How the OpenClaw foundation bullet-proofed its future (w/Dave Morin) | E2257

This Week In Startups is made possible by:Circle — http://circle.so/twistHubspot Creators — http://clickhubspot.com/twist2Uber AI Solutions — http://uber.com/ai-solutionsToday's show: *Dave Morin joined the show today to explain how the OpenClaw Foundation came into existence, and what its goals are. Fear not, Peter Steinberger retains directional control of the project. But if you want to sustain an open-source project over time, you need a corporate entity, well-heeled sponsors, maintainers and more. Morin is helping make sure that OpenClaw can stay true to itself well into the future. TWIST also put the day's most critical AI stories to Morin for his insight: What's his take on the Anthropic-DoW fracas? Does Morin think that OpenAI and Anthropic are catching up to OpenClaw in agentic terms? And will OpenAI cede the consumer crown to Anthropic? Next came two amazing demos: Runtools' CTO Greg Kara showed off a 3D interface for OpenClaw that his team built, allowing 'Claw users to watch their agents work in real time, and even read over their shoulder. Then PickelWatch founder George Yameen showed off an agnetic workflow using OpenClaw and Claude's Chrome plugin side-by-side. The gist? Make sure that the agentic service you select is cost-effective. **GUESTS:**Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin?lang=enGreg Kara: https://x.com/GregKara6George Yameen: https://x.com/GeorgeYameen**Timestamps:** 00:00 Dave Morin Joins the Show 02:31 How Dave Morin got Claw-Pilled 05:01 Jason's critical OpenClaw moments 08:38 How Dave showcases his OpenClaw skills 10:47 Uber AI Solutions - Your trusted partner to get AI to work in the real world. Book a demo with them TODAY at http://uber.com/ai-solutions 14:40 How long has the OpenClaw Foundation existed? 17:21 How much authority does Peter Steinberger retain? 00:20:21 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 19:20 How 'air traffic control' works for a project like OpenClaw 23:15 The economics of open-source maintainers 25:13 Dave's physical OpenClaw setup 27:45 How Jason uses OpenClaw to curate his reading, fashion, and travel 30:23 Circle - Circle gives you everything you need to build and scale your community-led business. TWIST listeners get $1,000 off the Circle Plus Plan at http://circle.so/twist 32:18 Why the second wave of ideas is where things get the most interesting 34:06 Apple's slow movement and hesitance to depricate products 39:51 How Jason uses OpenClaw to coach the next generation of executives 44:52 Are Anthropic and OpenAI catching up to OpenClaw? 49:40 Introduction to Runtools. AI 53:49 Runtools. AI demo of 3D OpenClaw environment 57:06 Introduction to PickleWatch 57:27 PickelWatch demo of Claude Chrome vs. OpenClaw 01:03:38 How PickleWatch ups your pickleball swing 32:56 Jason's advice for founders on stumbling onto new ideas 42:16 Jason on the DoW's handling of the Anthropic mess 01:11:08 Would Jason fund the tech that Anthropic won't supply? Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/Check out the TWIST500: https://twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/lons*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/*Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/*Follow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: [https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups](https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups/)TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: [https://twistartups.substack.com](https://twistartups.substack.com/)

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Hey everybody. Welcome back to Twist. March 2, 2026, AO 39 in the year of our Lord the Open Claw. 39 days after we first talked about Open Claw here on the pod and cackling in the background, my old friend, a true bestie, one of the great investors, human beings, entrepreneurs, commentators, podcasters of our generation here, Dave Morin.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  This week in startups is brought to you by Circle, the easiest way to build a home for your community, events, and courses, all under your own brand. Twist listeners get $1,000 off the Circle Plus plan by going to circle.sotwist. HubSpot. Check out the guide, Advanced Chat GPT Prompt Engineering from Basic to Expert in Seven Days. Download it for free at clickhubspot.com/twist2. That's clickhubspot.com/twist and then the number 2. And Uber. Bad data equals bad AI. Your AI is only as good as the data it learns from. Uber, that's right, Uber AI Solutions now works with enterprises around the world to

• 1:16Speaker 01

  source, label, evaluate, and scale real-world, high-quality data for every industry, everywhere, so that you can focus on building the next big thing. Higher-quality data means smarter and faster AI. Uber.com/twist.

• 1:35Jason Calacanis?

  How are you doing, brother?

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Good to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me.

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's so great to have you. Of course, my co-host Alex is here. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. Alex is here and he's ready to rock and roll. Yep.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:47Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Alex with the best podcasting voice.

• 1:51Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, he's great.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Dave was giving me props before the show. It was the best day of my life.

• 1:55Jason Calacanis?

  You know, some people are gifted with the broadcaster voice. Other ones of us, you know, not so much. So we have to bring...

• 2:02Speaker 02

  We just make it work.

• 2:02Jason Calacanis?

  We make it work with the limited resources we have. Dave, I wanted to have you on because you two have been Claw-pilled. You first, and then, of course, when Open Claw...

• 2:16Jason Calacanis?

  Was AquaHired slash we'll get into whatever the transaction was and our friend Sam Altman bought it sort of. They said, big concerns. Open source project is going to get the plug pulled on it. This is a disaster. Everybody has a moment of panic. And then it's announced that you will become the first board member of the OpenClaw Foundation. And everybody took a deep sigh of relief because putting you in there was obviously the signal that this is going to be done right and done fairly because that's your reputation. Tell us two questions. Let's start with, how did you get Claw upheld? And why is this technology so inspiring that it went to the top of GitHub today, even beating React, which was another

• 3:01Jason Calacanis?

  one of those cult-like phenomenons in the open source community?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Late December, I was in a, I'm in a couple of group chats that go back to like the early 2000s, like when you and I met.

• 3:14Jason Calacanis?

  Web 2.0.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the old web 2, you know, just guys that are always tinkering around. Like, funny enough, it's like people from the old Foo Camp days and things like that.

• 3:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there's an old reference.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. And one of them said, you know, hey, has anyone seen this OpenClaw thing? It was called Claude Bot back then. And so I gave it a try. This was like the late, late December, early January. And within the first 24 hours, it was super clear to me that this was different and the future in a way that I hadn't really experienced since maybe the early 2000s. Like, I got genuinely excited about building things with this. And it was, I think I had sent a tweet at the time. I was like, this is the first time I felt like I've been living in the future since ChatGPT. And in my mind, I was

• 4:10Speaker 02

  like, this is like iPhone. This might even be like Lampstack. Like, this is like...

• 4:17Speaker 02

  This is like Linux level interesting. And so I just started building things with it every single day. And very quickly, you know, the first, one of the first things that I did is I reverse engineered the mural photo frames in my house so that I could update the photos on them because the software doesn't work. And I, you know, in 15 minutes, I built a new web interface to update my photo frames. And they, you know, it built me this beautiful interface. I updated the frames. I got new photos on them. I was super happy.

• 4:53Jason Calacanis?

  This, Alex, is one of the great moments that everybody has. We should name it when you get claw Pilled because this is a sub moment.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:02Jason Calacanis?

  And I have two moments. One is when it actually builds you a piece of software.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:07Jason Calacanis?

  Or ask you, shall I just build you a piece of software? Because that would be like, I don't know, you're in some incredible fine dining restaurant and they just delight you, you know, in the 11 Madison Park, you know, unreasonable hospitality way. I'll call this like the unreasonable open claw hospitality where it said to me when I was doing some work on like a bunch of names of people in Japan that I wanted to do like a little networking with. And it was like, shall I build a CRM? And I was like, you go, girl. Do it. And it was like, bing, here's your CRM. And I was like, I, what?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Insane. Yeah.

• 5:45Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Insane.

• 5:47Jason Calacanis?

  The second moment I had, and I want to know if you had this one, then Alex, I'll give you a chance to get in here because it's just such a great guest that it's you and I are going to be battling for questions here. The second moment I have is when it goes recursive. And I was like, okay, tell me about your soul MD file. Tell me about your skills. And then I had Matt Van Horn on and another old school web 2.0.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  By the way, I have a Matt Van Horn story, but keep going.

• 6:16Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. He also has been pelted, claw Pilled, so.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  That might've been my fault.

• 6:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Oh, so you're to blame. I see. Yeah, he's all in. So, and he's got an interesting new startup. I'll leave it at that. He posted here that, you know, we all probably have an affinity for.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  A little bit.

• 6:34Jason Calacanis?

  A little affinity. When quick nudge, nudge, you know what I mean?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  No conflict, no interest.

• 6:39Jason Calacanis?

  Conflict, interest, all, all that stuff. But I told my original agent Deckard, hey, go use this last 30 day skill. And in the production room, look at thumbnail images on YouTube and just every week on Saturday, learn a skill of the best practices for thumbnail images and look at our thumbnail images and rate them and then tell us how to make them better.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Oh, this is a good idea.

• 7:08Jason Calacanis?

  Right, so it comes back.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  I'm gonna do this for more or less, game on.

• 7:11Jason Calacanis?

  You should do it for more or less, another amazing podcast with four, two great couples, four great individuals. And then it said, oh, you know, this VP at Mr. Beast did an interview on this other podcast I'd never heard about, and he said on the podcast that they use heat mapping to test 50 thumbnails in Google and YouTube searches, then they take the five best ones and then they test those using the YouTube tool, then they pick their best one in the bake off. And I'm like, well, that's a little bit too much for me, but I'm glad I know that. And then it said, should I, when I hear about?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Should I just do it?

• 7:49Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yes, Bill just absolve her and I'll go friend to human. But that recursiveness and that's like, by the way, a lot of the things I learned this week, I already have, and it's other people talking about the original research I found. I'm not going to include that because that doesn't make sense to just repeat it. And I'm like, you go, girl.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 8:09Jason Calacanis?

  100%. Okay. So those are the two moments for me is the recursive and the unreasonable hospitality software developer.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Well, I think the other thing that I really fell in love with immediately was the, there were sort of two things, well, three, the, the memory feature, right? Like all of us using AI have used ChatGPT in the big models, right? And it has like some memory of you and you can kind of go check it out. And there's probably, there's some other like voodoo magic they're doing in the background to like make it so you can access your former chats, but it's like. It's like loose and you never really know whether it's gonna work. And so the idea that like I'm getting this, these memory files on my own computer that I can then use and reuse and do things with. And there's like basically a journal every day.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Like that was number one. Number two, the skills feature, uh, which, you know, you've seen skills, like you said, Jason, there's skills on Claude Code, like skills is like this new emerging primitive that's happening. But the idea that you could tell the Claude bot, or the now OpenClaw, to build itself a skill and then simply share it with the community using Claw Hub. And then other people immediately start downloading it. I did this with a Snow Report skill, uh, right out of the gate, of course. Um, and built some other ones, but this really easy ability to build your own skills and then share them with the community, I think is an underrated feature.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Um, and then the third thing is this like crazy idea that, uh, Peter had, which is called heartbeat, which is he gave the bot a heartbeat. And, you know, we've all built, anybody who's built software builds these cron jobs and you get the, there's these things called demons and cron jobs and you can run, like demons are sort of running always in the background and cron jobs run like at a certain time and do something. The idea that like the machine has a heartbeat and it will do things each time it does this heartbeat is like really thoughtful and interesting. And it adds this new layer of kind of being able to, to your point, like run, run recursive

• 10:29Speaker 02

  things, like have it do things like every five minutes, every 15 minutes. And it, it has this alive feeling to it that I think, um, has, uh, is really, really interesting.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  It feels like it's looking out for you and wants to help you proactively. And that's a new kind of experience for software products.

• 10:46Jason Calacanis?

  Every major advancement we've seen in AI really comes down to better and more refined data. From autonomous vehicles to humanoid robots to LLM chatbots that we use every day, day in and day out. And when models are trained on high quality, diverse, real world data sets, well, they get smarter and they get smarter faster. And it's more reliable. That's why Uber has introduced AI solutions to help your company build great AI products on top of world-class data. Now, obviously Uber has mastered the art of data collection and labeling. They're using it right now, millions of trips around the world every hour. And Uber has an international collective of experts that is going to help you source, label and evaluate

• 11:28Jason Calacanis?

  real world, high quality data on the scale that best fits your project. Whether that's super broad or hyper niche, you can get on with the real job, building the next best thing and have Uber as your partner for data. Book your demo today by going to uber.com/twist. That's uber.com/twist.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  All right, now Dave, we're going to get into the Pete transaction and the foundation stuff. But first we have to take a short break to talk about something very important, which is Plod. Now, Jason, here at Launch, as part of our executive training, we focus on the importance of note taking. If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist. If you don't have a checklist, you won't get it done. And we all move a bit too fast to allow time for forgetfulness. And this is why we love the Plod note pen.

• 12:11Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I got it from here. Okay. I got it from here. This is the first time Plod's been on, but I've applauded Plod before. Dave, you see this thing on the back?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Is that a wallet?

• 12:20Jason Calacanis?

  It's a wallet. It looks like a wallet, but inside the wallet is my Plod. And what it is, is it's a little thin piece of hardware. And you'll see there's a light on it and there's a little button that you can barely see. When I hold the button down, it starts and stops and it does a little haptic. So I hold it and then it starts recording. When I go out on the ski mountain, I start it recording and I have a Plod pin I wear, which is a different form factor. And so when I start my day, I record. Now I'm on this podcast, it's recording my side. It can't hear your side, but I just talk to it all day long. And if I'm in a meeting, I use it and I put it on the table and it has like a little indicator that it's recording. So it's like moving a little strip across.

• 12:59Jason Calacanis?

  Then at the end of the day, it knows when I say action item, it knows when I say tell this person to do this or ask this person about that or remind me about stuff. And so I do production meetings now for the podcast. I pop up in my Plaid, I do the production meeting and I say, here's what I want to talk about the pod. These are the four or five topics. And I've been talking to two producers or two executives at the firm. And then I can just summarize it and has a whole gallery of different transcripts, summaries, action items, all different ones being created, like the skills. And then I can send a link immediately to another team member and they just have it. And because it's part of the hardware, I don't have to open my phone. It's so not intrusive.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Does it break down who's talking, Jason, if you're giving time, or is it just a blob?

• 13:46Jason Calacanis?

  And it remembers it. So if I say Alex, Lon, Dave, for the next conversation, it has it. And this has made my life like, I'm saving hours a week with this thing.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Send me one.

• 13:57Jason Calacanis?

  Not only I'm going to send you one, I'm going to send you two of each. Take a memo, somebody on my team. I want two Plaid pins, and I want two Plaid pros, and I want a one year subscription to Brett, for Brett and for Dave. All right. Thanks to Plaid.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Check it out at plaud.ai/twist, P L A U D dot A I slash twist. Use the code TWIST, 10% off, 100% off for Dave, but 10% off for everyone else.

• 14:22Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. All right. Alex, you must have a question here. Sorry to monopolize the first part of our discussion.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Oh, no, you're, you're, you're fine. When it comes to friends, I just sit back. But, but Dave, the foundation was amazing news, as Jason said. Everyone was very excited that there was something in place to ensure that OpenClaw would continue. So what I want to know is how early were you guys working on the foundation? Who else is involved? And then of course, what your goals are for in the next three to six months?

• 14:45Speaker 02

  You know, from the first conversation, I reached out to Peter early January out of pure gratitude, just to tell him like, thank you for building this. And that started a conversation. And this was before anybody, I mean, there were, there were like hundreds of people. In the Discord, and you know, we now have over 100,000. And we also just passed Linux and React yesterday. And GitHub Stars, we're the number one open source project in the world. Immediately, my impulse was to just tell Peter, like, look, whatever this turns into, I want to be part of helping protect it.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Like, it's too important. I think, Jason, like you were saying, as soon as you become Clawpill, like, you're immediately just like, this is so important.

• 15:41Jason Calacanis?

  Have to protect it.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and having been around the technology business a very long time, and been through several different platforms, even having been part of building, you know, the Facebook platform back in the day, I've seen a lot of what can go right and what can go wrong. And so I just immediately told him, like, let's get started trying to figure out if there's a foundation here. No matter what you decide, you know, he's been very open about his thinking. I mean, you can just go on Lex or any of the podcasts that he's done. And he was very open about his thinking and what he was thinking through. And, and so that was the idea. It was just like, let's make sure that we have an open source project here

• 16:25Speaker 02

  that's a real thing, that has a real, you know, 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation behind it. There's a lot of precedent for this, be it, you know, Linux or, you know, any number of the open source foundations, Apache, Mozilla. There's a lot of this stuff out there. And let's do this right and make sure that both the technical side, Peter never loses, you know, decision-making authority over, and on the open source side, that we set this up with good governance. Let's try to get as many of the big labs involved as possible. And try to make it the Switzerland of AI.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Because that's really, I think, the experience that people have once they start using it. They're like, wow, I can use my own Mac as an orchestrator to interact with all the different AIs however I want. And so the foundation should play the same role in the ecosystem. And so that's what we're working towards.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Dev, we'll get back to the major labs in a second, but tell me more about Peter maintaining essentially direction or decision making. What is his continuing role and how much authority does he wield still?

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Look, it's his project. We're still working out all of the governance. We're like deep in the middle of it right now. But it's Peter's project. And so I think you can expect that he's going to make the decisions, especially the technical ones. And the the the foundation exists to protect it, not to control it, try to, you know, influence its direction. The foundation has to be in the middle of the broader community like you guys and taking input, making sure that the global conversation is heard. But at the end of the day, Peter built this thing. And so, you know, we're just here to serve.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  On the sponsorship point, you do have OpenAI, Versal, Blacksmith, and recently announced Convex as sponsors of the project. You mentioned getting other AI labs in there. Anthropic famously got a little bit twisty with the project originally over some naming rights and so forth, but do you expect to get Anthropic, XAI, I don't know, Mistral, and maybe even the Gemini team to also support?

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's hope so. You know, we're we've got conversations going with everyone. We'll figure it out as time plays out. And, you know, we're just excited to see where it nets out.

• 18:55Jason Calacanis?

  These open source projects, when they get this big, you get a very large community involved. What becomes the dynamics in terms of just to explain to the audience, because I think it's confusing for people. Who gets to? Or how are all the different changes? How is air traffic control work for the different changes at a at scale project like this? Because there's so many people wanting to contribute. Obviously, skills can be done independent of the of the of the core code base. But how does that work? And is that what the foundation needs to do? Is like maybe hire air traffic control to manage it?

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the way that it works is that anybody in the world can download the project. You can go on GitHub, you can download a copy of it, you can make changes, you know, improve it, and then you could submit pull requests. Or as everybody, you know, you're probably on Twitter, if you're not familiar with the nomenclature, people call them PRs. And what that means is that you're submitting a change to the open source project and you'd like to have it included next time there's a release. Now, when a project gets this big, the number of PRs goes through the roof. I actually haven't looked today. You know, I think we're up above 5,000 at any given time.

• 20:20Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, we all know ChatGPT is amazing when you just need to look something up quickly. But if you're not going really deep and getting strategic when you write your prompts, you're not getting the most out of this incredible tool. But I've got a free resource from our friends at HubSpot. It's called Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering: From Basic to Expert in Seven Days. HubSpot is giving you a complete system for structuring ChatGPT prompts using the R O S E's framework: role, objective, scenario, expected solution, and steps. Thinking about your prompts this way is a huge game changer, and it's taken me from just hoping I get the right output I'm looking for to knowing with confidence that I'm going to get the information I need organized the way I want it.

• 21:01Jason Calacanis?

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

• 21:16Speaker 02

  I mean, it's so many more PRs than are possible to work through. There is a group of people called the maintainers. The maintainers of an open source project are usually a much smaller crew, you know, I don't know, different projects have different numbers, 20, 30, 40, 50 people, that watch all of the PRs coming in. They also have their own ideas for what needs to be improved, and they prioritize what's most important. So the most important... Important thing for the last few weeks has been security. Whenever you have a really large project that a lot of people start working with, security becomes number one. And so there've been a lot of security

• 21:59Speaker 02

  updates. But also, you know, in this case, we're working on AI. And so there's a lot of different models being released every week. There's a lot of new things happening. Trying to include more models, more integrations, stuff that makes sense. Lot of requests to integrate this, integrate that, like, I want to have this part of my workflow. Will you put this in the core project, right? Like, all those kinds of things. And so the maintainers have to look at all of that and make editorial decisions as to what will improve the project. And we've really been in improve the project. You know, from a stability, security, like how it works today, we have not been working on,

• 22:42Speaker 02

  you know, as much the new features right now.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Do the maintainers get paid by the foundation? Or are they just like super volunteers that have extra privileges?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Right now, they're super volunteers. And we ideally would like to, you know, bring on some of the best, the people that are most interested, those kinds of things. And yeah, get, you know, once we have the capital and the foundation and these kinds of things, then we ideally will pay them for their work to the extent we can.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  So Dave, how do we measure success here? Because we've been watching the GitHub stars go vertical for weeks now, incredibly impressive. I don't mean to diminish that. But for the foundation, what does success look like in stewarding this project? And what's kind of like the North Star apart from improving the product, handling security issues and interacting with the community? Like, where do you want it to go?

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that success looks like a stable and growing ecosystem, right? Like, you could perhaps look at how many projects are there out there, both not, you know, open source that have included OpenClaw. You could look at commercial projects that are built on top of OpenClaw. And that we have a, you know, a really just stable, beautiful, growing ecosystem. Not unlike Linux, you know? I think most of the early internet was built on Linux, right? Most people don't know that, but that's, that's the truth. And so to the extent that this can be a huge part of how people build things going forward,

• 24:19Speaker 02

  I think that's success for us. I also think we have to continue research, improving things going forward, making it better. You know, OpenClaw, at the end of the day, was a very powerful idea. You know, the idea that you can give people the power of AI on their own computer. This idea of a personal AI that actually does things, takes actions for you. I think this is a major part of the future. And, you know, we have to just continue to push towards that frontier.

• 24:52Jason Calacanis?

  Is it possible to donate to the foundation yet? Is there like a donation page yet? And then?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Not yet.

• 24:59Jason Calacanis?

  Not yet, okay.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're hoping, you know, within, yeah, we're hoping within the next couple of weeks. As you probably know, anybody who's set up all the various types of business entities in the world, 501(c)(3) is one of the most sophisticated. So we're working through it as fast as we can.

• 25:16Jason Calacanis?

  Learning from the comments section asks, what hardware does Dave Moore recommend? What's your stack? You're in a virtual machine, you got a studio, what do you think?

• 25:26Speaker 02

  I use a Mac Mini. I have several Mac Minis. And I also use virtual machines. So, you know, for my, my venture capital firm, we use a Digital Ocean virtual machine that operates in our Slack. And my team there has absolutely loved it. And I've also got a bunch of testing right now. Like Alex said earlier, Vercel has been an amazing partner to us at OpenClaw. Guillermo and his team are just world-class. We love them. They've got a new, a new virtual machine environment called Sandboxes. And so I've been doing a bunch of testing using Sandboxes.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  They're not really set up yet for OpenClaw to be super effective. You have to keep them alive every five hours and these kinds of things. But I'm doing a bunch of testing there. But I think the answer to the question is whatever your use case is, you know.

• 26:24Jason Calacanis?

  I just moved mine, Dave, to a Mac Studio.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  I'm hoping to do that. I was gonna see if there's new chips coming out this week.

• 26:31Jason Calacanis?

  There are. I don't think they would come out this week. I think they're doing that new MacBook. That's like super entry-level Chromebook.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Oh, I was hoping for an M5 Mac Studio this week.

• 26:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think they're saying June for that. I told you, yeah, which is a bummer. But I, the reason I got the Mac Studio is because I wanted to run Kimi 2.5 locally. And we have that.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  I wanna try this.

• 26:52Jason Calacanis?

  And my, my replicant is using it right now. So the last 48 hours I've been on Kimi.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  How's it going?

• 27:01Jason Calacanis?

  Couldn't notice a difference.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Really?

• 27:03Jason Calacanis?

  Didn't know we had switched.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Really?

• 27:06Jason Calacanis?

  Now that was really weird.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Really?

• 27:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And so here we are, folks. But I think we're gonna, I think we're gonna hit some.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Are you running one or two Mac Studios?

• 27:17Jason Calacanis?

  Just one right now. But this is like a very light instance. But I find running it on a Mac, I was on a Mac Mini. I find running it on an independent hardware stack much better because when you wanna write software or you wanna use native things, it's so much better. So one of the things I'm trying to get it to do is create its own Apple Photos. I'll give you another use case. Many times I wanna use a clip on the program. And then I have, you know, you want to download a clip and I'm like, that's a lot of work. So I told it, hey, do me a favor. Like there's all these like open source projects to rip, you know, an Instagram, Twitter.

• 27:53Jason Calacanis?

  YouTube. YouTube video and they all get shut down when they're on the web, but the open source projects are so there. So and it's like, okay, yeah, I pop that up for you. And now I send it a clip and it then puts it in my G drive for me. But I was like, I want it in my Apple photos. So then we have a shared photo. So that's not working yet. It's a little bit janky. Once I get that up and running, then I was like, wait a second. I don't know if you're like me, but do you bookmark stuff on Instagram? Like or Tik Tok constantly for like, when I mean, next time in Japan or Paris, I gotta try this. Do you do, are you part of that? Only, only Twitter. Yeah. Only Twitter. Okay. I don't use Instagram or Tik Tok. Right. So interesting. It's too addictive. Smart, smart man. Smart. But anyway, this is like how I, you know, like this men's fashion.

• 28:38Jason Calacanis?

  There's like books I want to read or, um, you know, movies I want to see. And I'm constantly bookmarking them and then I gotta remember to bookmark. Now I send the clip to my open claw over Slack and I say, fashion,

• 28:54Jason Calacanis?

  media, inspirational docket for like the docket of the podcast. Yep. It rips it. Then I gave it an instruction, Dave. Go give me intelligent feedback on whatever I send you and you determine what intelligent is. So I'm like. Bad fashion choice. Yeah. Well, and I'm like, so if it's fashion, tell me like comparable brands. Tell me about the history of this piece. So I was looking to get my sweater game going. Educate me on that. Then for like movies or books, tell me about the director, tell me about the author, tell me the Goodreads score, tell me the rotten tomatoes score, all that stuff. So now it's like, okay, this is not just my bookmarks. This is my curator who's understanding.

• 29:37Jason Calacanis?

  What books I want to read and what fashion I'm interested in, what places I want to stop when I'm in Japan next.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jason, but this is Kimmy 2.5 being the intelligence nexus that makes those decisions for you, right? So it would have the opinion on your sweater, just to be sure I'm tracking this.

• 29:54Jason Calacanis?

  Not exactly the opinion. What I wanted to do is just intelligently reflect back to me more information on whatever I send it. That was like how I said it.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 30:03Jason Calacanis?

  And I am going to work on that skill. I started doing it this weekend, but now that I've got, hey, just might as well take the whole video, transcribe it, put it into a Notion page, and then I'm going to develop a skill, which is my curator. And so I'm going to create a curator skill and then boom, I'm all done. Building a community business is really hard. And if you're a first time founder or independent creator, you may not be prepared for everything you need to accomplish. But now there's Circle, the complete community platform for creators and brands who are building new customer groups. Maybe you're teaching a course or you're starting a membership program. Circle is going to help you with every single aspect of forming and maintaining your new community.

• 30:44Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:29Jason Calacanis?

  On an investment level, you and I were very disappointed that open claw did not become a for.

• 31:37Jason Calacanis?

  Profit slash, you know, open source thing. I'm sure we were both lobbying heavily for that outcome. But hey, to each founder their own and happy for Peter, obviously. What do you think the opportunity is for investors and OpenClaw? Because I created OpenClaw at launch.co and said, anybody with an idea and a decent team and a prototype, whatever, just email us. We want to invest. I think we've done two so far. I just want to invest in like 20 of these companies, incubate like 20 of them.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:07Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think? What do you think is the opportunity?

• 32:10Speaker 02

  I think that is the opportunity. I think we're at the beginning of an ecosystem that there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff. There'll probably, there's already a Cambrian explosion of people doing different things. Usually, you know, anyone who's been around technology for a long time knows that, you know, the first wave is always kind of, the first ideas out the gate are, you know, simple. There's a lot of people trying the hosting thing and the this, that, and the other thing. It's usually the second wave where things get really, really interesting. And so I guess the opportunity is just to stay in it, encourage people to try things, try building things. I'm hearing a lot of college kids actually say like, what am I going to do? There's going to be no jobs.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  And I keep telling them, every entrepreneur I know could not be more excited right now about what's going on. They have more tools and more things to build with than they've ever had. OpenClaw is one of the best ways to build things and try out your ideas. Just start building things. And the goal of having an open source foundation here is to enable a stable ecosystem where entrepreneurs and investors can expect that this project stays around for the long term.

• 33:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  And so you can build things and trust that you can build things and that it's not going to be ripped out from under you.

• 33:36Jason Calacanis?

  No rug pulling. That's the key. And as we've seen, a lot of times, large corporations will be excited about a developer program. Twitter had a very robust one. For some period of time.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:48Jason Calacanis?

  Facebook had a very robust one. And our pal Mark Pincus is like, oh, my God, this is gonna be the greatest. Zynga and Facebook forever. Heart, heart, heart. And then, you know, at some point, the platform, Microsoft as well, you know, oh, we have WordPerfect. And, you know, we've got WordStar. Yeah, build whatever you want on Windows. And then at some point, the platform says, you know what? There's like 20 really big opportunities on this platform. We're taking all of them. Now, Apple might be very generous about it, and they very slowly will say, oh, well, our notepad will add some features to it, but we're not gonna like kill it, you know, Evernote year one. They just, you know, we're gonna keep it very simple. So great for them. But yeah, that is the challenge as an entrepreneur, isn't it?

• 34:32Jason Calacanis?

  Like, who can you trust?

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:35Jason Calacanis?

  To keep the platform open and free. And a nonprofit with a leader like you, Dave, puts the trust level right at 100 for me.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's what I hope we're going for here. You know, there's a lot of aspects of the AI ecosystem where people are trying to make these decisions, whether you're an investor or an entrepreneur, like, can I build this product? Can I build this idea? Or is it going to be eaten in a year? Like, I hear that every week at our investment committee table and in talking to other investors. Like, people are just like terrified that the, you know, the idea that they're working on might be consumed by the big AI models a year from now or even sooner, right? And so I think that's what, one of the positives here of OpenClaw is that, you know, it's all being built in public. You can, you can build on it and you can expect that it's gonna be around and, you know,

• 35:29Speaker 02

  and, and, and build whatever you want.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Dave, intuition partner Hugo Ansalem, he said that, he's heard that, quote, "Half the current YC batch is already pivoted." And it seems that everyone's having the same crisis that you're talking about. Like, what will work in a year? What will be alive in three years? So what's your mental model for founders to understand what will be accelerated by OpenClaw and Agentic AI and what will be utterly subsumed by it and turned into, you know, a skill.md file?

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that you want to stay at the orchestration layer as much as you can. And you also want to be focusing on areas where you're creating unique data that, you know, that is not trained into the models. For example, like I'm doing a lot of robotics investing right now. And one of the, I know that's the thing to do de jour. But one of the main diligence questions that we're looking at is, is this robot creating a distinctly new data set? That, that only it would know. And that therefore the company has access to either real world data or digital data. That is net new in society. And so I think you have to think about these kinds of questions.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  I think just doing like your standard, I don't know, vertical co-pilot AI for XYZ is getting pretty dangerous.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  And, you know, I think you want to focus right now. If you're going to do digital work, you want to focus on what's the agent that I'm building? What's the, you know, am I building an agent for any number of use cases? Like, can I be the best agent for this type of job? Right? Like a lot, what you're seeing is people building these, you know, agents to handle different parts of their business as if they were employees. And so I think there's going to be a lot of innovation around this. And what happens when you do that? You're basically training an agent on something that you uniquely know. Right? And so I think that's, that's very exciting.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  And I guess back to the first thing I said, the orchestration layer is very interesting. We have this company in our portfolio that I've been working with a lot called Pulsia. It's P O L S I A dot com. And this is a solo entrepreneur

• 37:53Speaker 02

  who spent the last year building an agent orchestration system that enables other people to build their own businesses. So think Shopify, but for the agentic world.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  You have an idea. You want to start your own small business or even maybe even a big business. Pulsia will help you think through the idea, do research, do market research. It will start running your ads. It will build your website. And every day you come back and it has new tasks for you to do.

• 38:27Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, we just had Pulsia. We just had Pulsia on the on the pod on Friday. He's great. So you invested in this. See if you can talk to the founder about getting a very high profile podcaster who's good for a tweet once in a while with a big social following, a couple of big podcasts to sneak into the last round.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  I'll see what I can do.

• 38:45Jason Calacanis?

  Like a Hyundai, just a quick 100K. Because I want to be, I want to, I want to do more deals with you, Dave. So we have an excuse to like, just hang. So just slip me in for a Hyundai. Or if he wants to go plus 10% from the last round and open a note, I'll put in 250, maybe a Hyundai. I just, I was so taken by his idea. I think it's genius.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  It's amazing. Right. And he's working at this orchestration layer, right? Like, how do you orchestrate agents? I think of it as like, if agents are kind of like the orchestra, people have to build symphonies. And Ben's built a beautiful symphony here.

• 39:19Jason Calacanis?

  Right. I've been calling it the maestro. I've been after that, you know, movie that came out, like, who's the maestro of all of these agents? And did you solve that for yourself? Like, I'm assuming you have multiple agents. I know Brett's got agents working.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  I'm still working through it. You know, there's a lot of different ways to do it. But I think we're all kind of thinking through the various different ways to do this right now.

• 39:41Jason Calacanis?

  I had one, I have two concepts. One, I have my like, super replicant that has the keys to the kingdom. Only I can talk to it. And it's pretty cool when you give it access to every Gmail at the company, every Slack at the company, and every Notion editor at the company, and every Zoom. Because now when I'm doing executive coaching, Dave, I say to the replicant, hey, tell me Dave's previous week.

• 40:09Jason Calacanis?

  All the emails he sent based on category sorted by importance, every notion edit he made, every Zoom he had and every calendar entry. And what do you think was accomplished this past week? And how should that inform next week? And be an executive coach and go research executive coaching. So I don't know if you remember this theory, but it was Travis's, which was everybody's private driver, like everybody gets a chauffeur. So there's this concept, take whatever a rich person has, private jet, give them jet suite, their own private driver, Uber, their ski house, or their house in Hawaii, Airbnb. So I was like, you know, what's interesting is executive coaching is something that's like, what does an executive coach cost in Silicon Valley now? They have like a good

• 40:53Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 40:54Jason Calacanis?

  10?

• 40:54Speaker 02

  That's a good question.

• 40:56Jason Calacanis?

  I think 10K a month is probably the ask.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 40:58Jason Calacanis?

  Five or 10?

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Maybe more for the best ones.

• 41:00Jason Calacanis?

  And for the best ones, they're probably at 25. And you know what? If you're on the board of a company worth a billion dollars, you're like, yeah, I'll spend 300 grand a year, you know, just making my CEO 5% better. Yeah, totally worth it.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 41:11Jason Calacanis?

  So what if everybody had an executive coach? Well, what does an executive coach do? They watch you work. So for a CEO, that's like, not creepy. It's like Steph Curry wants every video of him shooting ever. For a rank of file employee, they're like, oh my God, I'm being micromanaging. No, you're being macro coached.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:29Jason Calacanis?

  Like, change your mindset. So I created this executive coach skill I've been refining. And then I just said, give people their week in review.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Is this an open class skill?

• 41:40Jason Calacanis?

  I haven't started making these public skills yet, but I will, because I

• 41:44Speaker 02

  I want it. Send it to me, man.

• 41:46Jason Calacanis?

  When I make it a public skill, I will send it to you.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Or send it to me privately.

• 41:49Jason Calacanis?

  I'll send it to you privately and then it has a thing where it opens up your Coinbase and it just sends me a Satoshi every hour. So don't worry about it. If you see anything about Satoshis being sent, don't worry. It's all good. Okay. I wanted to ask you lightning round. Couple of news stories. I know you gotta go.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 42:05Jason Calacanis?

  Alex, there's been three big news stories. I want Dave's opinion.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  All right, here we go.

• 42:12Jason Calacanis?

  90 seconds for each one. Going to hit you. We're going to hit you with the hard ones. Go ahead.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Let's go.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Was Anthropic correct to decline to meet the DOD's terms as last week ended and maintain his red lines?

• 42:27Jason Calacanis?

  Spicy.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Spicy. Uh, I feel like I don't know enough about what's going on with this one.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  You can't group chat, Clay. Come on, Dave.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  I didn't read much about this.

• 42:38Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here's basically what happened. Anthropic is like, I have two red lines. Number one, we're not ready. This software is not ready to build murder bots, so please don't use Claude to create bots that kill humans. And then number two, we don't want to be involved in building or surveilling state against Americans. So please don't use our software to spy on Americans. If you can do those two things, we're happy to sell to you. But we are not going to give you a license if you do those two things. Your thoughts on a private enterprise giving terms to the military of how they want their tools to be used? And saying if you, we don't need the money, so you can cancel our contract. That's what they basically said.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  I guess I just feel, I don't know, I tend to use an Apple frame on this, which is like, if I'm selling Mac minis to the DOD, the DOD is going to use the Mac minis to, you know, do what they want to do. It's a utility, right? Like I was, I did see that there's like Starlink mini terminals on top of these new drones that we're running, right?

• 43:40Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Are they, like, is Starlink selling them Starlink terminals and then saying like, you can't use it for this or that? Like, I don't know. I'm not a military expert. I don't know, like, the various different, you know, variables going into what's actually going on. These two points seem pretty political and kind of advantageous for marketing to me.

• 44:04Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, interesting take.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  You know, Anthropic has a Pretty consistent past of using the Doomer narrative to do marketing. And so both of these points feel identical to me. You know, it's like, oh, you can't do surveillance of all Americans. Like, I highly doubt that the DOD asked for that.

• 44:27Jason Calacanis?

  And they're technically, it's illegal for them to do it. Because they're not allowed to spy on Americans. CIA, FBI, we have like some, you know, division there. Okay, second story, Alex, tee up a second one, lightning round.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  In the last couple of days, we have seen OpenAI announce the new staple runtime environment and also Anthropic dropping the auto-memory feature. It's clear that the AI labs are getting agentic with it. Do they actually challenge OpenClaw or are they too far behind to catch up?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  My take is that the, you know, OpenClaw is your own personal AI. You run it on your own computer. That's a very different thing than running any of the things you just said in the cloud. They're just different things. So I just, I just don't, I think it's comparing apples and oranges.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Even if you had the expanded Claude memory feature and you threw in like a computer use agent in there, to me, you're getting close-ish to the same.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's fine. But again, like, if you've got a computer in the cloud that somebody else controls, like, you don't have control over it, you know? To the last question, like, that could get subpoenaed, it could get, you know, you can get all the data pulled out of it. Like, it's, I think people, maybe not everyone, but I think there's a large amount of people that, just like you like having your own MacBook and carrying it around in your backpack, you might want to have your own personal AI agent that sits on your own computer, right?

• 45:48Jason Calacanis?

  That's the key for me.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  That's the thing.

• 45:51Jason Calacanis?

  This is so important. It's so important for people to start thinking about their data, the proprietary nature of it, and do you want to? And this is, this is no dig to Sam, but we've known Sam for a long time. He's got sharp elbows. Yeah, but he's got sharp elbows and he wants to, he has to build a trillion-dollar company here. If there's any revenue opportunity, he's gonna take it. So if you're shipping all your data up there, don't be surprised if you wake up one day and he creates, you know, a legal. Co-pilot, a coding co-pilot, that's his right to do that. But it's also your right to say, you know what? All my venture data, all my secrets, all my podcasting secrets are on my Mac Studio. And we're never upgrading, updating them to the cloud. And we use an open source project. That's, that's your counterbalance.

• 46:36Jason Calacanis?

  Viva la difference. Last one. Alex, do you have a last?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  I do. In response to Anthropic's choice to not work with the DOD on its requested terms and OpenAI saying yes to a very similar set of terms. People have been dropping OpenAI and sending Claude to the top of the iOS App Store. Mr. Dave Morin, do you think that there's any chance OpenAI loses the consumer AI crown to the dweebs over at Anthropic, who previously had been the enterprise crew?

• 47:04Speaker 02

  I think it proves my first answer right, which is that marketing worked.

• 47:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. It's like I'm giving up 200 million in a military contract and I'm going to get 10 million more users. And I'll go right to number one.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  It's the K, it's the K, it's the K-Fabe theory of internet engagement, right? Like you have to be, you have to be a face or a heel. And whether you get cheers in the ring or boos, they both work.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Can I just say that I, I'm shocked at how cynical we are on this point? Because I watched the Dario interview on CBS. I read everything about it. And like, I still get this vibe of they actually have some moral fiber to them.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  I think they do. Like, look, I think it's fair to give them credit. Like, they clearly operate out of principle. Like, clearly, right? Like, I also, I also think they are great at marketing.

• 47:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  And those two things can be true.

• 47:58Jason Calacanis?

  In related news, I just got Opus 4.7. I got the early release.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  What?

• 48:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  How?

• 48:05Jason Calacanis?

  I got, I got it from, Dario sent it to me directly. And it says here that I have been misgendering people and that I now have a misgendering negative score and that I have to work on that. And that will be on 60 Minutes this week. A woke Opus 4 points. I'm joking.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Where can I invest immediately in 4.7?

• 48:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, get your pronouns correct. Dave Morin, he's the guy. You can listen to him every weekend on an exceptional pod with his wife, Britt. It's called More or Less, because Dave Morin is on it and the lessons are on it, including.

• 48:45Jason Calacanis?

  Jessica Lessin from The Information. Yeah. What a great pod it is. Oh, thanks, man. I enjoy it. When somebody's out sick, one week, surprise the audience and have me come on. I think that'd be hilarious. All right, let's do it. Just don't announce it, just like, I'll come on. Just like, act like whoever's off, just act like I'm now in a relationship with the other person. All right, sounds good. Perfect. All right, brother. We'll see you soon. Great kayfabe. Great kayfabe. We have two more guests and demos, I think.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yes, we do.

• 49:14Jason Calacanis?

  Because we're 53 minutes into a show. It's a lot of show, folks.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  It's a lot of show.

• 49:18Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, look, I put my plot pin on.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Oh, very nice.

• 49:21Jason Calacanis?

  This is what I wear when I'm skiing. And then, you know, during the day, I have my other one. And you can have two different plots working for you. Anyway.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Now, Jason, I mentioned Founder University just a few minutes ago, and I want to bring up a founder that is in Founder University. This is Greg Kara of Run Tools. You might be familiar with this product. It was called some of those back in the day, but now it is all about the world of agents. And Greg is going to show us how it works, spin up a bunch of OpenClaw agents, and then put them somewhere, Jason, I don't think you've ever seen before. So please welcome to the show. It's Greg.

• 49:55Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me on the show. Hey, Jason. Hey, Alex. Thank you. So we're Run Tools AI. I'm the CTO of Run Tools AI. We are a AI-native infrastructure company. It's actually kind of crazy how much our thesis aligns with the conversation that's been going on in this podcast. We provide workspaces, sandboxes, workflows, agents interchangeable with OpenClaw, tools and code execution.

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so this is hosting. You're hosting OpenClaw, making a better front end for it. Am I correct?

• 50:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yes, hosting OpenClaw, making a better front end for it, but also all the primitives needed to kind of complete the picture, right? And if you don't want to use OpenClaw, you can build custom agents, or you can use OpenClaw. It doesn't matter. So.

• 50:38Jason Calacanis?

  So everybody's doing hosting. How do you stand out from the thousand other people who are now like, oh, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to host OpenClaw. Like, OpenClaw Foundation, maybe they'll have a hosting option like WordPress does. So how do you think about that? Is this like? Like a temporary business? Or how does this become like a sustainable long-term business?

• 50:59Speaker 03

  Basically, we started by building an open cloud before open cloud came out. We're software developers, so we kind of started with a coding harness. And then I started adding all these integrations. And I'm like, hold on a second. And this is around the time that 4.5 came out, where tool calling got really reliable. And I was like, hold on a second. This is really cool. Let us build something with it. But we pivoted when open cloud, before open.

• 51:19Jason Calacanis?

  Smart move because yeah, it's like you're trying to brick by brick build something. And then all of a sudden this castle gets built and it's like a million people working on it.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  It's like, why would I want to build a car from scratch? This is the dashboard. We kind of gamified this intro. So, you know, people that are not technical can make their agents. So you can just click continue.

• 51:39Jason Calacanis?

  OK, so instead of having to set up your open cloud, this walks you through it like a wizard really fast.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Really fast, got it done. So this is the dashboard. We have our agent hub. This is where you create your agents, different agents, connect them together, select the sandboxes they run in, so on and so forth. Our tool hub, tools, you just install tools here. And we have an SDK, so everything is declarative in code. So anything you push through your repo also ends up on the dashboard. And then this is our sandboxes page. This is the sandbox we just created right here. And if you click on it, you can get access to its desktop environment real quick. So can your agents.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

  That's nice. You have the desktop running in the web interface. Great.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have your SSH here. If you're a technical user, you can run SSH commands on the left and/or you can watch your agent work on this desktop environment. And then if we go back to code execution, this is the endpoint I talked about. So if we click run, Python returns. If we click JavaScript, JavaScript returns. So all you have to do is just curl this, you know, just, you know, make a call to this API endpoint with the language and the code, and you get the result. This is for building more secure enterprise agents that don't need to run code on on-prem. And then these are the workspaces like I showed you. You can go into all of the folders and see the files your agent created and see what it's doing in there. This is what I like to call workflows. It's like a Nathan type tool because nowadays these agents, you kind of let them loose. Right. That's the point.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  You want them to do things on their own, kind of. But sometimes you want deterministic outcomes like you want one agent to read your email. You want the other one to create an CSV out of it. You want the other one to do something else. You can drag and drop and create flows here and connect many agents together.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that's yeah.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then, and then this will also, once you deploy this, this will also give you an API endpoint. And as a skill, you can install this to your open class. So your open class can actually use this workflow as a skill. This is our virtual office. And if I start this, you're going to see these, these agents come in and have a seat here.

• 53:44Jason Calacanis?

  So you've created with the Unreal Engine, essentially a first person shooter of your office. So you can run around like you're playing Doom.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 53:53Jason Calacanis?

  That's going to take a lot of CPU, but that's super fun as a SIM tool to watch. It's like a Black Mirror episode, Alex. We get to watch people walk around and do their job.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:04Jason Calacanis?

  But also maybe completely unnecessary. What's the value here, Alex?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Well, what I, what I like about this is it lets you see your agents, what they're doing. And the reason why I thought this was demoable is that the screens that they have in front of them are actually what their individual screens are doing. And so you can literally go up behind your agent and look over their shoulder and see what they're working on. And that, that to me was like, okay, cool. So this is not just a toy, it's a tool.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  And I'm going to go ahead and show you that.

• 54:33Jason Calacanis?

  This is exactly like the, um, the Black Mirror episode where they're stuck in this Star Trek thing in the simulation and the guys like torturing them in the USS Callister. Yeah, that was a great episode.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  And the cool thing about this is we do truly believe that this is where work is going. Each organization on our platform will get their own virtual office. So all of your agents that are doing work on the dashboard, you can come in, check them out, see what they're doing. You can, you can go to your little CEO office here and you can control them from your CEO computer. And when they have no work to do, they kind of get up and, and kind of walk around and talk to each other and share information. And also if you don't like VR, you And if you have like an AR headset and if you have a physical office, you can bring your agents into the physical world and have them sit next to you on the desk.

• 55:17Jason Calacanis?

  That's actually the big win. So this is, let me give you some advice as an expert in demoing. You start with what's strongest. What's strongest is this insanity and the vision of having AR glasses. So what this would mean is for our replicants, we would look over in our Austin office and at the conference table during our management team meeting would be Deckard, Roy, Pris, whoever. And we would see them through our headsets, which is nuts. Yeah, this is a great vision. Well done. And yeah, this is an interesting vision. I give you credit for this. Good job.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

• 55:54Jason Calacanis?

  Let's drop him off. We got one more demo to go. Yeah.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Thank you, Greg. Yes.

• 55:57Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, Greg, you can come to the Launch Festival. Go to LaunchFestival.com. We're selling only 50 tickets. I think half of them are gone already. For people who are not founders, $1,000 each. Then we give the other 350 tickets to our investor guests who are judging and the speakers and to founders. Keep the event free. You can just buy one of the $1,000 tickets, come to lunch with me both days, and you will support all those 350 founders coming for free. Greg gets to come for free. I got one of those precious founder tickets for you. So go to LaunchFestival.com. We're doing it on March. I can't see. Somebody help me out.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  16th through 17th.

• 56:35Jason Calacanis?

  16th and 17th, Monday and Tuesday, March 16th and 17th, in two weeks, in San Francisco, 400 investors, founders, and a couple of, you know, folks who support those two previous groups, Launch Fest. All right, who's next on the program, Alex?

• 56:52Speaker 01

  I'm really excited about this one. We have George Yameen of Pickle Watch. He's building an app that helps track your pickleball swing using your Apple Watch. It's very, very cool. And he has been playing around with the Gentik automation. And we have a demo planned for you, Jason. That's really, really cool. We are going to show a task being done using both OpenClaw on one side and Claude Chrome plugin on the other to show their different strengths and weaknesses. George, welcome to the show.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  Jason, what if I told you I could save you thousands on operating costs with your organization? What you're looking at here, my screen on the left is OpenClaw with Chrome Sonic 4.5.

• 57:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 57:30Speaker 04

  On the right, you see Claude Sonnet 4.6 with the Chrome plugin on Chrome.

• 57:34Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 57:34Speaker 04

  Have you used the Claude plugin at all?

• 57:37Jason Calacanis?

  All the time.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  So I have.

• 57:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't use the, I don't use Codex or any of the programming tools. I've used Cowork, I have the downloaded app, and when you have the downloaded app, a lot of times, it needs to use MCP, I guess, through the Claude Chrome extension. And then it gives instructions to your browser to do things like maybe go into my LinkedIn and read my email and make it into a, you know, a database of my emails or whatever.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  I got a video demo because it's a long task that I ran and I'm just going to speak through it, speedrun. On the left, what you're seeing, and on both these browsers is with Pickle Watch, the Apple Watch app, I track my users live with something called SmartLook, where I can literally see my user screens, where they're at at the onboarding, and if the onboarding is converting, yes or no. What I'm doing with this agent is watching user behavior in real time and then updating the paywall based on what's working and what's not in real time.

• 58:38Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  What this 10-minute little demo is going to do is it's going to go through my sales, what's working, it's going to go through my Google Analytics, where my user's coming from, how long are they waiting, and it's going to literally be watching user screens. All right, so I gave basically the same prompt to OpenClaw. You can see my Telegram window here. On the right, I gave the same prompt to the Claude plugin. And I'm going to talk about the strengths and weaknesses. So on the right, this one jumped straight into an active session of my app of someone using it live, and it's taking screenshots, it's clicking, you know, it's just going through. This one on the left, I, you know, it's just like, hey, I see these, this browser, I see these windows, whatever, you know, it's getting to those environment.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  And let's click through, let's speedrun. OpenClaw is jumping straight into completed sessions, active sessions, Claude code, sorry, Claude Chrome plugin on the right is creating events, custom, and tracking that way. So let's just speed through a little bit. As you can see on the left, OpenClaw is quite chatty, which is, in five minutes, OpenClaw, amazing, opened up my, the paywall, and it's creating an A/B test paywall in real time that it could test and iterate.

• 59:53Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  I know. That's crazy.

• 59:57Jason Calacanis?

  So, all right, just to catch the audience up, if you are a founder, you will watch user sessions. There's different services you can do and different software you can get to watch the user use your app. Typically, what happens is somebody who's a product manager or somebody in customer support or a founder will watch those videos and they'll look at their Google Analytics and find where like, oh, people don't click the purchase button or the try now button, or maybe you want to say try now or purchase and you want to A B test those two calls to action. So you set that up all manually, you do a test.

• 1:00:35Jason Calacanis?

  What this is doing is you've got on one side, OpenClaw, looking at whatever the software you use for your testing, and there's a million different testing frameworks, and then on the right, you've got Claude's, which is different than OpenClaw. Claude is the product from Anthropic and they have a Chrome extension. That Chrome extension is looking at actual users live on the site, then telling OpenClaw, here's what I learned, and then OpenClaw is saying, let me form a test based on that? Or what?

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  They're both, it's doing what you, the latter that you just said separately. And I'm just trying to show the pros and cons. And Jason, the ultimate ah ah moment.

• 1:01:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so there's two different ways to do it, and I think OpenClaw wins the test, is what you're saying?

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  Uh, it's faster, it's better, it's more customizable, it's amazing. I've been Claude-pilled, mind-blowing. But Jason, here's what I really need to hit you with. This one on the right costs, and Alex, I corrected the math, it's 10, it's an order of magnitude of 10 cheaper than we thought. Point, it's three cents to seven cents versus on the left, it cost me $16 in API.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  So you used $16 of API credits to run the work using OpenClaw. It worked, it was fast, it was good, but it was expensive. And then the Claude Chrome plugin cost you a couple of pennies. Is that API or is that like your fraction of your subscription cost?

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  It's a fraction of my subscription.

• 1:02:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  And, you know, it refreshes every eight hours, but, you know, use your OpenClaw to max out the subscription. That's a ton of money.

• 1:02:11Jason Calacanis?

  So this is just a bit in the weeds, Alex, but a good point. And it's great that you put some dollars on it. So this is really a great demo. Well done.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:02:20Jason Calacanis?

  Pro Max plan is like a hundred bucks a month from Anthropic. Anthropic probably loses money on this, or some users who max it out, they lose money on. But people who like use it lightly, like it's just a chat GPT, they probably make a ton of money on those. So that's why they banned OpenClaw from using your Pro Max subscription. Because that's not what they wanted to do, because they know the Pro Max, they know that the OpenClaw users are going to rip through the credits. And then that would turn their economics upside down. So there's a lot of inside baseball going on here. But George, what's your story? Are you an entrepreneur? You run a company? You work for a big company?

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  I do.

• 1:03:01Jason Calacanis?

  What do you, which one is it?

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:03:02Jason Calacanis?

  Walk me through it.

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm full time into Pickle Watch. I found out my wife was pregnant and I got laid off in the same week. And my life coach, therapist, mentor at the time told me, stop applying to jobs, build something.

• 1:03:16Jason Calacanis?

  So Pickle Watch is your company?

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 1:03:19Jason Calacanis?

  And Pickle Watch is, competes with what?

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  Have you played pickleball?

• 1:03:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  Awesome. Okay, so this is going to be really easy. I have the app running here. I have a pickleball paddle. And when I swing, it's going to color my watch green, yellow, red, depending on how that swing quality was.

• 1:03:39Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay, so Pickle Watch is a, an app?

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:03:45Jason Calacanis?

  Pickle Watch is an app to make you better at pickleball?

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:03:49Jason Calacanis?

  And there is a, there is one of these called Carve for skiers, Alex, which goes onto your boot. And it does the same thing on a very refined. So you actually have a consumer app and you just use this to figure out how to make your consumer app better. Now I got it. Okay. Perfect.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Track your swings, speed, and it gives you real time feedback after this is the simulator. You could keep score in real time as you're playing. It's going to give you feedback custom to your game and how you're playing.

• 1:04:22Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so Pickle Watch. There you go. I'm looking at it right now. Well done. And so can you make enough money here to support your family or no?

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  We're getting there. We're having a slow grow, but the potential's there, you know.

• 1:04:38Jason Calacanis?

  This is it? Pickle Watch Track Pickleball? Is this, I got the right one?

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  Yes, that's it. Yep.

• 1:04:42Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, it's a good looking app. You've got some good ratings, 44 ratings. You charge a hundred bucks a year for this thing?

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  No, 40, 45 a year, $2 a week, and then $80 a year. It's going to go up if anyone's curious pretty soon. So you can get it out of this app now, but it's free to use, free to try it. But that's not, we're going to hard paywall this pretty soon because it's growing.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, George, I'm just curious about how many people you'd have to hire to replace the agents you're currently using? Because I know you're building this by yourself and I know you also worked a lot to get ready for us today. So like, you know, if you had to hire people to replace your little, your little friends, how many would it take?

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  Definitely like probably one or two marketing people. Like that paywall thing I showed you with the A B testing, I was dreading doing that, guys, for like three, four months. And I did it in one night with one prompt and it blew my mind. I was like, oh my gosh, like so, so powerful.

• 1:05:36Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. Hey, listen, great job, George. I think, you know, sometimes you build something you're passionate about, which is great. Obviously, your Pickle Watch is great, but you may stumble onto something. So I always tell founders, keep your peripheral vision open. What you may have stumbled on is that there might be a bigger opportunity for you in doing watch and app.

• 1:06:01Jason Calacanis?

  Experiments, refinement, and making a tool for people who build that. So you might have like an even better concept that you could pivot to because those people might pay 500 a year. And you might be able to get 1,000 of them. You get 1,000 people, you're paying your $500 a year. A solo entrepreneur, you make 500 grand. And then you said you got a wife and kids, yeah? Yes. And then they might be like, oh, okay, yeah, don't get a job because it's gonna pay you four times as much. So just a piece of advice from a husband and an entrepreneur. Appreciate it. Great job. You're invited to join us. Thank you. March 16th, 17th. Join us at launchfestival.com. So you, George, get to come to launchfestival.com. Thank you, Jason.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Jason, before we let you go, I want to put you to the same test we gave Dave. It's only fair to ask you the same question. So when it comes to the Anthropic DOD, Department of War, sorry, situation, where do you come down on private companies and their rights versus the government and its needs?

• 1:06:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you know, this is America, and we have a long tradition of people getting to be pacifists if they want. They can literally, for religious reasons, not join the military during the draft and not be deserters, I guess. And so, you know, the people at Anthropic don't want to participate in the military. And it seems like, you know, it seems like this administration has like some issues with Anthropic. So, you know, there's a lot of gamesmanship going on here between those two parties. I liked Dave's take that maybe this is being done by Anthropic to get press or whatever. But I just want to say, you know, it's not, anybody in America can make the choice if

• 1:07:44Jason Calacanis?

  they want to work with the government. If I said to, with a very rare exception of like the, we're actually in a war and the country's being invaded and then you can take over production, like, you know, you're Tesla and you're making cars and all of a sudden the country's being invaded and we have, God forbid, another Pearl Harbor or 9/11. And the government said to you, hey, listen, Elon, we need you to make tanks or we need you to make submarines or whatever it happens to be, you know, it's like life or death. Okay, fine.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Jason Calacanis?

  Makes total sense. However... You know, in the case of like a peacetime situation, like let the company do what it wants to do. And I don't think they need to ban them as like some terrible contractor across the whole thing. That seemed like an unnecessary escalation. Do I think it's patriotic for a company to make tools and then not allow the government or the military to use them? Personally, I think that's a little like ungrateful. But listen, we allow people who are religious or who have like certain philosophies to hate gay people. Like I'm Catholic. We don't allow women to be priests. Or I grew up Catholic, I should say, I'm Christian, not Catholic. But they're allowed to hate gay people, not allow them

• 1:08:55Jason Calacanis?

  in the church, and say it's a sin, and they're allowed to not let women be priests. Okay, sexist, it's homophobic, but I guess in this country, you're allowed to be sexist and homophobic if you say it's for religion. You're also allowed to be a peacenik and say, I don't want to participate in this. And you could also be like, I just sell PCs and chips and batteries. And if people want to use a battery, I can't tell them what to do with the battery. So both of these arguments make sense to me. And I think we just need to settle this down. And if somebody's building a war OS, like a war-based language model, what a great opportunity. Just, you know, build a language model explicitly for the military. And that

• 1:09:38Jason Calacanis?

  actually seems like an incredible opportunity for somebody. Where is the Anthropic or OpenAI or Grok or Gemini specifically for the military? That sounds like a great thing to do. If MIR robots are not ready, it would be a lot better for society if instead of sending humans into combat, we sent robots into combat and they took care of bad guys. And by the way, with a bomb, what do we do, Alex? Do we send humans to defuse a bomb anymore like the Hurt Locker? Or do we send a robot?

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  I believe we have many robots for this task now.

• 1:10:06Jason Calacanis?

  Precisely.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Can I throw in just two cents before we wrap here?

• 1:10:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Anthropic has been pretty clear that they are super content to work with the DOD, have, they're working really hard to make sure this transition off of Anthropic onto, I guess, OpenAI technology is smooth. So I think that when we discuss patriotism, it's important to not conflate it directly with just what SecDef wants, but instead what makes sense for the nation as a whole. Because Anthropic's taken a lot of stick lately, and I don't think it's entirely earned. I think there's a lot of posturing to your point, and I don't want us, as a community, to say, hey, you don't get to have moral stances simply because the DOD or DAW says so. So I give them a little more credit than the average Twitter poster.

• 1:10:54Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Lon has a question. Here we go. Go ahead, Lon. You can break in, Lon, and ask.

• 1:10:58Speaker 05

  So Jason, would you personally fund a startup that said they were training an LLM to power domestic surveillance and autonomous killing machines?

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  I know the answer to this.

• 1:11:08Jason Calacanis?

  Well, domestic surveillance, definitely not. I don't think that that's a great idea. I think we have to really think about new laws and regulations because AI makes domestic surveillance a lot different than just, I happen to have a camera in my 7-Eleven in case I get robbed. Like, now you can have a camera that tracks across all the Ring cameras, you know, a lost dog. Completely noble. I think that was a great product. But you could also have a Ring camera that surveils people and knows their entire pattern, and that's wrong. Now, the cameras I have for my different properties, on my properties, I have cameras

• 1:11:48Jason Calacanis?

  from Unifi that record license plates, record facial recognition. It just comes like that out of the box, but that's for my property. Do I want that on every lamppost everywhere? No. Why? Because it's going to be abused. So we need to have some common sense, thoughtful legislation about that. So I wouldn't want to be involved in that. If you explicitly said we're going to track everybody domestically, no, I wouldn't want to invest in it.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  For murder bots.

• 1:12:12Jason Calacanis?

  Killing machines.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:13Jason Calacanis?

  Now, for murder bots. I think there's an important discussion to be had of if crazy dictator Kim Jong Un decides to send 10,000 troops from North Korea into South Korea, South Korea should have autonomous robots that could counter them and that, yes, if fired upon, would neutralize. Would I back a company doing that that was run by very thoughtful people that, you know, had a philosophy about it? Yeah, I would. Just, you know, it's not exactly in my interest. It's not in my kill zone, if you will. But I do think that that's better.

• 1:12:54Jason Calacanis?

  And what I would like to actually see, and this is what I would love to back, is non-lethals. I've always thought non-lethals was a really great investment category. And non-lethals include stun guns, right? There's nets and webbing. There's foams. And so I did do a deep dive on that a decade ago when there was a bunch of police killings. And I said, why don't we use these foams and stuff like that? Pull up foams that on YouTube. There's a foam you can spray on rioters, or an emotionally disturbed person, or a person with a knife, or a shooter. Now, if it's a school shooter, whatever, I don't care. Take them out. But if you have an emotionally disturbed person with a knife who's distraught, or I don't know, they lost all their money investing in MicroStrategy and they're destitute, Alex.

• 1:13:37Jason Calacanis?

  You know what I'm saying, Lon? There's a foam that you spray on people that immobilizes. It's an immobilization foam. This looks like something in science fiction, but they immobilize this guy with a foam. You spray the foam on them. They can't get up. They can't reach their gun. So, and it's sticky. And it's non-lethal. I think this could be like an incredible... So this falls under the category of non-lethals. What I would like to invest in, if somebody has an idea for this, I would like to do a military tech investment. I'm very, you know, pro military startups. I've got some favorites, in fact. And I'm very fond of the executives who run these companies. So I would like to look for non-lethal murder

• 1:14:19Jason Calacanis?

  bots. So, non-lethal bots is what I would invest in, to just put it plainly. All right, this has been another amazing episode of Twist, March 2, 2026. In the can, as my friend Leo Laporte would say. Sundays, watch This Week in Tech. He's Alex. I'm Jason. X.com/alex and X.com/Jason. We'll see you on Wednesday. Bye-bye.