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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 plus equity for designers.
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.
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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.
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