Every industry develops its own jargon. Tech's happens to double as a social credit system.
For founders, it's not enough to simply be clever anymore. They're "sweaty","insane" or "cracked". In recent years, investors, employees and other founders have collectively invented an escalating vocabulary that signals just how exceptional someone is supposed to be.
Like startup valuations, the praise has suffered from inflation. Once "genius" would do. Now you apparently need to be "insanely cracked".
Here's Sifted's field guide to the terminology of tech bros.
1. Sweaty
A relatively new addition to the lexicon. According to YouTuber Max Tkacz, “If you say: ‘He’s sweaty. He's a sweat,’ it means he doesn’t shower, wears sweats and is always vibing with AI.”
Originally gamer slang, "sweaty" has been enthusiastically adopted by AI Twitter. A sweaty founder isn't literally perspiring (although they probably are). They're permanently online, shipping code at 2am, surviving on caffeine and convinced sleep is optional.
To most people, this may sound like an intervention waiting to happen. In the grind-loving world of tech, it's praise.
2. Insane
The baseline compliment.
Once reserved for things that were genuinely alarming, "insane" now describes almost any vaguely competent founder. Raise a decent seed round? Insane. Build a prototype over the weekend? Insane. Reply to emails within ten minutes? Also insane.
If you label a techie insane, it’s a compliment: you’re perceived as being very skilled. And it doesn’t necessarily require any kind of mental health intervention.
3. AI-pilled
Someone with a near-religious enthusiasm for AI, of which there are many such cases.
For the AI-pilled, the technology is the answer to almost every question. Symptoms include replacing entire departments with agents, ending every sentence with "the models are getting better", and believing AGI is somewhere between six months and six years away.
4. GOATed
Short for "greatest of all time." Once the pinnacle of internet praise, it has since been overtaken by a newer, more inflated generation of compliments.
5. Cracked
Cracked outranks goated. A term borrowed from gaming, it describes someone with almost superhuman technical ability and execution speed.
To be cracked is to be someone whose ability appears almost unfair. In startup circles it usually refers to founders who ship products at impossible speed, absorb technical concepts instantly and somehow still find time to post 14 times a day on X.
There is also an entirely unrelated sexual meaning which the tech industry has either failed to notice or collectively agreed to ignore.
Applied to founders, it means you're operating several levels above merely "insane."
6. Insanely cracked
Linguistically unnecessary but spiritually inevitable. If everyone is cracked, someone eventually has to be insanely cracked.
7. Most cracked
This is rare air. Once you're the most cracked, there is nowhere left to go. The only catch is that multiple founders seem to hold the title at any given moment.
Of course, like startup valuations, founder superlatives rarely move backwards. Once everyone's "insane", you need "cracked". Once everyone's cracked, you need "insanely cracked". Give it another year and someone will probably announce a $50m seed round led by a "quantum cracked" founder with "negative latency".
Should such a time come to pass, we will, of course, update this guide.
