Latest news with #RoyLee
Yahoo
24-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Viral AI 'cheating' startup Cluely is offering engineers up to $1M and $350K for designers: 'Please be world-class'
Cluely is betting big on compensation to recruit top-tier talent. "Please be world-class," said the cofounder of the AI startup that promised to help people "cheat on everything." Chungin "Roy" Lee also said he'll be "reviewing every application by hand." Cluely, the AI startup that promised to help people "cheat on everything," is betting big on high compensation to recruit top-tier talent. Chungin "Roy" Lee, the CEO and cofounder of Cluely, wrote on LinkedIn this week that the San Francisco startup is offering engineers up to $1 million in base salary and $250,000 to $350,000 for designers. Both job descriptions also list equity. Entry-level engineers in San Francisco typically start at $75,000, with senior engineers earning up to $235,000, according to a startup compensation guide by Kruze Consulting. Designer salaries range from $80,000 to $150,000 for junior roles and $100,000 to $172,000 for senior positions. "A startup truth I disagree with is that you shouldn't pay high cash comp," Lee wrote in a post on Thursday. The traditional startup hiring model was to "pay everyone below market, give them a tiny bit more equity, sell them on the 'mission,'" Lee said. But to win, a startup has to be "elite at everything, including comp." Cluely launched earlier this year as a tool to help software engineers cheat on their job interviews, among other use cases. Lee made headlines after he was suspended by Columbia University for posting content from a disciplinary hearing. 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 startup landed $15 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lee announced in June. The 21-year-old also wrote in a post on Wednesday that he will be "reviewing every application by hand." "I've removed every field in the job application except link to your portfolio," he wrote. "I only care about how good your work is." "I do not care about school, experience, age, citizenship status, etc. Please be world-class," he added. Lee told Business Insider on Thursday that the response has been "going very well." He has reviewed about "1,200/2,000 applications" for a founding designer and about 3,000 applications for founding engineers. He said he spends about two seconds on each portfolio. "As soon as I find something wrong with it, I'll reject them," Lee said. About 1 in every 100 portfolios makes the cut, and those candidates receive an interview request. "I've sent out a few emails," he said. Hiring a small but killer team In the LinkedIn post on Thursday, Lee said that startups "don't need 100 people," but "a few killers who move insanely fast." Lee previously said that the startup only hires engineers and influencers, and he is betting big on the latter to drive growth. Cluely needs to be "the biggest thing" on Instagram and TikTok, Lee said in an episode of the "Sourcery" podcast published in June. "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. Some startup founders also said they've preferred to keep their teams lean. Windsurf's founder, Varun Mohan, said on an episode of the "Twenty Minute VC" podcast published last month that early-stage product teams should ideally just comprise three to four people. A small, "opinionated" group moving fast to prove an idea is "actually really good," he added. Some of AI's biggest names have built with tiny teams, such as Anysphere, the maker of coding copilot Cursor. The advent of AI has also enabled startups to do more with less, prompting some founders to maintain extremely lean teams. "We're going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon," OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, said in February 2024. Read the original article on Business Insider Sign in to access your portfolio
Time of India
24-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Porsches, triple salaries & $100 million offers: AI startups go wild with hiring offers as tech giants scoop top talent
Startups are pulling out all the stops to attract AI talent, with Composio offering a Porsche for successful referrals and Cluely tripling salaries for designers. BENGALURU: When Karan Vaidya, co-founder of AI infra startup Composio, promised a Porsche to anyone who referred a product engineer who joined their San Francisco team and stayed for three months, it sounded like a spiel. "Not kidding," he wrote in the now-viral X post, complete with a photo of a black Porsche model he had in mind. You Can Also Check: Bengaluru AQI | Weather in Bengaluru | Bank Holidays in Bengaluru | Public Holidays in Bengaluru Just hours later, Roy Lee, co-founder of Cluely, another early-stage AI startup, chimed in with his own no-nonsense offer. "I'll triple your base salary," he posted, as he searched for a founding designer. "No questions asked." The timing is uncanny. This same week, Microsoft reportedly poached 24 AI researchers from Google DeepMind, including Amar Subramanya, the former engineering head of Gemini team who is now a corporate VP at Microsoft AI. Meta hired three DeepMind experts who had helped build a language model that achieved gold medal-level performance in the International Math Olympiad. Big money can hurt small AI teams, say experts Meta has also been aggressively staffing its new Superintelligence unit, reportedly offering compensation packages of over $100 million to lure top researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic. "There's a real risk that we're overpaying for momentum and mistaking it for durability," said Manav Garg, co-founder and managing partner at Together Fund. "High-visibility compensation moves can bring in mercenaries rather than missionaries. That's dangerous for early-stage companies where cultural fit and long-term belief in the vision are as critical as technical skill." For many investors, the current frenzy feels inevitable. "Talent is IP," said Avijeet Alagathi, founder of Shastra VC. "Capital solves for little in this space, so it's being used to buy and retain talent." Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan, co-founder at Upekkha, described the market as unforgiving. "In artificial intelligence , the fourth player doesn't even matter," he said. "The people who can orchestrate systems at scale are reaching infinite price." For now, in a winner-takes-all environment, founders are betting that conviction, like a Porsche, can still turn heads.
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Startups Weekly: Still running
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can't miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. This newsletter took a break for the Fourth of July, and maybe you did, too, but the news didn't. Even the biggest startups are still running after more funding. To help you catch up, we've got the top startup stories from the week, plus some from the previous one. So far this month, we've learned that not getting acquired by Adobe can be good business and that it is sometimes worth embracing the messiness. As for cheating, we are afraid the messages are still mixed. Blockbuster ahead: Figma released a regulatory filing ahead of its IPO, which experts estimate could raise up to $1.5 billion for the design company — and its financial details are impressive. Multitasking: In case you missed it, everyone in tech has an opinion about Soham Parekh, the serial moonlighter Silicon Valley startups apparently can't stop hiring. Between the cheats: Cluely is making noise with its rage-bait marketing, but the numbers are also following. Its annual recurring revenue doubled to about $7 million in a week, founder Roy Lee told TechCrunch. Lee also said he isn't worried about rivals, nor cheating detectors. Insights from Brex: If your company is struggling to procure the right AI tools, you're not alone, and you may find it interesting to know how corporate credit card company Brex has embraced the 'messiness.' New stripes: Stripe's first employee, Darragh Buckley, who went on to found fintech startup Increase, has seemingly succeeded in achieving his long-rumored goal to buy a bank; but his interests are not what his competitors think, he told TechCrunch. Several interesting deals and new funds were announced in the last couple of weeks — and there are more to come. In talks: Revolut is reportedly seeking a new funding round at a $65 billion valuation; SpaceX is looking to raise $250 million at a $400 billion valuation; and Lovable is on track to raise $150 million at a $2 billion valuation. Meanwhile, LangChain may become a unicorn soon. Also: Rivian spinoff Also, a micromobility startup building e-bikes and more, raised $200 million from Greenoaks Capital. Concrete: Colorado-based startup Terra CO2 locked in a $124 million Series B to slash the carbon footprint of concrete. AI for robots: Genesis AI, a startup that aims to build a foundational model for enabling robots to perform tasks, emerged from stealth with a $105 million seed round (yes, seed) co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures. From Dubai to Spain: Huspy, a proptech startup that streamlines finding homes and mortgages, closed a $59 million Series B to double down across the Middle East and expand in Europe. It is already present in Spain. Happy accidents: After rediscovering a forgotten hydrogen tech, Tulum Energy raised $27 million to build a pilot plant in Mexico alongside a steel plant belonging to Techint Group, out of which it spun out. Quantum collective: Israeli quantum startup Qedma just raised a $26 million round with participation from IBM, which takes the stance that driving quantum further requires a community effort. Composed: Tailor, whose system Omakase allows AI agents to securely access its enterprise resource planning platform via API, raised a $22 million Series A. '[B]usinesses want systems that can be composed, not hardcoded,' CEO Yo Shibata said. Battle-tested: Co-founded by Pipedrive CEO and angel investor Ragnar Sass, Estonian VC firm Darkstar completed a first close of approximately $17.5 million to invest in defense solutions that have been tested in combat in Ukraine, with the goal of helping re-arm Europe. Alum backing alums: Phosphor Capital, a venture firm launched by Zeus Living founder Kulveer Taggar, will solely invest in Y Combinator companies, and YC CEO Garry Tan is one of its investors. As evidenced by Salesforce snapping up cloud management firm Informatica for $8 billion, AI is forcing the data industry to consolidate, but there's more to it. 'This consolidation is being driven by customers being fed up with a multitude of products that are incompatible,' trend analyst Sanjeev Mohan told TechCrunch. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Cluely's Roy Lee isn't sweating cheating detectors
Cluely, an AI startup that uses a hidden in-browser window to analyze online conversations, has shot to fame with the controversial claim that its 'undetectability' feature lets users 'cheat on everything.' The company's co-founder, Roy Lee, was suspended from Columbia University for boasting that he used Cluely, originally called Interview Coder, to 'cheat' on a coding test when he was applying for a developer job at Amazon. On Tuesday, another Columbia University student, Patrick Shen, announced on X that he had built Truely, a product designed to help catch 'cheaters' who use Cluely. Marketing itself as an 'anti-Cluely,' Truely claims it can detect the use of unauthorized applications by interviewees or others during online meetings. But Truely's launch didn't faze Lee. 'We don't care if we're able to be detected or not,' Lee told TechCrunch last week. 'The invisibility function is not a core feature of Cluely. It's a nifty add-on. In fact, most enterprises opt to disable the invisibility altogether because of legal implications.' Lee responded to Shen on X by praising Truely, but adding that Cluely 'will likely start prompting our users to be much more transparent about usage.' Since securing a $15 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz last month, Cluely has shifted its marketing strategy away from promoting 'cheating.' The company's tagline has recently been changed from 'cheat on everything' to 'Everything You Need. Before You Ask. … This feels like cheating.' Cluely's marketing tactics have been described as rage-bait marketing, and now it seems that the company has baited us into thinking of its technology as a cheating tool. However, Lee has much bigger ambitions for Cluely: to take the place of ChatGPT. 'Every time you would reach for our goal is to create a world where you instead reach for Cluely,' Lee said. 'Cluely does functionally the same thing as ChatGPT. The only difference is that it also knows what's on your screen and hears what's going on in your audio.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
TechCrunch
10-07-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Why Cluely's Roy Lee isn't sweating cheating detectors
Cluely, an AI startup that uses a hidden in-browser window to analyze online conversations, has shot to fame with the controversial claim that its 'undetectability' feature lets users 'cheat on everything.' The company's co-founder, Roy Lee, was suspended from Columbia University for boasting that he used Cluely, originally called Interview Coder, to 'cheat' on a coding test when he was applying for a developer job at Amazon. On Tuesday, another Columbia University student, Patrick Shen, announced on X that he had built Truely, a product designed to help catch 'cheaters' who use Cluely. Marketing itself as an 'anti-Cluely,' Truely claims it can detect the use of unauthorized applications by interviewees or others during online meetings. But Truely's launch didn't faze Lee. 'We don't care if we're able to be detected or not,' Lee told TechCrunch last week. 'The invisibility function is not a core feature of Cluely. It's a nifty add-on. In fact, most enterprises opt to disable the invisibility altogether because of legal implications.' Lee responded to Shen on X by praising Truely, but adding that Cluely 'will likely start prompting our users to be much more transparent about usage.' Since securing a $15 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz last month, Cluely has shifted its marketing strategy away from promoting 'cheating.' The company's tagline has recently been changed from 'cheat on everything' to 'Everything You Need. Before You Ask. … This feels like cheating.' Techcrunch event Save up to $475 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $450 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW Cluely's marketing tactics have been described as rage-bait marketing, and now it seems that the company has baited us into thinking of its technology as a cheating tool. However, Lee has much bigger ambitions for Cluely: to take the place of ChatGPT. 'Every time you would reach for our goal is to create a world where you instead reach for Cluely,' Lee said. 'Cluely does functionally the same thing as ChatGPT. The only difference is that it also knows what's on your screen and hears what's going on in your audio.'
