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Cluely is betting big on compensation to recruit top-tier talent.
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“Please be world-class,” said the cofounder of the AI startup that promised to help people “cheat on everything.”
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Chungin “Roy” Lee also said he’ll be “reviewing every application by hand.”
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 for designers. Both job descriptions also list equity.
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.
