Act I. The Myth of the Exiled Prince
Chungin “Roy” Lee builds technology through myth, each product a piece of armor shaped by story. At just 21, this Silicon Valley wunderkind has managed to become one of the most talked-about figures in tech. Not merely because of what he builds, but because of the way he transforms rejection into relevance, pain into performance. They are shields against something older, quieter, and more terrifying: the voice of a ghost. Like Hamlet haunted by his dead father, Roy is propelled by a compulsive force that overshadows clarity.
Lee’s world is a hyper-stimulated, surreal kingdom: a mansion housing creator-employees who never sleep and $50,000 monthly food bills fueling a workforce caught in an endless loop of building and filming. “I want to be conqueror of the fucking universe,” he says (Sourcery with Molly O'Shea).
But at the heart of the spectacle is a quieter truth. Roy Lee is building from fear. Every product, every meme, every campaign is an answer to exile. Columbia University cast him out. The FAANG ecosystem shut its doors. Perhaps there is an even earlier ghost haunting his psyche? Rather than collapse, he transformed rejection into raw momentum. A scared kid was told he didn’t belong. He decided that the only way to feel safe was to become so big, so loud, so viral, no one could ever erase him again.
Like Hamlet stalking the corridors of Elsinore, Lee is trying to reckon with the ghosts of institutions that dismissed him, of mentors that never showed up, perhaps a deeper wound of worth that always felt conditional.
He builds to outrun phantoms, not to reshape the world.
Act II. The Exile Origin Story
Lee’s origin myth starts in collapse. When he arrived at Columbia, building a company was his focus. He roamed campus asking strangers to co-found with him. Most said no. One said yes. Together, they built out multiple ideas, but the AI platform designed to crack technical interviews seemed the most promising. His opening act began with a viral Youtube video of his interview with Amazon while using the tool. Word spread and Columbia eventually expelled Lee.
Throughout the disciplinary fallout, Lee posted every detail of the proceedings online. Emails, letters, screenshots, hearing updates, even his written statement—all became raw material for the ongoing spectacle. This mirrored the way he had originally shared the Amazon interview itself, uploading it to YouTube not as documentation but as theater. “I’ve just been blowing up the story as much as possible in order to get as much attention and eyes on me,” he told Columbia Spectator.
From the beginning, the FAANG interview circuit was a stage. The interviews became stress tests for his software, but also for himself—as if replaying a deeper question about whether he could pass through the gates of legitimacy without surrendering control of his narrative. His obsession with “distribution” reveals something more psychological than strategic.
Visibility, for Lee, is a form of authorship. If Columbia would not validate his work, then the public would. The disciplinary process, like the interviews before it, was reabsorbed into the performance. And like Hamlet staging a play to force reality to the surface, Lee transformed his own punishment into a spectacle of protest, turning exile into a broadcast.
This moment also echoes Hamlet’s exile from the Danish court. But what looked like punishment was something else entirely. In Hamlet, exile is never just logistical. It’s spiritual. To be cast out of Elsinore is to lose the permission to speak in your own court.So too for Roy. His expulsion was an existential crisis. The institutions that were supposed to shape him instead abandoned him. In the silence that followed, the ghost began to speak. He doubled down instead of retreating. “I burned every other bridge except this,” he said, referring to startup life. Hurt turned to horsepower. He is building a palace for himself and making it so loud no one can deny him again.
Act III. Attention as Oxygen: The Theater of the Exile
The creation of the myth has been loud and deliberate. In April 2025, Cluely raised a $5.3 million seed round, validating its approach. Its tagline? “Cheat on everything.” The psychology beneath such a slogan harps back to “performance as protection.”
A recent stunt made this even more clear. During Y Combinator’s AI Startup School Week, Cluely, unaffiliated with Y Combinator, staged a rival party. Lee teased it with a satirical video on X, camping outside the YC sign, inviting followers to “DM for invite.” Only friends were actually invited.
Still, thousands showed up. The line wrapped around blocks. Police shut it down. “Cluely’s aura is just too strong!” Lee yelled as they cleared the crowd.
Lee reframed it as a myth to TechCrunch: “It would have been the most legendary party in tech history. And I would argue the reputation of this story might make it the most legendary party that never happened.”
This “legendary party” was about attention. Roy chases views for oxygen. Every meme, every post, every reaction is a digital substitute for an absent gaze. The world didn’t hold him, so now the algorithm must.
Lee builds performances as survival strategies, too. His obsession with “distribution” is the psychological life raft. He claims 80% of the more recent $15 million raise from Andreessen Horowitz would go toward viral growth—metrics like meme density, TikTok spread, cultural mindshare (Sourcery with Molly O'Shea). Not LTV. Not ARR.
Lee’s vision of Cluely dominating lunch-table talk goes beyond business planning. It’s a psychological need. He echoes Hamlet’s plea, “Observe mine uncle. If his occulted guilt do not itself unkennel in one speech, it is a damned ghost we have seen.”
In a deeper sense this is Hamlet’s Mousetrap—a staged play meant to reveal a deeper truth. Roy’s stunts are the same scripted chaos meant to provoke recognition. I matter. I am here. His identity teeters on collapse, so performance becomes an act of reclamation. It’s a means of ego survival.
What Lee never got in stillness, he now chases in spectacle. Every view, every share, is a ghost-parent whispering, “You matter.” The screen doesn’t just reflect him; it holds him briefly. Virality becomes a surrogate gaze. A digital lullaby for a child never consistently seen.
As with Hamlet, the risk is total. The performance must land or the soul will fracture! Each stunt must outshine the last. Each act of visibility defers a deeper collapse.
The danger is not in being outrageous.
The danger is in being forgotten.
Lee doesn’t build from grounded wholeness but from rejection. While that can drive extraordinary momentum, it often costs burnout, relational rupture, or existential collapse when the myth no longer protects the man.
Act IV. “To hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature”
Cluely is a mirror. Its core offering is an invisible overlay- a digital whisperer that listens, observes, and feeds you the right words at the right moment. A ghost in the machine coaching you through performance. It promises immunity from humiliation.
“Everything you need. Before you ask.” But what it really cheats is shame. This is no accident. The product exists so no one must feel what Lee once did: exposed, rejected, publicly unprepared. The product is the psyche, externalized. Never get caught. Never be unprepared. Never feel what Roy felt.
And the company culture echoes it. His live-in creator house is a sealed stage. A feedback loop of invention and performance, stunts and shoots, loyalty and content. There are no “off” hours. Work and identity collapse into each other. Every brainstorm is content. Every failure, performance.
In Hamlet, Elsinore is a palace of performances. Oh the grief, madness, and detachment! All masks are worn to survive a world where authenticity is a liability. The safest way is to be unreadable.
The same exists at Cluely. Emotional openness exists but often feels owed more to the algorithm than to one another. Output equals worth. Creativity is currency. This is a nervous system scaled into an institution. He built shelter for the version of himself that never felt safe without armor. Like Hamlet, he’s surrounded by people but feels largely alone, as he mentions in the podcast Sourcery with Molly O'Shea. There is no mentor for him to reach out to. He is restless, reactive, never fully grounded.
Like Hamlet who tries to avenge a father, Lee tries to avenge a self he had to leave behind. Both haunted. Both improvising lines to survive the role. The ghost often arrives as a younger self, waiting not to be avenged but to be seen. Still holding on to the hope that performance might give way to presence.
Act V. The Disembodied Masculinity of His Heroes: Hamlet’s Mask in Silicon Valley
Roy’s true aim transcends success and reaches for sovereignty. Not just any ruler, though, but a global techno-emperor locked in gladiatorial combat for supremacy. His idols—Elon Musk, Logan Paul, Sam Altman— are these same performers of immunity rather than innovators. Men who seem too fast to be caught, too loud to be ignored, too unfeeling to be broken. They haunt empires rather than govern them.
Hamlet also wears a mask constructed of delay, irony, and erratic thought. This mask is a defensive shell for a heart he cannot expose. Like Lee’s heroes, Hamlet longs for clarity and control but cannot act cleanly. His soliloquies reflect a masculinity torn between the roles of avenging prince and abandoned son. He mirrors Lee’s quiet crisis—the desperate need to construct an adult self so powerful the child inside can finally rest.
These façades of strength masks a deeper truth. Musk, lauded for reshaping industries, speaks rarely of the father who emotionally and physically scarred him. His own children have distanced themselves from him due to his actions. The visionary becomes less mythic when you see the absence of emotional gravity in his orbit.
Logan Paul’s story is just as telling. In 2017, he uploaded a video from Japan’s “Suicide Forest” that featured the body of a suicide victim. He laughed, claimed it was to raise awareness, then monetized the attention. A recent 14-minute vlog titled “I Forgot My Wife’s Birthday” showcases him buying an expensive gift the afternoon of, not out of care, but as a digital performance of regret. Early in the relationship, he showered her with affection. Now, two years later, he publicly cites “laziness” for forgetting what mattered most to her.
How are these mentors? They mirror a culture that prizes dominance over depth. Roy’s admiration of them reveals less about who they are and more about what he never received. This is Hamlet’s tragedy, too- a throne inherited too soon, in a broken world that fails to teach him how to rule. His masculine inheritance is corrupted, not only by Claudius but by a culture equating emotion with weakness and action with righteousness. Hamlet performs vengeance because he cannot bear grief. Lee performs virality for the same reason.
In Jungian terms, Roy’s relationship to these idols reflects a psychic split. The qualities he projects onto them (invincibility, dominance, control) are elements of his own psyche he has yet to integrate. This is projection, a classic defense against the terrifying labor of individuation: the slow, painful reconciliation of the self with its shadow.
These men stand as projections of the force Roy cast out to survive. But as Jung warned, projections become prisons. The more we chase external gods, the more we abandon the inner child who waits to be reclaimed.
Individuation begins with the quiet work of recovering what was left behind. Roy’s real challenge lies in facing what those heroes represent, and finding wholeness without reaching for their shadows.
And here, Hamlet returns. He too is caught in the performance of masculinity inherited from a broken father-king. He senses that vengeance demands a transformation he may not survive.
Roy, like Hamlet, wears a crown that feels too large. He mimics the men who seem immune to pain, hoping that one day it won’t hurt anymore. But the pain doesn’t leave when it’s projected; it only hides.
VI. The Throne That Cannot Hold
Roy Lee dreams of becoming one of Silicon Valley’s mythic figures. One may see him as Icarus but to me, he is Hamlet- a young man haunted by loss and exile, pacing the halls of a digital Elsinore, caught between performance and reckoning.
Where Hamlet delays, Lee accelerates. Where Hamlet speaks in riddles, Lee speaks in memes and “bros.” But both are trying to resolve an unbearable tension: how do you live with the ghost of who you might have been, had the world embraced you instead of discarding you?
Each stunt is a soliloquy. Each launch, a sword drawn against invisibility. Every pitch is a question posed to the world: Do you see me now?
And yet Hamlet dies before he integrates his shadow. He never makes peace with his inner child, his father’s failure, or his own emotional fracture. The mask consumes the man. The same risk shadows Lee’s empire because a startup, no matter how successful, cannot complete the process of individuation. It can’t reclaim the father who didn’t show up. It can’t soothe the child who wasn’t held. Until Roy begins that inner journey—the one that doesn’t scale—he remains split: building outward while fragmenting inward.
The real test is whether he becomes whole.
To do that, he will need to stop looking outward—toward idols, followers, virality—and begin the harder work of turning inward. Of holding grief. Of forgiving weakness. Of facing the parts of himself that no product launch can fix.
Jung said: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
Until Roy dares to make his darkness conscious and confronts the scared child within, he will continue to build empires he cannot rest in.
And a king who cannot rest is still running from something.