybe with a 10-15% padding, then tell them straight up “the most expensive part of this is working with me” because he knows what to do and knows all the right people to do it. It’s less of a negotiation than it is “take it or leave it”. He has a million other things to do if that one deal falls through.

It makes me think of Marc Andreessen talking about how all great men of history didn’t sit around all day thinking about themselves.

“You don’t have any levels of introspection?”

Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible.

“Why?”

Marc: Move forward. Go!

Even though he’s busy all the time, he’s the only person I know who calls their parents every day. Even though he knows everyone in LA, he still spends most nights hanging out with his best friend Max³. He feels pretty grounded in a city full of people with their head in the clouds, probably because he always makes time for the people close to him.

He’s not lacking depth in his relationships because he’s not even thinking about it like that. He’s just hanging out with people he likes. If he wants something or they want something, they can just ask. He’s not trying to force anyone to stick around, but he’s good to the people that do.

I mentioned wanting to grow SF Alexandria’s Instagram presence, and Rohan’s been sending me reels for inspiration ever since. The fact that he cares enough to help me unprompted⁴, it makes me want to stick around.

Make what’s reel

On the flight back, I thought a lot about the future of this blog. I’m aiming to have more readers than the New York Times one day, but right now it’s just me writing these profiles. I see fully AI-written Substack publications with thousands of subscribers and can’t help but feel jealous. I do this for art rather than the algorithm, and I’m kind of shy about promoting it, but after the week with Rohan I’ve realized there’s no inherent quality in obscurity. People have to see something on social media, and I think I make good stuff, so why shouldn’t they see my work?

“At Beast the goal was simple. Just make videos that get the most views possible,” Rohan told me.

“Not the best?” I replied.

“I mean, is most viewed the best? I think about that all the time,” he reflected for a half second while texting someone.

Spending a week in the content factory made me realize all social media will eventually be either really good or really shitty. It’ll be either expensive and well produced cinema or an iPhone video with no script filmed by some farmer in Missouri that’ll get the most views.

Rohan would mention over and over that, “it’s about getting the right people in the right rooms and creating a situation for good content to happen.” Ronaldo walking by on a live stream would be planted just like painting someone into a wall to scare a streamer or rigging a desk to break so it could be clipped and reshared later on short-form.

Seeing how hard the entertainment industry works to get people addicted to their phones made me a little depressed. Some days I feel like I’m fooling myself putting my heart and soul into this blog. After all, no one reads anymore. Maybe I should start making TikToks or work for OpenAI.

Driving to the airport, Rohan pointed at a billboard. “I like the Lyft ads. Probably my favourite ad campaign recently. I feel like I actually check Lyft more now.”

“What do you like about it?” I asked him.

“They did something honest. They know they’re not the leader and they called it out. They’re meeting people where they’re at.”

Something about that is really motivating to me. If honest media stands out to someone whose job it is to understand content, maybe I should keep making it. Maybe it’s not fundamentally impossible to get people to read my work, maybe I just haven’t tried hard enough yet.

You can find Rohan here. DM him and tell him I sent you.

1. Rohan came up with “I Traded My Car at a Red Light” and “Would You Fly to Paris for a Baguette?”, two shorts that really outperformed compared to how much they spent. “Creativity saves money” was something Jimmy repeated a lot to his team.

2. It was actually really hard to keep track of all the names that weekend even though I have a biographer's memory, I met like 3 Zacks that week.

3. After the tinned fish party, when we were at Max's apartment, he told me, "I know it looks like Rohan has a lot of friends, but he's here pretty much every night."

4. Rohan sent me this text after I told him my draft was almost done.