Cluely Raises $15 Million From a16z | Roy Lee, Founder & CEO

25:06And sperm racing would never have been allowed to air on TV back in, like, 20 years ago. But now, of course it can. Of course it can. Everyone is aware that there's controversial things happening, and it's okay. And I think we're going to see the same thing with professionalism. And let's just imagine a world where I do make it here. Like, what do you think will happen to the culture of startup professionalism and, like, oh, like, brand risk and, like, all this shit? Like, I strongly think that it's just going to, people are going to realize, like, oh, this shit doesn't matter. Everyone's cool with this now.

25:34And if I make it, then it will, like, be, like, the death of professionalism. So there are two sides to your argument. There's one that would say you're a marketing genius, and there are people that are posting about it online. Like, you did it. you are very polarizing. You have camps that are like super supportive and some that are like, wow, this is really not, this is very distasteful. I don't want anything to do with it. This is a shame on the venture capital industry and everybody in technology. Because there are these two camps to this, where do you think the risk lies?

26:13Is there anyone that you're concerned about offending? Or do you think that the more virality, the more stunts you do, the more desensitized everyone becomes? I have two responses to this. I think probably the most controversial person in the world might be Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is a founder that everybody looks up to. He has undeniably made it. And perhaps he's like big, and this ties into my second point, when you become big enough you become untouchable and the risk of controversy becomes zero like or as about as close to zero as it gets um and now elon can pretty much say whatever the fuck he wants do whatever the fuck he wants and he's also the richest man on earth exactly exactly and has many multi-billion dollar companies that shield him from that once you make it then you are shielded but he didn't make it by being controversial he made it by working really hard i would push back that he didn't make it by being controversial.

27:14The person that he is right now is very likely similar to the person that he was when he was 20. And I guarantee you the bets he's making now that are controversial and people think are crazy are the exact same bets they would have made 20 years ago. He just didn't market it so publicly. The difference is that I'm being extremely public about the marketing of it. And perhaps it'll burn me. Perhaps it'll make me win. But I know that I would not be here right now if I wasn't public about being controversial. And I think this is the revenue numbers, the fundraising, everything that's happened so far is a place where 99 % of founders don't ever see in their lives.

27:46One of the biggest pushbacks in addition to those is they don't think that this is sustainable, that you're going to crash and burn. There's actually a Calci market out on it that will the CEO of Cluelay leave the company this year, insinuating either you crash and burn, you get fired you get pushed out or maybe you go to jail i don't know okay i don't know what the lines are with your stunts so what do you think i mean i think every single great person in the world has had a point in their lives where they faced extreme controversy the the richest people in the world with the most successful companies you put you post a picture of them on on on instagram and they just get dogged on by a million people saying oh this is an evil billionaire this person is literally morally bankrupt they say all these things and when you fail you become sam bankman freed and when you win you become elon musk sam altman and um like there's people who say sam altman is building like the fucking devil and accelerating the end of humanity as we know it there's people who think he's like a saint and it's like at the end of the line the person with the most attention has 50 of people rooting against him and 50 of people rooting for him and it's just in that like you will be hated by people and uh i'm just unfazed uh the the only thing that everyone needs to worry about is can you hit escape velocity fast enough to become untouchable before you piss enough people off and um i think right now i'm accelerating my my trajectory towards both escape velocity and towards pissing a bunch of people off but who knows who knows if i will get there what are your odds on leaving the company this year leaving the company i mean zero like we're literally profitable and we spent like we spend as much money as we can there's almost zero expense that goes unapproved by us because we understand that um you need to spend big and swing big to win big and all of our marketing sense like If it means we buy 10 fursuits and they're all$10 ,000 and we dress up everybody in the office as a furry for a video, fuck it, we'll do it, bro.

29:41Yet we're still profitable because we make a bunch of money. Again, we're accelerating both towards escape velocity and we're accelerating towards burning. You guys are profitable? Still. Still profitable. That's crazy. I know, right? Who would have known? Still profitable. More seriously, though, you have enterprise customers now. Yes. How does this lead into customer service with those enterprise customers? Have you been getting any pushback from them? Almost none. The only reason I have the contracts that I do right now is because the decision makers at these enterprise companies have seen my Twitter and think I'm funny and are rooting for me.

30:15And they're part of the 50 % of people that are rooting for me. And I would never have had these contracts if I was just some lame person about this random HUD translucent liquid glass screen overlay. Like if that's all clearly was just like, oh, AI sales calls. Like I would have not had any of these contracts. But I have these contracts because I'm willing to take the risk, be polarizing and some people support me your company account tweeted um yesterday you tweeted 20 million ugc views in two weeks x and linkedin is not our target audience and if you're fuming at our messaging you will soon find yourself on the wrong side of history victory is inevitable when you understand how to capture attention consistently that's deep yes yeah you guys are good with words.

30:58But beyond X, where are you also capturing this tension? What's the strategy? X and LinkedIn are extremely small and especially tech Twitter. It's super small. What I've learned is if you have a post, if you're in tech Twitter and you have a post that does over say 40 ,000 impressions, you've hit pretty much every relevant decision maker in tech. It's an extremely, extremely small world. And realistically, if I go outside San Francisco, I walk around for 10 hours, the giant shirt that says Cluelly guy, nobody's going to recognize me. Maybe like a few, a handful of people will recognize me because this world, it's super niche.

31:36And what feels like, man, Cluelly's been on my timeline for the past two months. Like it's all I can hear about. In reality, you walk outside, nobody's fucking heard of this because regular people are not on Twitter, LinkedIn or ex-LinkedIn. Regular people are on like Instagram, TikTok. Well, more, many, many more people are on Instagram, TikTok than on XLinkedIn. And every single big company is known by regular people. And I think the two ways that you achieve full consumer mindshare is you can either get the mindshare first or you can have your product funnel you into mindshare. I think we don't have the time to let our product grow that big that fast.

32:17But we do have the time to go hyperviral on IG TikTok. I'm not sure that I'm framing this right, but I guess to put it in an analogous way to building companies, the TAM of IG TikTok is way bigger. And even if I've captured the TAM of X, it's not big enough for the company to hit escape velocity. We don't just need to be the biggest thing on tech Twitter. We need to be the biggest thing on IG TikTok.

32:45And that takes a lot. in the tweet katie sue from your team she broke down how you guys achieve a million views per day and this bleeds down into hiring in 10 creators in-house yeah how did you get that idea i mean this this is the playbook that every consumer app uses um do you think marketing teams are going to have to all shift to this now is growth now in the hands of the creator of course i mean marketing teams can try but i think the reason why cali founder is like fucking 18 quitter founder is like 19 the reason why all these big consumer app guys are so young because you need to be tapped in with young culture to understand what's funny and you can have like a 35 year old marketer who's um like scrolls as much as they want for some reason they just won't have the viral sense to come up with hooks that are capable of generating 10 million views.

33:40And if you don't have a guy who's capable of generating these crazy hooks or capable of identifying who has Algalpool right now, then you can't do this. This process is the one thing that you need for this process, which in reality is quite easy, is ViralSense. And ViralSense is something that is extremely scarce. How big is your team to date without the interns? 11 full-time. 11 full-time? Yep. And you guys all live in a house together? Most of us live in the house, but some of us live in an apartment that's a block away. How do you think of the whole house idea? I know hacker houses have been a mainstay in San Francisco for a while, but you got a very nice one.

34:19You got a very big one. I think you need to work where you live if you're serious about building the company. Like work-life balance should not be a thing that you think about. Your work should be your life and vice versa. and if that's the case then the best way to to realize this is by literally living where you work you wake up you go straight to work you go to you go to bed uh on the couch essentially um and that's that that's sort of the culture that we're trying to promote here um there is no work life balance your entire life is clearly and your entire work is clearly okay what's the team composition uh four and seven growth okay and then we only hire one of two types of people you're either an engineer or like a world-class engineer or you're an influencer and also like like a world-class influencer with like high alcohol there's nobody who's not a great engineer who has less than 100 ,000 followers wow yeah how do you find everyone what's your recruiting process i how do you filter them out i think that's a very dense yeah team i think i have viral sense um i scroll quite a bit and I understand what's trending in culture right now.

35:30As a result, like when I suddenly got this injection of money, like I knew immediately, here's like the top 10 people I want to hire. And now fucking like seven of them are living with me in the house. When you scroll enough, you just know, like the same people tend to pop up recently. You see the same series. You know exactly which series are hot right now and you know which creators are hot. and it's not celebrities anymore. It's not people with 10 million followers anymore. It's literally like the college kid with 100 ,000 followers or maybe even like 10 ,000 followers sometimes. And those are the people that we've recruited.

36:03Talking about the culture within the house, are you at all concerned with all these stunts, the stunt marketing, that it's gonna leave the wrong impression on your employees or something might go too far and you won't be able to manage it or you're gonna bring in a lot of really bad talent who just thinks that you're crazy and you're not serious. How do you manage that? A lot of people think because of my ex that I'm the guy that comes up with all the crazy stunts. But in reality, almost every single day we have a brainstorming session about what is the craziest thing we can do in the near future that will capture attention again.

36:40And if you think what we've done to date is crazy, then you're going to shit your pants when you see what happens for like the next month or two months. we have a storyboard of content that is like genuinely insane and has never ever been attempted before in the realm of Twitter and I think it's I don't have to worry about the employees because the employees are the ones coming up with these ideas everyone is on board with the craziness and we understand that this is like the lifeline of the company we are either crazy enough to make it or we're crazy enough to die or too crazy and we die what would you want someone to know if they were coming to work at Cluely?

37:16Hmm. What would I want a future employee to know? I think perhaps the one pinnacle of the company is that there are only two roles here. You're either building the product or you're making the product go viral. And if you're not excellent at one of two things, then you're probably not going to get hired. And if you are excellent at one or two of the things, then you are likely crazy enough to be fully on board with what we're doing. And if you're not, then you wouldn't have applied in the first place. So there's no reason for you to be here. A world-class engineer only applies for a company like Cluely because they're attracted by the culture.

37:51And if you're attracted by the culture, then why would you ever try and stop the culture from promulgating? And if you are an influencer, then just by nature of influencers, you will understand what it takes to be viral. You will understand that it's cool what we're doing, and you will contribute. Or you'll quit because you don't think the culture is right. What do you think is your grand vision for Cluely? I think it's inevitable that in about two or three years, we will have models that are multimodal, large context windows, are capable of reasoning over, say, three hours of a screen recording.

38:23In that world, all of a sudden, the second that release comes out, the second that API comes out, all of a sudden, every technologist in the world has the capability to build, essentially, Jarvis. But in that world, who wins? Who is actually the one that becomes the main distributor of Jarvis? In my opinion, it's whoever has the same thing that Google had when they put out Gmail and killed Yahoo Mail. Same thing that Google had when they put out search and they beat Bing. It's not a fundamentally better product. It's a capturing of mindshare. And I think mindshare is something that is probably like the most important lever of consumer or just lever of technology distribution in general.

39:02And what people often mistake this for virality, they think, oh, virality is not sustainable. But what is sustainable is mindshare. And the difference is this. You can have a product that gets a billion monthly views for, say, UGC content every single month, and nobody will ever sit down at a lunch table and start talking about your product because they might see it brain rotting or they might have heard about it, but they don't actually care. And to make people care, you need to do something polarizing, something crazy like our launch video. And I think the only way to capture mindshare is to know that in this world, there's millions of people who go to lunch every day and talk about you.

39:36And truly, the only way to do this is to be controversial and viral and do it consistently. And if you can do this, then you will get the same. Like, there's a reason why people use Discord all the time. They don't use any other social app. They use, like, it's cool. And you don't become cool by just getting views. You become cool by being the talking point of every lunch table. And you get there by doing pretty much exactly what I'm doing. It's how Mr. Beast got there. It's how the Paul brothers got there. It's how Charlie D 'Amelio got there. Like, everybody gets there by doing some crazy shit and getting talked about over and over and over again.

40:09Are there actually 50 interns there? 50 interns never meant 50 interns. Well, not 50 actual in-person interns the same way that you think about them today. But it means like five interns and like, say, 45 UGC creators. We're actually planning on scaling this to way more. But like, this is what a modern day internship looks like. And this is probably what like labor in general looks like in a future of AI. I mean, UGC creator, you sit down on a phone and you make TikToks about a product. This is like a concept that wouldn't, it's a job that did not exist even 20 years ago. So it feels sort of absurd to call it an internship.

40:42In reality, it is an internship. Like you're here doing part-time work at a job that may convert to full-time in the future and you're providing value to the company. Like this is by all means a growth internship. So we have a bunch of interns and right now, like, yeah, we're like closing in on 50 if you count all the UGC creators. How do you manage that internally? Like, are you guys going to create your own platform for managing like views, analytics? What metrics do you measure? How do you think about that against the virality, against the growth hacking? I mean, this is like a critical component to the business.

41:11So how do you manage it? Yeah, I mean, we have like what is shaping up to be our own internal CRM for managing all this stuff. And probably this will be like the first of its kind, like a CRM exclusively for managing creators. But it's in-house right now. There's not too much overhead because in reality, you don't have to manage the people. You have to manage the content that they produce. and you get paid for the content that you make. So if you're lazy, then you just don't get paid and that's it. There's not significant operational overhead. And we have the systems in place for this to scale to like 2 ,000 creators.

41:46So I'm pretty confident about this. Not sure. Yeah, but how do you manage that system? How do you manage the views of all that? How do you determine they're real, they're fake? Are they boted? Are they not? Like if you scale to 2 ,000 creators, I'm in Discord channels, I'm in WAP, like I'm doing content rewards. Like you can like scaling for quality is really hard. And something that I don't know, like not every view is worth it. So I'm just really trying to deeply understand how do you scale up quality views? Yeah, I think there's two main types of content that we put out. One is like converting content.

42:29you have a hook where you actually like you visually show the product and you explain one of the use cases of the product and you just expect it to convert and be profitable and you have ones that are intended to capture hive mind and again this is we don't care about the profitability of this at all we just want people to consistently see Cluey and like hear about Cluey like man like another fucking Cluey video on my timeline I cannot get this off my feet this is crazy even if they're never going to go to Cluey.com just implants it deep in their mind. And I think tracking conversions on views and all that shit, it's like the most stupid thing you can do.

43:07Because in reality, there is no dollar amount of one view. You can't really calculate what the dollar amount of my launch video was because this was like a culturally significant moment in tech. This is something that everyone was talking about. And as a result, there's people going around in the biggest rooms talking about the Cluelly launch video. How do you calculate? How do you put a monetary value on that? Is it like the conversion? Like, I don't give a fuck about the conversion. like we made a cultural moment um and i think tracking that stuff is is like pretty meaningless eventually suppose you could scale up to say 100 billion views a month that that's pretty extreme but if you could do that then like bro like fuck i will pay any fucking how how much money do you think google would would would pay to get 100 billion dollars of views a month consistently like a lot of fucking money um how much money have you spent on views less maybe like 20 000 $20 ,000?

43:54How much did you spend on the viral video? Which viral video? The Clue Lee launch video. Clue Lee launch video was$140 ,000. Okay. Yeah. It was before the raise, too, so at the time it was like our entire life savings. Do you have a budget for all of this? Like how do you manage? The budget is essentially all of our investor money. Okay. Probably like 80 % of it. And it's just, you just can't track these things. I don't think you should be tracking these things. and it's pretty obvious if you have like a very visual product demo it will convert and all you have to worry about is if you watch the video do you think this is highly converting does it actually show a demonstrable use case visual of the product and is it actually something that would make someone with a need buy your product if yes then fuck off the conversions like don't track the analytics because uh like the analytics means nothing love premium merch just as much as we do.

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45:19And for any VCs, DM me on X, and I can get all your portfolio companies set up with a free samples credit deal. Are you going to use any of these AI generated videos? Like Veo just came out. CalShe just made an amazing viral video on this. And I'm not just saying that because I work with CalShe and their sponsors. But CalShe just made like an incredibly, very tasteful AI generated video with another creator and it went so well. Are you thinking about using any of those? It's possible. There's like literally a million viral formats out there. Right now we're sticking with what we know works and what we as influencers know.

45:59And like a lot of these are just like talking head videos from real people. I think the most important thing with a video going viral is like, do people think that it's real? And if there's even like a slight hesitation, like, oh, this might not be real, this feels AI, then there's formats that that kills. Like there's formats that that kills in, but there's also formats that are just like impossible if the average viewer looks at it and thinks, ah, it doesn't look real to me. And those are generally the formats that we try to use. So I don't think we've completely crossed the uncanny valley with VO3.

46:27So, yeah. Well, I want to get into some more personal stuff, Roy. Let's do it. I can't imagine that this whole process has been up and to the right for you. I'm sure that there have been challenges and there will be challenges and you're probably facing many when you pull these things. but like how do you manage that and what kinds of challenges have you faced so far as founder and CEO of the company? I mean obviously the PR crises are the biggest thing we have to manage but there's a very clear north star here and it's a I want to be conqueror of the fucking universe and I think anybody who wants this does not have the time to sit in their room shit in their pants worrying about the people that they might have pissed off the only thing I can do is what I do best right now.

47:16And clearly this is capturing people's attention and building this specific product. I think these are like I spike in one thing very obviously and clearly. If my goal is to make as big a swing as possible, then I need to capitalize on the things that I'm great at. And if it turns out and I think like so far I've been rewarded immensely for capitalizing on this one particular skill that I have. and in the future perhaps I will be burned by it but perhaps I will be rewarded a million times more immensely and I think obviously like the PR crises like when you swing this big it is inevitable that sometimes you'll miss and when you do miss like it's it's pretty bad because you swing really big and you missed when you make these huge bets on virality and you try and go super viral every time it is inevitable that sometimes you'll win but sometimes you'll lose and the times where you lose I think I'm faced with a situation that almost nobody faces in their in their lives ever and it's hard there's like no one I can turn to for advice who's the person I asked for hey I just got kicked out of Columbia for building a cheating tool and going viral I'm blacklisted from every big tech company now what should I do who can I ask for advice on that there's almost no one and it's times like this where I have to uh sit in a room and just like reflect with solely myself and I think just being alone and thinking about like man maybe I really fucked it up this time.

48:39Those are definitely the hardest times. And I think this is like a challenge that even like among tech founders, almost nobody experiences. The things that help me are, there might not be people that I can go to directly for advice, but there's people that I know will always be on my side. And like my parents or my best friends, my co-founders. And I think it's very important to draw a distinction between my real life and who I am online. The way I'm online is like the craziest person ever. I'm optimizing for one thing, and that's eyeballs on Cluey. But the life that I live in the real world, the people that I'm around that love me unconditionally, and I love them unconditionally back, I know this will never change.

49:20And I anchor myself to them.

49:27So what are you looking to improve upon as a CEO? I think I've been thrust into a position of leadership and management over a lot of people. And it's pretty crazy. This is such a stark difference from me just hacking in a dorm room with Neil. I don't really get to make the same engineering mistakes and just be like, oh, fuck it. Sorry, I'll send a sorry email to our 20 users and just redo the entire DB. I don't really get that anymore. now I sort of have to be stricter with people and that's sort of like the framework that we always operated in and I'm sort of the one that has to step up now and be like hey we gotta be more serious and it's hard for people to take that seriously when it's coming from me I think this is probably the thing even at work I try to inspire people to think creatively about swinging big, taking huge risks but I'm also the guy that has to step in when things get bad and like hey this is a shitty migration we can't do this again And I think it's been hard to distinguish that with the employees.

50:30And sometimes being serious CEO Roy mode. And most of the time being like, let's all think about crazy shit we can do. Is there anyone you particularly admire or look up to? Yeah, Elon Musk. I think this is the one guy who gets it so right. He was the most controversial, hated, might have been at one point the most hated person on the internet. And he just fought through it. And this guy is literally the richest man in the world. there is nobody that's ever been like Elon or done what he's done. And I think if there ever was a role model for my sort of controversial polarizing this, hitting escape velocity and just being able to like go to the, I do whatever the fuck I want zone, it's Elon.

51:06Go to Mars. Go to Mars. Exactly, bro. Exactly. Okay. Well, as we wrap up, I like to close out on a really fun predictions segment. Okay. So we're going to use Calci and we're going to go through a couple. I know we already went through one, whether or not you're going to leave the company. So the market's out for that. But on the topic of Elon, do you think Elon will create a new political party this year? I hope so. I am very anti-politics. I try to be as apolitical as possible. I have almost no political takes. But the one thing that I love about politics is that it's very, very ruckus. There's always some shit going on that riles people up.

51:46and I think it's entertaining to watch and I would love to see Elon start a new political party. As he tweeted the most entertaining outcome is the most obvious and I think if there's ever a person in the world who has the ability and willingness to do some crazy shit like this, it'd be Elon. I'm all for it. I'm like, I would full port that. What do you think that political party would be? Probably like the fucking technology party, AA party, I don't know, American party. The American party probably is what people are saying, right? Okay. Yeah, the party that represents to 80 % of people in the middle.

52:18If Cluelay disrupts the labor force as much as you think it might, jobs might be lost. Okay. What do you think the unemployment rate will be in 2030? Probably like fucking 4%. Like things will revert back to the meatball. Like humans will always find new jobs except for the 4 % of people that just don't want to work. Okay. Well, you're, we don't know. We don't know if you're right or you're wrong. I know. The market right now says 8.7. That's the forecast. is wrong. Clearly told me this. The market is wrong. We could expect four. Alright. Lastly, you seem like you know a lot of stuff. You're online all the time.

52:54All the time, yeah. All the time. Do you think a major meteor will hit the Earth by 2030? Bro, absolutely not, bro. Like, I feel like this is such a stupid thing to bet on, because if you're right, what the fuck do you win? And if you're wrong, like, you have nothing left to gain but to win. I think it is stupid to think about like the worst case scenario. I'm like an extreme optimist. I genuinely think super intelligence will do almost no harm. Whatever harm it will do, it will like self-restore. I think all the people worried about like AGI, safety, all that bullshit. This is like, bro, like I'm an extreme optimist.

53:29I think AI will cause us all to live to 500 years plus, will cure cancer and Alzheimer's. And literally in probably like 50 years, I'm going to be on Earth 3 in universe like B47. Thanks to AI. And Elon Musk. And Elon Musk. Exactly, bro. I'm an extreme techno optimist. I think meteor strike is just, it's the most negative thing to think about. If I could bet on, like, I will full port no. Okay. All right. Well, there's a 65 % chance. Yes? Yeah. Are you serious? I think that's ridiculous. Maybe I'm reading it wrong. Okay, Roy. Well, this was certainly an interesting conversation. I don't think I've been called bro more than my life.

54:10but thank you so much for coming on and sharing more about Cluely and your crazy your crazy stunts and all the things you're doing you're welcome bro