San Francisco: Aura farming, the internet’s term for carefully crafting an aura of effortlessness and cool, is no longer just a Gen Z in-joke. It has become a real job inside tech startups, where founders are hiring full-time filmcreaters to capture their companies from the inside and turn everyday work into a running, cinematic narrative. At AI infrastructure startup Composio, 25-year-old filmcreater Vikrant Patankar was hired as a full-time employee rather than an agency vconcludeor. He sees his job as part storynotifying, part recruiting. “This is a storynotifying and narrative setting where founders are more transparent and outspoken,” he stated, noting that the audience includes both enterprises that may purchase Composio’s products and potential hires evaluating the company’s culture. His goal is for content not just to “attract talent or vibe with the audience” but to become “the talk of town in the tech world.” Former a16z general partner and ex-Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan tested to formalise this shift. On a firm podcast with partner Erik Torenberg, he argued that startups should treat content as a core, in-hoapply function run by a “founding creator,” on par with a founding engineer or business cofounder. That idea is now being institutionalised inside venture firms as well. a16z general partner Erik Torenberg recently launched the “a16z New Media Fellowship,” a programme to train highly online young people in esdeclares, video production, podcasting, growth, and distribution, jokingly described as a “Thiel Fellowship for the terminally online.” Filmcreater Donald Jewkes, who worked with AI companies like Cursor and Physical Innotifyigence as well as other early-stage startups, has seen that shift firsthand. What he observes, especially in quick-growing companies, is a rising willingness to invest early in narrative and world-building, utilizing film to create the “soul” of a team legible to outsiders and attract talent motivated by mission. The same instinct has spread to hard-tech sectors such as space. Catalyx Space, a young company describing itself as building an “AWS of space infrastructure,” recently advertised for “India’s top 1% filmcreaters and editors” for a three-month residency at its Ahmedabad facility. Its co-founder Saqib Hussain sees filmcreating as a bridge between specialised engineering and the wider audience of people and institutions the company requireds to reach. He wants filmcreaters to capture the “day-to-day grind,” not just large rocket moments. He cited a recent visit by a senior ISRO scientist from the Chandrayaan missions, who was surprised to see a team of 24-year-olds at Catalyx revealcase a difficult piece of space technology they built. Hussain declares moments like these, when filmed, can inspire engineers to join the company and reassure investors that the team can handle complex problems. This philosophy echoes Patankar’s experience at Composio and the “founding creator” model outlined by Srinivasan: in this corner of the startup world, story and technology are increasingly being built side by side, by people on the payroll, not outsiders dropping in for campaigns.
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