Chungin “Roy” Lee is known for many things. Viral social media videos. Throwing ragers at his office. Being suspended from Columbia University. But conversations with the cofounder and CEO of Cluely, San Francisco’s buzziest and most controversial startup, tend to loop back to the beginning. As in, the beginning of civilization.
“I always harken back to ancestral living,” said the 21-year-old.
“Humans are biologically primed to live in a group, hunt with each other, and work together,” he said, donning a black T-shirt and dazzling Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra bracelet. “We wake up, and we’re all excited to hunt down the king of the jungle.”
But not before — just as our ancestors would have done — putting in a group DoorDash order for Peet’s Coffee and Tadaima matcha.
For a CEO who rose to internet fame after building an AI tool meant to help engineers “cheat” on technical interviews (which got him booted from his Ivy League college), the origins of humanity don’t seem like the most obvious inspiration. But Lee is clearly in touch with man’s baser instincts.
“We try to keep it as fratty as possible,” Lee said of the SoMa building that serves as the Cluely team’s living quarters and office space. It boasts three floors, six bedrooms, and a garage for the company’s Tesla Model X. A handwritten note, “CEO Cluely,” taped to the wall, serves as his nameplate.
Dorm-style decor aside, Cluely’s office looks like that of a typical AI startup, down to the desks and monitors crammed into the home’s dining area. A screen projecting revenue each day looms above the 16 employees — 14 are men — who usually work from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day except Sunday.
The company’s product is a rebranded and updated version of Interview Coder, an AI desktop assistant that Lee and one of his less edgelordy cofounders Neel Shanmugam built in college. The app acts as a teleprompter, using your screen and audio to provide real-time analysis, questions, and notes. It’s meant to be used — undetected — during work meetings, sales pitches, and job interviews. In a manifesto published on its website, Cluely compares the tool to the calculator, a spellchecker, and Google — all of which were deemed “cheating” when they first came out. The Cluely branding purposefully leans into the ethical controversy that initially raised Lee’s profile.
What is atypical about Cluely, compared to most heads-down grindcore startups, is the fanaticism about creating viral videos and posts, meant to make the company impossible to ignore. According to Lee, most AI companies fail to see the value of short-form content, because “nerdy engineers tend not to be willing to put their face behind a camera.” To buck the trend, Lee stars in many of Cluely’s videos, including the launch video, in which he uses the tool while on a blind date to lie about his age, job, and interests. The video, which ends with the woman storming out of the restaurant in anger, has racked up more than 13 million views on X.
“We are the kings of distribution and the kings of virality,” said Lee. “Never, ever before in the history of humanity has it been possible to pick up a camera, talk for five seconds, and reach 100 million people. We’re using that to build a generational company.”
King of the content jungle
Last month, Lee took to X with a dramatic, “Social Network”-style reenactment to announce a milestone: Cluely had secured a $15 million investment round led by Andreessen Horowitz — just two months after raising its initial $5.3 million seed round.
Set to ambient string music, the video features Lee theatrically reenacting his disciplinary hearing at Columbia, rising indignantly to protest his persecution before a room of college administrators.
“To be honest, in two years, nobody’s gonna think this is cheating,” Lee says.
Cluely has gained early traction. Lee said the company has $7 million in annual recurring revenue, 100,000 users largely concentrated in the U.S., and is profitable some weeks. By comparison, ChatGPT, which Lee hopes to one day unseat, has between 800 million and 1 billion weekly active users.
When Cluely launched in April, early reviews were scathing. “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything,” seethed a headline from The Verge. Curious to see if the product has improved, I downloaded the app onto my desktop and shelled out $20 for the pro version. (The free version allows only 15 responses per day.)
I asked my editor to conduct a mock interview with me for a reporter job at The Standard and relied on Cluely’s thin bar at the top of my screen to get me through the grilling. But the app was slow to populate the screen with answers to my editor’s questions about Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration and why I wanted to work in local journalism. When pointers did appear three to five seconds after the question was asked, they were so generic that I cringed to say them out loud.
As a follow-up, my editor sent me an editing test, with three basic grammar questions.
I asked Cluely which answers to select — and it got every single one wrong.
“You didn’t get the job,” my editor joked.
Granted, Cluely gets better the more you use it, and the startup is working on making it quicker and more accurate. But during my visit, the office felt more like a Los Angeles creator mansion than a Silicon Valley hacker house; engineers are outnumbered by influencers who spend all day making content meant to pump up Cluely downloads.
“A lot of this was built off of Twitter fame,” said Katie Xu, 22, who is taking time off from Duke to work as Cluely’s head of marketing. “We’re not sure where it’s going, but the next few months will be very defining.”
In addition to investing in a camera that costs $100,000 and frequently bringing in extras for video shoots, Cluely pays for more than 60 creators to live in San Francisco and make content, and pays 700 “clippers” to edit videos from a Cluely repository into short-form content posted to social media.
When I asked Lee about whether he identifies more as a content creator or a technologist, he again turned to prehistory for an answer.
“There were two people in the tribe who were the most popular,” Lee said. “The storyteller who told stories by the fire and the hunter who went out, killed the king of the jungle, and came back to feed everyone in the village for two months.
“I do not want to be remembered as the guy who told interesting stories,” he said.
For Lee, the dream of hunting for meat includes embedding into every human’s brain a Cluely chip that will supercharge their existence using AI. For this contribution to humanity, Lee, who says he pays himself minimum wage, will amass billions of dollars, just like his idol, Elon Musk.
‘Gym-bro protein vibes’
When I dropped by the SoMa headquarters last week, I was greeted in the entry by giant stuffed animal heads — costumes that will feature in an upcoming TikTok. Cases of Coors Light, party-size bottles of Coke, and towers of red Solo cups lined the common rooms — remnants of a party last month that police shut down for crowding. On my way to the top floor, I walked by $100 bills, a half-smoked cigar, and boxes of busty anime figurines.
“It’s very, like, gym-bro protein vibes here,” Xu said.
Employees work out together most evenings, dine Mondays on meals cooked by a private chef, and have weekly Korean barbecue nights. They’re encouraged to go on Hinge dates and get PTO to do so. They’re even allowed to expense the cost of their dates.
Lee said the policy is borrowed from Bronze Age ancestors who didn’t hesitate to hook up, at least according to his reading of history.
“I think people are generally more productive when they’re not lonely,” he said.
Most of Cluely’s employees are college dropouts barely old enough to drink, though one engineering intern is 40: Kevin Grandon, who previously worked at Uber and Dropbox. When I asked him if he felt like the dad of the house, he just laughed.
Another intern, Dris Elamri, 18, convinced his parents to let him leave Minnetonka, Minnesota, for San Francisco without getting a high school diploma. Elamri now makes videos for Cluely and, like many of his colleagues, has open disdain for traditional education.
“My whole life, I have not learned a single thing from school aside from that the system will teach you nothing and will only make you unemployed,” Elamri said, before interrogating me about what I learned in college and if it really helped me become a reporter.
After about two hours in the Cluely bunker, I was asked to leave so the team could have a confidential product discussion. On the way out, I heard about Cluely’s plans to promote its technology.
On the agenda is a $1.5 million rave in September and a MrBeast-style stunt to buy $5,000 Van Cleef bracelets for everyone in the office. There was even chatter about renting a warehouse to shoot a live-action anime movie, in which the main character uses Cluely to cheat on tests, get promoted, and get hot girls.
“People just aren’t ready for what we’re gonna do on Instagram and TikTok,” Lee said.