Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks
38:24 Share

We 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 for the consumer facing, for sewers facing. To do that consistently is actually way harder than you're impossible. 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 chatbot.

Six months ago, I was some random college kid in a dorm, and now I feel like I'm at the center of the tech universe. What happens when a founder treats virality not as a tactic, but as the product? Roy Lee, co-founder and CEO of Clue.ly, 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, not 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 ClueLean. We talk about Roy's approach to building in public, what Gen Z understands about attention that tech still doesn't, and why momentum might be the new moat in consumer AI.

This 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 companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures.

Roy, man, the myth, the legend, the man of the moment, clearly is the current thing. Yes. How does it feel? The announcement the other day, a lot of love, a little bit of hate. Yeah. 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 an 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. And 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. You

Elon's reaching out. Meta's offering a billion dollar acquisition offer. Brian, we said not to do it, of course. Of course, of course. I'm to the moon. Brian, what is your reaction 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, bro, this is what we're going to show. Yeah, exactly.

And I was like, okay, like, this is great. And I think it's going to 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, underestimated how positive people will view this. There's a lot of meta analysis on you out there, which is like really, really cool. And there are people who are going like two to three layers deep. I've actually read something that like linked

a meta analysis of A16Z with Cluelee and how there's like this sort of fungibility of thoughts and things like that which is mind blowing. I have no idea what the fuck they're talking about. So it's just been incredible. Look at people doing literary criticism. No, I'm not kidding. There's literally a guy who wrote like fungibility of thoughts with A16Z and Cluelee. Yeah, yeah.

That's funny. People always over-read into stuff. They're like, oh, this has this master plan. A6Z 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 4D chess here. It's like, it's fine. 10 threads, analyzing the left-hand handshake. It's like, guys, come on. Some of the haters, I tweeted somebody, I was talking to Brian, I tweeted, how you feel about Cluelee is how you feel about yourself. But I deleted it because I didn't want to trigger people on Twitter. I'll talk shit on a podcast. Maybe I'll get clipped to Twitter, but I don't want to inflame people. But it's fascinating 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 like 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. This played out elementary, middle and high school. I was always like I had a camp of people that loved me and a camp of people that hated me. I was like always the boldest, like I would say the craziest shit. Everything that was on my mind, just no filter, I would 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. I did 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. We were all like 16, 17, 18. And then I got a suspension for that. And that was like when the camp of Roy haters took the storm and reported everything everywhere. And it ended up getting rescinded from Harvard. And then that kind of started my journey of, I think, like entrepreneurial, wanting to actually swing big at

building companies. And that's when I felt like my life took such a crazy turn. For context, my parents literally run like a college admissions consulting company. So we literally teach kids how to get into Harvard. And the youngest son of the company like gets fucking rescinded from Harvard. It's like the worst thing ever. So we decided, let's keep this quiet. You still have the same test scores and application, everything. Maybe next year you'll get into a different school. So I spent like an entire year at home. And I underestimated how mentally

tormenting 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, like 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. So 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 going to have a moment of like, oh, this has set me back in some ways. Maybe I should reform or tame it down. But you took the opposite of like, no, this is who I am and

And it's going to 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 bets that I am today.

Later, 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 still looking for the wife. But on pretty much the first day, that's when I met Neil, my co-founder, started hacking on a bunch of things. And the one thing that worked was the earliest version of Clue. So, wow.

And were your parents ever trying to reform you or moderate you or were they kind of like, hey, Roy's going to be Roy? Almost 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 Ivies. Like, I guess I really can't trust him. And his unorthodox swings will be home runs. And is that where they're at now? Yeah.

That's actually what I'm going to ask. You mentioned before that your parents, they will love you no matter what. Yeah, yeah, yeah. However, I am curious what they think now.

Man, it's crazy how lax 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, 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 context of going viral, I heard you say is that Twitter is two years behind.

behind Instagram. Yeah. Or behind other platforms. Talk a little bit about when your sort of provocativeness sort of translated over to Twitter or just like the digital mediums. Like how did 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 platform

essentially content, and now you weren't paying for commercials and the visibility and publicity and content was not gated by amount of money you're willing to spend on ads or TV space. It's just gated by the quality of content. And 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 just because there's literally not enough content for the average consumer to consume. And people have not caught on to a few things. First, 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, consume, 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 want to seem like the most interesting, thoughtful, like 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. And people on X-LinkedIn

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-LinkedIn explodes because the algorithm inherently highly, highly rewards this stuff. And as a result, it's just getting shoved into everyone's feed and they don't understand. But I'm just like literally applying the same principles everywhere.

of controversialness from IG TikTok onto X LinkedIn. And they're just so not ready for it that it feels like the craziest thing ever. And this is something that I said before, but I guarantee, like, my videos do not go as viral on Instagram, like Instagram TikTok. And the sole reason is because on those platforms, they are not controversial enough. And on those platforms, there are literally people committing felonies in public, or at least insinuating like they were committing felonies.

even then it'll be like, oh, good try, bro. It's not interesting enough. And like, X-Linked, they just have not caught on. There's not enough creators out there who are willing to press the controversial button. Mark says this sometimes, right? Like supply chain of the meme. 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 CNBC. And there's like a train that it goes that certain people are just really late. But when you actually flip it with virality and controversiness, maybe that foreshadows

flips a little bit. Well, and sometimes it starts at like 4chan or something, like because I'm the most controversial. That's what I mean. Like I didn't even 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.

Yeah, 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. Like, they would not be able to comprehend how are people, like, digesting 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. You're not going to 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 you

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. Like how 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 ex-LinkedIn people don't know yet. And it is sort of like mastery of the algorithm. And I think everything started with the interview coder situation. Interview coder was the earliest prototype of Clue. 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 me like blacklisted from big tech and kicked out of school. And that situation was inherently viral. Like 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 virality of launch video. And I just kept scrolling on Twitter. And I was wondering, like, man, why is nobody doing what Avi Schiffman with friend.com showed the world you could do a year ago? Why has nobody done this yet? And it worked. And then I did the 50 interns thing and it worked. And like, I kept doing viral video after viral video. At a certain point, it just realized like,

Holy shit, people on X-LinkedIn, 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 form. And as a result, I am able to dominate the timeline for not the past week, but like 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 out, the 50 interns maybe explained this idea of basically at your company, you either have engineers and you have creators. Yeah, there are only two roles. You are either a

a world-class engineer who's building the product or you're a world-class influencer. And for a full time, every single person 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 intern based or just like having an army of creators?

and sort of deploying them towards their end? Yeah, I'll go a bit deeper in the interns. So Clulee made a pretty viral video announcing that we were hiring 50 interns and you'd be in here 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 Clulee. And this is what marketing looked like. This job does not exist five years ago. Like, how do you explain the job where 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. Like 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 Bowl ads when you can get the same quality and quantity of views, $20,000 behind. - And you see it converting? - Yes, yes, yes. I mean, like those are real, it's clear, are 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 Clulee, of how you and Roy met and built this relationship and how this partnership formed. I had a good contact in New York who travels in the young crack folks area. And her name is Allie DeBeau.

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 out. Hey, heard your name, blah, blah, blah. We should talk. You're like, oh, bro, let's talk. And then a day later, you wrote back and my actually you're multistage. I don't want to talk to you. My advisor says, don't want to talk to you. Go away.

And what do I do? Like, I could have just stood down, but I said, okay, fine. I promise you will not talk about fundraising. Let's just talk. Like, I want to meet you. I want to talk to you. I want to build a relationship. Thankfully, you agreed. We got on a quick call. We like chatted a little bit where you like had your origin story. I'm like, oh my God, it's good. It's amazing. It's so cool. Like, I'm glad he's doing this. Sadly, he's 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. Yeah.

And I had it in my mind, okay, next time going to Opportunity Strikes, I'm just going to show up. So I think I somehow got your phone number or some such thing 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 you randomly was just like, oh, there's something like really strange and special happening here. And all of your team members sitting in the thing and like doing things and creating content and you and Neil working on the product. It was 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 or, you know, you're eating steak. Yeah.

And then you flash some metric or something where I realize that you're converting this like awareness and eyeballs into money, dollars. You like drop some numbers. You're like, oh, yeah, we're doing this many revenue. And that's where we're going. And guess what? Like some enterprise customer wants to talk to us. I don't know why. Blah, blah, 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 this thing called momentum as a mode because it's been so hard to pierce through the noise of everything in the AI, especially in the sort of consumer facing, pursuers facing. To do that consistently is actually way harder, near impossible. And so I had the theory that, oh, like companies who know how to do that, companies know how to build at that speed are going to be the winners. And I felt like I have found a person who was doing that.

And so I think we moved 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. 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 where you called some of them old, bald, and boring. And we were excited to do the deal. I think I was at an LP summit running around in Las Vegas trying to call you to get to a terms, etc. And that's how it all worked out. And after a while, I brought you five, six pounds of steak as an excitement and a deal. Wow.

I want to double click on the momentum as a piece, Brent, because you have an interesting background in that you've been doing it somewhere for a while. You worked at Snap beforehand, among other places. And I remember Ben Thompson had this post about Snap where he said that Snap has a gingerbread strategy where basically if they invent stuff, Meta is going to copy it. So they just have to keep...

inventing stuff. And I guess it's called the breadcrumbs 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. And 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 divestability. This might be somewhat interesting to you, Roy, and folks, which is I did not have that view before. I did not think gingerbread strategy necessarily worked, 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. And I have believed that led to high retention. So the thing that I looked 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 moat?

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 try 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 repeated again and again. And guess what? Things change too fast.

Like the underlying model changes every day or every week. If you like craft this thing and open AI as someone like built their new model to include that part in their new product, you're done, you're gone.

So then it couldn't become about like this highly thoughtful, slow build product. It 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 bot 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 down, I 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 is

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 most.

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 Clue.ly and sort of the distribution advantage 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. So how do you think about the next stage and et cetera? But that's how it links to sort of my theory of momentum of the month. I want to get to Roy's product strategy, but first I just want to

I'll add some points, which is, it was interesting. Paul Graham, when he started Y Combinator, identified that technical founders were undervalued.

that they were being underappreciated and people thought, oh, you need to have an MBA. And you realize, hey, it's easier to teach technical founders business than it is to teach business people how to build great products or how to code. And then what happens over the next 15 years, it becomes way easier to build these things, you know, AWS, local AI, et cetera. And distribution becomes the scarcity in that there's so much software. It's such a flooded ecosystem, as you quoted in your piece, Andrew Chen's piece about how

All the marketing channels suck. They've all been sort of rang out dry. And so distribution is now the scarcity. And so in the same way, you know, the technical co-founder, now there's almost like an audience co-founder. How do you really break out? And we've seen creators start to build business like Mr. Beast with his Feastables, right? You know, Kylie Jenner with her, what was it? Lip gloss. Yeah, commerce. But no one's really done it with software.

No one has put the two and two together. You know, Justin Bieber tried to do a social network called Shots or John Jehidi using Bieber. But no big creator has really built, whether a consumer or enterprise, huge social network.

software company. They built commerce or physical goods. And I always thought, hey, why doesn't Mr. Beast launch like a square competitor? Like he's got all these eyeballs, like I'm sure he's got to get better margins than Feastables. And he has games and he's a friend and a friend of the firm and he's done phenomenally well. But what I like is that Roy is putting both of those together. And so maybe you can walk through a little bit. You talked about your distribution strategy. Why don't you talk about how the product strategy has evolved from the beginning and then we get to the sequencing? Yeah, I think

Something that a lot of people miss is that

The first line of Cluele code was written like 10 weeks ago. So this is like really new. And this started with interview coder, which is just like a product that I coded up over a weekend in my dorm. And it was like a tool to let you cheat on interviews. And what we realized after we got about like 250 million impressions on the whole scenario is like, wow, we just got so many eyeballs on this thing. Maybe if we can do this again, but we have a more general use product with a similar UX because we think we're really onto something with the UX here, then maybe we can make a lot more money. And

And that's what we did with Clueless. And we just launched it as like interview coder for everything, you know, cheat on everything. Let's just see what happens. And the usage data will tell us what people are using it for. That's like exactly what's happening. Now we have this general purpose cheating tool, which is in reality is just like a invisible AI overlay. And here's a new user experience for AI. Let's push it out to a bunch of people and see what happens. And as a result, like now we're past like a billion views online.

overall on Cluey and we're probably like the most viral startup in the world and we have all this usage data that literally tells us, hey, here's where this is most sticky and here's where the product direction needs to go. I think that's like the core advantage of distribution is you do not have to worry about market fit or anything because your users will tell you where the direction of market fit is headed and their usage data will literally give you the information that you need to know and if you don't have usage data then you're literally shooting blind. Like every person who has built a company before knows that you can't really know what

direction you're going, you have to talk to your users. I feel like if your distribution is strong enough, you don't need to talk to your users. You just need to look at their data. You just need to look at the aggregate number of

When you're also redefining kind of what a minimum viable product is to some degree. Yeah. Other people, other companies will spend many months building this thing and then seeing how people use it. But for you, if you can sort of draft the right content, you can test out the idea in a much quicker way to see, hey, is this really resonating? Yeah, exactly. I mean, when we launched the video, like we barely had a functioning product. Like the day before is when we finished our final test and we're like, OK, we think this works. And

Now let's just launch the video as soon as possible. And we launched the video and like all of a sudden tens of thousands, we just said, hey, let's just throw sales calls in the videos to see if people use it for sales calls. Because that seems like a pretty lucrative space. All of a sudden we have like over a million dollars of enterprise revenue coming in for people using it for sales calls. And it's just like you can shot in the dark distribution a lot quicker and a lot more accurately than you can shot in the dark product. And you don't need like a million product integrations. Like it's just so much quicker. And

And what's even better about it is that the iteration loop is much faster too, because the algorithm will literally tell you via a number, which is number of views, likes, shares, whatever, like how well your strategy is going to work. So it's much, much easier to test

is this viral? Does this have viral fit rather than does this have like, you know, market fit? Roy, does that mean you sort of let the audience guide where the product goes? Is that how you sort of think? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the form factor, because one of the things that internally we discussed is, look, Roy is probably top 1%. Now I revise it to top 001% in the world in terms of knowing how to distribute. The Venn diagram of that and people who know and had the instinct to build a semi-translucent overlay

It sounds so simple. Yeah. This disappearing picture sounds so simple. It's easy. It's not technically hard. Like half translucent overlay. That sounds simple. It's not technically hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that overlap to me was what gave me so much excitement around what you're building. I actually have it right now on. Eric, did you go to University of Michigan?

Yeah, I did. See, I didn't know that. I did not know that, but I have Clue.ly open. I'm like, you went to U of M, got that. Oh, you did philosophy, policy, and economics, I think. Like, great. We can sort of bond overnight. This all of a sudden is an incredible tool.

That's amazing. Why don't you talk more about where you see the product going or particularly like how you think about it? Anyone who's building AI tools, like asking themselves the question of how is this defensible from one of the major players? Will OpenAI or et cetera just build this feature? How do you think about making your product like truly defensible, especially from the people that have because of their reach, their size? OpenAI has distribution too, right? So how do you think about this?

Yeah, I mean, I guess we're first to move in a pretty novel UX. And I think we did get to translucent. Like, I think everyone's going to inevitably get to translucent overlay. This is how integrated AI should feel. And Apple shows everyone that like liquid glass is the translucent overlay that will be the form factor of AI in the future. Right now, I feel like it's just a land grab. And if the question is about distribution, then I think there's actually like a pretty strong case for us to make that we will actually end up distributing better than open AI. And it's enough that you could probably

bet on us at like a 30,000x discount. I'm actually not worried about distribution and I think the quality of the product, I mean,

It's quite simple. I really feel like this is just a land grab right now to see who can convince as many consumers and enterprise first that they're the guy who deserves to win the translucent overlay. And right now we're making so much noise. I mean, like with the translucent overlay, like why would it not be us? And when did you figure out the translucent overlay was right? Yeah, I mean, I was just in my dorm with Neil and we were just like, we literally spent every day thinking about how can we make interview coder more invisible to interviews? And we played around and there's probably like 20 to 30 versions of interview coder in the past that just we thought didn't work. But

essentially it feeds you a code answer, like an answer to a coding problem. And you need to overlay that on top of your code. And we're just like, man, I really need this integrated into my code. I need to see what I'm doing as well as see the answer that AI is giving me. And eventually we just landed on translucency. And this was like, wow, this is like a magical moment. This is what the product needed. And like very soon we realized like,

Why are we only thinking about coding interviews and like software engineering coding interviews? This is such a small market. This is true for everything. AI should not feel like a separate window, like it should be integrated seamlessly. And that looks like translucency.

Brian, you said you were inspired by the Dragon Ball Z scouter as an example. I would love, Roy, to chat about the staged approach of how you're thinking about it, I think. Like right now, we're distribution first, and then we'll sort of build the product as we go. Stage two, here's how we do it with a bunch of engineering prowess and product development, etc. We sort of chatted a little bit about that on text. And to me, that was like, oh, okay, like you'll figure out product as you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd love to talk a little bit about that.

I mean, right now, the internet is up in storm saying, hey, where's the product? Where's the product? And the two things that like we are literally working day and night to build out the product that we have in our head that the users are telling us that they want. But also every video I make that's not directly about the product drums up so much more hype for the eventual product launch video. Like I will guarantee that this will be viral. And I guarantee that it will be more viral than if we just launched like earlier. And I think

There's truth in the statement of launch early, ship fast, launch before you're ready. But for some reason, when we're doing that at scale, it feels like everyone is, oh no, you launched too early. Now where's the problem? What are you talking about? This is the playbook. We wrote our first lines of code 10 weeks ago. We're earlier than the latest YC batch of companies, yet we're generating probably more revenue than every single one of them. And the product is

It's literally two and a half months since being built. In my perspective, we are pre-launch. And the huge benefit of being like massively distributing pre-launch is that you will know what product to build with as much certainty as you could possibly get. And if you can distribute and hype it up to an audience of literally millions of people, like, hey, this product's coming out, this product's coming out, and we're screaming to the world, AI overlay, like AI that sees your screen, hears your audio. Like the second we make that, like, why would you pick AI

anyone else's product to use. We've been screaming it from the top of our lungs since day one, like before day one even. And like right now, that's the stage is distribution. Get it into everyone's mind. What is Cluely? Cluely is the invisible AI that sees your screen and hears your audio. Everyone knows this. And as soon as we launch it, like who else will they download? Yeah.

One thing I think that's fascinating about what you're doing, and I'll compare it to our friends at TBPN, who are kind of rebranding or reclaiming, they call themselves corporate-driven media, because everyone was like, we're independent media. And they're like, no, no, we're corporate-backed, we're more honest that way. And they're just leaning into all the bits about ramp and save 5%. And there's this kind of humor to it. And I think similarly, you're kind of leaning into the controversy or being controversial as a strategy where some people think, oh,

oh, that's fake or forced or whatever. But you're at the same time, you're super authentic in the way that you're doing it. And people feel like they know you. And sometimes even if there's a character, an exaggeration that also feels authentic in some way, it's just kind of a unique style.

Yeah, I mean, I think this like just reflects a growing shift in society. I mean, literally for the past few decades now, there's just been such this sharp drop off in professionalism. And I really think it's because like content creation has been democratized. Like the first ever YouTube creators were just people making funny videos in their dorms. And this was the most authentic, like people crave this. Nobody wants to see another ad or another corporate newspaper, like bullshit like that. Like they want to see some real person doing real things. And the democratization of content creation has allowed...

authentic people who make content to be seen by millions. And now authentic people who create content will be seen by millions. And for some reason, it's just like no company gets this, that you'll have 100x followers and your post will be about introducing blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like the most corporate bullshit ever. You're not going to get any views and nobody wants to see this. Would you rather have a world where everyone was extremely transparent and even the founders were honest and like everything you see is just someone's authentic life? Or would you rather see like a bunch of corporate bullshit everywhere? Like what we envision for the end state distribution of Cluey is that it does not feel like an ad at all. This is just

the story of someone's life that you want to see. And it is like true and authentic. And I try to be like, I'm probably more transparent about everything than I'd say probably 99% of companies in the Valley are. What's funny is what you're saying, some people get so mad at, I heard someone call it RIS marketing, which is a compliment, but they're like, I hate this RIS marketing. Like it's got to be product first, get back to fundamentals. But first this is its own fundamentals too of how the world works today. But two is, so of course they can't destroy you, but even the people who want to destroy you, they're

The joke in my head is they could try to kill you, but they can't kill the idea. Yeah. Like the way that you're building companies, like there's something about it that is going to have an impact on the next generation. And you're just starting the company journey. What I would say the viral marketing, when you say viral marketing is interesting, right? Like one leads to another. I actually think what you're doing is like anti-fragile marketing. Yeah.

Like, you're so controversial, I'm going to cut off your head. And three sprungs up because one is mad at you, one is really happy about you, one is neutral. Like, you get all these, like, every time someone comes at you and comes at the idea of Clulee, the more aura points it gets. Yeah. Like, aura farming.

Any lessons from the most controversial stuff that you've done? Oh, is it always triple down? How do you think about is there a line where to cross it? I think the few lessons have been never punch down, like never, ever even remotely close to punch down. And I think people reward and

And the algorithm does reward authenticity more than anything. Like it rewards many things. But one of the things that it rewards most is like authenticity. I think you'll see me in Twitter like every once in a while I'll make like a genuine comment. Like, hey, hey, thank you. Like I really respect you or something. I think like people love to see that. I saw your response to Gary Tan. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, it's true. Yeah, like I respect that guy. And I hope that one day when the company gets to where I imagine it will be, then he will come turn around and

I don't think the lesson is to triple down on everything. But I think the lesson is to, if you're honest, then the algorithm will reward you because

there's literally zero other company out there that is being fully honest about everything. And there's zero founder out there that behaves authentically. The only other person I might think is like Elon Musk. And I think that's a really good role model to have in business making. Yeah. As you build Cluely into the first destination for consumers and enterprise alike, how does like the type of stunts, if you will, and skits actually fit into the type of customer that you

that you want to serve. I think we're headed towards a future where this is the new normal. I mean, 40 years ago, we were way more professional than we are now. If you were even an engineer, you come into work, you come in with a suit and tie. And if you don't, it's distasteful. It's disgusting. I cannot believe it. Like you should never, ever show up in a hoodie and sweatpants.

Now you're weird if you come up with a suit and you're not in a hoodie and sweatpants. Everyone wants more authentic things. Right now, for some reason in society, we're still lingering on this image that companies need to be like brand friendly and boring and never say anything controversial or whatever. Like, I don't understand how this became the societal norm. But in reality, people want to see interesting things. I mean, like, that's the point of life is you see interesting things that

There's just this lack of professionalism. And again, with the distribution of short form content, like everyone sees the craziest things and you just get desensitized to these things. And that's why sports like sperm racing were able to be so hyper viral. Nobody would have aired this on CNN 10 years ago, but you don't need CNN anymore. You have Instagram, TikTok and Instagram, TikTok. They love sperm racing. As a result, they're able to raise that a fucking mass evaluation, like genuinely have a shot at being like the next legit sport.

And it's not just sperm racing. I mean, it's every company in the world. There's Sam Altman talking about how hot the guys are that GPT generates in the timeline. There's Elon Musk doing ravings about his political takes. Like every company is getting more and more controversial, less professional. This trend is not dying anytime soon. I'm just...

the person that is pushing the envelope perhaps a little further than the world is ready for at the moment. But I think that the question that everyone should linger on a little bit is, can you imagine a world where we do win? Can you imagine the world? What will the state of the world look like if Clulee does win? And we prove to everyone like the bar for professionalism is here where we've determined it. The corporate culture of America as a whole is going to shift and perhaps the entire world. Everyone will realize, oh, we've

we've had our panties up in a bunch worrying about brand image and professionalism when in reality, the world craves something different. And I have very strong conviction that I'm right in this because I was right about X. And I did not understand for the life of me why nobody is...

producing the viral videos that were so obviously designed to go viral for the algorithm. It's just because nobody has caught on and nobody's willing to like press that button. Now that I've pressed the button once, just imagine what the world looks like if Clue makes it. You probably like are more interested in that. That would be a much more interesting world if every company was being 100% radically transparent and doing exactly what the most interesting thing was.

As Elon says, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. It's true. On that note, this has been a fantastic episode with Rory Bryan. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.