Silicon Valley's Hottest Young Founder Right Now | Cluely, Roy Lee

0:00 Hello, my name is Roy.

0:01 I founded this company called Cluely, and I just got kicked out of Columbia

0:04 for building this tool called Interview Coder.

0:07 It's like a cheating tool for software engineering.

0:09 Technical interviews.

0:10 I used the technology to build a much bigger company.

0:12 Cluely, the desktop app that lets you cheat on everything right now.

0:16 We just launched about a month ago.

0:18 We're closing in on $5 million in annual recurring revenue,

0:21 and we also just closed a $5.3 million

0:24 seed round led by Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures.

0:32 I was a pretty wild kid.

0:34 I got in a lot of trouble, but I was pretty smart.

0:36 I think I was pretty good at math.

0:37 I did a bit of math competition when I was younger.

0:40 I was on the debate team.

0:41 I played some cello.

0:42 I loved girls, you know, every year I had a new girlfriend.

0:45 Yeah, my mom made me do a lot of studying, but I hated studying.

0:48 I was always trying to go out and like, have fun, play with my friends.

0:52 I've always been very competitive.

0:53 When I was a kid, I had an older brother who was two years older than me,

0:56 and I always wanted to be smarter than him.

0:58 I always wanted to do better and get better grades at school than him.

1:01 I'm always trying to win.

1:02 I'm trying to beat ‘Juhn-Gyo Eel-Deung’ at everything.

1:04 Top of the class You know, in the world of software engineering,

1:06 if you want to get a job at a big tech company, you have to answer these sort

1:10 of riddle-esque questions that are called LeetCode questions.

1:13 And pretty much every developer you know

1:15 at a big company has gone through the gauntlet

1:17 of memorizing 300-600 riddles and just sort

1:20 of memorizing the solutions and regurgitating them in interviews.

1:23 I'm very, very competitive.

1:25 So the second I knew that there was a global ranking on LeetCode,

1:28 I knew I had to be one of the best.

1:31 So I spent hundreds of hours studying, grinding the riddles,

1:34 even though I don't care about LeetCode, I didn't enjoy it.

1:36 I didn't really have a good time, but I was just competitive.

1:38 So I thought, if there's a ranking,

1:40 then I've got to be on the top of the ranking.

1:42 But I mean, it just ended up with me wasting a bunch of hours.

1:44 LeetCode just has nothing to do with what you do on the job.

1:47 It's like the modern day equivalent of asking

1:49 how many balloons fit in the Empire State Building.

1:52 It's supposed to test your critical thinking,

1:54 but the questions are online to the extent

1:56 that rather than practicing critical thinking,

1:58 you just practice memorizing the riddles.

2:00 You're going to sit through and memorize all the 1000 questions,

2:02 because it means you get a $200K a year job.

2:04 This is not good for anybody.

2:06 You don't learn anything from practicing these riddles,

2:08 and you just end up wasting time when you should be programming.

2:11 I thought this was pretty stupid and this has

2:12 been going on for around 20 years right now.

2:14 The technology was there to develop this tool that would

2:17 invisibly let you use AI to cheat on these interviews.

2:20 So I built the tool.

2:21 I publicly recorded myself using it on the Amazon interview.

2:24 I got the job and I posted this everywhere saying,

2:26 look how easy it is to hack these interviews.

2:29 Eventually this got me in some trouble.

2:31 But, the impetus of everything was when I decided that it's

2:34 just a stupid industry practice and I wanted to change it.

2:39 A lot of people think it was explosive from the start,

2:41 but it took about a month before it really started to take off,

2:44 and for a month I posted everything.

2:46 Amazon was getting mad at me, and Columbia saw it and was getting mad at me,

2:50 and everyone was just upset and it didn't

2:52 really go that viral for about a month.

2:53 And during that time I was really stressed.

2:55 I just gave up my entire career

2:57 and my entire education for the hope of a company.

2:59 But it didn't even go viral like I did all this for like 15,000 views.

3:02 And I was really worried.

3:03 Everybody in my life, including even my co-founders,

3:05 were telling me like, hey, we should probably stop.

3:07 We should probably shut this down.

3:08 But I don't know.

3:09 There's just a voice in my head that said, this has potential.

3:12 Like I have to keep going.

3:13 And I did keep going.

3:14 And then at one point it did go viral, like super viral.

3:17 And everybody in tech saw it.

3:19 At that point, I was safe.

3:21 Virality protected me from further punishment from Columbia.

3:24 It made the path to entrepreneurship a lot easier and clearer.

3:27 I've sort of committed my life to building companies.

3:30 Once I made that decision, it was very easy for me to decide to leave Columbia.

3:34 And once I did leave Columbia,

3:35 I knew I'm going to do the only thing that I can do now,

3:38 which is build companies.

3:39 I think it also helps position me.

3:41 I'm a very unique person now who got kicked out of an Ivy League.

3:44 And as a result, there's a lot of interest

3:47 from Silicon Valley about what I'm going to do next.

3:49 At the time, it felt like things were moving really slow.

3:52 As soon as Interview Coder went viral,

3:54 I knew that I had to capitalize on the moment

3:56 because the attention wasn't going to be there for long.

3:58 The product was a product designed to die,

4:00 the product to cheat on technical interviews.

4:02 So the second companies change technical interviews, the product dies.

4:05 Meaning I have a few short moments before

4:08 my spot in the limelight dies and I thought, I have to raise a round.

4:12 I have to start a bigger company

4:14 that's more sustainable and defensible long term.

4:16 So for me, it felt like things were moving so slow.

4:18 I had to push back my fundraise like two weeks.

4:21 I was going to fundraise two weeks earlier than I did.

4:23 To me at the time, I felt like I was in such a time

4:26 crunch and I had to wrap things up and do the next thing,

4:30 and it felt like things were moving super slow

4:31 But I guess I was under the pressure of the situation.

4:36 I mean, we planned for me to use Interview Coder to cheat

4:39 on a bunch of big tech interviews and get the jobs,

4:41 and we thought that was going to be a viral moment.

4:43 So in that sense, we planned it.

4:45 But for the last three months I've made probably like maybe a thousand tweets,

4:48 and since then, I've figured out how to make tweets that will go viral.

4:51 How to make tweets that will be more controversial and get more engagement.

4:55 I think for X especially, I've only really cracked X,

4:58 because I think people on Twitter are a very unique type of people.

5:02 They love controversy, they love drama, they love attention,

5:05 and they love to either dog on people or watch people get dogged on.

5:09 I think every single time you tweet something,

5:11 if you don't think half the people in the world would feel very

5:14 negative about this, then it's probably not going to be viral as a tweet.

5:17 All of your tweets that you're planning on making go viral,

5:21 they need to have a very strong,

5:22 controversial twist that makes people pause and be like, what the fuck?

5:25 And this is not the case for Instagram,

5:27 TikTok or LinkedIn or whatever, but it is the case for Twitter.

5:30 And yeah, I think Twitter is- the more

5:32 controversial you're willing to make your tweet,

5:34 the better and the more viral you will go.

5:35 Interview Coder on Twitter was received so positively.

5:39 It was just like this scrappy young kid

5:41 who was trying to fight back against big industry,

5:44 big tech, and everyone on Twitter was very supportive.

5:47 I think as I got bigger and my account grew,

5:50 people grew less supportive, which is like to be expected.

5:52 I'm generally very good at receiving hate and criticism.

5:55 I'm a very polarizing personality,

5:57 and I do a lot of crazy stuff throughout my life.

5:59 I've always had people giving me hate.

6:01 None of the negative comments really stood out,

6:03 but I was very surprised to see how positively Interview

6:05 Coder was received on Twitter when I first launched it.

6:07 I think people are often so worried

6:09 that they're going to say something bad online,

6:11 and it's just going to get back to them and their reputation is over.

6:14 And I don't know, like it's going to bury them.

6:16 But I think in reality ‘all press is good

6:18 press’ I say a ton of super controversial stuff.

6:22 And in every video I'm in, there's like a bunch of comments saying,

6:25 oh, this guy's evil.

6:26 This guy's like, this and that, and there's always some hate.

6:28 But it's like, this stuff really doesn't matter.

6:30 Yeah.

6:30 I mean, I've learned that it really doesn't matter

6:33 if everybody in the world just doesn't like you.

6:35 Well, actually, it's done pretty much the opposite.

6:37 I've realized that even if I say extremely crazy shit online,

6:40 it will just make people more interested in me and the company,

6:43 and it'll just drive more downloads

6:45 and conversions and get more eyeballs onto Cluely.

6:47 If anything, I've learned that I need to become crazier online

6:50 so that people will keep funneling attention towards the core product.

6:54 I think it's very, very rare that you will say something

6:58 online that translates to something negative happening in the real world,

7:01 like online is not real life.

7:03 I'm a pretty chill person in real life,

7:05 but online I'm crazy because it gets me engagement and attention.

7:09 When you are so polarizing and controversial online,

7:12 you need to very clearly distinguish this is

7:15 my real world life and this is the online life.

7:18 And in my real world life,

7:20 there are very few people who I trust fully and who I think I love and love me.

7:25 My parents will always be on my side,

7:27 no matter what crazy shit I do online and my future wife and kids

7:30 They will always be on my side no matter what crazy shit I do online.

7:32 And I think it is very, very important to distinguish.

7:35 This is my real life family and friends and they love

7:38 me unconditionally and I love them and everything online is just noise.

7:41 Even if everyone online or everyone outside this box hates me,

7:45 it doesn't matter because the most important people are in this box,

7:48 and the people that I love and love me back.

7:51 Interview Coder is a tool designed to let you cheat on technical interviews,

7:56 but what we realized as we built Interview Coder is that the idea of an AI

8:00 that sees your screen and hears your audio

8:02 sort of shows itself as this translucent screen overlay.

8:05 This has never really been attempted before.

8:07 This is a completely novel user experience,

8:09 and it's very shortsighted to think that this is only good for cheating.

8:12 Ultimately, what we're building is we're building for a future

8:15 where models are multimodal and the models are not there yet,

8:18 and they're probably not going to be there yet for another three years.

8:20 Nobody's really thought of what happens when chatbots are no longer relevant.

8:24 What happens when you don't want to prompt GPT anymore?

8:27 And it just knows what you want?

8:29 Then how will you interact with AI?

8:31 Nobody's really attempted this before,

8:32 and I think Interview Coder was the first proof of concept

8:36 of a user experience that could work in this world.

8:38 So we realized that.

8:39 And that's what we're building Cluely.

8:42 I mean, Cluley is the new way you will use AI in five years.

8:46 Hopefully if we do things right then in two years.

8:48 The phrase "cheat on everything" is intentionally ambiguous.

8:51 Like what is cheat on everything?

8:52 Like, I know what cheat on test means,

8:53 but I don't know what cheat on everything means.

8:55 It's left to be sort of confusing and make

8:57 you sit on it and reflect for a moment.

8:59 When you see someone using AI for everything, it makes you think this is unfair.

9:02 They're not supposed to be doing that.

9:04 They're cheating.

9:04 In reality, if you can use this for everything,

9:07 like what is cheating on a meeting look like?

9:09 It's not really a thing.

9:10 It's just our gut human reaction to think, this is so different.

9:12 This is such a big advantage that it's unfair.

9:15 And what we hope to do is we hope to give everyone this advantage.

9:18 When every single person is using AI to cheat on meetings,

9:21 then it's not that you're cheating anymore.

9:23 this is just how humans will operate and think in the future.

9:26 I think when you can use AI, you should use AI.

9:29 If it helps you, then you should use it.

9:32 If using a calculator will help you, then you should use it.

9:34 If using spellcheck will help you, then you will use it.

9:36 Eventually, the spell check will teach you how to spell the right words,

9:38 because you'll get used to it so much or you

9:41 just won't need to know how to spell anymore.

9:43 You'll just need to know what the word is.

9:45 If you can use AI to help, then you should.

9:47 And if you can already do the job,

9:48 then you'll never need to do the job in the future.

9:50 Assuming AI is everywhere, which it will be.

9:54 All technical interviews need to change,

9:56 not just in software engineering, but everywhere in the world.

9:58 If you get asked the question and AI can answer the question,

10:01 then you should probably get that out of your interview.

10:04 I think interviews will be a lot more holistic,

10:06 and I really question whether we even need job interviews at all in the future.

10:10 If there is an AI that knows everything about you,

10:12 everything you're good at, why do you need a one

10:14 hour interview to assess anything other than culture fit?

10:17 I already know all the work you've done,

10:18 or at least the AI already knows the work you've done.

10:20 It knows how good it is.

10:21 It knows what skills you're good at, and if there is a skill match,

10:24 then I should just be able to match you directly to the job.

10:26 Assuming that we get along after like a 30 minute conversation.

10:30 I really don't know that there is a need for interviews in today's age,

10:32 but right now what we use is really just a conversation.

10:36 We check if you're a culture fit,

10:37 we talk about past work you've done, and that's pretty much it.

10:40 The whole point of Cluley is to get everybody used to the fact,

10:43 or used to a life where they use AI for everything.

10:46 Once everybody uses AI in every instance possible,

10:48 there's going to be a lot of jobs that get replaced,

10:50 and there's going to be a lot of people who

10:52 are able to do so much more than they previously were.

10:55 If every scientist decided one day, like today,

10:57 I'm going to start using AI as much as possible,

10:59 they will be 100 times more productive.

11:01 When scientists are a hundred times more productive,

11:03 we cure cancer ten years earlier.

11:04 We cure Alzheimer's ten years earlier.

11:06 Everyone lives to 400 years old and we're

11:08 on the next flight to fucking Mars in like two years.

11:10 The rate of societal progression will

11:13 just expand and exponentiate significantly once

11:16 everyone gets along to the fact that we're all using AI now.

11:20 And that's what Cluley hopes to achieve, is to get everybody used to "we're all

11:24 using AI now." I think for the user experience,

11:30 I spent a lot of time making the user experience very seamless.

11:33 It's less of a technical challenge, I think, and more of a taste challenge.

11:37 The concept of a translucent screen overlay is

11:40 something that really has never been attempted before.

11:43 And it's something that I tried,

11:44 and I think I only got to it after like dozens of iterations

11:48 of different tools that would be a more seamless use of AI in your life.

11:52 Yeah, I think that was probably the biggest technical challenge,

11:55 just figuring out what exactly is the best

11:57 user experience for someone using this tool.

11:59 I mean, latency, response speed and accuracy are the two biggest things.

12:04 This is what every model, like OpenAI,

12:06 is working to improve: latency and accuracy.

12:09 There's ways that we can get to a much faster response,

12:13 for example, if we host models on our own servers.

12:15 This eliminates a lot of latency that comes from the load

12:18 balancing and request handling that is just inherent in OpenAI's servers.

12:23 That's probably what we will end up doing.

12:25 There's ways that we can cache the input and sort

12:28 of parameterize the inputs so that you get the same condensed info.

12:33 Same information, but just condensed in a smaller

12:35 way and the smaller the input size, the faster the time to first token.

12:39 Also, generally, accuracy can be improved by specific system prompts.

12:43 We're developing custom evals in-house based on a lot

12:46 of the analytics and usage that we're seeing.

12:48 And like everything is getting better.

12:50 Like every single day, the Cluely gets more accurate and faster.

12:53 At a certain point, we're going to know exactly

12:56 what type of responses you prefer as an individual,

12:59 what sort of conversations that you're in, and we

13:02 can use all that data to generate a very, very hyper specific, personalized,

13:06 fine-tuned model for you that knows that, hey, I'm a media reporter,

13:10 I conduct these sorts of interviews,

13:11 and I generally want these types of responses.

13:14 The tonality of my emails is this.

13:15 So I would like you to respond in this way.

13:17 And we can just get the most personalized model in the world.

13:20 And once we have that data as like a moat,

13:23 defending us from the other big tech companies,

13:25 then we'll pretty much be unstoppable.

13:26 More so than the data,

13:28 I think the user experience is just interesting, untapped and novel.

13:31 If we're correct about this, then we'll be the first to market.

13:34 And there's a huge first mover advantage when you're trying a new form of UX.

13:39 And if we can capture the market

13:41 quickly enough by going viral enough sufficiently,

13:43 then I think it will be very hard to compete with us.

13:49 The entire way we're going to think will be changed.

13:52 Every single one of my thoughts is formulated

13:54 by the information I have at this moment.

13:57 But what happens when that information I have isn't just what's in my brain,

14:00 but it's everything that humanity has ever collected and put online, ever.

14:04 What happens when AI literally helps me think in real time,

14:07 the entire way that humans will interact with each other,

14:09 with the world, all of our thoughts will be changed.

14:11 Like what happens when I know about every single post you've made online ever.

14:15 And I use that to distill down

14:17 into a condensed blurb of everything about you ever.

14:21 What does our interaction look like then?

14:23 It's really hard to say, but I think this is a turning point for humanity,

14:27 and it will fundamentally change the way that we

14:29 think and the way that we behave as humans.

14:31 Well, if you're not building a company in AI right now,

14:33 then you're probably not doing the right thing.

14:35 AI just enables you to build such cool stuff,

14:38 and it's such a new technology that even if you're

14:41 19 and you've been playing with it for two months,

14:43 you are one of the brightest minds.

14:46 You are one of the pioneers of the field.

14:47 It's not like biology where if you haven't studied for ten,

14:50 20 years, then you don't, then you're not an expert in biology.

14:52 You can study AI for two months and you'll be an expert in AI.

14:55 This technology is so gigantic,

14:57 and it's so new that you can be really, really young.

15:00 And you can know it more deeply than anyone else,

15:02 and you'll have the opportunity to build like a billion,

15:05 $10 billion company out of it.

15:07 I would say take bigger risks.

15:08 This is the only advice I have for anyone, really.

15:11 You are smart enough.

15:12 You're capable enough, you're hard working enough.

15:13 Just take bigger risks.

15:15 If you take bigger risks and force yourself

15:17 into positions where you have to make it,

15:18 you'll find that you're a lot more hard working than you thought you were,

15:21 and you'll also find that life gets a lot more interesting.

15:24 And very often the downside risk is much smaller than you think,

15:27 and the upside of risk is much bigger than you think.

15:29 I wasn't really like this five months ago.

15:31 I mean, literally like, half a year ago, I was thinking,

15:34 I just want to get a job at a big tech company.

15:36 That's all I want to do.

15:37 And it wasn't until very recently that I thought, oh,

15:39 I actually want to build companies and go

15:42 all in on this, taking risks initially.

15:44 It means being willing to get rid of the constructs

15:47 and limiting beliefs in your mind that make you think,

15:49 hey, when I graduate, I have to be an engineer or lawyer or doctor or whatever.

15:52 Just being willing to see what would happen if you didn't do it.

15:55 Every risk starts very small.

15:57 Right now, I think people look at me and think I'm a crazy risk taker.

16:00 But it didn't start like this.

16:01 It started with me taking smaller risks.

16:02 Like the first risk I took was, hey,

16:04 what if I built this tool and told nobody about it?

16:06 Then the next risk I took was what if I post it online

16:08 but made it free and didn't really associate with it so that people,

16:11 more people would see it and eventually the risk just snowballed and snowballed.

16:13 Until now, I'm like fully posting whatever confidential

16:17 document Columbia gives me because like, I don't care.

16:19 Like the risk is not that much of a risk anymore, and I've grown used to it.

16:22 So grow used to taking bigger risks.

16:27 I feel like my life is very easy.

16:30 My life has been very easy.

16:32 I mean, my mom.

16:33 I've got loving parents, my mom, she made me study even when I didn't want to.

16:37 She would just say, Roy, you should go study.

16:39 So I studied and as a result, I did well in school and I hung out

16:42 with smart kids and they helped me do better in life.

16:44 Like, I have two amazing, great parents and I come from a great family.

16:47 I don't really feel like my life has been all that challenging.

16:51 Getting kicked out of Columbia?

16:52 It's not that challenging when you're out there building companies,

16:54 and I was going to drop out anyways.

16:56 Getting rescinded from Harvard?

16:57 This is also not that challenging when you have a loving family at home.

17:00 There's kids out there who are starving in Uganda

17:03 and like my life is not that hard.

17:04 Really.

17:05 A lot of everything that you should think is you should just

17:07 try and think more positively about life and be more optimistic about things.

17:11 It's very rare that you're going to be in America,

17:13 you're going to have the opportunity to go to college,

17:16 and you're really in an actually challenging situation.

17:19 In reality, we're in the most interesting time in history.

17:21 If you live in America and you're

17:23 not in poverty and your parents aren't crackheads,

17:25 you have the opportunity to make billions of dollars

17:28 and make generational wealth and do the most interesting thing ever.

17:31 There's very few challenging situations

17:33 that are so challenging that you're just, like, limited right now.

17:36 Anybody can do anything,

17:37 and you should just try and take risks and be bold because,

17:41 you're very privileged right now to be living in this world.

17:45 Success is having a wife, having 12 kids and having people remember me.

17:51 I think Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are very

17:54 cool in that everyone has a strong opinion about them, whether it's good or bad.

17:58 Everyone has something to say about Elon Musk, and I think that's really cool.

18:02 We're all gonna die eventually and nobody's

18:04 gonna remember us in a thousand years.

18:06 I might as well be remembered as strongly

18:08 as possible for the time that I'm here.

18:10 I think the biggest thing is confidence.

18:12 Like, truly, you hear all the time

18:14 that, the people that build big companies are not geniuses.

18:17 They're not smarter than you.

18:18 They're just they take more risks than you,

18:21 and they're hard work, harder workers than you.

18:23 And I think this is generally true.

18:25 Five months ago, I was just some random student at some

18:27 random school and I didn't really have anything going for me.

18:29 And now I just raised $5 million, and I'm in this giant office,

18:33 and I'm building a company that I hope will change the world one day.

18:35 And very little has changed about me except the fact that I took a risk.

18:39 Even moving forward, if I do end up becoming the next trillionaire,

18:42 like as big as Mark Zuckerberg, there will be nothing about me that changed.

18:46 It'll just be a series of well calculated

18:48 risks that I took that will lead me there.

18:50 And I think the gap between Mark Zuckerberg and your average human,

18:53 it's really not that big.

18:54 And if you just have the confidence to take bigger risks,

18:57 then very often you will win.