Cluely
At the AI startup that promised to help people “cheat on everything,” there are only two job titles: engineer or influencer.
“There are only two roles here. You’re either building the product or you’re making the product go viral,” Chungin “Roy” Lee, the CEO and cofounder of Cluely, said in an episode of the “Sourcery” podcast published Saturday. “There’s nobody who’s not a great engineer who has less than 100,000 followers.”
Cluely launched earlier this year as a tool to help software engineers cheat on their job interviews, among other use cases. Lee went viral after he was suspended by Columbia University over an early version of the tool.
Cluely has since removed references to cheating on job interviews from its website. It still positions itself as an “undetectable” AI that sees its users’ screens and feeds them answers in real time.
The San Francisco startup, which announced a $15 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz on Friday, has made it clear it’s betting big on influencers — not marketers — to drive growth.
Cluely needs to be “the biggest thing” on Instagram and TikTok, the 21-year-old said. “Every single big company is known by regular people,” he added.
Lee previously told BI that his main goal for Cluely is to reach 1 billion views across all platforms.
“Marketing teams can try,” he said. “The reason all these big consumer app guys are so young is because you need to be tapped in with young culture to understand what’s funny.”
“You can have a 35-year-old marketer who 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.”
No work-life balance
Lee said most of the team lives and works together — part of his belief that “work-life balance should not be a thing.”
“You need to work where you live if you’re serious about building the company,” Lee said. “Your work should be your life and vice versa.”
“You wake up, go straight to work, go to bed on the couch,” he said. “That’s sort of the culture we’re trying to promote here,” he added.
Lee told BI on Tuesday that “work-life balance at an early-stage startup is a myth.”
“The only way to succeed is by being all in on your company, not by working 40 hours a week and going home early,” he added.
Lee also said on the podcast that he doesn’t have to worry about his employees because “everyone is on board with the craziness.”
“We understand that this is like the lifeline of the company,” Lee said. “We’re either crazy enough to make it or we’re crazy enough to die.”
The rejection of work-life balance is hardly new in startup culture.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman said during an episode of the “Diary of a CEO” podcast that startup employees shouldn’t expect work-life balance if they want their business to take off.
“Work-life balance is not the startup game,” Hoffman said.
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban said on an episode of “The Playbook” that “there is no balance” for the most ambitious people.
“If you want to crush the game, whatever game you’re in, there’s somebody working 24 hours a day to kick your ass,” he said.
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