NEW YORK, NY
Roy Lee's startup raised $20 million partly on the strength of a launch video.
Cluely, which Lee co-founded, promised to help students cheat on exams. It was a premise dazzling enough that Andreessen Horowitz and other investors wrote checks. The company has since repositioned as more of a note-taking tool, but the launch itself did what it was designed to do: it made Lee, now 22, a face of young Silicon Valley, and it set a template. "Everybody's doing shiny, good-looking launch videos," investor Timothy Chen told TechCrunch this month. "It wasn't even a thing three years ago."
That template has become something of an arms race. The July 24 TechCrunch feature on founders under 20 that got me thinking about this describes a generation now building companies under the assumption that getting noticed requires performing certainty — a dazzling video, a hyperbolic claim, and visible, constant momentum. Pranjali Awasthi, 19, who dropped out of high school and then Georgia Tech to build the YC-backed Slashy, put it plainly: "Now there is this constant ambient pressure from LinkedIn and Twitter where every raise, every milestone, every pivot is public." Aidan Guo, 20, co-founder of Attention Engineering, was blunter still: "You already have a constant fear of failure on your mind... And then you have all these people piling on anything you do wrong."
The cost of that pressure also shows up in their work. As the same article notes, founders without a comms team can get caught in a loop, "content creation for social media starts to crowd out writing good code." Getting attention becomes its own full-time job, running in parallel to everything else involved in building an early-stage company.
Ashley Smith, a general partner at the early-stage firm Vermilion, was asked in the same TechCrunch piece what actually separates founders who make it from those who don't. Her answer had nothing to do with production value. "Conviction, intellectual honesty, and obsession with the customer," she said. "None of that has anything to do with age." An intelligent, custom-built exec content strategy is where that shows up, but it involves time and commitment from the exec and it doesn't scale with a bigger budget or a slicker video, which is exactly why it feels too hard to tackle for some early-stage founders.
A majority of executive content skips that step (see my previous article on ghostwriting: Ninety-six percent of B2B marketers say their organization creates thought leadership content. Fewer than 5% say the people with real subject-matter expertise regularly contribute to it). The Cluely approach starts from the performance and works backward (as reinforced by Lee's later admissions that the company's $7 million ARR was fabricated), which is why so much of it is interchangeable: swap the company name and the post reads pretty much the same.
This matters more, not less, in an AI market where everyone has access to the same tools for producing polish. If a launch video is table stakes, the video stops being the differentiator and the thing underneath it, the actual insight, becomes the only thing left to compete on. Executives who haven't done that underlying work are the ones most tempted to compensate with volume: more posts, more launches, more visible motion, because motion is the only lever left when there's no distinct point of view driving it.
"Post less" isn't a particularly useful rule, neither is "avoid launch videos" — Cluely's worked. It's a harder, more specific question: what do you actually believe about your market that you'd be willing to state plainly, defend if challenged, and be wrong about in public? If the honest answer is "nothing in particular, but here's an update on what we shipped," that's a status report, not thought leadership, and no amount of production value fixes that.
For founders building a content strategy right now, the practical advice I'd give is: before the next post, video, or campaign gets made, write down the specific claim underneath it in one sentence. Not "we're excited about our progress", but an actual, arguable position about the market, the customer, or the problem you're solving that someone in your space could reasonably disagree with. If that sentence doesn't exist yet, that's the work to do. If it does exist, the content's job is just to say it clearly, not to dress it up.
The founders getting real, lasting attention right now aren't the ones who figured out how to look most convincing. They're the ones who had something to be convinced of in the first place, and said it plainly enough that the rest of us noticed.
