On the Record With Roger Mondrane

For a week, I lived in this unassuming hotel on the outskirts of Madrid. That hotel room became my home. At one point, I realized I can’t quite remember what it was like to not live here. I know that sounds dramatic, but I kid you not, every day felt like a year in that building. I got used to eating yogurt from with a knife in the middle of the night, somehow always too busy and/or tired to find a spoon. Vince was on a straight diet of canned salmon and rotisserie chicken stuffed in his mini fridge. In one short week, during Semana Santa, we built two worlds and shot two films.

On the Record With Roger Mondrane is out today. You can watch it here.

A few months ago, Edmund rang me and said he wants to make a film as a brand push for Superposition. We were a week out from being on set for another production in Madrid, so I said ‘sick, let’s do it, but we have two options: a) we do this in a few months, or b) we do this right now by tagging on to the production we already have in place’.

The next day, Edmund and I got on a call where I got the opportunity to learn more about him, his sources of inspiration, ways of making sense of the world, and ultimately how it all ties into what he’s creating with Superposition. 72h later, we had written an original screenplay. Fast forward a week, and we were on set, across four locations, for two full days of shooting.

To celebrate the big and beautiful process that was the making of this film, Edmund and I sat down to chat about it all. Here are some highlights from our conversation.

Watch the film

🌀 On the making of a narrative short film 🌀

Why make a film instead of a normal launch video?

“I’d rather not make a video at all than play it safe. It wasn’t a choice between making a default launch video or making something high-taste. It was: do we put our resources and attention into something that clears the bar of being opinionated and high-taste, or do we just not do it at all?”

Roger is this older billionaire. He’s far from you in reality, but with your essence encoded into the character. How did it feel watching a version of yourself come to life through him?

"Making him older actually makes it more compelling. You can imagine him as a branching-timeline future me, taking this distilled essence of my very strong views about how to hire. And I think that was a really good choice on your part: decoupling it from the obvious move of a default founder in their 20s or 30s, and fast-forwarding to this future state, but in a nonspecific timeline. It has this old-world aesthetic, but a future-looking protagonist."

You’ve said most launch videos fall flat. Why?

“Most founders suck at brand. Up until the launch video, they’ve never had to do any branding. At the early stage, even your landing page is a sales asset, not a marketing asset. So they treat the launch the same way and copy everyone else. But brand is zero-sum. You actually need to be differentiated and have your own point of view.”

At what stage does brand actually start to matter?

"Distribution is the last differentiated thing, and attention is zero-sum. The bar to build something that works is way lower now, and your product iterates faster than anything in history, so people aren't really buying the product today. They're betting that you can execute fast, and that you have the taste to be executing in the right direction. Brand is the clearest way you can communicate that taste."

What did making this film mean to you?

“I’ve really enjoyed this whole process of creating an actual piece of art. Not just a piece of collateral. And now we get to share it with everyone, beyond the group who came to the premiere.”

🌀 On Edmund & Superposition 🌀

You studied physics and philosophy, founded a theater company, before becoming a recruiter. That’s kinda weird, tell me more?

“I couldn’t choose between words and numbers, so I found a way to do both. When I wasn’t in the labs doing physics, I was directing Shakespeare. Then I went straight into recruitment, a weird thing for a physicist to do, admittedly, but I love selling. Recruitment is the hardest form of sales, because your product has an opinion.”

What’s the origin story of Superposition?

“I used the agent to recruit my co-founder, Li. He got a DM from me, and when we met up, I confessed it wasn’t actually from me, it was from the agent. Because he’s also a weirdo, he thought that was cool. That was the genesis of the company. We started building it together that day, on the coffee table.”

I find it interesting that you’re in a seemingly very competitive space, but as I’ve gotten to know you and what you’re building more, I actually don’t think that’s the case. What are your thoughts?

"All the companies I deeply admire are in surface-level, face-value crowded spaces, but they have a unique insight and are deeply opinionated. Take PostHog. There are thousands of analytics tools, and yet they captured everyone's attention with one opinionated view: that the people actually building the product should be the ones who care about the analytics. The first and only analytics tool for engineers. It's the same in our space. No one disagrees that recruitment is broken, but most people building here haven't been in the kitchen. They haven't done the job."

What makes this so hard to build?

"There's no ground truth in our domain. There's no golden dataset of how to recruit, because recruitment's been done so badly for so long. Most human recruiters suck. I can say that, I was great, and even I suck. So you can't reinforcement-learn your way out of it. You have to build it from first principles."

🌀 On culture, and being specific 🌀

You talk about culture as the operating system of a company. What does that mean?

“I’m opinionated on opinionated cultures. I don’t think there’s one correct culture. The companies that win are the ones who get very specific about theirs and have the right people opt in. The ones that stay in the middle of the road, that can’t articulate what it means to come work there, are the ones that will die. And now, anything you define about your culture gets ingested not just by the people who join, but by your agents too.”

If you had a microphone and every single person on planet Earth was listening, what would you say?

“Be specific. When I first moved to New York I was at drama school, and the teacher had studied under Sanford Meisner. ‘Be specific’ was what they wrote on the chalkboard at the start of every class. Get really crisp about who you are, who you aren’t, who you’re looking to attract, and what you’re actually building.”