Your company’s TikTok strategy needs a Rashad Assir

Rashad Assir had every intention of joining corporate America in the most traditional sense. With a degree in industrial engineering from Virginia Tech, he began meeting with consulting firms around 2016—and it wasn’t long before he realized how ridiculously rote the interview process is.

“Everyone’s entering this sort of robotic mode,” Assir says. “And it felt like there was room for observational comedy.”

So he started posting videos of himself to friends on Snapchat rattling off interview clichés like “my biggest weakness is that I’m a perfectionist!”

“I got a ton of really good engagement from my 12 followers,” he notes.

Posting the same content on Instagram got Assir some traction beyond his dedicated dozen. And, as has been custom with many creators during 2020, his TikTok videos are what caught fire during the pandemic, pulling him into content creation and away from business. Well, sort of.

Assir’s postgrad experiences as a tech consultant and account executive were ideal fodder for his brand of comedy that calls out everyday workplace situations such as interacting with a new hire, post-weekend small talk, and mansplaining CEOs. That content caught the attention of Josh Machiz, a partner at the VC firm Redpoint Ventures, who reached out to Assir with an offer to build the company’s presence on TikTok.

“Having worked in tech and having had some experience in content, I had proven that I could build a following,” says Assir who joined the company full-time in February. “And I think that was a unique combination of skills that fit nicely into what their vision for content strategy was.”

Redpoint’s TikTok had under 9,000 followers when Assir joined. The company now has nearly 20,000 and 438,000 likes. Assir’s videos for Redpoint are really just an extension of the kind of content he still posts through his own account (@corporayshid)—even if that content is often a sendup of startup and VC culture.

“I’ll give the team at Redpoint a lot of credit for not being overly restricting in the ways that I can be creative,” he says. “If I was told you can do this and you can do that, especially if you’re trying to make people laugh, that would make it even even tougher.”

Assir does note that his content for Redpoint never punches down but leans into being self-aware.

“We’re part of the joke. We’re wearing the vests or saying the ridiculous things,” he says. “We’re making fun of ourselves as much as we are making fun of other people.”

Assir’s aim with Redpoint is the same as so many companies appealing specifically to TikTok’s audience: be less promotional and more of a natural presence on the app.

“It’s owning more share of voice, and having founders associate Redpoint with the great investments and, ‘Oh these are people that I could hang out with, have a coffee with,’” Assir says. “At the end of the day, choosing an investor for a high-profile founder is a lot about who are the people that I want to spend time with? Who’s this person that’s going to be on my board?”

In addition to Redpoint’s TikTok content, Assir also regularly appears on the Cartoon Avatars podcast helmed by Redpoint managing director Logan Bartlett and recently launched No Agenda, a video podcast through the company where he interviews an array of internet friends to learn about what they’re good at.

As he grows Redpoint’s digital content, Assir admits that he hasn’t quite figured out the big-picture vision for his own creative output. Loosely speaking, he sees himself applying content creator to aspects of his life that he’s passionate about from athletics to his home country of Lebanon.

“Right now, I’m in building skills mode,” Assir says. “I feel like I’m doing that in the perfect environment with a good platform and smart people that are putting their trust in me to build cool things. We’ll see where it goes.”