About Durindal
Origins. The name. The mark.
ORIGINS
MOSAIC started as a method, not a product.
Our CSO, Sebastian Hidalgo, trained in hostage negotiation and psychological operations. Once he entered the commercial market, he would spend up to eight hours profiling a single person with a single goal: helping clients close deals. Those early profiles covered what they wanted, how they decided, where they would walk away.
Most teams never did this work at all.
A decade removed from the first manual profile, DURINDAL began as a go-to-market firm for dual-use companies. For over a year we helped defense technology companies sell into commercial markets and government, and helped one of them raise over $3M and another one sell their product to an allied country.
In every deal, the same gap showed up: our clients could map the market, the program, and the org chart but they couldn’t produce a reliable read on the person across the table. So we built one. We funded MOSAIC for twelve months out of consulting revenue, structured the method, and logged every call it made so we could check it later.
Today the consulting practice is gone. Today, MOSAIC is the company.
THE NAME
DURINDAL is the legendary sword of Roland, Charlemagne’s paladin, in The Song of Roland. The poem was written by an unknown poet in the 11th century and is the oldest surviving major work of French literature. In it, an angel brings the sword to Charlemagne, who gives it to Roland. Its hilt holds relics: a tooth of Saint Peter, blood of Saint Basil, hair of Saint Denis, and a piece of the Virgin Mary’s raiment. Some later romances name Wayland the Smith as its maker.
The poem retells the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. The real battle, on 15 August 778, was an ambush by Basques on Charlemagne’s rearguard as it crossed the Pyrenees. Three centuries later, the poet turned it into the tale of a holy war.
What we took from it is the ending. Surrounded and dying, Roland tries to destroy his sword so it won’t fall into enemy hands. He strikes it against stone and the stone chips. But the sword? Intact.
The name is usually traced to the French “dur”: hard, enduring. That’s what we hold MOSAIC to. Regardless of whether we’re serving a private equity firm or an intelligence analyst, a read should survive the people trying to break it. But especially in National Security the capability should stay in the right hands: the hands of America and its closest allies.
THE MARK
Our mark is a single blade drawn from three lines. At the top they stand apart. As they descend, they converge into one point.
We drew it as a consulting firm, for many disciplines brought to bear on one result. It turned out to describe the product better.
A briefing starts wide: filings, interviews, public statements, records, and the material a client already holds. Different sources, different quality, often in tension. MOSAIC doesn’t pick one and ignore the rest. It brings all of them to bear on one question, how this person is likely to decide, and presses until it produces a call specific enough to be proven wrong.
Breadth that doesn’t converge is just noise.
One blade. Many signals. A single call.