Because of the recent Cluely backlashes, I think it is a good time to share this opinion tweet that I read last month:
I simply cannot “hate” Cluely.
Hate would presuppose a betrayal of some authentic moral substance, yet what we witness in Cluely is precisely the absence of substance, it is the pure performative excess of our age. San Francisco, the shimmering techno-utopia, overflows with identical characters; most merely veil their vanity and predatory behavior beneath TED talks, AI summits, VC fireside chats, and the soft tyranny of kombucha taps.
Cluely, however, refuses the veil. They magnify the narcissistic core of the start-up cosmology until it becomes a screaming caricature a grotesque theatre in which the venture-capital ego parades in designer athleisure, chanting “disruption” while grinding its employees into gig-economy dust. We’ve traded in Patrick Bateman’s polished Wall-Street sadism, for the hoodie-clad prophet of infinite scale, a sociopath whose weapon is not the axe but the KPI dashboard.
The cruelty? It is systemic, algorithmic, JIRA tickets and 2 a.m. slack pings.
The abuse? Wrapped in equity grants, vesting schedules, and the promise of a venture capital partnership following a successful exit where the abused becomes the abuser. Cluely is not unique in this regard they merely have turned the knob to eleven, amplifying the obscene vanity already endemic to the Bay Area’s temple of self-curated brands.
And therein lies the joke… the sublime, obscene joke:
By exaggerating the rituals of founder hagiography, Cluely exposes the whole circuit of exploitation that sustains it. We laugh, yet our laughter is uneasy, for what we confront in his performance is our own complicity. Cluely is the carnival mirror in which every well-meaning product manager, every “mission-driven” angel investor, must see the distorted reflection of the very system they nourish.
That is why I do not hate Cluely; I thank them for staging, in the language of farce, the truth we all politely ignore.
This is so well written in the Gen Z consumable format (fractured pieces of information cards) and also pointed out the exact phenomenon where leveraged beta is all you need, and the transplant version in crypto’s scenario (CAUTION: this link redirects to an X article), which overlaps almost perfectly with the Cluely hype cycle narratives:
But game theory shows us why this won’t happen:
- FOMO is real: Early investors make the most money, creating pressure to invest before validation
- You can’t verify claims: Most investors lack the technical skills to evaluate if a project can deliver
- Fund managers don’t care: They’re rewarded for this quarter’s returns, not long-term success
- Everyone’s incentives are broken: What’s good for individuals is bad for the market
And this goes to the AI projects that fits this category:
And that’s why projects with no product will keep raising more money than those actually building something useful.