I was at a pitch last week where this 23-year-old founder opened with: "We help companies commit securities fraud at scale."
Dead silence broken only by Matt Levine rising for a slow clap.
I almost spit out my iced oatmilk latte.
Then he clicked to the next slide: "$5.3M seed round closed."
Lights = off
Lasers = on
Fog cannons = blasting
Sounds = AIRHORNS
Iced oatmilk latte = ejected
Not because I was shocked.
Because I realized I'd been watching this playbook unfold for months without a name for it.
Now I have one: airhorning. And once you see hear it, you can't unsee hear it.
Okay fine, that didn't actually happen. What did happen was I read this article in the SF Standard about Cluely.
Roy Lee, 21, gets suspended from Columbia for building an AI cheating tool.
Normal response: shame spiral, delete LinkedIn.
Roy's response: Name company "Cluely." Film yourself using it to lie on a date. Raise $5.3M. Then $15M from a16z.
The SF Standard visits their office: beer pyramids, anime figurines, employees who expense Hinge dates. It's a frat house with a Delaware C-Corp.
This is the airhorn: confession as go-to-market strategy.
Also This Week:
The dogwhistle died because reputation died. It was a high-trust play for a high-trust world. Signal edge while keeping optionality. Wink at your tribe, shake hands with their parents.
That world's gone. Trust evaporated somewhere between Theranos and the tenth "thought leader" exposed for exactly what they preached against.
The airhorn doesn't signal. It screams. No subtlety, no deniability. The ugly part IS the pitch.
Remember Susan Fowler's Uber post? Sexual harassment, HR coverups, threats. The internet explodes. Travis hires Eric Holder. Everyone pretends shock that the "Boober" company might have issues.
Peak dogwhistle era. We all knew but agreed to act scandalized.
Seven years later, Roy Lee puts "suspended for cheating" in his LinkedIn like it's a Rhodes Scholarship.
That's the gap between dogwhistle and airhorn. One demanded investigation and denial. The other makes confession the product.
Previously on Out of Scope…
Here's the arbitrage: In a saturated attention economy, trust costs millions to build. Outrage costs negative dollars—every hit piece is free marketing.
The math is brutal:
Attention = currency
Controversy = attention
Confession > cover-up
You can't cancel the pre-canceled
These aren't nihilists. They're rational actors who did the math and realized shamelessness scales better than shame.
I keep thinking about Fowler watching Lee turn "I cheated" into a venture-backed company. She exposed actual crimes and got called difficult. He built Cheat-GPT and got called disruptive.
But that's the point. We built platforms that reward engagement über alles. We made contrition worthless and shamelessness profitable.
Roy Lee just showed up and said: "You want authenticity? I help people cheat. Where's my check?"
I don’t even know if it’s wrong. It just works.
That’s the part no one wants to say out loud.
The airhorns aren’t distorting anything.
They’re just saying what everyone else is trying to dress up.
They’re playing the game as it is, not as we wish it were.
You could say they suck, but you know what they would say to that?
They’ve got a tiny CAC.
Welcome to the airhorn economy.
