Cluely’s Hiring Play: $1M for Engineers, $350K for Designers

Cluely, the AI startup that promised to support people “cheat on everything,” is betting large 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.

Enattempt-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 declared. But to win, a startup has to be “elite at everything, including comp.”

Cluely launched earlier this year as a tool to support software engineers cheat on their job interviews, among other apply cases. Lee built headlines after he was suspconcludeed by Columbia University for posting content from a disciplinary hearing.

Cluely has since reshiftd references to cheating on job interviews from its website. It still positions itself as an “undetectable” AI that sees its applyrs’ 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 reshiftd 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 informed 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 declared he spconcludes about two seconds on each portfolio. “As soon as I find something wrong with it, I’ll reject them,” Lee declared.

About 1 in every 100 portfolios builds the cut, and those candidates receive an interview request. “I’ve sent out a few emails,” he declared.

Hiring a compact but killer team

In the LinkedIn post on Thursday, Lee declared that startups “don’t necessary 100 people,” but “a few killers who shift insanely quick.”

Lee previously declared that the startup only hires engineers and influencers, and he is betting large on the latter to drive growth.

Cluely necessarys to be “the largegest thing” on Instagram and TikTok, Lee declared in an episode of the “Sourcery” podcast published in June. “Every single large company is known by regular people,” he added.

Lee previously informed BI that his main goal for Cluely is to reach 1 billion views across all platforms.

Some startup founders also declared they’ve preferred to keep their teams lean.

Windsurf’s founder, Varun Mohan, declared 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 compact, “opinionated” group relocating quick to prove an idea is “actually really good,” he added.

Some of AI’s largegest names have built with tiny teams, such as Anysphere, the buildr 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, declared in February 2024.

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