Roy Lee on the AI money rush and the shrinking graduate job market
A Cluely-founder pitch that AI has made small fortunes unusually easy to grab, which is upbeat for people willing to move now and bleak for new college graduates.
- The easiest opening is AI-made video ads: build free sample ads for funded startups, pitch them cold, and charge a monthly retainer if the ads make money.
- The broader money-maker is selling AI work to the 99% of companies that still do not know how good the tools have gotten — ads, websites, simple apps.
- Roy Lee says Cluely runs seven products, most making over a million dollars a year, with only two full-time engineers, and pays over a thousand creators purely on ad performance.
- He guesses a large share of this year's graduates may never land a job, and that within five years most will struggle — AI is eating entry-level white-collar work.
- Marketing, he argues, will not scale into a giant business, since attention and consumer spending are a fixed pie that competitors just fight over.
Outlook: Expect more tiny, high-revenue AI companies and more pressure on entry-level hiring as cheap AI content floods advertising.