A Worldview You Can Bend to Your Liking and Venture Capital

Over the weekend, it was reported that a16z, one of the world’s largest venture capital firms by assets under management, led a $15 million funding round for Cluely, a startup that offers a coding-interview cheating service and has gone viral with the slogan “Cheat at everything with AI.”

The partner who led the investment said, “Cluely has increased brand awareness through a deliberate strategy,” adding that this “has laid the groundwork for generating meaningful subscription revenue.”

Roy Lee, Cluely’s co-founder and CEO, said, “Our ultimate goal is to capture attention,” arguing that work culture is becoming increasingly casual and that, compared with traditional media like TV, “now, only ‘brain-rotting’ shock content that grabs people’s attention” actually works as advertising.

He said Cluely has only a handful of full-time employees but has hired more than 60 interns, most of whom are focused on producing provocative content designed to capture the attention of hundreds of millions of people.

I’ve been following Cluely CEO Roy Lee’s moves since they first became known (he was even interviewed by the Korean startup media outlet EO), but I had held off on making any judgment about his actions. After running businesses for a long time, I may have internalized the idea that it’s not good to rush into calling things right or wrong. In the midst of that, I came across an essay by an American venture capitalist, Kyle Harrison, that caught my eye, so I’m sharing it here in translation along with my own thoughts.

I once wrote an essay like this before: that we can only think one thought at a time. No matter how fast we try to move, how much content we try to consume, or how much capital we try to deploy, we cannot hold multiple thoughts in our head at once.

Sometimes each individual choice feels so trivial that it seems meaningless. What’s the big deal about watching one more YouTube video? How much could one more donut really change? Does it make any difference if you snap at your partner one more time? Will the world end if you make one more investment in a founder who is full of red flags?

But when I was talking about this before, I wrote the following: “You are the sum of everything you do, think, listen to, write, and say.”

Venture capital is no different. I’ve written ad nauseam about how the venture industry is increasingly driven by scale and speed. And it’s worth thinking carefully about what that really implies.

If you run around all day without a break, you can get an enormous amount done in a single day. If you never stop to focus or pause, the sheer “volume of actions” you take can be ten times that of an average person. The more that happens, the more each individual action starts to feel insignificant.

Venture capital is exactly the same. The larger the pool of capital you have to deploy, the less important each individual deal looks in the grand scheme of things.

I call this a “fungible mindset.” The more actions I take, the more each individual action becomes interchangeable, and the less I care about the impact it has.

But a fungible mindset ultimately leads to a fungible worldview.

What prompted me to think about this now was the reaction online after the startup Cluely raised a $15 million Series A from a16z. At first glance, it might look like just another ordinary funding announcement. But this “controversy” is in fact a carefully engineered product.

First, Cluely launched with the slogan “Cheat at everything.” At a glance, its website looks like a typical AI tool. It “sees what you see and hears what you hear, without anyone knowing.” It secretly records Zoom meetings, reads the on-screen context, and in the launch video this functionality is built into glasses so you can “cheat on the go.”

From the beginning, CEO Roy Lee was courting controversy. While at Columbia University, he built a tool to “cheat” on software engineer coding interviews and ended up getting expelled for it.

After that, they used the investment money to travel, get tailored suits, throw a Y Combinator after-party that ended up with the police showing up, hire 50 interns for content production, and even bring strippers into the office.

Cluely’s argument? “In the modern economy, attention is money.” No matter what you do, no matter how crazy it is, as long as you get attention, it’s justified—that’s the logic.

Roy also insists that “not a single person believes our company was created to deceive people,” pushing back against the criticism. In the fundraising video, he says, “It might be deception today, but it can be fairness tomorrow.” He’s leaning straight into the controversy over whether AI is a form of cheating. While other AI companies hedge by saying they “assist humans,” Cluely says:

Of course, “attention currency” only has value if you eventually spend it. Cluely claims it has actually converted that attention into revenue. According to Roy:

And investors back this strategy. Brian Kim, who led a16z’s Series A, put it this way: “A lot of people think it’s just a ‘show,’ but he’s actually turning it into revenue.” That shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to a16z’s recent moves.

One of my most-read pieces described a16z as “the Blackstone of Innovation” or a “Capital Agglomerator.” Many VCs can be used to explain this broader trend, but a16z is by far the clearest expression of its evolution.

a16z is a kind of corporate venture capital—but not in the sense of Intel Capital or PayPal Ventures, which are funds owned by a parent company. It’s a venture firm that itself operates like a large corporation. It has at least $56 billion in assets under management and more than 500 employees. If that’s not a corporation, what is?

I’ve said many times that funds like a16z are no longer chasing “traditional venture returns” (10x multiples, 20% IRR). It’s not that they don’t want to make money; it’s that those returns are no longer the core of their business model. I unpack this in more detail in a piece called “The Unholy Trinity of Venture Capital.”

The point is that a16z embodies a new ethos in venture capital—scale and speed. Bigger funds, more people, more deals. And they have to back the winners. That’s why they’re perfectly comfortable backing multiple competitors in the same category at once. For example, they’ve double- and triple-dipped across “foundation model” companies like OpenAI, xAI, Thinking Machines, Mistral, and SSI.

The interchangeable worldview I mentioned earlier stems directly from this pursuit of scale and speed.

Back in August 2022, in a piece titled “The Rise of The Cash Man,” I wrote about how a16z had just made a record-sized investment into Adam Neumann’s (WeWork’s founder) new company, Flow.

At the time, Marc Andreessen (a16z’s co-founder) declared that “it’s time to build,” criticizing America’s housing supply problem. Yet in his own town, he tried to block new multi-family housing. When a16z invested in Flow, it pitched the company as “a direct answer to the broken housing market,” but the solution it actually offered boiled down to “saltwater pools and dog parks.”

We need to build more. Just not in my neighborhood. We need to solve the housing crisis—with homes that come with pools and pet amenities for the wealthy.

Given the nature of real estate, Flow is an extremely capital-intensive business, and a16z needs to raise new $5 billion–plus funds every few years. In short, a16z needed industries that could absorb a lot of capital, and the incentives lined up.

In June 2025, a16z announced that Flow was expanding into Saudi Arabia, saying “this momentum is now extending beyond the United States.” That dovetails perfectly with the way a16z and Adam Neumann have been openly courting Saudi capital. At the same time, a16z’s “American Dynamism” thesis emphasizes U.S. sovereignty and national security.

So what do they think about the housing crisis? How does Middle Eastern capital see it? It’s unclear. Only one thing is certain: an obsession with scale and speed.

I often write about the polarization between mega VCs and the rest of the market, but I haven’t directly criticized the strategies of the big firms. Because they’re playing a completely different game.

And a16z plays that game brutally well.

Whether they pursue “scale” over “focus,” “broad exposure” over “selectivity,” or invest in companies whose philosophies seem diametrically opposed on the surface—that’s their strategy.

But that kind of philosophical flexibility can be confusing for some people.

Under the slogan “American Dynamism,” a16z has turned the defense industry and manufacturing at large into an investment category. In this space, they’ve actually produced strong results and hold portfolio companies capable of reshaping entire industries.

But many founders in this field hold a worldview that is the opposite of a16z’s. These are people with very concrete and unwavering visions of the future.

Take Augustus Doricko, CEO of Rainmaker, for example. He’s trying to solve drought and crop failure with cloud-seeding technology. His worldview is crystal clear.

You’d think someone like that would share the same kind of ideological seriousness as the philosophy behind “American Dynamism,” yet a16z chose to invest in a company like Cluely. His worldview seemed shaken; he reacted like this.

Similar reactions followed. People said things like, “With that $15 million, how many CNC machines could you buy, how much could you revive American manufacturing, and how many diseases could you treat?”

When I first heard about a company called Cluely, I just thought it was distasteful and trivial. But while writing this piece, I came to understand the strategy: using the controversy around them as a marketing tool to mint “attention currency,” then converting that into revenue. In theory, it makes sense. These days, attention and distribution are harder to secure than anything else.

What I really take issue with is Roy Lee’s worldview.

In an interview, he mentioned Elon Musk and said this.

The interviewer pushes back.

But Roy argues this:

It may look like Musk succeeded by courting controversy, but from my perspective, he’s someone who started from a first-principles way of thinking. Even if his ideas run into popular resistance or stir up controversy, that’s not the essence. At his core, he tried to start from what was fundamentally right, and the controversy followed afterward.

Roy Lee’s strategy of using controversy is a bit like how MrBeast sells chocolate on YouTube.

“Do you like chocolate? Who cares. As long as it sells.”

“Are you passionate about building cheating tools? If people buy them, then gladly!”

Controversy can be a marketing tool. But for it to be sustainable over the long term, it also has to be right. Roy himself says:

But controversy itself is not a long-term strategy—unless, that is, you actually want to become Martin Shkreli, the American investor turned financial fraudster.

For people like Roy Lee and a16z, the ends justify the means. As long as they get attention, as long as revenue comes in, as long as capital flows in, as long as they succeed, that’s enough.

The question is this.

If you only look at outcomes, it becomes much easier to nod along. Fifty billion dollars is better than zero, and having revenue is better than having none.

Roy brought strippers into the office because he wanted higher revenue. a16z takes Saudi money because it wants fifty billion dollars. That’s their choice. I’m not here to pass judgment on their methods per se.

But as this “interchangeable worldview” slowly spreads, a problem emerges: people gradually stop standing for anything at all.

In the end, we don’t do things because they are the right thing to do. We do them because of the outcomes they might bring. Sometimes we act in ways we know aren’t right, because we believe the results will be better.

And then, we go one step further and come to believe this:

I’m not trying to pass judgment on these tactics. I just want to remind you of this:

Life is the accumulation of the actions you take. Every choice you make in every moment leaves a mark on your soul. So choose wisely.

Anyone who has run a business knows this: stepping into the “gray area” to generate sales and profits is as easy as slightly stretching out your hand, and when times are tough, it feels like a very sweet temptation.

That’s especially true in the investment-related business we’re in. There are influencers who sell secret manuals and courses promising huge short-term gains to their social media followers for anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, generating cumulative sales in the tens of millions. There are also people who churn out personal finance books and YouTube channels as if stamped out by ChatGPT, then leverage the awareness they gain to earn lecture fees of several million dollars a year.

From a reasonable outside observer’s perspective, it’s easy to assume their lack of real skill will soon be exposed and they’ll head down the path of ruin. But their staying power is tougher, and their shelf life is longer, than you might think. If boosting revenue is the ultimate goal, then charging outrageous fees and selling the fantasy of getting rich quickly to those who are most desperate for money would be the optimal sales strategy.

According to people who have worked in the industry for a long time, the main customer base for high-priced stock-tipping chat rooms that cost thousands of dollars a month is not people with substantial assets and income, but young people with little to no assets or income—or even in debt. Because these customers never take a long-term approach in the first place, the providers set irrational prices to squeeze out the maximum revenue in the minimum amount of time.

You might think companies built on this kind of model are unsustainable because they constantly lose customers. But they build aggressive sales organizations to attract more new customers than they lose, and with the know-how they’ve accumulated over the years, they generate huge revenues in a short period of time.

Of course, there is always the option of using the large revenues generated by compromising with reality to build up the company’s foundation in the early days and then later pivoting to a sustainable business model.

The problem is that such cases are extremely rare. Inertia increases in proportion to mass, so once an organization has grown large, changing its direction and speed becomes very difficult. People who have grown accustomed to the old way of doing things resist change, and leadership has long since forgotten its original goals.

There’s a saying: “There are people who’ve never tried drugs, but no one who’s tried them only once.” Once you receive a big reward for a small amount of effort, becoming addicted to it is simply your brain’s natural reward mechanism—and a basic human instinct.

I don’t want to sit in moral judgment of Roy Lee, the CEO, or of a16z. But if I had to bet 500 won, I’d wager that Cluely’s strategic pivot will be delayed, or will always be pushed to “after we grow just a little more.”

We need to think carefully from the very beginning. The deliberate strategies I execute today will harden into the mindset that defines who I am tomorrow.