At just 21 years old, Roy Lee is already making waves in the tech world with his AI company, Cluely. But this young entrepreneur’s path to success has been anything but conventional.
Lee’s journey began when he was accepted to the prestigious Harvard University straight out of high school. However, his time at the Ivy League institution was short-lived. After getting caught sneaking out for a school field trip, Lee had his acceptance rescinded.
Rather than letting this setback derail his ambitions, Lee saw it as a sign to forge his own path. “I knew I wanted to start companies,” he explains. “And I thought this was like a sign from God. I got the acceptance and showed to myself, my parents, that I could do it. But I got it taken away to sort of like push me towards building companies.”
Undeterred, Lee enrolled at a community college in California for a year before transferring to Columbia University. But even there, he found himself increasingly impatient with the traditional academic track. “As soon as I got to Columbia, the only thing I did was look for co-founders. And as soon as I found one, we just hacked on projects and until something stuck. And that something was InterviewCoder.”
InterviewCoder, Lee’s first major venture, was a “cheating tool” designed to help software engineering students ace their technical interviews. The app used AI to provide answers to the notoriously tricky “riddles” that are commonly asked in these high-stakes assessments.
While some may have seen InterviewCoder as simply a way to game the system, Lee viewed it as a necessary disruption. “For 20 years, they’ve been asking essentially the programming equivalent of how many balloons fit in the Empire State Building. It’s just not really positive for society,” he says. “So I built a tool to let you cheat on it.”
Introducing Cluely
The success of InterviewCoder laid the groundwork for Lee’s next big project: Cluely. Described as an “Everything app” that provides AI-powered assistance for everything from sales meetings to deep work sessions, Cluely represents Lee’s bold vision for the future of productivity.
“The ability to use an AI that is context-aware, that nobody else knows that you’re using, is much more powerful than just for shooting interviews,” Lee explains. “It can literally be used to answer any question before you even finish thinking of the question.”
This concept of an omniscient, invisible AI assistant may sound like the stuff of science fiction. But Lee is adamant that this is the direction technology is headed, whether people are ready for it or not.
“The future you fear of AI sort of coming, taking jobs, and displacing people, it’s not just coming, it’s already here,” he says bluntly. “And you might not think that everyone is sort of like getting with the program and using AI, but you’d be vastly mistaken. 99% of students in college and high school are using this to the utmost fullest potential.”
Lee’s brash, unapologetic attitude has certainly rubbed some the wrong way. Critics have accused Cluely of enabling academic dishonesty and giving unfair advantages to those who can afford it. But the young CEO remains undeterred.
“You can call it cheating. You can call it whatever you want. But I mean, the future is now,” he declares. “If you’re not with the program, you will get replaced by someone who uses AI extremely quick.”
It’s a bold, even confrontational stance. But Lee believes it’s a necessary one in order to prepare the world for the seismic shifts that AI will bring. And with Cluely already generating $3 million in annual recurring revenue just 16 days after launch, it’s clear that his message is resonating with many.
Since its viral launch, which garnered 12 million views for its provocative promotional video, Cluely has attracted 70,000 users in just weeks, boasting a 0.25% conversion rate from views to signups. Lee’s vision is to build Cluely to be the fastest company to reach $100M in revenue in human history.
Of course, Lee’s vision extends far beyond the current capabilities of Cluely. He speaks excitedly about a future where the app is seamlessly integrated into our very minds, with “brain chips” that make us all “cyborgs.” It’s a future that may sound dystopian to some, but to Lee, it’s the inevitable next step in human evolution.
“Everything as we know it in society is about to be changed in the next five to ten years, including, I mean, the entire social order, entire economic systems will collapse,” he predicts. “And nobody knows what the future is going to look like.”
Love it or hate it, there’s no denying the audacity of Lee’s vision. At a time when many of his peers are still trying to figure out their next move, this 21-year-old dropout is boldly charting a course that could fundamentally reshape the way we live, work, and think. It’s a future that may be unsettling to some, but for Roy Lee, it’s the only way forward.
