Clinkle, a well-funded startup run by Lucas Duplan, the Prince Joffrey of mobile payments, recently revealed its $30 million idea. After rounds of layoffs and many setbacks, young Duplan has bestowed the world with . . . a debit card. Not sold? Well how about if Clinkle gives you $20 from its Treat Bot vending machine?

Sir Richard Branson (net worth: $4.6 billion) just tweeted out this photo of himself and Lucas Duplan, whose hilariously disastrous app he invested in last year. The caption is "this is why I invest in startups." Let's think about this.

One of the many gospels Apple delivered to tech bloggers today was Apple Pay. It's a magical sounding mobile payments system that will use near field communication (NFC) to let users pay for things in front of them through their phone. The magic might be lost on child CEO Lucas Duplan, who raised more than $30 million for Clinkle by telling venture capitalists he could do the same thing. He has not.

If coders are the new rockstars, then hackathons (marathon coding sessions to experiment with software) are a natural setting for a music video. A millennial CEO like Lucas Duplan gets that, which is the $30 million Stanford sob story is lifting its spirits through power of song.

Clinkle, the payments app run by a tyrannical 22-year-old Stanford grad, is cloaked in roughly the same amount of mystery as the island in Lost. A source tells Valleywag that the app, which raised between $30 million in venture capital without a product, may deliver the same disappointing ending.

At some point after investing tens of millions of dollars in 22-year-old Lucas Duplan, investors decided a boy with no experience wasn't fit for the job. So they installed the former CFO of Netflix, who just bailed. This company is fucked.

Clinkle was supposed to be the mobile payments app of the future, but so far, all it's been able to create is horrible headlines about itself and its hated 22-year-old founder. Like clockwork, Clinkle just got hacked, and revealed this endearing photo of Stanford star and CEO Lucas Duplan.

How to get a "30 Under 30" nod from Forbes, in the coveted finance category: provide a documented history of being a bad boss at a company that has never released a single product, or even acknowledged what its product is. Congratulations, Clinkle CEO Lucas Duplan.

The overwhelming evidence against giving a 20-something Stanford kid millions of dollars for a startup and letting him run wild continues to pile: an anonymous post by a former employee says Clinkle's CEO screwed his staff out of money.

Fortune's Dan Primack reports that Clinkle, the stealth mobile startup company that raised $25 million in venture capital without really explaining what it does, has "issued pink slips to 16 of its 60-person staff, or just over 25%." The layoffs have not been in engineering, but rather the business side of operations.

The more we learn about Clinkle—a mobile payments app so fantastic, so splendorous, that the startup hasn't deemed our species worthy of any details—the duller it seems. Another way to pay with our phones—super. But what's lackluster for us is miserable for them: according to a new post on Quora, working for the joint's infamously young boss is hell.

Remember Lucas Duplan, the Stanford kid who grabbed a $25 million investment for an app he won't tell anyone about? He still won't explain what "Clinkle" does, or when it will come out, but that didn't stop him from making this insanely pretentious promotional video.

Lucas Duplan, age 22, just banked $25 million for an app no one really knows much about. Well, a few do: his investors, and a tipster who leaked us some very interesting details about the clandestine wallet app. Does the world need a new way for Yale kids to buy things?

Lucas Duplan dropped out of Stanford, brought a bunch of his buddies with him, and got to work on something daunting: creating an app that lets you pay for things with your phone. This is daunting because so many other things let you do it. Despite this, and the fact that his app is a total mystery, powerful VCs just handed him $25 million.