Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks

0:00We wrote our first lines of code 10 weeks ago. We're like earlier than the latest YC batch of companies, yet we're like generating probably more revenue than every single one of them. It's been so hard to hear through the noise of everything in the AI, especially to the consumer facing for sure is facing. To do that consistently, it is actually really harder near and possible. I heard someone call it RIS marketing, which is a compliment. They're like, I hate this RIS marketing. AI is so magical, we like built the digital god, locked it in a chat box. Six months ago, some random college kid in the dorm, and now I feel like I'm at the center of the tech universe.

0:37What happens when a founder treats viability not as a tactic, but as the product? Roy Lee, co -founder and CEO of Cluelie, is either a generational entrepreneur or a walking internet experiment, maybe both. In just a few months, he's built one of the most talked about startups in tech, now with a massive fundraise or a polished product suite, but through relentless short form content, polarizing stunts and a translucent AI overlay that feels more like performance art than interface. Joining me today is Roy, along with Brian Kim, who led A16Z's investment in Clueline. We talk about Roy's approach to building in public, what Gen Z understands about attention that tech still does it, and why momentum might be the new mo in consumer AI.

1:16This is a conversation about distribution as design, founder market fit at internet speed, and what happens when you stop trying to be professional and start trying to win. Let's get into it. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company's discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z .com forward slash Disclosures.

1:57Roy, man, the myth, the legend, the man of the moment. Kooley is the current thing. How does it feel? The announcement the other day, a lot of love, a little bit of hate. How do you react to this? I mean, it's pretty crazy. I think, like literally six months ago, some random college kid in a dorm, and now I feel like I'm at the center of the tech universe. And the more astonishing thing is how correct my assumptions on virality have been. I think it's growing increasingly clear that people on X LinkedIn are behind. And there's such a big, extremely small intersection of people who understand how developed the algorithm is on like Instagram, TikTok, and people on tech, like Twitter LinkedIn, X LinkedIn.

2:40And there's just such a small intersection that it's inevitable that my predictions will be right. And it's been crazy to see that play out in real time. Yeah, Elon's reaching out. Metta's offering a billion dollar acquisition offer. Brian We said not to do it. Of course, of course, of course. I'm just a moment. What is your reactions to seeing this play out and having led the investment? Yeah, well, first he's a bro of the moment. I love the little snippets of like you calling Molly bro like 20 different times amazing. Look, Roy, this is fantastic. It's so interesting. I remember right before the announcement, you had already sent me the video 24 hours ago, like, well, this is what we're gonna show.

3:16Yeah. And I was like, okay, like, this is great. And I think it's gonna do well. I didn't think it would do that well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I didn't think it would create that much controversy. But I also, I think under estimated how positive people will view this. There's a lot of meta analysis on you, which is like really, really cool. And there are people who are going like two to three layers deep. And I actually read something that like linked a meta analysis it's a basic 16z was clearly and how there's like the sort of fungibility of thoughts and things like that. No, I'm not. There's a lot going on.

3:52So it's just been incredible. What people do in literary criticism? No, I'm not kidding. There's literally a guy who wrote like fungibility of thoughts with a 16z and clearly. Yeah, yeah. That's funny. People always overeat into stuff. They're like, oh, just had this master plan. A6 and Z is trying to do this whole. That's what I'm saying. Everyone. Yeah, it's just don't tell them Eric. We are playing 40 shots here. That's like 10 threads analyzing the left hand handshake. That's like, guys, come on. To some of the haters, I tweeted to some of them, I was talking about Brian, I tweeted, how you feel about Clule is how you feel about yourself.

4:23But I deleted it because I didn't want to trigger people on Twitter. I'll talk shit on a podcast, and maybe I'll get clipped to Twitter, but I don't want to, yeah, and hopefully, I was passing to see. So, I want to go back to the beginning, because this isn't a story that has been told a lot. You know, we were 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 or the through lines from your childhood that can help make sense of who you are and kind of this moment. I think from birth, the most character defining feature of me has been like attention grabbing and provocative.

4:57This played out elementary, middle, and high school. I was always like, I had a camp people that loved me and a camp of people that hated me. I was like, always the boldest. Like I would say the crazy shit. Everything does on my mind, just no filter out, say it. And this ended up with a lot of people liking me and a lot of people just really disliking me. And I think things culminated senior year of high school. They lied to well in school. I got accepted to Harvard early. And then later that year, I was just always doing crazy shit. And I snuck out of a school field trip, passed curfew. Like the police had to come and escort me back because we were out at 2 a .m.

5:25We were all like 16, 17, 18. And then I got a suspension for that. And that was like when the camp of Roy Hader's took the storm and reported everything everywhere. And it ended up getting me rescinded from Harvard. And then that kind of started my journey of, I think I'll like entrepreneur wanting to actually swing big at building companies. That's when I felt like my life took such a crazy turn for context. My parents literally run like a college in missions consulting company. So we literally teach kids how to get into Harvard. And the youngest son of the company like gets fucking percent from Harvard.

5:54It's like the worst thing ever. So we decided let's keep this quiet. Do you still have the same test scores and application? Everything maybe next year you get into a different school. So I spent like an entire year at home. And I underestimated how mentally poor that would be like, I'm probably the most extroverted person you might have ever met in your life. I cannot stay maybe like eight hours without talking to someone. And to spend a year alone, it made me think, man, my life is so crazy. I might as well just couldn't topple down on every single crazy belief thought I have and just live the most interesting life ever.

6:24So that was like the moment where I decided, like I'm all in on building companies, there's no way I can do anything else. I was wondering if you were gonna have a moment of like, oh, this is setting me back in some ways. Maybe I should reform or tame it down, but you took the opposite of like, no. This is what I am and it's gonna work. Yeah, you just sit in a room by yourself for 12 months and all of a sudden your craziest thoughts become logical and there's no one else. Like the echo chamber is you and your brain and it amplifies everything. And I think that's the reason why I am like the person that I am today and willing to make the best that I am today.

6:52Later I go to community college in California at the behest of my parents. I think California, this is like a middle ground. California I have the chance to build a company and community college like I have the chance to get the education that my Asian parents always dreamed of. So I do that and then later I get into Columbia and I have to go to Columbia for at least a semester to appease my parents. I go to Columbia and the first thing I'm thinking is like, can I find a co -founder and a wife? Like those are the only two things that I'm looking for in college. And so looking for the wife, but on pretty much the first day that's when I met Neil, my co -founder, so I hacked on a bunch of things and the one thing that worked was the earliest version of Clouley.

7:25And were your parents ever trying to reform you or moderate you or were they kind of like, hey Roy's gonna be Roy and it's almost not? every single day of my life until I got into Harvard, then they calmed down and they're like, wow, this kid really made it. And then when I got kicked from Harvard, again, they were like, on my ass a lot, until I got into Columbia again, and they're like, wow, after all this, he gets back into the IVs. Like, I guess I really can't trust him. And his unorthodox swings will be home runs. Is that what they're at now? Yeah. That's actually what I'm gonna ask. So you mentioned before that your parents, they will love you no matter what.

7:58Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am curious what they think now. Oh, man, it's crazy how laks they've gotten since I got back into Columbia. Like now they're okay with anything. When I told them, hey, mom, I'm dropping out to do this. Like she's like, oh, like, okay, you know, like I expected it. Why didn't you drop out sooner? Why did it take a semester and a half? Because at this point, I was like convincing my co -founder to drop out with me. And she's like, man, like took it long enough. So they're like totally on board with all the crazy shit that I do. Wow. One of the things we were talking about in kind of stuff, going viral, I heard you say is that Twitter is two years behind Instagram.

8:28Yeah. or behind other platforms. Talk a little bit about when your sort of provociveness sort of translated over to Twitter or just like digital mediums. Like how do that strategy evolve and let's talk about the difference in the platforms? Yeah, this goes way back, but many years ago when YouTube first came out as a platform, this was like the turning point of everything. This democratized essentially content and now you weren't paying for commercials and the visibility and publicity in content was not gated by a amount of money you're willing to spend on ads or TV space. it's just gated by the quality of content.

8:59And five 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 can you 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 and over again. Over and over again, you see the same Minecraft parkour video over and over. It's because there's literally not enough content for the average consumer to consume. and people have not caught on to a few things.

9:27First, 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 consumed and is digestible, and everyone on X LinkedIn is trying to go, be like the most intellectual, like thoughtful person, and they'll generate some slop that maybe like 200 people in the world can actually understand and make sense of. But of course, they wanna seem like the most interesting thoughtful intelligent person, but this just lacks viral sense. There's not enough viral content to go out, And the second thing is that the algorithms really promote the most controversial things.

9:58And people on X -linked in, there's not enough controversial things to be rewarded for. So when I come out swinging out of the gate, I've been on Instagram TikTok for the past 10 years of my life. And I understand what level of controversialness you need, I take the slightest foot into controversialness and all of a sudden, X -linked in explodes. Because the algorithm inherently highly, highly rewards this stuff. And I was, it's just getting shoved into everyone's feet and they don't understand. but I'm just like literally applying the same principles of controversialness from IG TikTok onto X LinkedIn and they're just so not ready for it that feels like the craziest thing ever.

10:30And this is something that I said before, but I guarantee, like, my videos do not go as viral on Instagram TikTok. And the sole reason is because on those platforms they are not controversial enough. And on those platforms, they're literally people committing felonies and public, or at least insinuating like they're committing felonies. Even then, it'll be like, oh, good try, bro. It's not interesting enough. And like, X -Sync did they just have my caught on. There's not enough creators out there who are willing to press the controversial button. Mark says that sometimes, right? Supply chain of the meme.

10:57Yeah. It's like the strangest concept. But the meme actually travels from like Reddit and then it goes to X and then it goes to Instagram, then LinkedIn, then CMBC and there's like a trained that it goes that certain people are just early late. But when you actually flip it with virality and controversy and that's maybe that flips a little bit. Well, in some sense it starts like 4chan or something. Like because I'm the most controversial. That's what I mean. I didn't want to say it. It's 4chan, Reddit, then Twitter, then Instagram and LinkedIn. But for you, it's actually Instagram and Twitter comes before Twitter in terms of the raunchiness or craziness of it.

11:31Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just feel like the average person who's in X comments hating about how controversial this is, they spend one hour looking through the timeline that is my Instagram feed. Their brains would melt and explode. They would not be able to comprehend how are people like that just in this at scale. It's funny because ever since Elon took over X, some people start complaining of, oh, this stuff has gotten too controversial or too much dark stuff or too much negative content. And yeah, it turns out it's just the beginning. Yeah, yeah. I mean, literally, this is what the future of content is going to be.

12:03You're not gonna get more millennial founders. You're only going to get more Gen Z founders. And I guarantee you, their backgrounds and content are the exact same as mine. And they know exactly what I'm doing. I'm sort of like the canary that's leading the way for this. But I guarantee you, there's more of this coming. and it's inevitable and just embrace it. When did you realize that this was the way you were going to build a company? How did you intuit, hey, distribution is a scarcity, distribution is what matters. Because there's a lot of creators out there, but they're not combining it with a tech company.

12:26How and when did you put this together? I guess there was a certain point where I kept going viral that I sort of realized that I know something that X LinkedIn people don't know yet, and it is sort of like mastery of the algorithm. And I think everything started with the interview cutter situation. Interview coder was the earliest prototype of Clule and it was a tool to let you cheat on technical interviews. And I used it to cheat my way through an Amazon interview. I made it super public. I posted it everywhere and ended up getting you like blacklisted from big tech and kick that school. And that situation was inherently viral.

12:57Like, when's the last time someone got kicked out of an Ivy League and raised $5 million. Like, this has probably never happened in the history of humanity. So that situation was inherently viral. And at that time, I had no idea that this was like a repeatable thing that I could do. But then the launch video happened and I had my intuitions about the by our Alliative Launch video. And I just kept scrolling on Twitter and I was wondering, like, man, why is nobody doing what Avi Shiffman with friend .com showed the world you could do a year ago, like why has nobody done this yet? And it worked. And then I did the 50 interns thing and it worked.

13:23And like I kept doing viral video after viral video. And at certain point, it just realized like, holy shit, people on X -Linked in, they have not caught on yet. And this is the massive alpha that I'm trying to capture here, is that they have not caught on to what it means to master the short -form algorithm or the algorithm that is one of short for them. And as a result, I am able to dominate the timeline for not the past week, but probably the past few months, just because people on X LinkedIn have not caught on and for some reason, they still refuse to catch on. And so just to put a point of point, how the 50 -inchers maybe you explain this idea, basically at your company, you either have engineers and you have creators.

13:59Yeah, there are only two roles. You are either a world -class engineer who's building the product or you are a world -class influencer. And for full time, every single person and 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 you understand what it takes. And I think 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 like the game has changed. And so do you think this is a strategy that other companies should also be employing whether it's interbase or just like having an army of creators and sort of deploying them towards their end?

14:32Yeah, I'll go a bit deeper in the interns. So cool, we made a pretty viral video announcing that we're hiring 50 interns and you'd be in here and making content all day. And essentially, that's almost what we do. We have like over 60 contractors. These contractors get paid per video and they just are forced to sit in front of a camera and make TikTok and Instagram videos about Cloulee. And this is what marketing, like this job does not exist five years ago. Like how do you explain the job of you sit in front of a camera and you make five, 10 second videos that seemingly make no sense to anybody, but just consistently generate millions of views.

15:00Like that's not a job that makes sense to people. But that is our internship. That's what like a modern day marketing internship looks like. And we pay very little money for the amount of views that we get. And different companies, they're paying literally millions of dollars for super role ads when you can get the same quality and quantity of views. $20 ,000. And you see it converting? Yes, yes. I mean, like those are realists clearer or only converting videos. Is the ones that we have on IG TikTok. Yeah. Brian, why don't you share your story of how you got excited about Cluley, of how you and Roy met and build this relationship and how this partnership formed?

15:32I had a good contact in New York who travels in the young crack folks area and her name is Ali Debo and one of the lists that she sent had Roy in it and I like read what they're working on and it sort of reminded me of Oh like a scout thing or it's on the edge of reality. I'm like oh this is interesting. I want to talk to him So I reached out Roy if you remember I just reached I hey her your name blah. We should talk you're like oh, bro Let's talk and then a day later you wrote back in my actually your multi -stage. I don't want to talk to you My advisor says, don't wanna talk to you, go away.

16:04And then 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 wanna meet you, I wanna talk to you, I wanna build a relationship. Thankfully you agreed, we got on a quick call, we chat a little bit where you had your origin story, I'm like, oh my God, it's good, it's amazing. It's so cool, I'm glad he's doing this. Sad he is not accepting money, but that's okay. Yeah, and then I tracked you. I tracked your Twitter, I tracked what you're doing, the 50 intern, you moved to San Francisco, I just go, and I had it in my mind, okay, next time, going to the opportunity strike, I'm just gonna show up.

16:35So I think I somehow got your phone number or some touching and texted you, yo, like I'm at your office, can I hang? So I come, and you say, yeah, like that's great, come up. And what I actually think was really, really cool. There are a couple of steps, but step one was, there was like an engineer who randomly found you on Twitter or Instagram and had just come up. Like you did not know him, he did not know you, He just came to your office, came in to say hi, wanted to say hello, and one of your friends, I think, Nicholas was just there hanging out. And the quality of the people, the fact that random engineers were knocking on the door to come talk to your randomly, was just like, oh, something like really strange and special happening here.

17:16And all of your team members sitting on the thing, and like doing things and creating content, and you and Neil working on the product, they're like, oh, like there's something very special. And I sort of was thinking, oh, like, Is this something that we should sort of back? And then I think one more video was made or something. And next time I visited, I think I came with some stuff where you're eating steak. And then you flash some metric or something where I realized that you're converting this awareness and eyeballs into money dollars. You drop some numbers. You're like, oh yeah, we're doing this many revenue and that's where we're going.

17:48And guess what? Some enterprise customer wants to talk to us. I don't know why blah, blah, blah. And that's when I sort of realized, Oh, he is actually able to like convert this awareness and distribution that you're getting into real dollars. And I don't know many people who know how to do that. And during that time, I was already writing the synchal momentum as a moat because it's been so hard to pierce through the noise of everything in the AI, especially in the sort of consumer facing for sewers facing, to do that consistently is actually way harder near impossible. And so I had to theory that oh like companies who know how to do that, companies don't know how to build that that speed are going to be the winners.

18:31And I felt like I have found a person who was doing that. And so I think we move very quickly. I told you look like just hit download, hit download on the Stripe data, hit download, send it to us. I won't ask any more questions. Yeah. And then we'll have a chat. And that hopefully is what we delivered. We quickly scrambled to do a very fun small person chat with you and some of the partners and where you call some of them old bald and boring. And we were excited to do the deal. I think I was going to help you summit running around in Las Vegas, trying to call you to get to a terms, et cetera. And that's how it all worked out.

19:08And after a while, I brought you five, six pounds of steak as an excitement and a deal. Well, I want to double click on the momentum as a moat piece, because you have an interesting background in that you've been doing the tumor for a while. You worked that snap beforehand among other places. And I remember Ben Thompson had this post about SNAP, where he said that SNAP has a gingerbread strategy. We're basically, if they invent stuff, Meta's gonna copy it. So they just have to keep inventing stuff. And I guess it's called the bread crumbs or something. And you also have backed a number of these, you've had a front -row view to, hey, these network effects aren't as necessarily defensible as they once were.

19:44And so companies need to keep innovating, keep pushing. And so share more about how this kind of momentum, Especially as it moves to AI companies. This theory was born at what it really means for a divestibility. This might be somewhat interesting to you, Roy, and folks, which is I did not had that view before. I did not think gingerbread strategy that's really worth, nor momentum was a moat. I did not. I actually truly believed in these handcrafted artisan products that really get to the core of why people want to use it. I still somewhat believe core of it, but these artisan products, where it just takes a while to build it, and it's like very, very nuanced.

20:17and I have believed that led to high retention. So the thing that I look at the most always was, is this product highly retained? Does it product have like network effect on does the traditional sort of theories of mode? And what I realized, and this was like true, to some extent, in the era of mobile. Mobile is like a two decade old platform. So a lot of things have been tried, and a lot of people tried different things, and therefore finding something of people came back again and again and again was the most important thing in my mind. And then AI hit and I still had that framework where oh like I'm going to look for things that are highly Retentive and repeat it again and again and guess what things change too fast Like don't are like model changes every day or every week if you like craft this thing and Open AI as someone like built in new model to include that part in their new product.

21:08You're done. You're gone So then it couldn't become about like this highly thoughtful slow build product and needed to be something where founders knew how to move extremely quickly. And that included product, that included distribution. And because these fucking things are so magical, AI is so magical, we like built the digital God, locked it in a chat box. Because it's so magical, right now, kind of anything goes, like people will give it a chance. And therefore, what's really important is to try to build the plane as it's falling down the cliff. And people who enjoy the thrill of the plane going down and actually is excited about building as it goes out.

21:48I think those are the winners of the next day. And so when I think about folks like Roy, it's the type of founder archetype who gets value and is excited and leading the charge in terms of that speed, whether it's marketing, distribution or product build, and usually all of that needs to come together to build an extremely durable long data product. And that to me, eventually we're turned into a product that need to be retained, that need to be used every day. but we're still in this early stage of AI where I think momentum is the mo. Going back to Roy, I love to hear how you think about it because we talked about a little bit over chat where you think like stage one, stage two, stage three of building clearly and sort of the distribution of energy that you have and you keep talking about this, oh maybe X and LinkedIn people don't get it right now, but that gap may narrow over time.