Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks w/ Roy Lee

6 months ago, I was some random college kid in a dorm, and now I feel like I’m at the center of the tech universe.

There’s something really strange and special happening here.

I heard someone call it “rizz marketing,” which is a compliment, but they’re like, “I hate this rizz marketing.”

We wrote our first lines of code 10 weeks ago. All of a sudden, we have over $1 million in enterprise revenue coming in.

Roy’s probably in the top 0.1% in the world in terms of knowing how to distribute. Is this viral? Does this have viral fit?

If any company in the world has a marketing team and the head of marketing doesn’t have at least 100,000 followers like you, you need to replace them. The game has changed.

You’re converting this awareness and these eyeballs into dollars.

I might as well just quintuple down on every single crazy belief and thought I have and live the most interesting life ever. I’m all in on building companies. There’s no way I can do anything else.

Roy, the man, the myth, the legend—the man of the moment—clearly is the current thing. How does it feel, the announcement the other day? A lot of love, a little bit of hate, maybe more in the middle. Any reactions? How do you react to this?

It’s pretty crazy. Literally 6 months ago, I was some random college kid in a dorm, and now I feel like I’m at the center of the tech universe.

The more astonishing thing is how correct my assumptions on virality have been. I think it’s growing increasingly clear that people on X are behind, and there’s an extremely small intersection of people who understand how developed the algorithms are on Instagram and TikTok and people in tech on Twitter and LinkedIn. There’s such a small intersection that it’s inevitable my predictions will be right, and it’s been crazy to see that play out in real time.

Elon’s reaching out. Meta is offering a $1 billion acquisition offer. Bryan, we said not to do it, of course.

Of course. Of course. Of course. To the moon. To the moon.

What is your reaction to seeing this play out?

Look, Roy, this is fantastic. It was so interesting. I remember right before the announcement, you had already sent me the video 24 hours ago, like, “Bro, this is what we’re going to show.” I was like, “Okay, this is great, and I think it’s going to do well.”

I didn’t think it would do that well, and I didn’t think it would create that much controversy. But I also underestimated how positively people would view this. There’s a lot of meta-analysis on you out there, which is really cool. There are people going 2 or 3 layers deep.

I actually read something that linked a meta-analysis of a16z with Cluely and how there’s this sort of fungibility of thoughts and things like that, which I have no idea what they’re talking about.

People are doing literary criticism.

No, I’m not kidding. There’s literally a guy who wrote about “the fungibility of thoughts” with a16z and Cluely.

People always overread the stuff. They’re like, “Oh, this had this master plan. a16z is trying to do this whole space.”

Yeah. No, don’t tell them, Erik. We’re playing 4D chess here.

10 threads analyzing the left-hand handshake. It’s like, guys, come on.

Some of the haters—I was talking to Bryan, and I tweeted, “How you feel about Cluely is how you feel about yourself.” But I deleted it because I didn’t want to trigger people on Twitter. I’ll talk shit on a podcast. Maybe I’ll get clipped to Twitter, but I didn’t want to inflame things. It was fascinating to see.

I want to go back to the beginning, because this isn’t a story that has been told a lot. We’ll be talking about the Amazon interview, but maybe let’s go back even further. When we think through where you are now, talk about the threads and through lines from your childhood that can help make sense of who you are and this moment.

From birth, the most character-defining feature of me has been attention-grabbing and being provocative. This played out in elementary, middle, and high school. I always had a camp of people that loved me and a camp of people that hated me. I was always the boldest. I would say the craziest shit—everything that was on my mind, with no filter.

This ended up with a lot of people liking me and a lot of people really disliking me. Things culminated during my senior year of high school. I did well in school and got accepted to Harvard early. Later that year, I was always doing crazy shit, and I snuck out of a school field trip and passed curfew. The police had to come and escort me back because we were out at 2 a.m., and we were all 16, 17, or 18.

I got a suspension for that, and that was when the camp of Roy haters took to the forums and reported everything everywhere. It ended up getting my acceptance rescinded from Harvard.

That started my journey of wanting to swing big at building companies. At that point, I felt like my life had taken such a crazy turn.

For context, my parents literally run a college admissions consulting company. We teach kids how to get into Harvard, and the youngest son of the company gets his acceptance rescinded from Harvard. It’s the worst thing ever. So we decided, “Let’s keep this quiet. You still have the same test scores and application. Maybe next year you’ll get into a different school.”

I spent an entire year at home, and I underestimated how mentally tormenting that would be. I’m probably the most extroverted person you might have ever met in your life. I can’t stay 8 hours without talking to someone.

To spend a year alone made me think, “My life is so crazy. I might as well just quintuple down on every single crazy belief and thought I have and live the most interesting life ever.” That was the moment when I decided I was all in on building companies. There’s no way I can do anything else.

I was wondering if you were going to have a moment of, “This has set me back in some ways. Maybe I should reform or tame it down.” But you took the opposite approach: “No, this is who I am, and it’s going to work out.”

You just sit in a room by yourself for 12 months, and all of a sudden your craziest thoughts become logical. There’s no one else—the echo chamber is you and your brain—and it amplifies everything. I think that’s the reason why I am the person I am today and am willing to make the bets that I am today.

Later, I went to community college in California at the behest of my parents. I think California was a middle ground. In California, I had the chance to build a company, and in community college, I had the chance to get the education that my Asian parents always dreamed of.

I did that, and later I got into Columbia. I had to go to Columbia for at least a semester to appease my parents. I went to Columbia, and the first thing I was thinking was, “Can I find a co-founder and a wife?” Those were the only 2 things I was looking for in college.

I’m still looking for the wife, but on pretty much the first day, that’s when I met Neil, my co-founder. We started hacking on a bunch of things, and the one thing that worked was the earliest version of Cluely.

Were your parents ever trying to reform you or moderate you, or were they kind of like, “Roy is going to be Roy”?

Pretty much every single day of my life until I got into Harvard, they were trying to moderate me. Then they calmed down and were like, “Wow, this kid really made it.”

When I got kicked out of Harvard, they were on my ass a lot. Then I got into Columbia again, and they were like, “Wow. After all this, he gets back into the Ivies. I guess I really can’t trust him, and his unorthodox swings will be home runs.”

You mentioned before that your parents will love you no matter what.

Yeah.

I’m curious what they think now.

It’s crazy how lax they’ve gotten since I got back into Columbia. Now they’re okay with anything. When I told them, “Hey, Mom, I’m dropping out to do this,” she was like, “Oh, okay.” I expected it. She was like, “Why didn’t you drop out sooner? Why did it take you a semester and a half?”

At this point, I was convincing my co-founder to drop out with me, and she was like, “Man, it took you long enough.” So they’re totally on board with all the crazy shit that I do.

Wow. One of the things we were talking about in the context of going viral—I heard you say that Twitter is 2 years behind Instagram and the other platforms. Talk a little bit about when your provocativeness translated over to Twitter, or just the digital medium. How did that strategy evolve? Then let’s talk about the differences between the platforms.

I think this goes way back. Many years ago, when YouTube first came out as a platform, that was the turning point of everything. It democratized content. You weren’t paying for commercials anymore, and visibility, publicity, and content weren’t gated by the amount of money you were willing to spend on ads or TV space.

It’s just gated by the quality of content. And 5 years ago, when TikTok came out and short-form algorithms really started taking over, that shifted the frame once again. So now it’s not about how much good content you make; it’s literally just about how much content you can make.

There is simply not enough good content out there for the average person to consume, which is why you see the same brain-rot reels over and over again. You see the same Minecraft parkour video over and over just because there’s literally not enough content for the average consumer to consume. People have not caught on to a few things.

First, you just need to make more content that a consumer will like. Most people don’t know how to make viral content—content that any person can watch, consume, and digest. Everyone on X/LinkedIn is trying to be the most intellectual, thoughtful person, and they’ll generate some slop that maybe 200 people in the world can actually understand and make sense of.

Of course, they want to seem like the most interesting, thoughtful, intelligent person, but it lacks viral sense. There’s not enough viral content to go around. The second thing is that the algorithms really promote the most controversial things, and people on X/LinkedIn seem to have not enough controversial things to be rewarded for.

When I come out swinging out of the gate, I’ve been on Instagram and TikTok for the past 10 years of my life, and I understand what level of controversialness you need. I take the slightest step into controversialness, and all of a sudden X/LinkedIn explodes because the algorithm inherently highly, highly rewards this stuff. As a result, it’s just getting shoved into everyone’s feed, and they don’t understand.

I’m literally just applying the same principles of controversialness from Instagram and TikTok onto X/LinkedIn, and they’re just so not ready for it that it feels like the craziest thing ever. This is something that I’ve said before, but I guarantee my videos do not go as viral on Instagram and TikTok. The sole reason is because on those platforms, they are not controversial enough.

On those platforms, there are literally people committing felonies in public, or at least insinuating that they’re committing felonies. And even then, it’ll be like, “Oh, good try, bro,” like it’s not interesting enough. X just has not caught on. There’s not enough creators out there who are willing to press the controversial button.

Mark says this sometimes, right? The supply chain of the meme is the strangest concept, but the meme actually travels from Reddit, then it goes to X, then it goes to Instagram, then LinkedIn, then CNBC. There’s like a train that it goes through, and certain people are just really late. But when you actually flip it with virality and controversialness, maybe that flips a little bit.

Yeah. Well, sometimes it starts on 4chan or something.

That’s what I mean. I didn’t even want to say it. It’s 4chan, Reddit, then Twitter, then Instagram and LinkedIn. But for you, it’s actually Instagram and TikTok that come before Twitter in terms of the raunchiness or craziness of it.

I just feel like the average person who’s in the X comments hating on how controversial this is—if they spent 1 hour looking through the timeline that is my Instagram feed, their brains would melt and explode. They would not be able to comprehend how people are digesting this at scale.

Well, it’s funny because ever since Elon took over X, some people started complaining, like, “Oh, the stuff has gotten too controversial, or there’s too much dark stuff, or too much negative content.” Turns out, it’s just the beginning.

This is literally what the future of content is going to be. You’re not going to get more millennial founders; you’re only going to get more Gen Z founders. I guarantee you, their backgrounds in content are exactly the same as mine, and they know exactly what I’m doing.

I’m sort of the canary that’s leading the way for this, but I guarantee you there’s more of this coming. It’s inevitable, so just embrace it.

When did you realize that this was the way you were going to build a company? How did you intuit, “Distribution is a scarcity. Distribution is what matters”? There are a lot of creators out there, but they’re not combining it with a tech company. How and when did you put this together?

I guess there was a certain point when I kept going viral that I realized I knew something that X/LinkedIn people didn’t know yet, and it was mastery of the algorithm. Everything started with the Interview Coder situation. Interview Coder was the earliest prototype of Cluely, and it was a tool to let you cheat on technical interviews.

I used it to cheat my way through an Amazon interview. I made it super public, posted it everywhere, and it ended up getting me blacklisted from big tech and kicked out of school. That situation was inherently viral. When’s the last time someone got kicked out of an Ivy League school and raised $5 million? This has probably never happened in the history of humanity.

At that time, I had no idea that this was a repeatable thing that I could do. But then the launch video happened, and I had my intuitions about the virality of the launch video. I kept scrolling on Twitter and wondering, “Why is nobody doing what Avi Schiffmann with friend.com showed the world you could do a year ago? Why has nobody done this yet?”

It worked. Then I did the 50 interns thing, and it worked. I kept doing viral video after viral video, and at a certain point I realized, “Holy shit, people on X/LinkedIn have not caught on yet.”

This is the massive alpha that I’m trying to capture here: They have not caught on to what it means to master the short-form algorithm. As a result, I’ve been able to dominate the timeline for not just the past week, but probably the past few months, because people on X/LinkedIn have not caught on. For some reason, they still refuse to catch on.

Right. And so, just to put a point on it, the 50 interns maybe explained this idea: At your company, you either have engineers or you have creators.

There are only 2 roles. You are either a world-class engineer who’s building the product, or you are a world-class influencer. For a full-time employee, every single person has over 100,000 followers on some social media platform. It is the only way to prove that you actually have mastery over virality and understand what it takes.

If any company in the world has a marketing team and the head of marketing does not have at least 100,000 followers, you need to replace them. The game has changed.

Do you think this is a strategy that other companies should also be employing—basically having, whether it’s intern-based or not, an army of creators and deploying them toward their end?

I’ll go a bit deeper into the interns. Cluely made a pretty viral video announcing that we’re hiring 50 interns and that you’d be in here making content all day. That’s almost what we do. We have over 60 contractors, and these contractors get paid per video. They’re forced to sit in front of a camera and make TikTok and Instagram videos about Cluely.

This is what marketing looks like. This job did not exist 5 years ago. How do you explain the job where you sit in front of a camera and make five 10-second videos that seemingly make no sense to anybody, but consistently generate millions of views? That’s not a job that makes sense to people.

But that is our internship. That’s what a modern-day marketing internship looks like. We pay very little money for the number of views that we get. Different companies are paying literally millions of dollars for Super Bowl ads when you can get the same quality and quantity of views for $20,000.

Do you see it converting?

Yes. Realistically, the only converting videos are the ones that we have on Instagram and TikTok.

Yeah. Bryan, why don’t you share your story of how you got excited about Cluely, how you and Roy met and built this relationship, and how this partnership formed?

Sounds great. I had a good contact in New York who travels in the young, cracked-folks area, and her name is Ali Dvash. One of the lists that she sent had Roy in it. I read what they were working on, and it reminded me of a scout thing—or it was on the edge of virality. I thought, “This is interesting. I want to talk to him.”

So I reached out to Roy: “Hey, heard your name. We should talk.” You were like, “Oh, bro, let’s talk.” Then, a day later, you wrote back, and I’m like, “Actually, you’re multistage. I don’t want to talk to you.” My advisor said, “Don’t want to talk to you. Go away.”

What do I do? I could have just stood down, but I said, “Okay, fine. I promise you will not talk about fundraising. Let’s just talk. I want to meet you. I want to talk to you.”

“I want to build a relationship.” Thankfully, you agreed. We got on a quick call. We chatted a little bit, and you told me your origin story. I was like, “Oh my God, this kid is amazing. It’s so cool. I’m glad he’s doing this. Sadly, he’s not accepting money, but that’s okay.”

Then I tracked you. I tracked your Twitter. I tracked what you were doing—the 50 interns and your move to San Francisco. I had it in my mind: Okay, next time the opportunity strikes, I’m just going to show up. So I think I somehow got your phone number or something and texted you, “Yo, I’m at your office. Can I hang?” I came by, and you said, “Yeah, that’s great. Come up.”

What I actually think was really cool—there were a couple of steps—but step 1 was that an engineer randomly found you on Twitter or Instagram and had just come up. You didn’t know him; he didn’t know you. He just came to your office to say hi and wanted to say hello. One of your friends, I think Nicholas, was just there hanging out.

The quality of the people, the fact that random engineers were knocking on the door to come talk to you—it was just like, “Oh, there’s something really strange and special happening here.” All of your team members were sitting there doing things and creating content, and you and Neil were working on the product. I was thinking, “There’s something very special here. Is this something that we should back?”

Then I think one more video was made or something, and the next time I visited, I think I came with some stuff. You were eating steak, and then you flashed some metric or something where I realized that you were converting this awareness and eyeballs into dollars. You dropped some numbers: “Oh yeah, we’re doing this much revenue, and that’s what we’re doing. And guess what? Some enterprise customer wants to talk to us. I don’t know why.”

That’s when I realized he was actually able to convert this awareness and distribution that you were getting into real dollars. I don’t know many people who know how to do that. During that time, I was already writing this thing called “Momentum as a Moat,” because it’s been so hard to pierce through the noise of everything in AI, especially in the consumer-facing, prosumer-facing space. To do that consistently is way, way harder—nearly impossible.

So I had the theory that companies that know how to do that, companies that know how to build at that speed, are going to be the winners. I felt like I had found a person who was doing that. I think we moved very quickly, right? Roy, I think I told you, “Look, just hit Download. Hit Download on the Stripe data. Send it to us. I won’t ask any more questions.”

And then we’ll have a chat, and hopefully that is what we delivered. We quickly scrambled to do a very fun 4-person interview, or small-group chat, with you and some of the partners, where you called some of them old, bald, and boring. We were excited to do the deal.

I think I was at an LP summit, running around Las Vegas, trying to call you to get to terms. That’s how it all worked out. After a while, I brought you 5 or 6 pounds of steak as some excitement and a deal.

I want to double-click on the “Momentum as a Moat” piece, Bryan, because you have an interesting background in that you’ve been doing consumer for a while. You worked at Snap beforehand, among other places, and I remember Ben Thompson had this post about Snap where he said that Snap has a gingerbread strategy: If they invent stuff, Meta is going to copy it, so they just have to keep inventing stuff. I guess it’s like following the breadcrumbs or something.

You’ve also backed a number of these consumer companies, and you’ve had a front-row view to how these network effects aren’t necessarily as defensible as they once were. Companies need to keep innovating and keep pushing. Share more about how this kind of momentum, especially as it moves to AI companies, how this theory was born, and what it really means for defensibility.

I did not have that view before. I did not think the gingerbread strategy necessarily worked, nor did I think momentum was a moat. I actually truly believed in these handcrafted, artisan products that really get to the core of why people want to use them. I still somewhat believe in the core of it, but these artisan products, where it takes a while to build them and they’re very nuanced, led to high retention in my mind.

The thing that I looked at the most, always, was: Is this product highly retained? Does this product have network effects? Those were the traditional theories of a moat. Mobile is a 2-decade-old platform, so a lot of things have been tried, and a lot of people have tried different things. Therefore, finding something that people came back to again and again and again was the most important thing in my mind.

Then AI hit, and I still had that framework: I’m going to look for things that are highly retentive and repeated again and again. And guess what? Things change too fast. The underlying model changes every day or every week. If you craft this thing and OpenAI has built its new model to include that part in its new product, you’re done. You’re gone.

So it couldn’t become about this highly thoughtful, slow-build product. It needed to be something where founders knew how to move extremely quickly, and that included product and distribution. Because these things are so magical—AI is so magical—we built a digital god and locked it in a chatbot. Because it’s so magical right now, kind of anything goes. People will give it a chance.

Therefore, what’s really important is to try to build the plane as it’s falling down the cliff. People who enjoy the thrill of the plane going down and are actually excited about building as it goes down—I think those are the winners of the next decade. When I think about folks like Roy, he’s the type of founder archetype who gets value from and is excited about leading the charge in terms of that speed, whether it’s marketing, distribution, or product build.

Usually, all of that needs to come together to build an extremely durable, long-dated product. That, to me, eventually will turn into a product that needs to be retained, that needs to be used every day. But we’re still in this early stage of AI where I think momentum is the moat.

Going back to Roy, I’d love to hear how you think about it, because we talked about it a little bit over chat. You think about stage 1, stage 2, and stage 3 of building Cluely, and the distribution advantage that you have. You keep talking about how maybe people on X and LinkedIn don’t get it right now, but that gap may narrow over time. So how do you think about the next stage, et cetera? That’s how it links to my theory of momentum as a moat.

I want to get to Roy’s product strategy, but first I want to touch on some points. It was interesting that Paul Graham, when he started Y Combinator, identified that technical founders were undervalued—that they were being underappreciated. People thought, “Oh, you need to have an MBA,” and he realized it’s easier to teach technical founders business than it is to teach business people how to build great products or how to code.

Then what happens over the next 15 years? It becomes way easier to build these things—AWS, low-code, AI, et cetera—and distribution becomes the scarcity. There’s so much software. It’s such a flooded ecosystem. As you quoted in your piece, Andrew Chen’s piece about how all the marketing channels suck—they’ve all been wrung out dry. Distribution is now the scarcity.

So in the same way that the technical co-founder was undervalued, now there’s almost an audience co-founder, or almost a, “Hey, how do you really break out?” We’ve seen creators start to build businesses, like MrBeast with his chocolate, Feastables, right? Kylie Jenner with her makeup line. These creators create these lip gloss and commerce businesses, whatever. But no one’s really done it with software. No one has put the 2 together.

Justin Bieber tried to do a social network called Shots, or he tried—John Shahidi, via using Bieber. But no big creator has really built, whether a consumer or enterprise, a huge software company. They’ve built commerce or physical goods. I always thought, hey, why doesn’t MrBeast launch a Square competitor? He’s got all these eyeballs. I’m sure he’s got to get something with better margins than Feastables. He has games, and he’s a friend of the firm, and he’s done phenomenally well.

But what I like is that Roy is putting both of those together. Maybe you can walk through it a little bit. You talked about your distribution strategy. Why don’t you talk about how the product strategy has evolved from the beginning, and then we’ll get to the sequencing?

Yeah. I think something that a lot of people miss is that the first line of Cluely code was written 10 weeks ago.

So this is really new. This started with Interview Coder, which was a product that I coded up over a weekend in my dorm. It was a tool to let you cheat on interviews.

What we realized after we got about 250 million impressions on the whole scenario was, “Wow, we just got so many eyeballs on this thing. Maybe if we can do this again, but have a more general-use product with a similar UX—because we think we’re really onto something with the UX here—then maybe we can make a lot more money.”

That’s what we did with Cluely. We launched it as Interview Coder for everything: cheat on everything. Let’s just see what happens, and the usage data will tell us what people are using it for. That’s exactly what’s happening now. We have this general-purpose cheating tool, which in reality is just an invisible AI overlay. We said, “Here’s a new user experience for AI. Let’s push it out to a bunch of people and see what happens.”

As a result, we’re now past 1 billion views overall on Cluely. We’re probably the most viral startup in the world, and we have all this usage data that literally tells us, “Here’s where this is most sticky, and here’s where the product direction needs to go.”

I think that’s the core advantage of distribution: You don’t have to worry about market fit or anything, because your users will tell you where the direction of market fit is headed. Their usage data will literally give you the information that you need to know. If you don’t have usage data, then you’re literally shooting blind.

Every person who has built a company before knows that you can’t really know what direction you’re going in. You have to talk to your users. But I feel like if your distribution is strong enough, you don’t need to talk to your users; you just need to look at their data. You just need to look at the aggregate number.

You’re also redefining what a minimum viable product is, to some degree. Other companies might spend many months building something and then seeing how people use it. But for you, if you can create the right content, you can test out the idea much more quickly to see, “Hey, is this really resonating?”

Yeah, exactly. When we launched the video, we barely had a functioning product. The day before, we finished our final test and said, “Okay, we think this works now. Let’s just launch the video as soon as possible.”

We launched the video, and all of a sudden, tens of thousands of people showed up. We said, “Hey, let’s just throw sales calls into the videos to see if people use it for sales calls, because that seems like a pretty lucrative space.” All of a sudden, we had over $1 million of enterprise revenue coming in from people using it for sales calls.

You can do shot-in-the-dark distribution a lot quicker and a lot more accurately than you can do shot-in-the-dark product development. You don’t need 1 million product integrations. It’s just so much quicker.

What’s even better is that the iteration loop is much faster, too, because the algorithm will literally tell you via a number—the number of views, likes, shares, whatever—how well your strategy is going to work. It’s much easier to test whether something has viral fit than whether it has market fit.

And maybe, Roy, does that mean you let the audience guide where the product goes? Is that how you think about it?

Yeah, exactly.

And maybe let’s talk a little bit about the form factor. One of the things we discussed internally is that Roy is probably in the top 1% of the world in terms of knowing how to distribute. I revised that to the top 0.1%. Marrying that with the Venn diagram of people who know how to distribute and people who had the instinct to build a semitranslucent overlay sounds so simple.

Yeah. This disappearing picture sounds so simple. It’s easy. It’s not technically hard. A half-translucent overlay sounds simple; it’s not technically hard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that overlap was what gave me so much excitement about what you’re building. I actually have Cluely open right now. Erik, did you go to the University of Michigan?

Yeah, I did.

I see. I didn’t know that. You did philosophy, policy, and economics. I think, great, we can bond over that. This is suddenly an incredible tool.

Why don’t you talk more about where you see the product going, particularly how you think about it? Anyone who’s building an AI tool is asking themselves the question: How is this defensible from one of the major players? Will OpenAI, et cetera, just build this feature? How do you think about making your product truly defensible, especially from companies that, because of their reach and size, could do this? OpenAI has distribution, too, right?

I guess we’re the first mover in a pretty novel UX. I think everyone is inevitably going to get to a translucent overlay. This is how integrated AI should feel. Apple shows everyone that Liquid Glass—the translucent overlay—is going to be the form factor of AI in the future.

Right now, I feel like it’s just a land grab. If the question is about distribution, I think there’s actually a pretty strong case for us to make that we’ll end up distributing better than OpenAI. It’s enough that you could probably bet on us at something like a 30,000× discount.

I’m actually not worried about distribution. The quality of the product is quite simple. I really feel like this is just a land grab right now to see who can convince as many consumers and enterprise users as possible that they are the one who deserves to win the translucent overlay.

Right now, we’re making so much noise with the translucent overlay. Why would it not be us?

When did you figure out that the translucent overlay was the right form factor?

I was just in my dorm with Neil, and we were spending every day thinking about how to make Interview Coder more invisible during interviews. We played around with probably 20 to 30 versions of Interview Coder in the past that we thought didn’t work.

It essentially feeds you a code answer—an answer to a coding problem—and you need to overlay that on top of your code. We thought, “I really need this integrated into my code. I need to see what I’m doing as well as see the answer that AI is giving me.”

Eventually, we landed on translucency, and it was a magical moment. This is what the product needed. Very soon, we realized, “Why are we only thinking about coding interviews and software-engineering coding interviews? This is such a small market.”

This is true for everything. AI should not feel like a separate window; it should be integrated seamlessly. That looks like translucency.

I’d love for you to talk about the staged approach you’re taking. Right now, you’re distribution-first, and then you’ll build the product as you go. Stage 2 is where you do it with a bunch of engineering prowess, product development, and so on. We chatted a little bit about that over text, and to me it was, “Okay, he’ll figure out the product as he goes.” I’d love to talk a little bit about that.

Right now, the internet is up in arms saying, “Where’s the product? Where’s the product?” We are literally working day and night to build out the product that we have in our heads—the product that users are telling us they want.

But every video I make that’s not directly about the product drums up so much more hype for the eventual product-launch video. I guarantee that this will be viral, and I guarantee that it will be more viral than if we had just launched earlier.

There’s truth in the statement, “Launch early, ship fast, launch before you’re ready.” But for some reason, when we’re doing that at scale, it feels like everyone is saying, “No, you launched too early. Now where’s the product?” What are you talking about? This is the playbook.

We wrote our first lines of code 10 weeks ago. We’re earlier than the latest YC batch of companies, yet we’re probably generating more revenue than every single one of them. The product has been built for 2.5 months. From my perspective, we’re pre-launch.

The huge benefit of massively distributing pre-launch is that you’ll know what product to build with as much certainty as you could possibly get. If you can distribute and hype it up to an audience of literally millions of people—“Hey, this product’s coming out”—and we’re screaming to the world, “AI overlay, AI that sees your screen, here’s your audio,” then the second we make that, why would you pick anyone else’s product to use?

We’ve been screaming from the top of our lungs since day 1.

Even before day one. Right now, the stage is distribution: get it into everyone’s mind. What is Cluely? Cluely is the AI—the invisible AI that sees your screen and hears your audio. Everyone knows this. As soon as we launch it, who else will they download?

Yeah. One thing I think is fascinating about what you’re doing—and I’ll compare it to our friends at TBPN, who are kind of rebranding or reclaiming themselves. They call themselves “corporate-driven media” because everyone was saying, “We’re independent media,” and they’re like, “No, no, we’re corporate-backed. We’re more honest that way.” They’re leaning into all the bits about Ramp, like, “You save 5%,” and there’s this kind of humor to it.

Similarly, you’re leaning into controversy, or being controversial, as a strategy. Some people think, “Oh, that’s fake or forced or whatever,” but at the same time, you’re super authentic in the way that you’re doing it. People feel like they know you, and sometimes, even if there’s a character and exaggeration, that also feels authentic in some way. It’s just a unique style.

Yeah. I think this just reflects a growing shift in society. Literally, for the past few decades, there’s been such a sharp drop-off in professionalism. I really think it’s because content creation has been democratized. The first-ever YouTube creators were just people making funny videos in their dorms, and this was the most authentic thing—people crave this.

Nobody wants to see another ad or another corporate newsletter, shit like that. They want to see some real person doing real things. The democratization of content creation has allowed authentic people who make content to be seen by millions. Now authentic people who create content will be seen by millions.

For some reason, no company gets this. You’ll have 100× as many followers, and your post will be about, “Introducing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” It’s the most corporate shit ever. You’re not going to get any views, and nobody wants to see this.

Would you rather have a world where everyone was extremely transparent, even the founders were honest, and everything you see was just someone’s authentic life? Or would you rather see a bunch of corporate shit everywhere? What we envision for the end-state distribution of Cluely is that it does not feel like an ad at all. This is just the story of someone’s life that you want to see. It is true and authentic.

I’m probably more transparent about everything than, I’d say, probably 99% of companies in the Valley are.

Well, it’s funny, because some people get so mad at what you’re saying. I heard someone call it “rizz marketing,” which is a compliment, but they’re like, “I hate this rizz marketing. It’s got to be product-first. Get back to fundamentals.”

But first, this is its own fundamental of how the world works today. Second, of course they can’t destroy you. The joke in my head is they can try to kill you, but they can’t kill the idea.

Yeah. The way that you’re building companies, there’s something about it that’s going to have an impact on the next generation. You’re just starting the company journey, but even still, causing or inspiring that shift is remarkable.

When you say viral marketing, it’s interesting, right? One leads to another. I actually think what you’re doing is anti-fragile marketing. You’re so controversial: “I’m going to cut off your head,” and 3 spring up because 1 is mad at you, 1 is really happy about you, and 1 is neutral. You get all these—every time someone comes at you and comes at the idea of Cluely, the more aura points it gets. It’s like aura farming.

Any lessons from the most controversial stuff that you’ve done, or is it always triple down? How do you think about it? Is there a line? Where do you cross it?

I think the few lessons have been: never punch down. Never, ever even remotely come close to punching down. I think people reward—and the algorithm does reward—authenticity more than anything. It rewards many things, but one of the things it rewards most is authenticity.

You’ll see me on Twitter; every once in a while, I’ll make a genuine comment like, “Hey, thank you. I really respect you,” or something. People love to see that.

Yeah, I saw your response to Garry Tan.

Yeah. I respect that guy, and I hope that one day, when the company gets to where I imagine it will, he will turn around. I don’t think the lesson is to triple down on everything. I think the lesson is that if you’re honest, the algorithm will reward you, because there’s literally 0 other company out there that is being fully honest about everything, and there’s 0 founder out there that behaves authentically.

The only other person I might think of is Elon Musk. I think that’s a really good role model to have in business.

As you build Cluely into the first destination for consumers and enterprise alike, how do the types of stunts, if you will, and skits actually fit into the type of customer that you want to serve?

40 years ago, we were way more professional than we are now. If you were even an engineer, you came into work in a suit and tie, and if you didn’t, it was distasteful—disgusting. You should never, ever show up in a hoodie and sweatpants. Now you’re weird if you come in with a suit and aren’t in a hoodie and sweatpants.

Everyone wants more authentic things. Right now, for some reason in society, we’re still lingering onto this image that companies need to be brand-friendly and boring and never say anything controversial or whatever. I don’t understand how this became the societal norm. But in reality, people want to see interesting things. That’s the point of life: you see interesting things.

Again, with the distribution of short-form content, everyone sees the craziest things, and you just get desensitized to them. That’s why sports like Sperm Racing are able to be so hyperviral. Nobody would have aired this on CNN 10 years ago, but you don’t need CNN anymore. You have Instagram and TikTok, and they love Sperm Racing. As a result, they’re able to raise a massive valuation and genuinely have a shot at being the next legit sport.

It’s not just Sperm Racing. It’s every company in the world. There’s Sam Altman talking about how hot the guys are that GPT generates in the timeline. There’s Elon Musk raving about his political takes. Every company is getting less and less professional and more and more controversial.

This trend is not dying anytime soon. I’m just the person pushing the envelope perhaps a little further than the world is ready for at the moment.

I think the question that everyone should linger on a little bit is: what happens? Can you imagine a world where we do win? Can you imagine what the state of the world will look like if Cluely does win and we prove to everyone that the bar for professionalism is here, where we’ve determined it?

The entire state of corporate culture in America as a whole is going to shift, and perhaps the entire world. Everyone will realize, “Oh, we’ve had our panties in a bunch worrying about brand image and professionalism, when in reality the world craves something different.”

I have very strong conviction that I’m right because I was right about X. I just did not understand, for the life of me, why nobody was producing the viral videos that were so obviously designed to go viral for the algorithm. It’s just because nobody had caught on, and nobody was willing to press that button.

Now that I’ve pressed the button once, just imagine what the world looks like if Cluely makes it. You probably are more interested in that. That would be a much more interesting world if every company was being 100% radically transparent and doing exactly what the most interesting thing was.

As Elon says, “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”

So true. On that note, this has been a fantastic episode with Roy and Bryan. Guys, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having us.

Thank you.