YouSaid · the spoken record

Cluely Founder

lines on the record: 37
first: 2025-06-25
most recent: 2025-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Where we've determined it. The corporate culture of America as a whole is going to shift in perhaps the entire world. Everyone will realize, oh, we've had our like panties up in a bunch, worrying about brand image and professionalism when in reality the world craves something different. And I have very strong conviction that I'm right in this because I was right about X and I did not understand for life in me why nobody is producing the viral videos that were so obviously designed to go viral for the algorithm. And it's just because nobody has caught on and nobody's willing to like press that button. Now that I've pressed the button once, just imagine what the world looks like if Clute makes it. You probably are more interested in that. That would be a much more interesting world if every company was being 100% radically transparent and doing exactly what the most interesting thing was.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's just this lack of professionalism. And again, with the distribution of short form content, everyone sees the craziest things and you just get desensitized these things. And that's why sports like sperm racing are able to be so hyper viral. Nobody would have aired this on CNN 10 years ago, but you don't need CNN anymore. You have Instagram TikTok and Instagram TikTok. They love sperm racing. As a result, they're able to raise at a fucking mass evaluation, like genuinely have a shot at being like the next legit sport. And it's not just sperm racing. I mean, it's every company in the world. There's Sam Altman talking about how hot the guys are that GPT generates in the timeline. There's Elon Musk doing ravings about his political takes. Like every company is getting more and more controversial, less professional. This trend is not dying anytime soon. I'm just the person that is pushing the envelope perhaps a little further than the world is ready for at the moment. But I think the question that everyone should linger on a little bit is, can you imagine a world where we do win? Can you imagine the world, what will the state of the world look like if CLULY does win? And we prove to everyone like the bar for professionalism is here.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're headed towards a future where this is the new normal. I mean, 40 years ago, we were way more professional than we are now. If you are even an engineer, you come into work, you come in with a suit and tie, and if you don't, it's distasteful. It's disgusting. I cannot believe it. Like, you should never ever show up in a hoodie and sweatpants. Now you're weird if you come up with a suit and you're not in a hoodie and sweatpants. Everyone wants more authentic things. And right now, for some reason in society, we're still lingering onto this image that companies need to be like brand friendly and boring and never say anything controversial or whatever. Like, I don't understand how this became the societal norm, but in reality people want to see interesting things. I mean, like, that's the point of life is you see interesting things.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's true. Yeah. Like, I respect that guy, and I hope that one day when the company gets to where I imagine it will be, then he will come turn around. And I don't think the lesson is to triple down on everything. I think the lesson is that if you're honest and the algorithm will reward you because there's literally zero other company out there that is being fully honest about everything and there's zero founder out there that behaves authentically. The only other person I might think is like Elon Musk. And I think that's a really good role model to have in businessmaking.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the few lessons have been never punched down, like never, ever even remotely close to punch down. And I think people reward and the algorithm does reward authenticity more than anything. Like it rewards many things, but one of the things that it rewards most is like authenticity. And I think you'll see me in Twitter, like every once in a while make like a genuine comment, like, hey, hey, thank you. Like, I really respect you or something. I think people love to see that.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I would say, the viral marketing when you say viral marketing is interesting, right? Like one leads to another. I actually think what you're doing is like anti-fragile marketing. Like you're so controversial, I'm going to cut off your head. And three sprungs up because one is mad at you. One is really happy about you. One is neutral. You get all these like every time someone comes at you and comes at the idea clearly, the more aura points it gets, like aura farming.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because what you're saying is some people get so mad at. I heard someone call it Riz marketing, which is a compliment, but they're like, I hate this Riz marketing. It's got to be product first. Get back to fundamentals. But first, this is its own fundamentals too of how the world works today. But two is, so of course, they can't destroy you. But even the people who want to destroy you. The joke in my head is they could try to kill you, but they can't kill the idea”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think this just reflects a growing shift in society. I mean, literally for the past few decades now, there's just been such this sharp drop off in professionalism. And I really think it's because like content creation has been democratized. Like the first ever YouTube creators were just people making funny videos in their dorms. And this was the most people crave this. Nobody wants to see another ad or another corporate newspaper like bullshit like that. Like they want to see some real person doing real things. And the democratization of content creation has allowed authentic people who make content to be seen by millions. And now authentic people who create content will be seen by millions. And for some reason, it's just like no company gets this, that you'll have 100 X followers in your post will be about introducing blah, blah, blah. And it's like the most corporate bullshit ever. You're not going to get any views and nobody wants to see this. Would you rather have a world where everyone was extremely transparent and even the founders were honest and like everything you see is just someone's authentic life? Or would you rather see like a bunch of corporate bullshit everywhere? What we envision for the end state distribution of Cluly is that it does not feel”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean right now the internet is up in storms saying, hey, where's the product? Where's the product? And the two things that we are literally working day and night to build out. There is truth in the statement of launch early, shift fast, launch before you're ready, but for some reason when we're doing that at scale, like it feels like everyone is, oh no, you launch too early. Now is the problem. Like, what are you talking about? This is the playbook. Like, we wrote our first lines of code 10 weeks ago. We're earlier than the latest YC batch of companies, yet we're generating probably more revenue than every single one of them. And the product is literally two and a half months since being built. In my perspective, we are pre-launch. And the huge benefit of being like massively distributing pre-launch is that you will know what product to build with as much certainty as you could possibly get. And if you can distribute and hype it up to an audience of literally millions of people, like, hey, this product's coming out, this product's coming out, and we're screaming to the world, AI overlay, like AI that sees your screen, here's your audio, like the second we make that, like, why would you pick anyone else's product to use? We've been screaming it from the top for long since day one, like before day one even. And like right now, the stage is distribution, get it into everyone's mind, what is cluly.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an example, I would love Roy to chat about the staged approach of how you're thinking about it, I think. Like right now we're distribution first and then we'll sort of build a product as we go stage two. Here's how we do it with a bunch of engineering prowess and product development, et cetera. We sort of chatted a little bit about that on text. And to me, that was like, oh, okay, like you'll figure out product as you go.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I was just in my dorm with Neil and we were just like we literally spent every day thinking about how can you make an interview coder more invisible to interviews and we played around there. There's probably like 20 to 30 versions of interview coder in the past that just we thought didn't work. But essentially it feeds you a code answer, like an answer to a coding problem. And you need to overlay that on top of your code. And we're just like, man, I really need this integrated into my code. I need to see what I'm doing as well as see the answer that AI is giving me. And eventually we just landed on translucency. And this was like, wow, this is like a magical moment. This is what the product needed. And like very soon, we realized like, why are we only thinking about coding interviews and like software engineering coding interviews? This is such a small market. This is true for everything. AI should not feel like a separate window. Like it should be integrated seamlessly and that looks like translucency.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bet on us at like a 30,000 X discount. I'm actually not worried about distribution. And I think the quality of the product, I mean, it's quite simple. I really feel like this is just a land grab right now to see who can convince as many consumers and enterprise first that they are the guy who deserves to win the translucent overlay. And right now we're making so much noise. I mean, like with the translucent overlay, like, why would it not be us”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I guess we're first to move in a pretty novel UX, and I think we did get to translucent. I think everyone's going to inevitably get to translucent overlay. This is how integrated AI should feel. And Apple shows everyone that like liquid glass is the translucent overlay that will be the form factor of AI in the future. Right now, I feel like it's just a land grab. And 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.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, I didn't know that. I did not know that, but I have clearly opened. I'm like, you went to U of M. Got that, oh. You did philosophy, policy, and economics, I think. Yeah. Right. We can sort of bond overnight. This all of a sudden is an incredible tool.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's talk a little bit about the form factor because one of the things that internally we discuss is look, Roy's probably top 1%. Now I revise at the top 0, 0, 1% in the world in terms of knowing how to distribute. The Venn diagram of that and people who know and had the instinct to build a semi-translucent overlay. It sounds so simple. Disappearing picture sounds so simple. It's easy. It's not technically hard. Like half transducent overlay. That sounds simple. It's not technically hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that overlap to me was what gave me so much excitement around what you're building. I actually have it right now on Eric. Did you go to university in Michigan?”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, when we launched the video, like, we barely had a functioning product the day before is when we finished our final test. And we're like, okay, we think this works. Now let's just launch the video as soon as possible. And we launched the video and like all of a sudden tens of thousands, we just said, hey, let's just throw sales calls in the videos to see if people use it for sales calls. That seems like a pretty lucrative space. All of a sudden, we have like over a million dollars of enterprise revenue coming in from people using it for sales calls. And it's just like you can shot in the dark distribution a lot quicker and a lot more accurately than you can shot in the dark product. And you don't need like a million product integrations. Like it's just so much quicker. And what's even better about it is that the iteration loop is much faster too because the algorithm will literally tell you via a number, which is number of views like shares, whatever, like how well your strategy is going to work. So it's much, much easier to test. Is this viral? Does this have viral fit rather than does this have like, you know, market fit?”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're also redefining kind of what a minimum alba product is to some degree Other people, other companies will spend many months building this thing and then seeing how people use it. But for you, if you can sort of draft the right content, you can test out the idea in a much quicker way to see, hey, is this really resonating?”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That literally tells us, hey, here's where this is most sticky and here's where the product direction needs to go. And I think that's like the core advantage of distribution is you do not have to worry about market fit or anything because your users will tell you where the direction of market fit is headed. And their usage of data will literally give you the information that you need to know. And if you don't have usage data, then you're literally shooting blind. Like every person who has built a company before knows that you can't really know what direction you're going. You have to talk to your users. But I feel like if your distribution is strong enough, you don't need to talk to your users. You just need to look at their data. You just need to look at the aggregate number of.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think something that a lot of people miss is that the first line of Cluley code was written like 10 weeks ago. So this is like really new. And this started with interview coder, which is just like a product that I coded up over a weekend in my dorm. And it was like a tool to let you cheat on interviews. And what we realized after we got about like 250 million impressions on the whole scenario is like, wow, we just got so many eyeballs on this thing. Maybe if we can do this again, but we have a more general use product with a similar UX because we think we're really onto something with the UX here, then maybe we can make a lot more money. And that's what we did with Cluly. And we just launched it as like interview coder for everything, you know, cheat on everything. Let's just see what happens and the usage data will tell us what people are using it for. That's like exactly what's happening. Now we have this general purpose cheating tool, which is in reality is just like an invisible AI overlay. And here's a new user experience for AI. Let's push it out to a bunch of people and see what happens. And as a result, like now we're past like a billion views overall on Cluly and we're probably like the most viral startup in the world and we have all this.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll go a bit deeper in the interns. So Kulu, we made a pretty viral video announcing that we were hiring 50 interns, and you'd be in here making content all day. And essentially, that's almost what we do. We have like over 60 contractors. These contractors get paid per video and they just are forced to sit in front of a camera and make TikTok and Instagram videos about Cluley. And this is what marketing looked like. This job does not exist five years ago. Like, how do you explain the job you sit in front of a camera and you make five, 10 second videos that seemingly make no sense to anybody, but just consistently generate millions of views? Like that, that's not a job that makes sense to people. But that is our internship. That's what a modern day marketing internship looks like. And we pay very little money for the amount of views that we get. And different companies, they're paying literally millions of dollars for Super Bowl ads when you can get the same quality and quantity of views, $20,000.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are only two rules. You are either a world class engineer who is building the product or you are a world class influencer. And for a full-time, every single person has over 100,000 followers on some social media platform. It is the only way to prove that you actually have mastery over virality and you understand what it takes. And I think if any company in the world has a marketing team and the head of marketing does not have at least 100,000 followers, you need to replace them. Like the game has changed.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I kept doing viral video after viral video. At a certain point, it just realized, holy shit, people on X LinkedIn, they have not caught on yet. And this is the massive alpha that I'm trying to capture here, is that they have not caught on to what it means to master the short form algorithm or the algorithm that is one of short form. And as a result, I am able to dominate the timeline for not the past week, but like probably the past few months just because people on Exlinkin have not caught on. And for some reason, they still refuse to catch on.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess there was a certain point where I kept going viral that I sort of realized that I know something that ex-LinkedIn people don't know yet. And it is sort of like mastery of the algorithm. And I think everything started with the interview coder situation. Interview coder was the earliest prototype of Cluley, and it was a tool to tell it you cheat on technical interviews. And I used it to cheat my way through an Amazon interview. I made it super public. I posted it everywhere and ended up getting me like blacklisted from big tech and kicked out of school. And that situation was inherently viral. Like when's the last time someone got kicked out of an Ivy League and raised $5 million? Like this has probably never happened in the history of humanity. So that situation was inherently viral. And at that time, I had no idea that this was like a repeatable thing that I could do. But then the launch video happened and I had my intuitions about the virality of launch video and I just kept scrolling on Twitter and I was wondering like, man, why is nobody doing what Avi Schiffman with friend.com showed the world you could do a year ago? Like why is nobody done this yet? And it worked. And then I did the 50 interns thing and it worked.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, literally, this is what the future of content is going to be. You're not going to 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. I'm sort of like the canary that's leading the way for this, but I guarantee you there's more of this coming. And it's inevitable and you just embrace it.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just feel like the average person who's in X comments hating about how controversial this is, they spend one hour looking through the timeline that is my Instagram feed. Their brains would melt and explode. Like they would not be able to comprehend how are people like digesting this at scale?”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing ever. And this is something that I said before, but I guarantee my videos do not go as viral on Instagram, like Instagram, TikTok. And the sole reason is because on those platforms, they are not controversial enough. And on those platforms, there are literally people committing felonies in public, or at least insinuating like they were committing felonies. Even then, it'll be like, oh, good try, bro. It's not interesting enough. And like Excinton, they just have not caught on. There's not enough creators out there who are willing to press the controversial button.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any person can watch consumed and is digestible. And everyone on XLinkin is trying to go be like the most intellectual, like thoughtful person and they'll generate some slop that maybe like 200 people in the world can actually understand and make sense of. But of course they want to seem like the most interesting, thoughtful, like intelligent person, but this just lacks viral sense. There's not enough viral content to go out. And the second thing is that the algorithm really promote the most controversial things. And people on XLinkedin, there's not enough controversial things to be rewarded for. So when I come out swinging out of the gate, I've been on Instagram, TikTok for the past 10 years of my life and I understand what level of controversialness you need. I take the slightest foot into controversialness and all of a sudden X LinkedIn explodes because the algorithm inherently, highly, highly rewards this stuff. And as a result, it's just getting shoved into everyone's feet and they don't understand. But I'm just like literally applying the same principles of controversialness from IG TikTok onto X-Linkedin and they're just so not ready for it that feels like the craziest.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. This goes way back, but many years ago when YouTube first came out as a platform, this was like the turning point of everything. This democratized essentially content. And now you weren't paying for commercials and the visibility and publicity in content was not gated by amount of money you're willing to spend on ads or TV space. It's just gated by the quality of content. And five years ago, when TikTok came out and short form algorithms really started taking over, that shifted the frame once again. So now it's not about how much good content you make. It's literally just about how much content can you make. There is simply not enough good content out there for the average person to consume, which is why you see the same brain rot reels over and over and over again, over and over again. You see the same Minecraft parkour video over and over just because there's literally not enough content for the average consumer to consume. And people have not caught on to a few things. First, you just need to make more content that a consumer will. Like most people don't know how to make viral content, content that”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Man, it's crazy how lax they've gotten since I got back into Columbia. Like now they're okay with anything when I told them, hey, mom, I'm dropping out to do this. Like she's like, oh, okay, you know, like I expected it. Why didn't you drop out sooner? Why did it take a semester and a half? Because at this point, I was like convincing my co-founder to drop out with me. And she's like, man, like, took it long enough. They're like totally on board with all the crazy shit that I”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every single day of my life until I got into Harvard, then they calm down and they're like, wow, this kid really made it. And then when I got kicked from Harvard, again, they were like on my ass a lot until I got into Columbia again. And they're like, wow, after all this, he gets back into the Ivies. Like, I guess I really can't trust him. And his unorthodox swings will, he home runs.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you just sit in a room by yourself for 12 months and all of a sudden your craziest thoughts become logical, and there's no one else. Like the echo chamber is you in your brain and it amplifies everything. And I think that's the reason why I am like the person that I am today and willing to make the bets that I am today. Later, I go to community college in California at the behest of my parents. I think California, this is like a middle ground. California, I have the chance to build a company and community college. Like I have the chance to get the education that my Asian parents always dreamed of. So I do that. And then later, I get into Columbia and I have to go to Columbia for at least a semester to appease my parents. I go to Columbia. And the first thing I'm thinking is like, can I find a co-founder and a wife? Like those are the only two things that I'm looking for in college. And so looking for the wife, but on pretty much the first day, that's when I met Neil, my co-founder, sort of hacking on a bunch of things. And the one thing that worked was the earliest version of Cluley.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tormenting that would be like I'm probably the most extroverted person you might have ever met in your life. I cannot stay maybe like eight hours without talking to someone. And to spend a year alone, it made me think, man, my life is so crazy. I might as well just quitle down on every single crazy belief thought I have and just live the most interesting life ever. So that was like the moment where I decided like I'm all in on building companies. There's no way I can do anything else.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Context, my parents literally run like a college admissions consulting company. So we literally teach kids how to get into Harvard. And the youngest son of the company gets fucking rescinded from Harvard. It's like the worst thing ever. So we decided, let's keep this quiet. Do you still have the same test scores and application, everything? Maybe next year you'll get into a different school. And so I spent like an entire year at home and I underestimated how mentally.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think from birth, the most character defining feature of me has been like attention grabbing and provocative. This played out elementary, middle, and high school. I was always like, I had a camp of people that loved me and a camp of people that hated me. I was like always the boldest. Like I would say the craziest shit. Everything that was on my mind, just no filter, I would say it. And this ended up with a lot of people liking me and a lot of people just really disliking me. And I think things culminated senior year of high school. I had a well in school. I got accepted to Harvard early. And then later that year, I was just always doing crazy shit. And I snuck out of a school field trip, past curfew, like the police had to come and escort me back because we were out at 2 a.m. We were all like 16, 17, 18. And then I got a suspension for that and that was like when the camp of Roy haters took the storm and reported everything everywhere. And it ended up getting me rescinded from Harvard. And then that kind of started my journey of, I think, like entrepreneur wanting to actually swing big at building companies. At that point, I felt like my life took such a crazy turn for a”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the haters I tweeted somebody I was talking to Brian, I tweeted how you feel about Cluley is how you feel about yourself But I deleted it because I didn't want to trigger people on Twitter. I'll talk shit on a podcast. Maybe I'll get clipped to Twitter, but I don't want to inflame people. It was fascinating to see. So I want to go back to the beginning because this isn't a story that has been told a lot. We were talking about the Amazon interview, but. Maybe let's go back even further when we think through where you are now. Talk about the threads or the through lines from your childhood that can help make sense of who you are in kind of this moment”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's pretty crazy. I think like literally six months ago, some random college kid in a dorm and now I feel like I'm at the center of the tech universe. And the more astonishing thing is how correct my assumptions on virality have been. I think it's growing increasingly clear that people on X-Linkedin are behind and there's such an extremely small intersection of people who understand how developed the algorithm is on like Instagram TikTok and people on tech like Twitter, LinkedIn, X LinkedIn. And there's just such a small intersection that it's inevitable that my predictions will be right. And it's been crazy to see that play out in real time.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been so hard to hear through the noise of everything in AI, especially the consumer-facing, pursuer-facing, to do that consistently is actually way harder, near impossible. I heard someone call it RIS marketing, which is a compliment. They're like, I hate this Riz marketing. AI is so magical. We built the digital god, locked it in a chat box.”
2025-06-25 · a16z Podcast · Building Cluely: The Viral AI Startup that raised $15M in 10 Weeks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source