Latest news with #Chungin"Roy"Lee
Hans India
5 days ago
- Business
- Hans India
Cluely CEO Declares Work-Life Balance a Myth, Says 'Work Is Our Life' at AI Startup
Chungin "Roy" Lee, CEO and cofounder of the AI startup Cluely, is once again stirring headlines — not for the controversial app that made him famous, but for his bold views on startup culture and work-life balance. In a candid interview with Business Insider, Lee dismissed the idea of separating personal and professional life, especially within a startup setting. 'Work-life balance? That's not really a thing here,' he said with a grin on a recent podcast. 'We wake up, we're at work. We go to sleep on the sofa if that's where we crash. The work is our life.' Known for launching Cluely — an app that initially marketed itself as a tool for engineers to "cheat" during job interviews — Lee is no stranger to controversy. The app, which leverages AI to discreetly guide candidates in real time by analyzing their screen activity, drew early backlash and even led to Lee's suspension from Columbia University during its prototype phase. While the company has since removed direct references to "cheating," its core functionality and mission remain unchanged. Lee justifies the startup's all-consuming work culture as essential to its growth. 'When you're building something from scratch, it's not a 40-hour-a-week job,' he said. 'You have to be all in, or you'll be left behind.' At Cluely, the philosophy is intense but clear-cut: you're either developing the product or making it go viral. 'There are only two kinds of people here,' Lee said on The Sourcery podcast. 'You're either creating the product, or you're making sure the world can't stop talking about it.' That mindset is reflected in the company's unorthodox hiring approach. Cluely employs only engineers and influencers — no traditional departments, no middle management, and no corporate layers. If someone doesn't align with either of the two roles, 'you don't belong at Cluely,' Lee declared. The Cluely team, based in San Francisco, reportedly works and lives under one roof, fully immersed in the company's mission. 'Everyone here understands the madness required to make it,' Lee said. His views echo those of other Silicon Valley veterans. Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, has made similar remarks in the past, suggesting that expecting work-life balance while building a startup signals a fundamental misunderstanding of entrepreneurial life. Lee's focus now is on cultural relevance and virality, not traditional marketing. 'Our goal is to be everywhere, the biggest thing on TikTok, Instagram, you name it,' he shared. For Cluely, the secret isn't advertising — it's authenticity. 'The people creating these viral moments aren't sat in an office somewhere planning ads — they're living it.' Lee aims for Cluely to reach a billion views across platforms — and if that means blurring the line between work and life, he's all in.
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
The cofounder of the viral AI 'cheating' startup Cluely says he only hires people for 2 jobs
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.
India Today
22-05-2025
- Business
- India Today
Creator of AI cheating tool says that technical job interviews for engineers are over, everyone will cheat
A month ago, a student at Columbia University made headlines, but for all the wrong reasons. Chungin "Roy" Lee was expelled from university and had his internships with Meta, Amazon, and TikTok revoked. The reason: he created an app, called Cluely, that helps engineers cheat in interviews. The story began when Lee posted a video on YouTube, showing off this app and how it works. While creating a viral app is a significant achievement, Lee landed on a disciplinary hearing. But this did not stop him from working on the app and making it even better. In his defence, he believes cheating with AI is the only fair way into the industry a recent interview with Business Insider, Lee stated, 'We say 'cheat on everything' because, ironically, we believe this is the only path towards a future that is truly fair." The statement gives birth to several ethical questions. One such question that is stuck in my mind is: if AI is the future and "cheating is the only way", is it even fair? If you visit the first thing that greets you is the large gray type that reads this. Lee says cheating will soon be standard practiceOnce known for creating software designed to assist job applicants in passing coding assessments using AI prompts, Lee has now expanded his ambitions. His company Cluely is positioned as an all-purpose tool that assists users during live conversations, from job interviews to first dates — even claiming to offer "cheating for literally everything."advertisement 'There's a very, very scary and quickly growing gap between people who use AI and people who moralise against it,' Lee said in an email to Business Insider. 'And that gap compounds: in productivity, education, opportunity, and wealth.'Lee believes that what's seen today as cheating will soon be standard practice. In another interview, he stated that once everyone begins relying on AI to navigate meetings, it will no longer be considered cheating — it will simply become the standard way people function and think moving predicts traditional interviews will become obsolete, replaced by AI-generated candidate profiles. These systems, he says, will analyse work history, skills, and compatibility to match candidates to jobs — leaving just a brief conversation to determine 'culture fit.''I already know all the work you've done, or at least the AI already knows the work you've done,' Lee told Business Insider. 'It knows how good it is. It knows what skills you're good at, and if there is a skill match, then I should just be able to match you directly to the job.'Lee reveals Cluely's hiring processCluely's own hiring process reflects this shift, with interviews reportedly replaced by informal chats. He said that since the company is not a believer of old-style interviews, it only aims to hold a conversation with the candidate. 'We check if you're a culture fit, we talk about past work you've done, and that's pretty much it," he the hiring process, Lee believes AI will fundamentally reshape the way people think, communicate and interact. In a new video, posted on EO YouTube channel, he said, "The entire way we're going to think will be changed."He added, 'Every single one of my thoughts is formulated by the information I have at this moment. But what happens when that information I have isn't just what's in my brain, but it's everything that humanity has ever collected and put online, ever?'He imagines a future where AI provides real-time summaries of people's lives, scraping digital footprints to give users condensed insights during interactions. 'What happens when AI literally helps me think in real time?' he asked. 'The entire way that humans will interact with each other, with the world, all of our thoughts will be changed.'Cluely, Lee says, is aimed at preparing people for this inevitable shift. 'The rate of societal progression will just expand and exponentiate significantly once everyone gets along to the fact that we're all using AI now,' he Lee, the divide between those who embrace AI and those who resist it will only grow. 'Mass adoption of AI is the only way to prevent the universe of the pro-AI class completely dominating the anti-AI class in every measurable and immeasurable outcome there is,' he told Business society accepts this vision or not, Lee is adamant: the AI revolution is already here, and it's time to keep up or be left behind.
Business Insider
21-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Founder of AI tool for cheating in interviews predicts everyone will do it — and technical job interviews are on their way out
Creating a tool that allowed job candidates to cheat on their technical interviews kicked off a chain of events that would eventually see Chungin "Roy" Lee kicked out of Columbia University — but he believes that, soon enough, everyone will be using AI to get ahead. Lee has since branched out from an AI tool for coding interviews alone, founding "Cluely," which he's previously called " a cheating tool for literally everything," including live conversation. A promotional video for the app, for instance, depicts Lee using the app to "cheat" his way through a date. "There's a very, very scary and quickly growing gap between people who use AI and people who moralize against it," Lee told Business Insider in an email. "And that gap compounds: in productivity, education, opportunity, and wealth." "We say 'cheat on everything' because, ironically, we believe this is the only path towards a future that is truly fair," he added. Lee talked more about his views on how AI use will impact interviews in a recent interview with EO. "When every single person is using AI to cheat on meetings, then it's not that you're cheating anymore," he said. "This is just how humans will operate and think in the future." In the coming years, Lee expects interviews to be a lot more "holistic," and largely assess whether the candidate is a "culture fit," rather than focusing on a deep dive into their skills. That is, if the interview as a means of assessment endures at all, given that he expects AI to become powerful enough to build individual profiles for each candidate and feed that information back to the interviewer. "I already know all the work you've done, or at least the AI already knows the work you've done," he told EO. "It knows how good it is. It knows what skills you're good at, and if there is a skill match, then I should just be able to match you directly to the job, assuming that we get along after like a 30-minute conversation." It's a practice that's already commonplace at Cluely, Lee added, where he says interviews tend to be less formal. "I really don't know that there is a need for interviews in today's age, but right now what we use is really just a conversation," he said. "We check if you're a culture fit, we talk about past work you've done, and that's pretty much it." Lee expects AI to eventually alter more than just the job interview — he believes everyone will soon be using it as frequently and broadly as possible. "The entire way we're going to think will be changed," Lee told EO. "Every single one of my thoughts is formulated by the information I have at this moment. But what happens when that information I have isn't just what's in my brain, but it's everything that humanity has ever collected and put online, ever?" For instance, Lee posed — how different would an interaction between two people look if an AI could feed one a "condensed blurb" of information about the other, after it was finished scraping their entire digital footprint? "What happens when AI literally helps me think in real time?" Lee said. "The entire way that humans will interact with each other, with the world, all of our thoughts will be changed." With Cluely, Lee hopes to get people used to what he believes is an inevitable transformation. "The rate of societal progression will just expand and exponentiate significantly once everyone gets along to the fact that we're all using AI now," he said. "And that's what Cluely hopes to achieve, is to get everybody used to, 'We're all using AI now.'" For Lee, it's simple — either get on board or fall so far behind you can't ever catch up. "Mass adoption of AI is the only way to prevent the universe of the pro-AI class completely dominating the anti-AI class in every measurable and immeasurable outcome there is," he told BI.
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Banned By Columbia, Backed By Millions: 21-Year-Old's AI Startup Cluely Lets You Cheat On Exams, Interviews, And Sales Calls
Cluely, a provocative AI startup born from academic controversy, just closed a $5.3 million seed round led by Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures. According to Futurism, the company's core product is a real-time, invisible AI assistant that operates through a hidden browser overlay, giving users live answers during interviews, coding tests, exams, and even meetings. Don't Miss: 'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm — . The founders, Chungin "Roy" Lee and Neel Shanmugam dropped out of Columbia University after being suspended for creating the early version of the tool, known then as Interview Coder. That tool, built to help candidates navigate technical interviews on platforms like LeetCode, quickly went viral and caught the attention of Columbia's disciplinary board. Within weeks of their suspension, the co-founders rebranded the product and announced the funding round on LinkedIn. Their AI, marketed as "completely undetectable," sees the screen, hears the audio, and feeds the user context-specific responses in real time. In an interview with the New York Times' "Hard Fork' podcast, co-founder Lee stated, 'I read the student handbook quite thoroughly before I actually started building this thing [...] but I didn't actually expect to get expelled at all. And the student handbook very explicitly doesn't mention anything about academic resources.' Trending: Donald Trump Just Announced a $500 Billion AI Infrastructure Deal — The $5.3 million funding round, completed in just a few weeks following Cluely's rebrand, is being seen as a sign of growing investor appetite for new forms of human-AI collaboration, particularly in areas where performance pressure and assessment bias remain high. Since launching its current version, Cluely has reported more than $3 million in annual recurring revenue. While critics have raised ethical questions about the software, supporters argue that it highlights inefficiencies in existing gatekeeping systems, particularly the widespread reliance on memorization-heavy assessments like LeetCode in technical hiring processes, writes Business Today. A recent promotional video shared by the founder on X showed Lee using the software during a date to fabricate knowledge and facts in real-time, sparking debate across social media. While some saw the demonstration as a humorous take on modern dating and digital dependence, others likened it to scenarios featured in dystopian fiction such as Black Mirror. Some developers have already attempted to counteract Cluely's software, with one Reddit user claiming to have created a Swift-based tool that detects the platform when it is the public controversy, the startup continues to gain traction across industries. Early adopters include tech workers preparing for job interviews, sales professionals seeking support during live calls, and students managing online exam environments. According to Fortune, Cluely offers unlimited access to its AI tool through a subscription model priced at $20 per month or $100 annually. With funding, momentum building, institutional support from respected venture firms, and rapidly growing user demand, Cluely is signaling a broader shift in the conversation around AI, merit, and human augmentation. Whether the world sees that as a threat or an evolution remains to be seen. Read Next: Here's what Americans think you need to be considered wealthy. Inspired by Uber and Airbnb – Deloitte's fastest-growing software company is transforming 7 billion smartphones into income-generating assets – Image: Shutterstock Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? APPLE (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report TESLA (TSLA): Free Stock Analysis Report This article Banned By Columbia, Backed By Millions: 21-Year-Old's AI Startup Cluely Lets You Cheat On Exams, Interviews, And Sales Calls originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Sign in to access your portfolio
