Roy Lee on the AI money rush and the shrinking graduate job market

Aug 26, 2026

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.

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