Assertion certainty 3/5 debate potential 4/5

Roy Lee: Cluely generates more revenue than the latest YC batch

Roy Lee · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks w/ Roy Lee · Jun 25, 2025 · at 33:25

Roy Lee is the co-founder and CEO of AI startup Cluely. He compares Cluely's early revenue traction against startups in the latest Y Combinator cohort.

0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, and, like, the product is, like, it's literally two and a half months since, since being built.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Roy Lee

Insight
Roy Lee: Replace marketing heads with fewer than 100k social followers
“If any company in the world has a marketing team and the head of marketing does not have a 100,000, at least a 100,000 followers. Like, you need to replace them. Like the game has changed.”
Roy Lee Jun 25, 2025 ▶ 0:24 Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks w/ Roy Lee
Insight
Lee: Strong distribution eliminates the need to interview users
“I feel like you don't, like if your distribution is strong enough, you don't need to like talk to your users. You just need to look at their data.”
Roy Lee Jun 25, 2025 ▶ 27:27 Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks w/ Roy Lee
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Roy Lee predicts Cluely will achieve better distribution than OpenAI
“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 OpenAI, and It's enough that you could probably bet on us at like, well, like a 30,000 X disco…”
Roy Lee Jun 25, 2025 ▶ 30:46 Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks w/ Roy Lee
Opinion
Roy Lee: Tech workers on X and LinkedIn misunderstand video algorithms
“I think it's growing increasingly clear that people on ex-LinkedIn are behind, and there's such a very, extremely small intersection of people who understand how developed the algorithm is on, like, Instagram, TikTok, and people on tech, like, Twitter, LinkedI…”
Roy Lee Jun 25, 2025 ▶ 1:25 Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks w/ Roy Lee
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Roy Lee: Future startup founders will overwhelmingly be Gen Z creators
“You're not gonna 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, and I'm sort of like the canary that's leading the…”
Roy Lee Jun 25, 2025 ▶ 12:04 Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks w/ Roy Lee
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Roy Lee: Every full-time Cluely employee has over 100,000 social followers
“There are only two roles. You are either 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 a 100,000 followers on some social media platform.”
Roy Lee Jun 25, 2025 ▶ 14:17 Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks w/ Roy Lee
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.