The Roy Lee/Clavicular balance - by Fergus White

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The Roy Lee/Clavicular balance<br>We've all heard distribution is the moat - but why hasn't anyone proved it?

Fergus White<br>Jun 09, 2026

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Two weeks ago I made a LinkedIn post from my bed about how I was going to spend the summer larping. (If you don’t know what that means, this might be a rough read.)<br>The post went insane. As I write this it’s at 2.9k reactions and a quarter of a million impressions. For LinkedIn those numbers are pretty amazing. And as someone who has been purely technical for my entire career, it got me thinking from a different perspective: can social media be the primary engine for building the next generational company? Not a growth channel as an afterthought. The core principle.<br>Thanks for reading Fergus's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Our choices are less and less our own as time passes. What you buy, what you believe, the car you suddenly want, the supplement you suddenly need, even who you vote for. More of it every year is shaped by whatever you subconsciously watched on your feed that week. The algorithm is now the default place people form their opinions and their wants, and it takes a bigger bite of our attention every month.

If you could reliably manufacture and hold attention around a central message, what is stopping you from making that message something that could be a generational product? It would sit upstream of demand itself, deciding what people want before they go looking for it - but with the recognizability enjoyed by influencers that play Fortnite all day.<br>The idea of distribution as a moat is not new. It was cemented in tech Twitter since Cluely showed up and raised a ridiculous amount of money from a16z (who even describe themselves as a media company now, that happens to make money through venture investments). But a year is a long time when it comes to measuring rapid growth. If we had finally seen the start of distribution being the edge, why haven’t we gotten a company trending towards being a generational player?<br>My belief is that companies like Cluely are first movers, and only function as experiments for VC firms. Roy Lee is smart, undeniably. But I find it hard to believe his plan from day one was to piss off both Amazon and Columbia in the hope of generating enough online attention to fund a cheating company that might still be culturally relevant two weeks later. Roy, if that genuinely was the plan, I sincerely apologise, and please continue rage baiting people.<br>Because that’s what Cluely actually is now. A media company that depends on a vocal founder constantly inventing new ways to look controversial, down to the occasional risky skit about only hiring Asians. The product itself has changed beyond recognition after what feels like a dozen pivots. How many of you can even tell me what it does today? Did you know it is now a glorified note taking app? Yup. A note taker. All that reach, and it got beaten by a European company named after a type of breakfast people pretend to like.<br>Billions of views and backing from the biggest VC firm in the world, beaten by a traditional startup from a historically worse region to build start ups in. Why? 1 of 2 possibilities stands out:<br>Roy has potentially fumbled the biggest opportunity of his career so far, despite the fact that he was a social media genius that orchestrated the rise of Cluely from the very first post and being kicked out of university.

He had absolutely no idea what the hell he was doing, but he had an entertaining personality and story that he managed to spin into traction through pure luck.

99% of you likely agree with me that it is the latter. None of it was planned. And it’s the same story with almost every founder people describe as having “good distribution.” It always reads as a last minute scramble, loosely stapled to whatever product they happen to be building that month. This is no shade towards Roy and these influencers, you still have to be entertaining and really fucking smart in order to convert online traction to cold hard cash. But it hits a ceiling fairly quickly.

But there is someone that I unironically think that start ups could learn from.

Clav.

Clavicular, or Clav, is a 20 year old influencer who blew up in late 2025. He sells the idea of looksmaxxing and is heavily linked to the “manosphere”. He is generally considered not a likeable guy, considerably more controversial than Roy Lee.

But - Clav is far more likely to create generational impact than Roy is. I’m aware this might be the worst sentence you have read this month. But look at how the world has actually responded to each of them, and what influence they’ve had so far (I’m not saying it’s good influence - but it’s influence).<br>Clav started posting seriously much later than Roy and already dominates on raw views alone. He’s been at the centre of mainstream news coverage...