Clément Mihailescu

Founder — AlgoExpert

Profile

Clément Mihailescu is the co-founder and CEO of AlgoExpert, the technical-interview-prep platform that became a rite of passage for a generation of engineers trying to break into FAANG. His own origin story is the pitch: bootcamp grad at Fullstack Academy, first line of code weeks after college, software engineer at Google six months later, two years in, a brief stop at Facebook, and then full-time on the education business he was building on the side. That bootstrap arc — no VC, no acquisition, just a paywalled catalog of algorithm problems and whiteboarded explainers — is still the whole shape of the company.

AlgoExpert is now a suite: the original algorithms product plus SystemsExpert, FrontendExpert, MLExpert, InfraExpert, iOSExpert, and BlockchainExpert. As of 2024 the company reported roughly $1.9M in revenue and over 200,000 paying lifetime customers, which is small for a tech brand this loud and large for a business run mostly by one very online founder. His YouTube channel — over half a million subscribers — is the growth engine: mock Google interviews, LeetCode walk-throughs, and increasingly, takes on where software engineering is heading.

That last part is why he shows up in an AI list. Mihailescu has spent the Devin / Cursor / Claude Code era publicly arguing that AI is not obsoleting developers — that no serious business replaces its engineers with agents, because the cost of a bad engineer dwarfs the cost of a good one, and that AI just scales what competent humans can build. It’s a defensible position, and it’s also conveniently aligned with selling interview prep, which is worth noting. But his argument — more demand for engineers who can drive AI tools, not fewer — is one of the more coherent bull cases out there, and he actually ships videos teaching people to use these tools rather than just posting about them.

For developers learning AI right now, he’s a useful pressure test. He’s not a researcher, not a framework author, not even really a teacher of machine learning. He’s the person mapping what AI means for the career of a working software engineer — how interviews are shifting, which skills still matter, what to study if you’re 19 or 49 and trying to stay employable. Read him as a market signal, not a technical source.