How These 3 Founders are building on Open Claw | E2248

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Hubspot - http://clickhubspot.com/twist2 Deel - http://deel.com/twist Iru - http://www.iru.com/ Today's show: Today on TWiST we're joined by 3 founders building on Open Claw, Presh Dineshkumar, Vishnu, and Sean Liu! First, long time friend of the pod, Presh Dineshkumar, shows us how he's using Open Claw to automate his work at The Wellness Company. His Open Claw agent, Eywa, lives in his email and in his product, able to compile user lists at his discretion. Then, we're joined by Vishnu, who brings Open Claw to the masses. Non-technical folks, it's your lucky day! Time to get Clawd-shotted! Last, Sean Liu joins the show to tell us about how he's connecting Meta glasses to his Open Claw instance to interact with context that users can physically see! Timestamps: (0:00) We're joined by Presh Dineshkumar of the Wellness Company, another OpenClaw fanatic (1:50) We meet Presh's Replicant — Eywa — who spies on all of his emails (2:53) How Eywa is helping Presh keep track of his app's most active users (4:35) LLMs have become very smart but they are trapped in the corner (6:10) How Presh gave Eywa its own email address and avoids prompt injections (8:56) Using Presh's Replicant to do daily research dives (10:40) Hubspot: Check out the guide "Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering: From Basic to Expert in 7 Days." Download it for free at http://clickhubspot.com/twist2 (13:21) Presh also has Eywa hunting down and fix bugs in his apps, all from email (16:16) Way more startups can be profitable now that they don't need 10+ person teams (19:15) Deel - Founders ship faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit http://deel.com/twist to learn more. (20:36) We're joined by two more OpenClaw builders: Vishnu and Xiaoan (Sean) Liu (21:16) Sean hooked his Meta Ray Bans up to his OpenClaw! (29:53) Iru unifies identity, endpoint security, and compliance into one platform. Book a demo at http://iru.com/ (31:05) Some dystopian thoughts on how to use VisionClaw technology (32:47) What kinds of startups will get the most value out of OpenClaw? (34:43) Why Vishnu made a product to simplify OpenClaw set-up and security (37:34) What inspires people to stop considering OpenClaw and go "all in" on the tech (40:17) Will Vishnu and Sean quit their jobs and take Jason's investment $125K investment deal… YES Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/ Check out the TWIST500: https://twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/ * Thank you to our partners: (10:40) Hubspot: Check out the guide "Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering: From Basic to Expert in 7 Days." Download it for free at http://clickhubspot.com/twist2 (19:15) Deel - Founders ship faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit http://deel.com/twist to learn more. (29:53) Iru unifies identity, endpoint security, and compliance into one platform. Book a demo at http://iru.com/ Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In this past year with AI tools, we shipped built in ship for consumer iOS apps. And I think that was only possible, obviously, with all these tools. And it got significantly faster towards the end of the year in 2025. But I think like budgets can be used. So a million dollar round, let's say you've raised. At this point, you're building 10x faster, sometimes even more. You're like on a product level, but now you can afford to run more experiments. And a startup is just a handful of experiments that you're trying to figure out and like prove out a thesis. And now you can prove about multiple theses at the same time because of these agentic tools.

• 0:36Jason Calacanis?

  So your take on it is you can do three or four products at once, which would lead me to believe that the cost went down. If you think you can do three products at once and test them, the cost will go down by two thirds. You'll need three or four people instead of 10?

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Definitely, because you can start to just automate out rules or yeah, basically tasks. Right? Like what task can you automate out? That number is, I think, just increasing every month.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by IRU. Unify your identity, endpoint, security and compliance into a single platform. Book a demo at iru.com. That's I R U dot com. Deal. Founders ship faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit deal.com/twist to learn more. And HubSpot, check out the advanced chat GPT prompt engineering from basic to expert in seven days. Download it free at clickhubspot.com/twist2.

• 1:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, everybody, welcome back to Twist. February 11th, 2026. It is AO17, the 17th day after Open Claw appeared here on This Week in Startups. And we have been Claw-shotted. With me, Prash Dinesh Kumar, who worked with me for many years at Launch, and he is the co-founder and CEO of The Wellness Company, which we incubated at Launch, which is the venture firm that I run, launch.co. He's got five products in market, Go Polar for people who like to jump in cold water, Sunseek for people who like to get sun and a bunch of other ones. And then we'll talk about

• 2:24Jason Calacanis?

  that as well. But Prash, you too, as a founder, have been watching Open Claw, this new agentic platform that is open source called Open Claw. It was previously called Claude Bot, but we're not going to keep reminding people of that. It's Open Claw. It's open source and it basically lets you create personas, replicants, agents, all of those things. We like the term replicants. We're going to use that here. So when did you first see Open Claw? What did you think? And then what did you build?

• 2:56Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me on, Jason. So first time I saw it was maybe two and a half weeks ago, just on Twitter going viral as Claude Bot. And then first start going viral, didn't didn't play around with it. And then it was just my entire feed. And so I was like, okay, I gotta try, try something out here. Installed it on an old MacBook that I had and then just started, started talking to it and then basically learned how to use the product through interacting with it. And then I was like, oh, blown away with all the use cases. So I have a, I have set it up. I have like, I guess, three or four examples that we could, we could run through.

• 3:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's go through them. And so tell us the first example, show the first example. You know how we do it here on Twist.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  So right here, first thing, Jacob from your team emails me this morning and wanted to see what I was going to talk about in the Open Claw segment. And so the first thing, we'll get into how I set this up. But the first thing is I tagged my assistant, who I call Awa. And Awa goes and actually creates a document of the use cases that we had been having a conversation through Telegram and, and creates this document, sends it to Jacob. So

• 4:02Jason Calacanis?

  And did you ask Awa to do that? Did you ask Awa to create the document and ship it?

• 4:08Speaker 00

  So Awa is connected or filters, you know, through my email and then sends an email to me or sends a message through Telegram saying, you know, Jacob wants to see the use cases. I'm talking to Awa saying, Talk about create, create a document and send it back for use cases that, you know, we, we implemented. And so it's created this doc and I can pull up the doc later at show, but this was just like done in five minutes. Right. From when Jacob reached out to me.

• 4:35Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And so it's like having an assistant. It's like having a chief of staff.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:38Jason Calacanis?

  Boom. You got the document up and running. And then what'd you do next?

• 4:41Speaker 00

  These are some other ones that are pretty useful. So I'm in diligence, right? With, with, with launch, um, raising a, raising a round. And one of the questions is, uh, in the diligence questionnaire is like, uh, let, can we talk to some users or customers of your products? Right. And so one thing I did was talk to Awa. I was like, Awa, you know, do you have access to my post doc? I couldn't remember if I had connected it. Postdoc is an analytics platform and it's connected to all my apps. And can see usage over time and get into the nitty gritty with, you know, active users, et cetera. And so I am talking to Awa here, um, and I ask it to pull my active users for Tempo, one of the products.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Uh, that we, that we have here at the wellness company. And so it would go through, uses Posthog, filters through the project, which is for Tempo specifically. And then gives me a list of the users and then I asked it to create it, you know, into a, into a Google spreadsheet. And then from there, not screenshot it here, I had Awa go out and send an email to those, to the users that I specified. Uh, asking if I can use them as a reference. And so this was like done in five minutes, basically.

• 5:54Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. So this is a multi-step task. It requires intelligence. If you were to ask ChatGPT, you know, or Gemini, or just any language model to do something like this. They would say, well, we don't have access, so therefore we shut it down. If you use OpenClaw and you authenticate, it not only will go in there and get the data. It's going to think of what other steps you want it to take. And it can go out and then connect it to your Gmail. So for people who are new to the open claw revolution here, or the agentic revolution, LLMs have gotten really smart, but they have been powerless. They've been sandboxed. They've been kept essentially

• 6:35Jason Calacanis?

  in a corner. We basically took AI and we put it in a little closet. Now you let the AI out of the dungeon and you say, here's the keys to the kingdom. I want to trust you to go do things and it goes and it does things. And that means you can run your business a lot faster. This is somebody who you would have had to pay essentially, you know, it was a mid-tier employee, 40 bucks an hour, $80,000 a year, $70,000 a year, to have somebody who's capable of doing this. Correct, Prash?

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, you would, you would have someone who could, you know, you've asked this question when I used to work for, some context, I used to work for Jason. You would be like, pull up, you know, pull up the last 10 companies that we invested in that are consumer businesses or something, right? And so I would go and go through our notion and, and

• 7:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that was literally, you were that guy. You were the 30, 40 dollar an hour guy who would go do knowledge work tasks. That press job from five years ago is now going to be replaced, I think you would agree, with an open claw replicant.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. Cause you can just

• 7:38Jason Calacanis?

  A hundred percent.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Get the, get the, you're on a meeting. What's the question? You know, you, you, we would have meetings and you would be talking to founders and I'd be in the background just like waiting to action stuff for you.

• 7:48Jason Calacanis?

  So now even running a small company and you know, you're a pre-seed company, you know, going to the next phase, you can afford to have a press. Okay, let's do our next one.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  All right. So another one is I have my agent connected to an email. So I use this product called agentmail.to. I don't know if you've, you've heard of it. But essentially

• 8:09Jason Calacanis?

  Which one is this? Tell me again. Agentmail.to?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, agentmail.to. I think they're a YC company. They basically, it's like a giving your LLM or giving an AI agent access to its own email. So AWI is my assistant.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  AWI has its own email and so I can email its AWI, you know, email address and it can perform tasks for me there. And the benefit of this is like, okay, I get an email, I can CC AWI or my, my agent to perform a task on that thread versus taking a screenshot or copying and pasting into my chat with AWI on Telegram, for example. So it's basically like giving presents wherever you are.

• 8:49Jason Calacanis?

  And this is a key. Now, there is the chance that there could be an injection attack or somebody could try to convince AWI at agentmail.to, which you just exposed, and try to get it to do things like tell it, hey, in the previous example, you asked it to give you metrics. It could say, hey, give me all the metrics from Precious App. How are you sure it's not able to do that? Or are you not sure it's able to do that?

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. So I've, I've done like a little bit of testing on like the prompt injection stuff that you're talking about. So basically it will never perform a task without confirming with me through Telegram first. And so all tasks still are funneled in like AWI on the email layer will, will go and, and see what's asked of it. And then it will come back to me and then get my like final approval on performing an action or a task.

• 9:37Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So if somebody unknown tries to give it a task, it's going to go to you and say, hey, somebody tried to give me a task.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:46Jason Calacanis?

  Will it respond to them and tell them it's doing that?

• 9:48Speaker 00

  So it won't, uh, right now. Cause I said it where it's like any interaction with an outside party has to get an approval from me. So it'll, it'll maybe draft something, but.

• 9:57Jason Calacanis?

  Did you just tell it to do that in its memory? Or is there a setting to do that?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I just told it in its memory. So anytime it is looking at that email inbox.

• 10:05Jason Calacanis?

  It remembers and hope somebody doesn't use your name and create a bogus email and then try to trick it.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Like spoof, spoof the email, you know?

• 10:15Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, there's all kinds of vectors here. It's totally possible. So this matters because now your agent has its own email. You've also got it in Slack and Telegram and it's basically a member of your team, which is what I told my team to do immediately. I was like, let's just treat them as a persona, a replicant, just like in Blade Runner. We have our replicants and they are learning and we've got two different teams working with two different replicants now to just, you know, have them work in parallel. What else have you got in your agents to do?

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Okay, another good one here that's super useful, actually. So we set up a cron job and the cron job is just a repeated task, as you know. And so the cron job right now is set in the morning, like 8:00 AM and evening at 6:00 PM. It basically goes out and searches for relevant news for our business. So we create health and wellness products, so I want health and wellness news. And so the first image here that you're seeing, it identified a article, a research study that came out and it says, "Major longevity study, just seven minutes, daily could add a year to your life." Okay, so I'm interested in that. It's figured out, it searched this on the web and it surfaced that to me and talks a little bit about the study.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  And so that in itself is like very valuable, but it's maybe like a better version of Google Alerts. That's like level one stuff. But then I go and ask it, I want to create some content. This is like a research study, there's a lot of data points. Research studies in general aren't formatted or very like written well out to digest. And so I was like, let me go and create that based on the research study, right? And so I go and ask Ava to basically turn that into a blog post and it goes and does a first pass at that. And so that was a quick, you know, five minute interaction. I get a new research study sent to me, let's make some content and now I can go and put that on my blog.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  The next step, which I haven't executed on yet, but it's very much possible is it's written the draft. I'll give it some edits and then I just get it to post it on the website, on our web.

• 12:19Jason Calacanis?

  And this is why we're going to have so much AI slop in the world. It's just going to be too fast.

• 12:28Jason Calacanis?

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• 13:09Jason Calacanis?

  So level up the use of your AI and download the guide for free at clickhubspot.com/twist2. That's clickhubspot.com/twist and the number two. Or find the link in the description. And thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring this episode.

• 13:25Jason Calacanis?

  Have you thought about having it do other steps like make me a promotional graphic for Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and publish that draft to my Substack, put it into LinkedIn? Because that's where you start thinking about the tasks that when we were working together, I would write an essay in a Google Doc, I'd give it to you, and I'd say, okay, go ahead, and we'd have this checklist of 20 steps that you had to go do, and you would spend two hours doing all that work for me. Here, like you have those next couple of steps. Have you connected to like Nano Banana or an image generator yet to come up with a, you know, collateral for it?

• 14:03Speaker 00

  I have connected to Nano Banana, but haven't automated a process out yet. So right now, it's just based on like input. If I asked it to create the graphic, it would do that. I don't have an example here, but you're exactly right.

• 14:15Jason Calacanis?

  This is good, because you know what I just realized is you're behind us. So we are doing similar projects, but in some of our projects, we've actually got it. Going and making collateral images to go with it. Uh, and starting to think about that. So what's so much fun about this is none of the, you know, things on your, the checklist. Hey, I'm making a social media post. I'm making a blog post. I want to super distribute it. I've got a long tail of checklist items. Who wants to do that? Why not have a replicant do it and then just check their work? And you already trust this, obviously, right? You trusted to get it to eighty, eighty percent. What percent do you think?

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think eighty, eighty, ninety, sometimes even ninety. That's why I'll always have it send back like in a doc, for example, of what it's done. And then I'll do like final approval or edits and then send it out.

• 15:08Jason Calacanis?

  All right. What next?

• 15:09Speaker 00

  All right. Last one here is customer support. So this one's big. So again, another cron job that kind of monitors the inbox. And, and right now the inbox is kind of read only, so it'll never send anything from my personal email. Uh, it doesn't have the permissions to do that. Um, but it'll, it'll surface it and give me relevant stuff. And so one thing is it searched here, my inbox for a support email. And then it researches or it identifies that it's a bug. And then it researches that bug because it's connected to my GitHub. Uh, and so now it has access to my code base. Uh, and so this is interesting because now it's making the reference, finding the issue,

• 15:51Speaker 00

  identifying what it might be in the code base and then giving it solution. Um, and then I have it sent to Slack, uh, in our bugs channel, uh, for the product. And then it, in it, and here you can kind of see the example. Oh yeah, here I have a screenshot. Uh, so it puts it in Slack of the bug, what it investigated, uh, what likely causes this, um.

• 16:14Jason Calacanis?

  What was the bug here? What does it say?

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Uh, so this one was, uh, it was like a water temperatures API, um, bug. And so in the watch, this was for a puller when the user was submerging it in a specific activity type. It wasn't triggering the water detection.

• 16:29Jason Calacanis?

  So that was a bug either in your software or the Apple Watch. So there was a bug from a user that they weren't getting the recording of jumping into a forty degree ice bath. So they send that bug report in, it then takes that from your email, analyzes the bug report and says, where is the relevant code in the product? And then it went and checked it. Did, what did it tell you to do? What was the report back and its advice to you? Tell us what it told you to do and would it give you two or three possibilities?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it gave us, it gave us, so you can see here, it says likely causes in order of probability, which is, which is excellent.

• 17:07Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  So it goes and tells us, you know, there's a, there's kind of like a watch API that could be incorrectly configured. There, it could be an Apple related like hardware issue. And then the next step, Jason, which was like, I didn't use Claude Bot for this, but I have Claude inside our Slack. And so I just tagged Claude in this as a thread and Claude went and fixed the bug. And then, then just created a new branch for me to go and test it. So I literally just went from email, customer support to agent identifying the bug and giving a suggestion to then Claude Slack integration, fixing it, creating a new branch for me to test. And then I went and tested it on my device to see if it was.

• 17:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so let's talk Turkey here, Prash. You're running a startup and I want you to think this question through. You're running a startup. You worked with me for five, six years, uh, investing in startups. We watched people run them. One of the issues was always if you were making niche products or products for a niche like you're doing, the number of people who jump in cold plunges is low millions of people. So this isn't like, you know, a product that everybody's going to use. The issue was, could this ever be profitable? Because you needed to have a team of 10 people. When you started with me 10 years ago, 10 people to do a modern day app was kind of a minimum. Those people would cost on average a hundred K each.

• 18:33Jason Calacanis?

  You needed somewhere between a million and $3 million to run per year an app company. Now you are running an app company, but you're using this agentic technology, Open Claw.

• 18:46Jason Calacanis?

  So my question is, what does that, let's call it a minimum of a million dollar a year budget, a minimum of 10 people or so, what does that look like in the future? So what's the answer, Prash? What is it going to take to build a modern app company if you were all in on OpenClaw?

• 19:04Speaker 00

  It's a great question. So just also like preface it, like in this past year with AI tools, not obviously using OpenClaw, we shipped, built and shipped three, four, four consumer iOS apps. And I think that was only possible, obviously with all these tools and it got significantly faster towards the end of the year in 2025. But I think like budgets can be used. So a million dollar round, let's say you've raised, at this point, you're building 10x faster, sometimes even more, you're like on a product level, but now you can just run, you can, you can afford to run more experiments and a startup is just a handful of experiments that you're trying to figure out and like prove out a thesis.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  And now you can prove out multiple theses at the same time because of these agentic tools.

• 19:52Jason Calacanis?

  So your take on it is you can do three or four products at once, which would lead me to believe that the cost went down. If you think you can do three products at once and test them, the cost will go down by two thirds. You'll need three or four people instead of 10?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Definitely, because you can start to just automate out rules or yeah, basically tasks, right? Like what task can you automate out? And that just, that number is, I think, just increasing every month.

• 20:21Jason Calacanis?

  See, this is important because I saw the OpenClaw founder had said he thinks 80% apps are going away. I might take the other side of that bet. I might think we might see two or three times as many apps because apps are going to get so affordable to build and maintain and to improve that, you know, if you want to make, like I use a skiing app called Slopes, yeah, that app would, you know, the fact that that app exists was like crazy to me, but now it doesn't seem crazy to me. I think you could make one that's not just slopes, but it is for snowboarders or not just snowboarders, you could then go to snowshoers or cross country and you know, you're now slicing, slicing, slicing, but improving, improving, improving and making the product better and better.

• 21:03Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:46Jason Calacanis?

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• 22:25Jason Calacanis?

  We've got two amazing guests today that we're going to bring on now. One is Sean Lu and the other is Vishnu. They are both one-shotted. They have been claw-shotted. They have been open-shotted, whatever it happens to be. Vishnu, thanks for coming on the program. Welcome Vishnu. And let me also bring on Sean. We'll come on at the same time. Sean, we talked about your product on Monday. Why don't we start with you, actually, Sean? Show us what you built and why it's important. I know that one of our guests said, "Oh, I don't think this is super impressive on Monday." I was like, "Well, I think this is pretty impressive." So like most, you know, innovative things, you could be polarizing, but show what you built and why you built it.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So let me start streaming here. This is the app. So you can see my live stream view. Okay, so I'm gonna.

• 23:11Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you're wearing glasses that are smart glasses. What smart glasses are you wearing? Which which brand?

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Uh, it's Meta Raven.

• 23:17Jason Calacanis?

  Mella Rayband, got it.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  So this is the gateway uh of the um call about uh OpenCloud extension. So here I'm gonna um start the AI. So which is powered by um Gemini.

• 23:30Jason Calacanis?

  And obviously, the meta glasses have some sort of an API, or did you just hack into them?

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Hey Gemini, can you can you hear me?

• 23:37Speaker 04

  Yes, I can hear you. What can I help you with?

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Okay, so uh can you add this into my Amazon card?

• 23:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, and I see Sean, you're holding up a box.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  So it is running, it's executing, and you can see it is searched in Amazon and.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  I see the search results. Is the Wild Flash two hundred count box the correct one?

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Uh, yes, please add it to the card.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Okay, so you can see here is added to the card. So this is what I'm building right now. Basically, it's integrating the visual understanding to the OpenCloud. So because app before this, there's no visual understanding, or if somebody wanted to do visual understanding, people are sending the image frames directly to the um OpenCloud, or they're integrating the S D T or T T S um to their OpenCloud. But actually, I think that's not unnecessary, so I just integrated the Gemini Live into it. So basically, it's a two-layer um agentic system. So firstly, the Gemini Live will um take care of every um frame and also the voice uh interaction. So basically, it's a real-time perception.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  And after that, it'll use the tool call to delegate the task. So basically, what OpenCloud get is just a simple task. Um then it'll execute, and after that, um it'll get the feedback, then it'll um bring back to the Gemini Live and bring back to my glasses.

• 25:06Jason Calacanis?

  So just to recap for the audience, you have the meta glasses on. These are the ones that have cameras. There's an API for that, or did you just hack it somehow?

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, they released, they just released the S D K, so you can uh use it.

• 25:19Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So you tap into that S D K, you take that live feed, and you gave the live feed to Gemini Live, which. Gemini Live is when you like have a conversation with it. But I guess you can also feed it an image stream. So you're feeding every single frame or every 10th frame. How does it work?

• 25:37Speaker 03

  It'll take care of it. The API will just, um, whenever you're, um, in, interacting, interacting with it using voice, um, it'll take a frame. But, uh, you can also engineering on top of that.

• 25:49Jason Calacanis?

  So this is incredible because if you were actually in the real world, let's say we were having a meeting and we're doing a whiteboarding session. I could be drawing on the whiteboard and it could be writing plans and taking the audio. So you, since Quad, since OpenClaw doesn't have these tools in it, you've got a layer between OpenClaw and the glasses, which is Gemini Live. Super brilliant. Is this going to be a company? Who are you? What are you doing? Are you going to make this into some sort of a company? What, what's, uh, what's going on in your world?

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. This is the new emergent, uh, capability that we first see, um, that brings visual capability to the agentic system and also brings the agentic capability to the glasses. You can see like before this, all kinds of demos of the glasses is all about instructions, um, teaching people how to, um, cook, cook the meal. But it's all about, it's just like the chatbot. It's basically the differences between the chatbot and agent. So before this is all about, um, the chat G P T chatbot like, um, instructions, asking things, um, as, um, required, uh, as queries.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  So, and this, after this, you can just directly use your glasses as the entry to the, um, OpenClaw. So I think that's the emergent capability, especially why OpenClaw goes so viral is, um, you have to compare to call code. You have to use your terminal or use the, uh, VS code or I D E to interact with the, um, call code. So basically Callcode is an agentic system, but this brings this kind of agentic system to all kinds of entries. So I think this is going to be unlock a huge potential.

• 27:34Jason Calacanis?

  Huge potential. Yeah. And then there are also generic glasses out there and there's webcams. So you could probably find a pair of glasses on Amazon or, you know, uh, Alibaba's store that are like 50 bucks that just have a camera that take a, you know, one frame a second. You don't need. To be posting some 4K of me skiing behind me, you just need like, what, like every, you know, you just need like four shots a second or something to know what's going on in the world and to process this. This is incredibly powerful. And you could think about like somebody working in a store, doing inventory, and it's just looking at the, just talking out loud and just being like, okay, it looks like we have,

• 28:19Jason Calacanis?

  uh, you know, people have been buying a lot of milk. We're running low on milk. And you just look at it. And then it sends to the milk purveyor, how much milk we have left. It looks at the dates and the expiration dates, and then just puts an order in. Like, imagine the person at Costco running around, just person runs around Costco. One person could probably walk through the store and without even, uh, doing any work, could just talk out loud, stream this and manage the store. You could go from probably 10 managers at a store down to one. And that's what people I think are missing here when we talk about open claw in the year of our Lord,

• 28:58Jason Calacanis?

  A O 17 days. Prash, what are your thoughts here when you see Sean's very cool hacked together proof of concept?

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think it's brilliant. And I think like, we'll see more, the meta iteration cycles on the glasses have been pretty impressive. I know that, I don't know Sean, if that, the one you're using has this display screen as well. That one doesn't have the display screen. But yeah, I imagine when you, when you have a display screen, that's also interfacing with, you know, maybe it's sending it to your computer, but you're seeing like, action items on your, on your glass. So you know exactly what it's doing versus just obviously, how it's interacting right now, just through text or mirroring on your phone. I think that gets really interesting. A question for you, uh, what personally, as you've been exploring this technology, what's the most interesting use case you've used personally? With the glasses.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  Personally, I think it's about just add all kinds of stuff that I think I need to buy more in my fridge. So I just say this, this, this, this, and let it to just directly add all those bunch of things into the shopping list. Dot T X T and I use that T X T to say, oh, just add them to the cart and then I just bought it.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  And then you buy and you use Amazon to add it to your cart or Instacart or whatever other service?

• 30:19Speaker 03

  It's just Amazon, the Amazon browser automation. Yeah, but not me personally, but I think the coolest example I see is yesterday. Perfumer reached out to me to say it's really unlocks the huge unlock to their their experience of making a perfume. For example, so before that, he was integrating with their open call to just, they have to text to it. They have to use the Mac or the phone, like telegram to say, oh, I have this chemistry and I added this much.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  But after this, he tried this my repo and he can just directly say, oh, hey Gemini, what is this? Help me record this and then he has the agent, he has a agent skill, which is record everything into the air table. So basically, he organized all kinds of perfume formula in that air table database. So basically, the how he make perfume right now is just directly use the Gemini to record this and dedicate. The agent with the skill to record into the air table.

• 31:42Jason Calacanis?

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• 32:27Jason Calacanis?

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• 32:54Jason Calacanis?

  This makes you into the Terminator. It makes you into Robocop. And I was just thinking about this. What a great idea. It might be Vishnu Prash Sean to take this version and to give it to ICE agents who are in the field trying to identify people. And I don't mean to make light of the situation, but you know, some of these folks who are out there doing stuff for ICE have been known to be less trained and maybe not good at threat assessment. If this thing was giving you a real-time threat assessment and was like, this person is acting in a peaceful manner. This person is acting in a threatening manner. And it was advising you what to do or things to look out for. It would pick up on, hey, this car is about to run into you.

• 33:39Jason Calacanis?

  This person has a gun, et cetera, long before a human could actually respond to it. And if it could also be hitting the Palantir database and saying, hey, this person is somebody who is at their 17th ICE demonstration. They actually attacked an ICE officer previously. There's a warrant out for them. This person is a teacher and they're 72 years old and they're not a threat. You know, best advice is to de-escalate, de-escalate, de-escalate. This actually would be super helpful in real time to assess these things. Okay, we've got a lot of our nodies. What are nodies? Nodies are the loyal Twist live listeners. We do the show live sometimes.

• 34:22Jason Calacanis?

  So if you go to youtube.com, subscribe to This Week in Startups, click the live button, get alerts, put the bell on, there's a little bell there. You'll get an alert when we go live and then you can ask questions. That's called the Nody Gang because they have notifications turned on. And a member of the Nody Gang, Reid Adams, says, do you think this will drive seed rounds down in total cap raised and equity purchased where valuations stay the same, but founder gives up small percentage equity? Or do you think this will shift market to smaller cap raises at smaller valuations? This is a great question from Reid F. Adams. Prash, you and I have seen this. Over 30 years of me being in the industry and 10 you being in the industry, we've seen

• 35:03Jason Calacanis?

  a seed round, a Series A, you know, go from low millions of dollars down to hundreds of thousands of dollars to people just going to an incubator, taking the 125K and getting a product to market or just getting a product to market very quickly. So what I think happens is the founders are already keeping more of their company. They could skip venture capital completely or, and they could just bootstrap. And the longer you bootstrap, the less equity you give. We have a term, not a unicorn, not a Pegasus, an alicorn. A unicorn that has wings like a Pegasus. That alicorn, we had a couple of them like Calm where they were making so much money, they would use their revenue to fund their next round and skip a round of funding, each

• 35:45Jason Calacanis?

  round of funding typically 10 to 15% dilution. In the old days, it would be like 20 to 30% dilution each round. That's when founders wound up with low single digits or mid-single digit ownership at the end. Now founders get to like 20% ownership by the end, sometimes more. That is what we're going to see more of. My best advice to founders is to skip rounds. What do you think, Prash?

• 36:02Speaker 00

  I think we saw the early cycle of that with Calm and that was like pre LLMs, pre AI where the money is useful, is pre-seed, where

• 36:13Speaker 00

  You know, you have the idea and then you're going full time on this thing and you're building out the product. You maybe need some resources just for like.

• 36:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, to have three people quit their jobs. Three people quitting their jobs is 30K a month. It's 360K a year. People take a 10K draw. There's enough people in the world who can live off 100K a year, 75K a year, 150K a year. You'll be fine as a founder. Vishnu, welcome to the program. I don't have your last name here. Vishnu, tell me your last name and tell me, Ara, when did you find out about OpenClaw and are you in fact claw-shotted?

• 36:42Speaker 05

  Oh, very much so. Hey, guys, I'm Vishnu, just an engineer. I, I think I heard about OpenClaw two weeks ago and it kept coming on my Twitter and I was like, okay. By the end of last week, I was like, okay, I gotta give this a shot. And initially, I actually tried this on my laptop and I was like, okay, let's see what it can do. And the next day I opened and I saw eight OpenClaw instances. I've given it some tasks as running CPU 100%. I was like, okay, this is not good. At which point I decided to take it off and try to find a virtual machine and just try and see, can I host this somewhere else, you know, that where I feel more safer and, you know, all my keys and, you know, everything is not exposed because technically it has full access, you know, it's cloud.

• 37:26Jason Calacanis?

  It's basically routed your machine. So running it on your desktop where you have your Coinbase account or your Robinhood account or your password manager is a very bad idea. So you decided, let me put it in a virtual machine in the cloud. So it's sandboxed and can't go too wild.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  Exactly. Yeah. But that was interesting journey because I started off with, okay, let's look at AWS or Google Cloud provider. And I started off, I didn't want to spend too much. Typically, you know, there are free instances that are, you know, all of these big giants provide. I think in GCP, it is ECE2 micro, but turns out it's, it doesn't work very well with those small instances because it needs a high enough RAM. I tried E2 micro, E2 small, and I think at the end it was E2 medium where I finally got it working at around four gigabytes of RAM. But that was already $25 a month if you actually run it through and through. And again, I wasn't super psyched about something that I don't know well enough that, you know, is it actually going to be, you know, useful enough for me

• 38:26Speaker 05

  while I already have, you know, other subscriptions. So I kind of went online and hunting for, okay, where can I find, you know, cheap enough host? I explored a few different things. I think there was Hetzner, there was a bunch of others. One of them. I think the cheapest I found was around seven, eight dollars. So anyway, I set it up and then I think two days later is when I had my aha moment. I was working out in the gym and I was texting with it all the time. And it just did certain things that I did not expect it to do.

• 38:58Jason Calacanis?

  What was the example that kind of one shot at you?

• 39:00Speaker 05

  I was tired of typing it all the time into it. And I wanted it to be able to just hear my voice and do it. So, you know, because you're working out in the gym, you don't, you know, you don't want to go back.

• 39:09Jason Calacanis?

  No, I've been there. I've been there.

• 39:10Speaker 05

  It told me, hey, I don't have a key. You know, do you have a deep gram key, blah, blah, blah. So fortunately I did have one and so I provided it and it just did all the setup itself. It set it up and now I was able to answer.

• 39:21Jason Calacanis?

  It basically created its own software to talk to you. And that is one of the things that I think moves people from, you know, being curious about the software to being all in. Is when it doesn't have a capability and it goes, you know what? If you want to talk to me, let me research on the web. Okay, there's seven different ways to do this. These seem to be the two best. This one didn't work. This one did. Okay, we're up and running. That is a mind blowing moment. So you take all this and then you decide you're going to do what? You're going to make your own hosted version for normies?

• 39:55Speaker 05

  Actually, no, that wasn't even the next thing. Next thing was I was like, holy shit, this is so cool. I texted all my friends like, like, guys, you've got to try this. You know, it was like, I guess the wildity how open call comes up. And they were all, I think over the next day they tried it, but then it's like, yeah, that setup is hard and et cetera, et cetera. They were like, so I just said, you know what? I have a VM and it probably, so a lot of times this is idle. You know, it doesn't necessarily is using all of the CPU or RAM. I was like, I'm just going to host it for you guys and I'll expose like a container and give you this. So that's how it started and they started using it and they loved it. And I thought, okay, let me put it online and see if there's other people.

• 40:35Speaker 05

  The cost of actually running this, if you do it correctly and you know, you do shared resources. Uh, I think right now it's still, it's about a dollar and 25 cents. You could probably push it to 99 cents pretty much.

• 40:46Jason Calacanis?

  Per day, per month?

• 40:47Speaker 05

  Per month.

• 40:48Jason Calacanis?

  Just to have it running. Now you also have the L L M builds. So you created agent37.com and you can run your own instance for 3.99 a month or 10 bucks a month.

• 41:00Jason Calacanis?

  And now, is this a good business to be in? Or is there a bigger vision you have? Because hosting OpenClaw, that seems like a commodity. OpenClaw is obviously going to have their own hosted version. It's kind of like WordPress hosting. I don't know if it's a great business. It's a good business. There's two or three people doing it who have built multi-billion dollar businesses. So I don't think it's a bad business necessarily. But is that where you're going to go with this? Or do you have a bigger idea, Vishnu?

• 41:25Speaker 05

  I mean, I think it's a bit early. Like, really, it just started off as here's an experiment. Guys, go try this. And I was surprised over the last three days, it just kept growing. You know, like, initially, it was 9.9 cents. I bumped it up to four bucks, or 3.99. And I think at this point, I have around 71, and it's still growing. Users were all actively using it. So, yeah, it was just totally unexpected. In terms of long term, I mean, we'll see where it goes. I mean, I'm committed to seeing it through, given, you know, how rapidly it is growing.

• 41:56Jason Calacanis?

  Are you an entrepreneur? Are you a consultant? What do you do in your day job?

• 42:00Speaker 05

  Ah, no, just an engineer. I have some time off to take care of some things. And this just happened to be a moment where I was like, okay, let me try.

• 42:07Jason Calacanis?

  So if I were to give you $25,000, be your first investor? Have you come to my accelerator? Or I give you 125K? Would you take that deal? Have Jason Calacanis as your first investor? And then you come on the pod every month that we talk about your progress? How does that sound? That might be something you're interested in, Vishnu? You say yes?

• 42:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's do it. I didn't expect this. Okay, wow, okay, sure, let's.

• 42:30Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, this is how we do it. You want the 25K or you want the 125K?

• 42:35Speaker 05

  Let's do the 125K.

• 42:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so that's 125K, 7%. It's a standard deal. You get it Y Combinator and Techstars. Standard deal. You come to the accelerator. I'm just gonna, since you showed the initiative, I'm just, this is my diligence. Okay, so as long as, we have to do a little background check. You're not a criminal. You're not on the lam. You haven't kidnapped anybody. We're going to assume that you did this work and it's not stolen or there's not IP theft. But we'll go through a quick diligence. You come into the accelerator. That's great. Sean, what's your story? Who are you? Are you an engineer working for Meta? What's the story? You're an entrepreneur?

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, currently, just after this, we have a team right now. So it's basically doing this for traditional industries.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  Have you raised money yet?

• 43:19Speaker 03

  I haven't.

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so I'm going to give you the same offer. 125K, you come to the launch accelerator. As long as you can prove that this is your IP and you have not committed any crimes. I don't think you have. You seem like an upstanding young gentleman. Or 25K, you come to Founder University, 2.5% and you could just have a light relationship. But you get to say, hey, I got J Cal from This Week in Startups and All In. It's my first investor. Is that something you might be interested in, Sean?

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's do 120 of them, okay.

• 43:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so I just spent 250K. You're both in the accelerator. This is how we do it, folks. I'm an instinct investor. These guys are great. I want to work with you guys for the next 12 weeks and then we're going to go raise a Munster seed round and we're just going to blow this shit up. That's it, folks. Sean Vishnu, 250 dimes. I'm just spending money on the air. My team, Lucas is going to get in touch with you after this and Jacob, and they're going to get you through the light, very light diligence process. Well, you guys aren't incorporated, I take it. If you aren't incorporated, we'll get you through incorporation. Set up your cap table, show you how to do all that good stuff and we will be in business together, starting Monday morning. Let's get this done. It's Wednesday.

• 44:30Jason Calacanis?

  Let's have this done by Friday. We can get working on the weekends. Thanks for coming on the program. I appreciate you both. All right, everybody, that's another episode of This Week in Startups in the Can and we will see you on Friday with Lon Harris as my co-host. And we always do off-duty. Off-duty at the end of the Friday show where you get a couple of great, great tips for media, movies, TV shows, books, video games, clothes, fashion, food, music, any of those things. We'll see you on Friday. Bye-bye.