In today’s competitive AI market, a startup called Cluely stands out with its unique business model and viral marketing strategies. Founded by young founder Roy Lee, the company has successfully attracted the attention of top investment institutions such as a16z with his deep understanding of social media communication and innovative product concepts, and completed a $15 million Series A funding round just 10 weeks after the product was launched.
Cluely is one of the most talked-about consumer AI startups in 2025. Instead of relying on huge financing or sacrificing feature kits for attention, it has achieved breakthroughs by “turning distribution into products”: leveraging traffic with viral short videos, creating polar volume with highly controversial and visually tense product releases, and pushing it into the spotlight through high-speed iteration and public construction.
Before that, founder Roy Lee was a newcomer to Silicon Valley: he taught himself to code since high school, developed scalable social tools, and was favored by Harvard and Columbia in college.
During his time at Columbia, Roy invented Interview Coder, an AI-assisted tool for technical interviews to help users cheat in interviews with major companies such as Amazon, which quickly sparked a craze, and also led to his suspension from Columbia and revocation of his admission to Harvard. This experience made him think deeply: “The controversy and heat brought about by technology itself can become a tipping point for communication.” ”
In June 2025, Cluely completed a $15 million Series A funding round led by a16z, which quickly closed after a $5.3 million seed round that just closed a few months ago.
Bryan Kim, a partner at a16z, said that what he values is Cluly’s “momentum as a moat”, believing that they have built a barrier of potential energy that is difficult to replicate through high-speed propagation in a short period of time.
Six months ago, founder Roy Lee was just a college student writing code in his dorm, and now he says he’s at the center of the tech universe. The Cluely project has been in business revenue for over $1 million in just 10 weeks since its launch. He said that he has completely devoted himself to entrepreneurship and can never look back.
Turn distribution into products
In his opinion, today’s communication logic has completely changed. If a company’s head of marketing doesn’t have at least 100,000 followers on social media, it’s time to change people. Distribution capacity is the key to success or failure. He initially experimented with viral methods on TikTok and Instagram, but later migrated them to X, where he found that platform users were not yet aware of the relationship between algorithms and controversial content, resulting in a poor information.
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The prototype of Cluely was Interview Coder, a gadget that assisted in passing technical interviews. Roy used it to “trick” Amazon interviews, and the news sparked a lot of discussion, but it also led to a ban and expulsion from school. The incident itself was highly communicative, and a student expelled from the Ivy League school was able to raise $5 million, which quickly sparked a topic on social platforms. He began to realize that viral content is not accidental but can be repeated.
The next few videos, including the announcement of “50 Interns Recruited,” received more traffic than expected. He described this as the embodiment of a new type of marketing. The team currently has more than 60 contracted content creators, billed per video, and tasked with shooting TikTok and Instagram videos around Cluly. Although each is only 5 to 10 seconds long, it often gets millions of views. Compared with traditional advertising, they get explosive exposure at a very low cost.
In terms of organizational structure, Cluely team members are divided into two categories: world-class engineers or world-class content creators. Roy made it clear that all full-time members must have 100,000 followers on at least one platform. Behind this requirement is his deep understanding of attention and distribution mechanisms. He emphasized that if a market leader cannot reach this level, it means that he does not have the basic ability to control the spread of the virus.
In his observation of the platform ecosystem, he believes that X and LinkedIn users pay more attention to showing the depth of thought, resulting in content that is difficult for the public to understand and the possibility of getting out of the circle. At the same time, the algorithms of these platforms favor controversial, topical content, but most people are unprepared for it. Roy claimed to be more aware of the pace of TikTok and Instagram, so he transplanted expressions that were not intense on short video platforms to X, triggering widespread spread. He noted that it is the norm for X users to not understand this practice and that it could be completely unacceptable if it flips to his Instagram one day.
Gen Z’s cultural counteroffensive
Speaking about the generational change in founders, he believes that the path of millennials has come to an end, and future founders will be dominated by Gen Z. They are familiar with the rules of the platform and understand how to use distribution algorithms to create volume. “I’m just the canary walking in front, and there must be more people behind me.”
Roy’s entrepreneurial motivation dates back to high school. That year, he was suspended from school for violating school rules, and Harvard revoked the admission qualifications that had been issued. It was a shock to his family – his parents were college application counselors, but he had problems on his application path. He stayed at home for a whole year. As an extremely extroverted person, this time is almost mentally tormented. He began to reflect that if life had deviated from the norm like this, it would be better to abandon all conventional paths and practice every crazy idea with all his might.
Later, he went to a community college in California as a temporary transition under his parents’ arrangement. California’s entrepreneurial atmosphere makes them feel like a “middle ground” where they can balance their educational background and access to entrepreneurial resources. Roy was then admitted to Columbia University. He said that he went to school mainly to appease his parents. On his first day at school, he set himself two goals: to find a co-founder and to find a wife. Although the latter was not yet found, he met his later partner, Neil, on the first day and began to experiment with various projects together, eventually making the prototype of Cluly.
His family’s attitude towards his choice has also changed. His parents tried to make him “restrained” many times until he was admitted to Harvard, and he felt a little relieved. After his admission was revoked, he fell into anxiety again until he entered Columbia University and breathed a sigh of relief again. When he proposed to drop out of school to focus on starting a business, his mother responded calmly, “I expected it a long time ago.” Why did you still take a semester and a half? He revealed that he was still persuading his partner to drop out of school together, but his mother urged instead, “You two are too slow to withdraw.” Since then, parents have fully supported his every “crazy decision”.
When it comes to structural changes in content distribution, Roy mentioned YouTube as a significant turning point. It democratizes content, giving creators who don’t rely on budgets the opportunity to gain traffic. But after the advent of TikTok five years ago, things changed again. His judgment is that the core question now is not “whose content is of high quality”, but “who can produce enough content”. The information supply is seriously insufficient to allow a Reels video to appear in front of users repeatedly.
He noted that many people are unaware of two key points of viral content. First, creators must produce content that anyone can understand and enjoy. X and LinkedIn users are often desperate to appear thoughtful and in-depth, but the content is understandable to a select few and not viral. Second, algorithmic push mechanisms naturally prefer controversial content, and users of these platforms are unprepared for this. He started from the content logic of Instagram and TikTok and had a clearer grasp of the scale and tipping point of controversial content. In his view, the strong reaction to these practices after migrating to X is that the platform is not yet used to this content cadence.
He also gave an example that on Instagram and TikTok, even if someone breaks the law in public or hints at breaking the law, it will not cause a violent reaction, and users will only say “come on” and “good”. But on X, even a slight deviation from the mainstream can trigger an explosion of public opinion. His videos have received mediocre receptions on IG and TikTok, but they continue to spark controversy and spread on X, based on this judgment.
He mentioned that his content path is reversed, moving from Instagram to Twitter rather than from Reddit to X. He said that those who criticize him for being “too controversial” may not understand “how this thing can be consumed normally on the web” if they click on his IG page one day.
When Elon Musk took over X, some people started complaining that the platform’s content was “getting darker,” and Roy responded, “This is just the beginning.” He believes that this is an evolution of communication patterns and also suggests that this trend is irreversible.
Bryan Kim sees Cluly’s current communication style of play as an upgraded version of “anti-fragile”. In his opinion, Roy’s expression is highly controversial, but it is because of this that it is more expansive. Attacks only bring more attention, and audiences with different positions form a structural moat of interaction, and each outside question strengthens his presence in the public sphere.
Founder who is active online
When the topic turned to the scale of controversy, Roy’s attitude was quite clear. He does not “strike down” and even avoid approaching similar borders. What he really cares about is the weight of “authenticity” in the algorithm. For example, he said that sometimes a simple thank you or praise on Twitter is far more infectious than deliberately creating conflicts, and it is easier to trigger the platform’s recommendation mechanism.
The Gary Town incident is one example. He has genuine respect for that creator and hopes to win Cluely to revisit it once it reaches a certain stage. In the face of controversial topics, he is unwilling to always be in confrontational mode, and more importantly, he is frank in his expressions. He sees Elon Musk as one of the very few people who can stand in the business world with a real attitude, and most other companies are still in a state of disguise, trying to maintain a “sense of business”.
When Bryan asked about the relationship between Cluey’s content style and B-end customer acceptance, Roy didn’t agree with the default that “brands should be neutral.” He traced back decades to the workplace culture where engineers were also required to wear formal attire to work, but now the opposite is true. He believed that this was the result of the evolution of cultural structures, not accidental phenomena.
Conventional wisdom always emphasizes brands being “gentle,” “professional,” and “avoiding controversy,” but Roy doesn’t really need these things. He believes that what the audience wants to see is fun and humanity, rather than well-packaged standardized expressions. Nowadays, short video platforms dominate the pace of communication, and users swipe all kinds of curious and absurd content every day, and the acceptance of “out of the ordinary” has long increased.
The popularity of racing culture is an example of this. A decade ago, this type of content was impossible to appear in CNN’s mainstream coverage, but now Instagram and TikTok are bringing it to the main stage, and valuations are rising. The same communication path applies to any commercial project. He had seen Sam Altman teasing GPT-generated images and remembered Elon Musk talking about political views on social platforms. These people are popular precisely because they no longer suppress expression, but allow founders to appear online like people.
This trend is difficult to reverse in the short term. Roy sees himself as someone who is willing to take an extra step forward, perhaps just accepting it earlier than the circumstances. He had envisioned what the consequences would be if Cluely succeeded? The most direct result is that the definition of professionalism will be rewritten, and the boundaries of corporate culture will be reshaped. He envisions a highly probable future where founders are willing to face the camera and say what they really think, and the company completes the narrative in the most natural way, no longer relying on design language or brand norms.
His confidence comes from the prediction of past success. An example of this is the content experiment on the X platform, where he has long seen what kind of expression the platform prefers, and knows that the vast majority of people do not understand this logic. Videos that are obviously easy to go viral are not done because everyone is unaware or unwilling to take risks. And he has chosen to press that button.
This judgment drives him to deduce that if Cluely wins in the end, the world will change. People will no longer be fascinated by the professional look and will embrace candor, fun, and expressiveness. He believes that there will be more companies like that, with more freedom of expression and a stronger sense of participation from users.
