On the Record with Roger Mondrane: The Film Behind Superposition

I'd rather not make a video at all than play it safe.

Most startups treat the launch video the same way they treat everything else: copy what everyone else did and hope it works. But brand is zero-sum. You actually need to be differentiated. You need your own point of view. And if you don't have one, the honest move is to not make a video at all, because a mediocre one actively damages you.

The bar to build a product that works is way lower now, and products iterate faster than anything in history. People aren't buying the product you have today. They're betting that you can execute fast and that you have the taste to execute in the right direction. Brand is the clearest way to communicate that taste.

So we partnered with the weirdos at JoCo to make a mockumentary that perfectly captures what Superposition is and why it exists: On the Record with Roger Mondrane. Watch it below.

If you haven't already, read Find Your Weirdos first. That's our manifesto on why hiring is broken. Here's how we turned that thesis into a film.

What is Superposition

We built an AI headhunter better at finding talent than any human recruiter. I know because I was one for years. Even the best human recruiters can't operate at the scale and precision this requires.

There's no golden dataset of how to recruit well. It's been done so badly for so long that you can't train on existing behavior and expect good outcomes. You have to build it from first principles. That's what we did with Superposition.

As our fictional character, Roger Mondrane, said: "You don't find your people by just looking for the best, whatever the hell that means. You find your people by knowing, precisely and painfully, who you are and what you are building."

That line is the entire thesis of Superposition compressed into two sentences.

The Superposition film premiere in NYC

We screened the film at Betaworks on June 18th to a room of founders, investors, and technologists. By the end of the night, people were debating whether Roger is right, quoting his lines back to each other over drinks. People who came expecting a product demo left talking about hiring philosophy.

That confirmed we made the right call.

The four lessons for founders

Roger is an older billionaire. He works as a branching-timeline future version of me, if everything I believe about hiring turns out to be correct and I spent forty years proving it.

The film is structured around four lessons Roger shares:

• Be specific.
• Generally good is not good enough.
• Find the right people. Your people.
• Ask the right damn question.

Every one of those maps to a problem we've spent years watching founders make.

They say "I just want someone really good" and then wonder why every hire feels like a coin flip. They want generically excellent people. But generically excellent people are successful everywhere, which means they're expensive everywhere, and they have no particular reason to choose you over the forty other startups trying to hire them this week.

The founders who built incredible teams were the ones who were specific.

The question nobody asks

Roger's closing moment in the film is directed at the interviewer. She asks him how he did it. And he says: "That's the wrong damn question. The question is who I did it with."

Every founder I've met who was struggling to hire was asking the wrong question. "How do I find great people?" when they should have been asking "who are my people, and how do I find them specifically?"

That's the question Superposition was built to answer. Find your perfect weirdos.