Attention is all you need | Alexandria

Alexandria<br>Attention is all you need<br>Rohan Kumar on using social media for fun and profit<br>By Aadil Pickle<br>Jun 2026

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 shorts[1] 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.

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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...