Watch These 12 Minutes to Understand OpenClaw

Key Takeaways

Could you tell the backstory of Opac claw because it's it's a pretty amazing thing and I think you actually know a lot more about it than I do. >> So there's a guy named Pete. So he's an Austrian dude. He learns to code. He builds like a PDF side project of sorts uh called PSDF kit and it actually becomes like the gold standard for like a PDF library for developers. It's used by like Apple and Box and Docyign. And he basically bootstraps the thing. He ends up selling a majority stake. I think he sold it for a lot of money, like $100 million. >> Tries to retire early. He's like, "Golf sucks." Uh, has an existential life crisis. Like, what do I want to do? Decides, "All right, I'm going to keep building. That's what I enjoy doing." So, he starts building open source projects. He launches like, you know, 40, 50 different open- source small little tools or projects before this. And then he decides to create like Jarvis from the movies. He's like, "Why don't I just have an AI assistant that lives on my computer like on my desk and I just tell it to do things and it could just do it?" And the problem with most AI tools before this was that they, you know, you could talk to, you could go to that AI app and you could talk to it and it could tell you things, but it couldn't do a whole lot, right? Because it didn't have access to your different apps and your accounts and it couldn't message somebody, it couldn't send money, it couldn't control this, it couldn't control that. And he was like, "Forget it. I'm going to give it god mode. I'm going to give it access to this stuff." And the reason why I can do that is I'll put it on my own little computer here instead of in the cloud and it will run as an open source project locally on my computer. So he releases this thing initially called uh cloudbot and then the anthropic who makes Claude was like hey we kindly suggest you change your name if you want to ever see your mother again or something you know. So he gets forced to change he changes it once twice and it ends up becoming open claw. So it becomes one of the fastest growing GitHub projects ever. Twitter goes nuts over this thing. It starts a revolution. People are buying Mac minis. The price of Mac minis is going through the roof. And then recently he gets acquired aqua hired by OpenAI for an undisclosed sum of money that people speculate could be a very large sum of money. Is this a one person billion dollar aquar? We don't know. We don't know what this is. Uh and now he's part of OpenAI. So that's the story. >> That's what people online were saying. They said it was a billion dollars, but I have no idea if that's true. >> Nobody knows. What's crazy is you talked I think last year you said the the word of 2025 is generative. So Ari, do me a favor. Share your screen again and click his GitHub uh link. Look at how many projects this guy has uh put out with the last one being Open Claw. But is that amazing how many projects or little products that this guy tried to make before he got to the huge win? It's not shocking. Let me put it that way. I think it's awesome, but it's not shocking because this is a pattern you'll see over and over and over again, which is that the people who are the best, they make the best quality stuff tend to also make the highest quantity of stuff. They just take a lot of shots on gold. They're prolific. They're generative. Often it's because they start earlier, but even if it's that not that they start earlier, they just attempt more than you. And that's a good example. In fact, uh, Levelvels had this great tweet, uh, about his hit rate. >> Levels being Peter Levelvels, who we've had on the pod, and he's kind of helped invent this word of indie hacker. He probably >> I would say he's the most famous indie hacker, >> and he does something like $2 million a year with just him making a lot of these uh, projects. And he's pretty amazing. >> All right, so check this out. Same tweet, same idea from level. So he says, "Four out of the 70 plus projects I did ever made money and grew. 95% of everything I did failed. My hit rate is only 5%. So ship more. And then he had basically a list. It's like all projects. And then he has projects that made good money and grew. Nomad List, Remote Talk, Rebase, and a YouTube YouTube network for electronic music. Those are the four out of 70 that he did uh to try to make this successful. I I've joked before he's like the Jordan logo for Indie Hackers, which is his like sitting on a couch, shirt off in his boxers, just typing on a laptop, sitting in Bali or whatever. and he basically showed that he has a 90 something% failure rate that it took him whatever 50 plus projects before he had a hit and um you know all the revenue all the success comes from like you know three or four projects that he did out of such a long list. >> Incredible. I'm not um I don't view myself as a prolific person. >> I think you're blind to it, dude. You did here's projects I know that you've done just projects, right? Sam's attempt to make a thing and be successful. Okay. Hot dog stand. Uh, next one. Um, moonshine company selling moonshine stuff online, right? Uh, book club that you did in San Francisco. Events business, newsletter business, blogging business, um, paid subscription business, Airbnb rental business, Airbnb community, mastermind community. That's I'm on 10 and it's been 10 seconds, [laughter] right? I don't even know the that you've done. What's funny is um >> keep going. What else is there? Keep going. >> Well, conferences, uh meetups. I did a lot of meetups and conferences. Uh I created a copywriting thing called copy that.com. Uh >> copyrightiting workshop you hosted at my office one weekend. I remember that school. >> Uh Sam's List. Your thing, your list of accountants. Okay. What else? >> Yes. Uh a web I made $3,000 from a website that taught you how to get a roommate in San Francisco. >> Roommate matching, roommate finder, roommate infographics. I made a thing called uh my renter which was a universal rental application. >> This podcast moneywise podcast uh your Instagram uh Instagram like influencer content uh attempt. What else? >> I don't view those as attempts. I just I and I guess that's kind of the point which is >> the point >> when um it's just like you're just like doing things in your free time that seem like hobbies >> and you you I don't know I don't know your family well so you could decline to answer this but like you have siblings in the same amount of time like let's say that was like a 15-year period and we named at least 17 things just now maybe there's probably 20 25 things total if we if we really thought about all the things right how many do you think the average person or even a sibling in your own home who grew up with the the same environment as you would have attempted. Is it 1:1 ratio? Is it half as much? Is it a quarter as much? Is it a tenth as much? What is it? >> It's a less than a tenth. >> Less than a tenth. I have a sister. Same thing. And there's no knock on them. They're great people. They're, you know, they're wired differently. They want to do different things in life. They have different goals maybe. But just to kind of just again drive this point home, which is that like quantity is the path to quality, right? And that you have to be prolific. You have to be generative in the in the amount of things that you're trying. And you almost always when you think you have a quality problem, you have a quantity problem underneath the hood. And it's quantity of inter iterations, right? You don't need to do 10 things at once. That's not what I'm saying. But you need to commit to doing a lot of things. And you only The beauty of it is just it's like dating or anything else in life. You only need one to work, right? Like you only need one and your whole life changes. >> Yeah. I I was making jokes. I was like, you know, dating like business, you only need to be right once. You could it only has to has to work out one time and it's worth it. >> Yeah. By the way, here's a blog post from him called Finding My Spark again. And he basically shows his GitHub commits for the year after he sold his business. So he sold his business and he tried to do other things and he just felt empty afterwards. And he just got back into making stuff, just committing code, writing code, building tools, building products. And he basically was like the spark returned because building was always the thing that gave me joy. And it just clicked. I had an idea. I started hacking. I realized my spark is back. and like to find meaning. It wasn't therapy. It wasn't Iawaska. It wasn't going to another country. I had enough of my own And I realized that you don't find happiness by moving countries. You don't find purpose, you create it. So you don't find purpose, you create it. I think is like a pretty like powerful. >> How cool is that? That he was blogging. And that blog post was from June of 25. So is that mean that Open Claw was 6 months old? >> Yeah. Open Claw is like brand new, dude. It's like >> Sorry, I know it's brand new, but uh like he'd only been working on it for 6 months. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy, right? >> Incredible. That's incredible. I don't know enough about uh uh technical stuff. Is he considered a great developer? >> Yeah. No, I think I don't know if this is true. This is now like I'm just going off of random tweets I've seen, but I think the story is that he vibe coded openclaw and he didn't even read the code afterwards, which is why there's like a lot of like security concerns and like potential vulnerabilities. And he's even said like why did he join OpenAI? He's like when I had this thing take off, dude. I mean, imagine the DMs. It's like the most popular AI project in the world and AI is the most popular industry in the world. And so, you know, his DMs are flooded with acquisition offers, job offers, investment offers, like turn this into a company. You could be the next chat GPT, etc. And he basically was like, I don't want to build a huge company. That's not what makes me happy. I want to build an AI agent that actually does the thing that I'm I'm trying to build here. Like that that's my best shot of doing that is joining OpenAI. And so, he went there and he's like, "Yeah, I agree. There's a lot of problems with Open Claw." He's like, I'll leave it open source. You know, there's there's issues. It's hard to set up. There's security vulnerabilities. Yes, agreed. And what? I'm going to go here and try to make a better version of that that will be without those problems. >> My co-founder installed it and he was like testing it out. I haven't installed it cuz I'm nervous. And he um we just got this he installed it just in our work Slack and he made like a marketing bot that would update uh the whole company on like um you know how many people signed up the day before, whatever. and this morning uh and he called it uh Stanley or something like that like Stanley the marketing bot and Stanley would give updates it would be like hey I'm Stanley I'm the marketing bot I want to let you know that these many people signed up to Hampton yada yada yada today we get we at our company we all got a message that said hey I'm Jerry I fired Stanley because he made a bunch of mistakes and I want to let you know that the previous air was XY andZ the truth is this and today this is how many people signed up and we were like what >> it did that by itself >> by itself I get a notification It said I fired >> you didn't give it feedback. It just decided >> I need to go. >> I got a notification in our team channel and it said I had to fire this person and that it changed its name. >> Okay. No, that's great. But did Joe say to the thing you're making mistakes? Make a better version of yourself. Did he tell it that or it just did it? >> He did not. He said that he did not tell it to do that. >> All right. That's scary. That's funny. And it's very scary. That's crazy. >> So we had to uninstall it. We like he [laughter] he uninstalled it because we were like this is just getting to be too much. This is weird. But it basic Yeah, it alerted us. >> Making some poor decisions lately. Sam is now tied up in an undisclosed location. I'll be making decisions from here on out. [laughter] >> It's pretty incredible, isn't it? I was using um Claude Co yesterday where I was saying analyze the the Slack conversations between my partner Joe and I and tell us what we can do to have like to be the best leader or like analyze to to make us like have the best relationship possible. It was amazing. >> That's hilarious. By the way, uh he said a great thing. So people took his like project list and they started tweeting like look at this. He failed 40. He did 40 or 50 different projects that didn't work before finding OpenClaw. And then he like what are you guys talking about? He's like all those things were basically like mini tools that OpenClaw used. Like that wasn't random. Like great it makes for a good story but that's not true. Here's the truth. And it's like if you weren't jacked handsome and rich already. Now you're honest too. God damn it. You know like this guy this guy seems great.