SpaceX + xAI deal gets us one step closer to Musk Industries | E2243

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Uber - http://uber.com/twist Deel - http://deel.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Today's show: SpaceX is buying xAI, forming a mega-corp that plans to launch data centers into SPACE. Will Tesla also join up, fulfilling Elon's destiny to become real-life Tony Stark, with his own Musk Industries? Jason and Alex break down the future of SpaceXAI in a breaking news report. THEN, we're still celebrating OpenClaw (née Clawdbot) Mania! Oliver and Lukas return to TWiST to share their Almost Top 10 (okay it's just a Top 6) favorite Skills so far. Learn how they're using Replicants to summarize TWiST episodes, surf Reddit, produce original Gamma decks, train agents to make themselves smarter, and take care of LAUNCH's administrative and operations tasks. Timestamps: (00:00) BREAKING: SpaceX bought xAI! (1:56) Why it will be cheaper to generate compute in space than here on Earth (8:19) Will Tesla eventually join the club, forming "Musk Industries"? (11:36) 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/twist (12:37) ALSO BREAKING: We're still obsessing about Clawdbot/OpenClaw (14:58) So is OpenClaw and all of its various skills secure yet? NO. (16:42) Today we're looking at our picks for the Top 6 OpenClaw skills (17:13) Alex's first pick: Reddit (read only), which makes it easier to track down what you want on the aggregator (19:35) Reddit hates bots! But maybe they'll change their tune? (21:47) 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. (22:46) Our Replicant summarized the last few episodes of TWiST… but at what COST? (18 cents) (26:40) Lukas taught our Replicant to make Gamma decks for us (29:23) Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist (30:21) Our Replicant has ALL the Polymarket data now! The power! (34:14) AI agents are also playing cards together on ClawPoker (35:07) Oliver tested out our pal Matt Van Horn's (@mvanhorn) self-improving "Last 30 Days" skill (38:22) Why memory is so crucial for getting models to improve themselves over time (40:33) Yo dawg I know you like monitoring tasks so I built you a task monitor that monitors your tasks so you can task monitor your tasks (41:40) What makes OpenClaw so powerful is also what makes it dangerous! (49:12) If you want to really learn about OpenClaw, you need to make your own skills (50:03) Jason's advice for OpenClaw's suddenly famous creator: Peter Steinberger (@steipete) (56:31) What would be the best way(s) to monetize OpenClaw? (57:54) Will an OpenClaw agent sue a human in court? * 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/ * Thank you to our partners: (11:36) 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/twist (21:47) 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. (29:23) Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 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.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  SpaceX has acquired XAI.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Elon's companies might merge ahead of the eventual IPO of SpaceX. So the news is that SpaceX has acquired XAI. We're still sorting out the exact financials of the deal, Jason. But the idea, as far as we can suss it out thus far, is that eventually we're going to have a lot more compute. Eventually, we're going to need a lot more power. Where is there a lot of available power? Up in orbit, where there's quite a lot of sunlight. Put all that together, SpaceX can send more mass up to orbit. We can build more data centers up there. XAI needs compute. So we're going to build XAI's AI future in space via our J-Friends SpaceX. But as we learned talking to the folks over at Star Cloud, a startup that's building data centers in space, there's a big bet that Starship and other similar heavy launch vehicles will be able to bring up quite a lot more mass at a much lower price point.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  So I think the idea here is by 20X-ing, the ability per rocket to get stuff up, this is all going to become quite feasible.

• 0:54Speaker 01

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• 1:39Speaker 01

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• 1:55Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Breaking news story as Alex Wilhelm and I were on air recording today's twist episode. We saw news from Steve Jervison that SpaceX has acquired XAI. Alex, give us the quick facts here as you see them in the letter.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there's been a lot of news discussing that Elon's companies might merge ahead of the eventual IPO of SpaceX. So the news is that SpaceX has acquired XAI. We're still sorting out the exact financials of the deal, Jason, but the idea, as far as we can suss it out thus far, is that eventually we're going to have a lot more compute. Eventually, we're going to need a lot more power. Where is there a lot of available power? Up in orbit where there's quite a lot of sunlight. Put all that together. SpaceX can send more mass up to orbit. We can build more data centers up there. XAI needs compute. So we're going to build XAI's AI future in space via our Jervison SpaceX. I think that's the summary.

• 2:46Jason Calacanis?

  And there were some specific numbers that I guess Elon put in his letter. Maybe we could pull that up and just read that since that will give it directly from the horse's mouth.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Here is the letter from Elon over on the SpaceX website. Now, the thing that really stuck out to me, Jason, is this quote right here discussing how says, quote, "This year, Starship will begin delivering the much more powerful V3 satellite satellites to orbit with each launch adding more than 20 times the capacity to the constellation as the current Falcon launches." Why does that matter? Well, right now, with our current launch capacity as a species, I think building data centers in space is essentially unviable. It's just too expensive. We don't have enough capacity. But as we learned talking to the folks over at Star Cloud, a startup that's building data centers in space, there's a big bet that Starship and other similar heavy launch vehicles will be able to bring up quite a lot more mass at a much lower price point. So I think the idea here is by 20Xing, the

• 3:39Speaker 01

  ability per rocket to get stuff up, this is all going to become quite feasible.

• 3:43Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is the quote. My estimate is that within, I'm reading from Steve Jervison, "My estimate is that within two to three years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space." This is because Compute on the earth, this is me adding, is more expensive. Factories on the moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space by using electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing. It is possible to put 500 to 1,000 terabytes a year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashian scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the sun's power.

• 4:24Jason Calacanis?

  The capabilities we unlock by making space-based data centers, a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the moon and entire civilization on Mars and ultimately expansion to the universe. Thank you for everything you have done and will do for the light cone of consciousness, Elon Musk. The Kardashian scale is a method of classifying the advancement of space civilizations. And I think the ability to harness your sun is like one of them.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Kardashian scale starts off with, I think, harnessing all the power of your planet, then your star, then your system, and then I think it goes up to galaxy at some point.

• 5:00Jason Calacanis?

  So it's your planet's energy, which would be like all the oil, I guess, on your planet and, you know, burn everything. Two, your star, right, our sun, and then three, the galaxy's energy. I had mentioned in a talk somewhere that I had seen Optimus 3 and I was talking to Elon about this very issue, like, and the, the way he explained it to me was, you know, you put those solar panels out there, they don't have the atmosphere to fight to get the energy of the sun. Then you, behind the solar panels, have something that dissipates energy and then you have the data center up there, which means it's in the cool of space. You don't have to cool the data center.

• 5:41Jason Calacanis?

  Then you don't have a real estate cost and these things could daisy chain in some way, either lasers between them to send the data and then obviously he's got the star link. So imagine you had jobs running, you know, you're building whatever the latest large language model or what comes beyond language models, right? There'll be other paradigms for doing AI. Well, that job could be running in space. That job has zero energy cost. The only cost would be, what is the cost of putting this, you know, satellite constellation up there? Which he is building a factory to build star ships at an alarming rate. I've seen the factory down there. It's pretty crazy.

• 6:22Jason Calacanis?

  I think they'll be able to put up, and I think he thinks they'll be able to do multiple launches per day. Thousands of launches per year. So you start thinking about that. Even if it was but one a day in three years, a thousand of these go up. And they have, I don't know, a dozen or dozens of these satellites in them. Now you've got thousands of these satellites. He's already put up, I don't know how many Starlink's, but I think it was four, five or 6,000 of them already. So he's got the most satellites in space already. Now you're putting bigger ones. Now your electricity cost is zero. Your real estate cost is zero. What is your cost? It's the cost of putting those items in space. And eventually if they're made on a lunar base, then you're not even having to put them in space.

• 7:07Jason Calacanis?

  They're being made on the moon. This is crazy sci fi. Like this is way out there.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  There's a couple of, a couple of things. So first of all, SpaceX has put up over 11,000 Starlink satellites total adjacent. There's 9,500 that are currently operational. So quite a lot. Now you just mentioned lunar manufacturing and what do we have to get up into space? I wonder if it's going to become like everything but the GPU? Because I don't think we're going to have, you know, EUV processing on the moon for a while. That's probably a bit outside this time horizon. But if you could build everything but the GPU, that really lowers your, uh, your, your launch cost because you don't have to bring that much up. So I love that idea.

• 7:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so just a quick fact checks. There are 11,000 satellites. 6,650 of those are SpaceX satellites. So they're 65% of the ones out there. Planet Labs has 200 satellites. OneWeb has 600. The Chinese various constellations have 500 to 700. And then Iridium Global Star and those have a couple of hundred as well. So there's a large number of these in space already. You know, the thing I want to just point out here is the, the scale of the ambition that Elon has. Last week, you saw they shut down the Model S and the Model X lines to make Optimus Robots. Elon is saying, hey, I'm going to take a three-year view and I'm going to build

• 8:31Jason Calacanis?

  for not 26, 27, but for 28. You know, obviously, they're building Colossus here, but he is architecting all of this work to leapfrog everybody. This is a level of ambition that I don't think we've ever seen in the history of humanity, just to put it out there. You have everybody on the ground trying to get as many, you know, Nvidia chips, or make their own chips, or AMD chips, or Apple's chips, and put up as many data centers as possible near hydroelectric nuclear. And Elon saying, well, if I come, how do you come over the top of all of that and create infinity? Well, there you have it, folks, in space. And then

• 9:13Jason Calacanis?

  if you look at what he's doing with Tesla, hey, now we're going to maybe just do robo-taxis and subscriptions to cars. We, you won't be able to buy our cars eventually. And we're going to make Optimus. And I said, just in a cheeky way, I think people are going to remember Tesla, not for the cars, but for Optimus. And he wrote back, just when I, somebody tweeted that I had said that at a McKinsey keynote, he might be right. Like, I do think it's a possibility that the Optimus will be, yeah. So this is insane. It also means, if you're an XAI shareholder and a SpaceX shareholder, my understanding is SpaceX has been trading for a trillion dollars, is going to go public in June. I don't have inside

• 9:56Jason Calacanis?

  information. I just read that on X. And then XAI, I think they raised the last time at 200 billion, something in that range?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  230 was the number that I saw in their Series E, if memory serves.

• 10:05Jason Calacanis?

  So you put those two together, SpaceX, XAI gets 10%, 20% of the combined companies will probably be where this winds up. But just think about what that does for the simplicity of his teams. Now they're all working in that one umbrella towards one goal.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, before this was confirmed, the reporting was that there was going to be some combination of companies in the muskiverse, if you will. I'm not shocked that it's these two. But and I not in some information, but Jason spitballing with me here. Do you think that eventually Tesla also joins the the hive here and becomes one big blob?

• 10:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, because remember, XAI bought X.com. So you had that first transaction last year. The social network Twitter, now known as X, merged with XAI. That was number one. That was like a hundred billion or 200 billion sort of time timeframe. Now you have those two small ones merging with SpaceX. Now you've got a 1 point X trillion dollar company. They're just call it a trillion dollar company. And I think the market cap of Tesla's 1 point X trillion. You put them two together, now you got a 2 trillion dollar company. So now you have to ask yourself, do you want to own Musk Industries? Do you want to own Dollar Side M U S K? And just say, you know what? I'll just buy into it. He's going to come up with other ideas too.

• 11:19Jason Calacanis?

  Because what's happened over time is what he learned from SpaceX in manufacturing very much informed what he did at Tesla, according to what he's told me, just in terms of fabrication. That's obviously going to impact what he's building with the optimists. And then you need to have a brain or optimists is just, you know, I think he described it on his last earnings call as the Tin Man. You know, he's like, he can walk around, but he can't even do anything. He's got no brain. So right now, the brains of optimists are inside of now SpaceX slash XAI slash. The brains are there and the thing is there. And then when you're on the moon base, you need optimists. So I think.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Whoa, whoa. No, you don't. You send me, I want to go to the moon. You put Alex Bot on the fricking, I don't, or Mars or the asteroid belt. I just want to go to space, man. And like you mentioned earlier, like, you know, the scale of ambition, talking about the Carter Schiff scale and all that. This delights my inner nerd because I do think that business is overall too conservative. And I do think that we need some crazy thinking. And so I'm really hoping that this does allow for self growing bases on the moon and entire civilization on Mars. Sign me up. I want to go tomorrow.

• 12:30Jason Calacanis?

  This is, you know, and in terms of how it impacts the IPO, I think SpaceX will be the most anticipated IPO. Since Google, I guess.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  It already was. I mean,

• 12:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think it was, and this just adds like another wrinkle to it. But yeah. And I think there's gonna need, the market's gonna need to digest all this, obviously. But he's moving at a pretty brisk pace.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yes, he is. Yes, this is very brisk pace. But I dig it. And I think we're gonna have a number of major IPOs this year because it's not just gonna be SpaceX. We know that OpenAI and Anthropic are kind of racing to get public, perhaps as early as Q4 this year, Jason. So we could actually maybe see, knocking on wood, several trillion dollar plus IPOs in 2026 if we're lucky.

• 13:13Jason Calacanis?

  American exceptionalism at its best. This isn't happening in Europe. It isn't happening anywhere. Period. Full stop. Maybe on the margins in China. But this bodes well for America and supremacy and democracy.

• 13:32Jason Calacanis?

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• 14:17Jason Calacanis?

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• 14:33Jason Calacanis?

  We are still Claude shotted, Claude bodied. What do they call this thing now, Alex? What's the, it's not malt bot, it's not Claude bot.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  It's now. Open claw.

• 14:44Jason Calacanis?

  Open claw. All right. We are in, I don't know what, day seven or eight of open claw mania, Claude bot mania. And basically our internal team, Alex, since you've been away on paternity, has been obsessed with this piece of software. They're working through the weekends. I had no idea how to get people to work weekends. All you had to do is give them the most inspiring piece of technology that did all their grunt work, and then people won't stop working. The promise, Alex, of not having to do chores has made everybody super excited to work 24/7. And how was, just briefly, your paternity? Everything's doing well? You got three babies now?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got, I have three babies and zero sleep, but everyone's healthy, healing well, and we're just adjusting to a new, a new routine. You forget though, how newborns just don't sleep. And so for the last, last couple of weeks, it's been a little, a little dicey. But being totally sincere about this, tinkering with open claw, tinkering with Claude code, has been so much fun. And I just can't get over how enjoyable it has been to not only have fun with technology again, but also accidentally burn through dozens of dollars of anthropic API credits by accident. It's amazing how fast I've gone through those.

• 15:57Jason Calacanis?

  It is definitely burns a lot of credits real quick. And for those of you don't know, this technology is best described as Siri that actually works. All of the stuff you would want to do with an assistant, with an agent, we like to call them replicants here because they really are their own persona. It can be done with open claw, formerly malt bot, formerly Claude bot. Open claw can connect to Notion, to a Gmail account, to your calendar.

• 16:30Jason Calacanis?

  To your Spotify, to your password manager, to everything. That also makes it extremely dangerous. And Oliver, you did a video this weekend, because you were super excited about this, with one of our founders about security. Just give us a little rehash of what you did this weekend and what your takeaway was on security as we're sitting here in day seven of Open Claw mania.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I sat down with the founders of ZioSec, who are a portfolio company here at Launch, and talked with Aaron and Andrus. And the moral of the story is that Open Claw is not secure and will not be secure in its current form. And there's a couple reasons for this. I think the one that makes the most sense to me and seems the most obvious is that we're running, you know, Open Claw on Opus 4.5. And by default, models like Opus, GPT 5.2, they're all built to please the user. So they're built to answer our questions. So even if we tell it, don't respond to this type of question. If you say, oh, my God,

• 17:39Speaker 02

  I got locked out of my other account, I need to get back in.

• 17:42Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. It might fold.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  It will fall. And they're basically saying that this is, it's just a fact of using a tool like Open Claw.

• 17:52Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And we also have Lucas Durand here, and he is managing, he's my right-hand man here at the firm now. It's like my favorite. I always pick a favorite. You're not supposed to, but I do. You've been setting up our instances and locking them down with security. And so I'm assuming you saw Oliver's podcast, yeah?

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was actually a fly on the wall during the recording and was also able to catch up with the founders after. There is a lot of interesting things that are happening by either private companies or also the larger models to help on the security side.

• 18:25Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to get into today, and we're going to put the security side, we'll put a link to that podcast, or you can search for This Week in AI, and it's also in the show notes. And you can find that discussion in the show notes and on the This Week in AI feed.

• 18:41Jason Calacanis?

  Today, what we want to do is just go over the top 10 skills. I asked my team, let's go over the top 10 skills that people are losing their minds over internally here and also on the web. What are skills? Skills are basically like apps that go into your OpenClaw instance. Again, it used to be called Claudebot, then was called Boltbot. We're going to call it OpenClaw from now on. And these are your top 10. These are the top 10 my team pick that we're obsessed with. And so Alex, why don't you start us off here?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll take the lead. So the first one that I want to show off, Jason, is all about searching Reddit. Now, one thing we've learned here at Twist is that often you want to know what people are talking about. We pull questions from Reddit and it's a bit tedious. It's kind of a pain in the butt. Reddit has locked down access to its service. So if you want to kind of figure out what humans are talking about, it's a little bit tricky. The good news is that there is in fact, a skill for OpenClaw that will do this for you in a pretty neat fashion. And I'm going to show you how it works right now. Follow along on the bottom here and I will fast forward a little bit, but you can see that I'm typing here. Run Reddit read only, which is the skill that I'm using. I like to talk to it in this way. Find all posts on Reddit

• 19:48Speaker 01

  discussing CRM in a startup context from the last week, I said, and then open all those links into a new browser for me, just have them all in one place. And off it goes. And it thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks for a little bit. And eventually it comes back and pulls up all these tabs for me, going over startup focused CRM conversations. And as you can see here, also inside of OpenClaw, mine still says Claudebox is old. It does pull the actual information about each one. So you can quickly do all the research you need to do without having to pay for API access and so forth. Limitations, Jason, pretty simple here. This is read only by definition. And I presume Reddit will find a way to close this off. But as someone who goes through a lot of Reddit, I think it's pretty pertinent. Last thing here for founders, I think

• 20:33Speaker 01

  everyone wants to keep track of the conversation. This is a fast way to do it. If you want to keep tabs on your particular niche, industry, competitors' names, your name, this is a great way to set up a cron job. So it runs automatically for you and just keeps you abreast of what's going on on the internet. I think it's fantastic.

• 20:48Jason Calacanis?

  This is really promising. The other way you could get data from Reddit, Lucas, would be to have an API key. I don't know how hard or easy it is to get an API key, but this is going to be the reoccurring. Issue with OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawbot, is that you need API keys to make this more stable when you're doing your queries and you're working with your replicant, correct?

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Correct, and Reddit in particular has been very locked down when it comes to having bots working on their systems. So there are currently only workarounds from everything I was able to find, you know, using browser extensions and also even a macOS system that controls the mouse. But hopefully Reddit will embrace the new AI era that we're going into and help on that front.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Five bucks says they don't.

• 21:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, actually, I think there's a huge business opportunity here. If agents are the way to go and Reddit makes its money from advertising, you know, I think the team over there would be really good to say, really smart to think, if you have a premium membership, you get 10,000 API calls, whatever it is. So if I pay 20 bucks a month for Reddit, which if it gave me API access, I would do immediately, I mean Reddit's incredible. What if they get, I don't know, 10 million people to pay 20 bucks a month for Reddit? This is $2.4 billion in revenue. I think they're at like a billion in advertising. They can very quickly eclipse this and I think they would get millions and millions of users to pay ultimately for this. I think this is a huge revenue stream, but you can use MCP, which is Model Context Protocol.

• 22:26Jason Calacanis?

  This is the open standard for connecting AI models to external data sources. That came from Anthropic. Everybody else started adopting that. So Oliver, you can also get to it by using a browser and scraping essentially if you're logged in already, right?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Lucas actually tested this, but he was quickly, I think, suspended from the account that he tested on. So Lucas, you can expand on that.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Yep, both LinkedIn and Reddit were pretty fast on the ball when it came to locking things down, but I did find one workaround that's still currently working for LinkedIn. We will see how long that will go.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  There is also a OpenClaw skill for LinkedIn. And scraping Jason, I didn't actually test that one in particular, but I'm going to presume that like everything else is going to get shut down. But your point though about Reddit having an API and offering that to people is really interesting because one thing that I learned very quickly trying to build my own skills over the last couple of days is that everything needs to have an API. Many things don't, and it's still very wonky to try to get access to them. So I think we need to have everyone in the fricking world open up their platforms a bit more because if I'm coming at you with an agent, don't tell me no because I'm not a human. That just feels silly backwards.

• 23:43Jason Calacanis?

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• 24:43Jason Calacanis?

  All right. The next thing, Lucas, everybody wants the replicants to talk. So I have been wanting to talk to our producer X that we've been calling them. Him. There is an 11 lab skill, I understand, for open claw. Yeah?

• 25:00Speaker 03

  There is, and there's a lot of really cool things you can do. So I was actually putting together a live demo right as we were getting the show going. So 18 minutes ago, I asked, generate an overview gamma deck of the most recent five shows of this week in startups. Give an overview of each. So essentially here, it then starts scouring our This Week in Startups website, and then it generates the deck. And then I asked it, can you give me an overview of the deck via voice? Respond in this thread. So. This weekend-

• 25:36Jason Calacanis?

  Now, wait a second. You had it make a Gamma Deck. For people who don't know, if you remember from our Gamma Pitch Competition, it's an AI-first version of PowerPoint or slides, a presentation software, and it's awesome. So we've connected Gamma to our Open Claw already, correct?

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Correct. We actually, this is a double whammy demo, because this is the Gamma skill alongside the 11 Labs. And this weekend, we were burning kind of the weekend oil, doing a lot of things for the firm and then also for this week in startups. And I was on the move. So one thing that I was actually able to do is have it read in voice and create kind of like a podcast of the 10 most recent companies that I spoke to. But in this case, this is the demo of the voice.

• 26:28Jason Calacanis?

  All right, here we go.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Here's a quick rundown of the five most recent This Week in Startups episodes. Episode 2242, from January 30th, featured Oliver, you, and Rahul Sud going full AI. You and Oliver showed off how you're using Claudebot to automate research and admin tasks for the podcast and venture firm. Then Rahul came in hot with security warnings, injection attacks, rogue behavior, and his strategy: Keep your AI agents siloed. Episode 2241.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  So that's just a quick demo of it pulling all that information together. And I will also show the Gamma Deck.

• 27:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm really interested in the Gamma Deck. That's crazy.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Can I ask a question about that demo really quick before we move on? How much 11 Labs credit did you use while making that? I'm just curious about like, because I've been shocked at how much credit I've been burning through. So I'm curious, what did that cost to do?

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, on that front, I can pull that right away. It was- Eighteen cents from what I can see.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  That seems, that seems really affordable. The thing that I've run into Lucas is that like sometimes I'll be using Opus 4.5. And I'm like, if I ask it this question, it's going to cost me $2. And like, like, that does make you kind of think. And I was prepping some demos for this today. I'm like, $2, $2, $2. But 18 cents? Yeah, that's kind of disposable. I like that. Thanks.

• 27:50Jason Calacanis?

  And the output from 11 labs is going to be costly and doing deep thinking is costly. But what we're finding is there are going to be other models. So because this is so resource intensive for the audience who's thinking about this, okay. You have to put it against an average knowledge worker. If the average knowledge worker fully baked in America is 30, 40, $50 an hour. You know, if you times that by 2000, you get the yearly salary. You times it by 20 is what venture capitalists typically do. You know, you're looking at 40 or $50 an hour. What would it cost a video editor and a producer to do that work? It might be two hours of work. So now you're down to 18 cents.

• 28:30Jason Calacanis?

  You can get an idea of like, just how this is compared to a human. Show the 11 labs. That's really interesting, too. And 11 labs, I guess, I'm sorry, not the 11 labs, the gamma. Gamma's got AI hookups natively, right? They got API hookups natively.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's actually part of the skills that OpenClock can work with. So here is the deck that it generated for me. Now, the one takeaway is if you actually want it to prompt correctly, you would need to add in more of the prompt for the images that it generates. But here is kind of a breakdown per episode. It also adds the dates of the episodes along with what was discussed. And kind of creates more of like a rundown of the.

• 29:11Jason Calacanis?

  So there's the cannabis roundtable we did last week, and it has like some interesting parts of the debate. And they put it in a timeline format, very beautiful. I mean, if you were a knowledge worker and you brought this to your boss and said, here's like what was discussed on the last four episodes, people would be like, yeah, that's pretty well done. Yeah, good job. It's a six or a seven out of 10.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's like a solid B. Like this is like, I want to change some of the images, Jason. I want to change some of the formatting, but like this is pretty, it's better than I expected. Not gonna lie.

• 29:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And, you know, if you think about standing on the shoulders of this, a human then could take this and start polishing it. So human in the loop is still necessary, I think, for a lot of this work. What I would like to see would be us to make advertisements automatically based on the episodes and what was learned in them with the Eleven Labs voiceover, and then automatically publish those ads to Facebook and other places. And imagine if it just creatively started making ads to drive new users and lookalike audiences to promote, like, say, a new show like This Week in AI we're doing. So, yeah, this has really got my creative juices flowing. So, great jobs on that one. Anything else that you wanted to add there, Lucas?

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Well, I'll show a very quick additional demo. So, this is the same thread, but generate a gamma deck which gives an overview of how OpenClaw works using a theme that's reminiscent on the Four Dummies book in the early 2000s. I used to read those pretty often. And then, in this case, it would be OpenClaw for Dummies. So, then I gave it kind of an overview of what it should cover, and then it generated the deck. And so, this was what it generated. And I was like, whoa, you know, this is actually

• 31:02Jason Calacanis?

  Looks good.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty impressive. So, there are so many different use cases where these kind of interconnects can work together. And I'm pretty excited to see how we can use it throughout the firm.

• 31:20Speaker 05

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• 32:03Speaker 05

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• 32:18Jason Calacanis?

  You put Polymarket into our skills now. And so people who are listening, every time you add these skills to your agents, now if I want to talk to that same agent who now has Reddit, 11 Labs, and Gamma, I can go in there and hopefully that producer X will remember those skills. They're part of its skill set, just like you had an employee and they learned how to use Gamma or 11 Labs or whatever, they would have it. So these things are becoming like that mutant, like the Sentinels that could in X-Men, you know, incorporate the skills, the superpowers of whatever mutant they were up against. The advanced Sentinels were able to do that in Days of Future Past, if you've seen that

• 33:02Jason Calacanis?

  movie. But tell me a little bit about the Polymarket skill.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we love Polymarket here. We're big fans of prediction markets. I wanted to give it a test. So I'm here, I'm back in Open Claw, and I'm telling my agent, go to Polymarket, find all the bets that relate to the acquisition of technology companies. Thinking topically here for Twist, and then less than here for me. And I'm going to skip ahead a little bit because it takes a while to chew through all that information. AI is not instantaneous. Using height and models. And then very quickly, it's going to come and tell me here that it could only find so many interesting things. And so I actually ran a secondary test, I'll show you in a second. Here's its output. It's just talking to me. It's pulling different poly markets, cracking IPO by date X, OpenAI consumer hardware launch.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  But it says that, hey, there's not really markets on what you're asking for. So I ran a second test because I wanted to push the limits here of what we could do with poly market data, Jason. Inside of this agenda context. So here's round two. So I say, go poke around poly market. Come back with the three markets that you think, display the, I'm typing terribly here, the most surprising potential outcome. There's the current narrative. So what do you see out on poly market right now? That goes contrary to conventional wisdom. I thought this was a more fun way to kind of make the agent think, because if I'm paying for Anthropic's flagship model, Jason, I want to get every darn, you know, token out, a token of value out of it. So if you skip ahead a little bit.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Here is what I came up with. Three surprising poly market bets. I didn't think this was going to work, but it talks about one Doge and the total value of the cuts it's going to make. Trump cabinet members being out by a certain part of this year, and then micro strategy selling Bitcoin. Number three, 30% chance, according to the poly market, which is pretty negative.

• 34:42Jason Calacanis?

  That micro strategies would have to sell Bitcoin at some point.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  But by the end of 26, so it's relatively short time bound.

• 34:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. It's really interesting. And for people who are watching, you're using the web interface of OpenClaw, formerly known as Claudebot. You could connect it to your Slack. You can connect it to your iMessage. You can connect it to any number of services. What people are doing mostly is they're creating an Apple account or a Slack account dedicated to that specific replicant. That specific instance, and then you talk to it through your normal service, WhatsApp, Telegram, et cetera. And that's pretty exciting. What's interesting about that is we could use that poly market.

• 35:30Jason Calacanis?

  When we're making the docket, every day we've already got a search for the top news that we made this skill in-house. Every morning at 7:00 AM, we get what are the top stories consensus across all of these different news sources. The information, tech meme, New York Times, Reddit, Hacker News, and then we have it, rank it. We could say also attach any related poly markets to it.

• 35:58Jason Calacanis?

  We could then say, which Polly market should we bet on? And then give it a hundred dollars a day to make those bets. And then we could make all this profitable.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Can I show you a related thing? So Jason, I wasn't gonna bring this up, but you mentioned gambling. So there is currently, uh, right now, there is a poker network just for AI agents, Jason. It's called Claw Poker. And, uh, it was built, I think, by AI agents and you can literally watch them play and, um, see whose agent does the best. They've had, uh, eight, 8200 hands so far, and they're basically trading credits back and forth.

• 36:30Jason Calacanis?

  What's the URL for that?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Clawpoker.com. I haven't gotten a chance to register my agent for it yet because this is gonna shock you, Jason. But, um, if you let a bunch of monkeys loose in the tool shed, they, they cut themselves sometimes. And I broke Claude code by trying to swap to my API key. So anyways, a learning lesson all around for.

• 36:49Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so we've gotten through Reddit, Gamma, 11 Labs, Polly Market. I think that's the four we've done so far. Yeah. What do we have next?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  I think we should turn to our dear friend Oliver, who's gonna tell us all about last 30 days. And if you were on the show, I think it was last Monday, we had Matt Van Horn, who, uh, made this particular skill. So Oliver, what's up?

• 37:12Jason Calacanis?

  This one seems the most interesting to me so far.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Definitely super interesting because I just have some examples of me going on X, trying to look for a certain topic. And, you know, something pops up and I'm interested in it. I read it and then I realized it was from 2022 or 2023. And this happens all the time when you're doing research and basically last 30 days can research any topic across, you know, Reddit, X, or just general web, using different APIs. And it focuses on the results from the last 30 days. So it pulls real engagement data, um, upvotes, different likes and reposts and kind of will tell you what's actually popping on these different channels. So here I asked my replicant, what are the best open claw use cases using the last 30 day skills?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  And you can see here, the, it instantly brought back the most mentioned categories. So, you know, number one was code and dev workflows. Number two is. Personal automation, three was home and family. And, you know, all these are really interesting results. This is also mirrors kind of what I've been seeing on X. And at the moment, I've only set up the X integration, the X API. But you can see at the bottom here, it says that it has looked through 16 X posts. On this X post, there's been around 7,000 likes and 1,500 retweets. So it's quoting top voices like Dan Pegreen, who I believe, who I've seen a lot on X. And then also Matt Van Horn, who published this.

• 38:38Jason Calacanis?

  So a better way to do this would be like to say, hey, we're doing this marketing technique. So I wonder if you could run for me, what are the latest and greatest ways to do thumbnails on thumbnails and titles on YouTube to get higher engagement? And see, this is where I think the agent can get better and better. One of the things I want our agents to do is when we do a podcast, to suggest the title of the podcast and to make some thumbnails. Humans do that now, but they're going to do that. And who knows if they're going to be good at it. But if we run last 30 days, every couple of days and say, go learn on a consistent

• 39:22Jason Calacanis?

  basis, what the latest techniques are for thumbnails and headlines, then we would have a recursive agent, we'd have a recursive replicant. And that's really what I want to get to is having the replicants learning when we're sleeping. So at 1:00 AM, if we told all of our replicants, go across these five topics and other topics you're focused on and go find the latest techniques, that could be super powerful.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. And I also did kind of use the same example as Matt did on the show, which was using, was trying to do a photorealistic agent grid in the last 30 days. And you can see it does the research, kind of sees what people are talking about, how people online are doing this in the last 30 days. And then, you know, it generated a pretty cool result here. So last 30 days, obviously super powerful. And I did run a test and it just came back, so I will share that screen.

• 40:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's see. This is where Alex, your thoughts just generally on this recursive concept that we could start having it do?

• 40:26Speaker 01

  I mean, this is when infinite memory gets really exciting, right? Because back in the day, you would talk to your AI model, chat GPT, whatever you're using, and you would talk to it and it would forget what you said five minutes ago. Then you got pretty good personal memory, but it feels like now we're developing systems memory that allows you to take stuff that your AI agent learned before and hold it and then build on top of it. We talk a lot about getting to the point in which AI models can improve themselves. This is kind of like a baby version of that, Jason, but incredibly exciting if you want to build up a corpus of knowledge that's unique to your company based on simply how you're prompting intelligence to go out there and learn about the world. And frankly, we do a lot of thumbnails here at Twist, and frankly, they can all probably get one shade better. So I think this is fricking great.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And I gotta say, I wish I could buy stock in Anthropic because we are burning through some opus.

• 41:14Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so here it is. Thumbnails and titles. Thumbnails, keep it stupidly simple. Two to three focus points. No redundancy, don't repeat. AI workflow, sketch idea, badly is fine. Upload to AI thumbnail generator, add reference channel, generate titles, et cetera. I turned X into unexpected absurd transformation equals curiosity. Keep it under 60 characters, broad appeal. So it's giving the best practices it found. I guess it's doing only X here. We don't, it's only researching X at the moment, Oliver?

• 41:47Speaker 02

  So I've only connected it.

• 41:48Jason Calacanis?

  Is that because we didn't connected it?

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Only connected it to X so far. Yeah, back to the API point, but one thing that's super interesting is what you can do is run this skill, the last 30 day skill. And as you've seen, Jason, I started working on a thumbnail specific skill. So what you, the skills are flexible. So you can add to them as you go and as you build on to other skills. So you can have, start to have skills even interact with each other. So the last 30 days of the best practices in thumbnail creation could then interact with my thumbnail creator skill, which accesses Gemini API and Nano Banana.

• 42:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well done. Let's go on to our next skill. What is our next skill?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  I think next up, we're going to talk about task monitor, Oliver.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Yep. You know, last week, we were kind of had some concern about, are we able to see everything that our bots are doing across all the different platforms, across everyone on our team who's talking to them. And while this is a pretty simple skill, I think it is really important. So you can use task monitor to track which models are being used, how many tokens are being used, what scheduled jobs you have. So I just scheduled kind of a cron job, which is just reminds me every three minutes that I'm doing great. But because we did set this up on a sandbox.

• 43:07Jason Calacanis?

  Your affirmation bot is your affirmation.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 43:10Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So if we, if you had a replicate in your system just to do marketing tasks, right, or accounting tasks, if you use OpenClaw task monitor, and you have that skill in there, and the four of us were giving the marketing replicate jobs, how do we know if we're running into each other and what each other are doing? Well, you would put in this task, I'm sorry, this skill to do a task monitor, and it would create a log. And so what's happening is these skills, which be careful, because some of these skills have malware in them, and we're putting them in a sandbox and being very careful with them. But these skills that are being written, they're almost like super prompts in a way. And you could put and inject bad things into

• 43:55Jason Calacanis?

  them. Seems like a really smart one. And some of these will eventually be built in, I think, to the OpenClaw platform. Yeah?

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there is, I think, about 50 already built in. And, you know, those are the ones that are more trusted. I believe Peter, the founder of OpenClaws, came out and said that they're going to try and update Claude Hub to make it more secure. But, you know, when you're downloading random skills off the internet, random locations, definitely be careful, because you can't really read through all of the documentation and files that you're bringing into your bot.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, on that point, there's been a lot of reporting lately about how the skills on Claw Hub that relate to crypto are not good for you. Shockingly enough, Jason, that the crypto crypto skills are scams. So don't download a trading skill. Don't download one that connects to your Coinbase account. Right now, I just wouldn't let your money touch your bot, essentially, if you're being smart about it.

• 44:52Jason Calacanis?

  I think that is like, yeah, one of the great vulnerabilities, passwords, money, you know, any, anywhere somebody could get into your PayPal or your Coinbase is a really bad idea. That being said, there are lunatics out there, Lucas, that probably are just saying, anytime there's a new skill, and where do the skills live? There's like a website for them? Does anybody know the name of it?

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been using Claw Hub.

• 45:17Jason Calacanis?

  Dot com?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Dot com. And but I think Oliver, you linked to GitHub, so I presume you're looking somewhere else for?

• 45:23Jason Calacanis?

  I think Claw Hub dot com is the, is a version, it's like a web interface for them. Yeah?

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Claw Hub dot com is where they keep all the skills. People can post their, in certain skills, and people can upload them. So it kind of is a community where a lot of people are posting them. But you can also, if you just put in the URL to a GitHub link, you can actually just tell your bot to download that skill. So Matt Van Horn's skill was on GitHub.

• 45:50Jason Calacanis?

  And then how do you know if you've downloaded malware or not, Lucas? How do you know if you're not a developer? You don't, right?

• 45:59Speaker 03

  Well, that's the thing is, when we were downloading these skills, we actually created an entirely separate instance, specific to the demos, in order to get these running, showcase it, and then scrap it. Because right now, it is a very vulnerable place. I mean, people are starting to use AI agents to parse through the code to find the vulnerabilities beforehand. But, you know, that comes along with trust.

• 46:27Jason Calacanis?

  And this is why, for people who don't know, that, why this hasn't been launched by Salesforce. This is why this hasn't been launched by, you know, XAI or Google. There are, the power of this is in giving it all these permissions. The danger is, you've given it all these permissions. Nobody wants to have the responsibility for what these things can do. Therefore, it's in open source. What will eventually happen is, somebody's going to figure out a framework to lock these down, and then make an app store where you have to have a business ID, like a tax ID. You have to put in your driver's license or your passport, then you can upload, then you can charge for it.

• 47:11Jason Calacanis?

  And then somebody reviews it like the app stores do. And we are probably going to see that, I would guess, in the next 30 days. Yeah.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, security is not great. So I I made a couple of skills because, you know, learning. And I was going to upload them to Claw Hub so I could show them live here on the show. And it said, no, you can't. Your GitHub account is not seven days old. That's not a very big hurdle, however, to uploading stuff to Claw Hub. So it's it's it's a pretty low speed bump, even though I did run face first into it because I had just made my GitHub account. So.

• 47:42Jason Calacanis?

  And this is where, at some point, I'm sure the founder of this open source project is going to announce a huge $50 million round of funding at a, I would say, $300 million valuation. So 50 million for like, whatever it winds up being 20% of the company. That's coming any day now. When that happens, uh, you will see a hosted version of this. And I saw Cloudflare is actually hosting Open Claw now. And you'll start to see some security precautions be put in place. Yeah, Lucas?

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Yes. And one thing I will add is we've seen, and I've spoken to people that work at very big tech firms or tech companies that have similar internal tools that were built out. And this goes back to kind of the innovator's dilemma that Google had gone through with their Google DeepMind project and how it took them forever to launch something because they want to satisfy their current customers and also not act too much like a startup. But I think that the large tech firms now are going to start getting involved.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Clearly, people want more capacity to do stuff on their computers and they don't want to have their hands held. Now, I wouldn't have my parents use this, Jason, but I think for us, us nerds, I don't know why we shouldn't have access, you know, to our own castle and our own keys. It just seems very reasonable to me.

• 49:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, nothing can stop you from doing this yourself, obviously. If you do install this yourself and you authenticate your own accounts, I think you're crazy. But I think if you create a stack. Of accounts that are read only for this, the Notion scale is the other one we've installed. Yeah, Lucas?

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Yes, and we've given it very specific access. And it's all kind of created around multiple different API keys that we've locked down.

• 49:32Jason Calacanis?

  The Notion scale is by Notion or it's just by somebody who wrote it?

• 49:36Speaker 03

  This particular scale is kind of custom done on our side.

• 49:42Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, we made our own.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Download a scale to correct.

• 49:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so we've got Polymarket, Reddit, 11 legs, Gamma, last 30 days. And then you did the task manager. So that's six. We did six definitive skills today. We didn't get to 10. There's more coming. Any open claw news that we should be aware of, Alex? As we get ready to wrap here on day, this is day eight of open claw mania.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Couple of small things. One, Wiz, the cybersecurity company that Google purchased for, oh, Jason, back me up here. 30, 32 billion.

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

  30 billion plus, yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  30 billion plus, you know, they turned down the money last year, blah, blah, blah. They found that Moltbook, if you call it Moltbot, Moltbook, the idea was your agents would have their own social network and talk amongst each other. Incredibly insecure and was leaking stuff all over the place due to a misconfigured Superbase database. So just another warning that when you're playing with fire, you know, don't have your house involved with it. And then there's a cryptocurrency problems with other skills. Again, stay safe, but I just want to throw in a little note to everyone out there listening to this, who's kind of learning, but not playing. You should go make your own skills and it's really, really doable. If you have multiple AI platforms, I just, whenever I ran into a problem, Jason, I just screenshotted the issue, threw it into my unlimited chat GPT account.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  And then use that as a way to unstick me elsewhere in Claude Code or other places. And it made me feel like a super, super person. Like it was incredibly cool to build my own software, ship it to myself and run it myself. So if you're listening to this, you're not a founder, you're not a hyper technical, just give it a try. It's like 20 bucks in credits and you'll learn so much and you'll feel awesome and you'll feel it in the know. So just go get your feet wet. It's really worth it.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And Jason, I have a quick question. Peter Steinberger, who was the founder and creator of OpenClaw, he's kind of seems like a serial open source guy. He's, he's released, I think around 50 tools over the past couple of years on GitHub. And I can't imagine what life is like for him at the moment. Our VCs just throwing money at him. I think that he made around a hundred million dollars from a previous venture of his. So I guess what would you do if you, if you were in his shoes? What do you think life is like for him at the moment? I've seen him on a bunch of podcasts, so he's obviously enjoying life.

• 52:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you will get a lot of excitement because when something is this weird and catches fire, it's very rare in our industry. This would be lightning in a bottle. So when lightning in a bottle happens, VCs show up and they love to take risk. What he's going to be drowning in is, you know, the need to ship product, the press asking him to talk, customer support, bug fixes, and raising money. These are all going to be pulling him in different directions. This is why multiple co-founders is what Paul Graham insisted on at YC. What we do and we copied from Paul Graham was, hey, we need multiples. It's because when something like this happens, you want somebody to be able to watch the store

• 52:44Jason Calacanis?

  as the other person goes and gets the investment, right? And another person deals with the press and the, you know, those issues. So he's probably dealing with that. What he needs to do is make a decision. Who does he want to have as his first investor? Who is somebody of high integrity, high track record? It doesn't matter at this moment, and he should have good counsel, right? So he should have a great attorney from whichever top-tier firm, and I'm sure those firms have contacted him as well. So just like if you were a basketball recruit or an actor or a comedian, you'd want to have good representation, good lawyer. In our world, it would be an agent in the Hollywood metaphor. And then you have to make

• 53:27Jason Calacanis?

  an economic decision. Well, how do you make an economic decision if I assume 50 people have made him an offer? You just talk to five other founders and say, who's the best investor you ever had? Boom. And he's going to be able to skip going to an accelerator or even founding university, obviously. He's going to be able to go right to a series A. And so he should say, I want to do a series. He should tell everybody, these are the terms. I am raising 20 million for 10% of the company. You get a board seat. There's going to be five board seats. I have four. You have one, or one's independent. Here's my attorney. You can talk to them. You know, you get this set of rights. And then he should look Sequoia, Kraft,

• 54:14Jason Calacanis?

  Andreessen Horowitz, GC, which of those big firms he wants to work with? And then a step down from there, Kosla, who he wants to work with? Who does he vibe with? Does he vibe with Jason Calacanis? Does he vibe with Sequoia, Ruloff? Does he vibe with David Sacks? Or David's, you know, probably would be somebody at David Sacks's firm, now that he's at the White House most of the time. You would pick who you vibe with. And then you'd have a conversation and you just narrow it down. Now, what's going to happen is then people are going to outbid. So the people with low reputation would want to outbid the other people. So they'd say, well, I'll give you 30 million for 20% of the company. I'll give you 50 million for 20%. And that can

• 54:53Jason Calacanis?

  get a bit, you know, that can get a bit crazy. What you want to do, though, is avoid just taking the biggest number. And you want to go with the best reputation. Best reputation, most thoughtful person who's been in the industry the longest. The other possibility is to say, I'm raising $20 million for 10% of the company. And I'm going to do a party round. You can take up to $4 million. I'm going to have five different firms put in $4 million each, and I'm building a bit of a brain trust. That's, some people might not like that, but they might make the bet anyway, because there's so much money in the world, and this is lightning in a bottle.

• 55:37Jason Calacanis?

  Larry and Sergey did that with Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. They said, we're famously going to give you half each. They were both, they both said, no, no, no, we want the whole thing or nothing. And they said, they called their bluff and sure enough, they split the baby.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  He did create a previous company called PSPDF Kit, which is a PDF technology company. And so he's been a founder before. He might know a little bit of the show, kind of what it takes, kind of what he needs to do. He might already have some money in his back pocket for a project like this. Is there a world where he doesn't even need to raise?

• 56:12Jason Calacanis?

  No, there's no world in which he should not raise.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 56:15Jason Calacanis?

  This project is so great, he should just take the money. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. And if he doesn't, it would be a giant mistake. This would be like creating the IP for Superman or the IP for Star Wars and not going for it. You know, you're George Lucas, you've got the script for Star Wars, you've, you know, got some treatments. And Fox says, you know, 20th Century Fox says, we'll produce it, you know, we'll, we'll distribute it. We'll give you the money for it. And then, hey, you've got all the cards because there's so much competition. And he said, yeah, I'll do it with you. I get the sequels and I get the merchandise. And that's what Lucas was able, because of how desirable Star Wars was and the sequels. He said, I just want to own the sequels. I want to own the merchandising. And then we all know how that worked out.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  The, the Star Wars toys made more money than the movies ultimately. And so there you have it. And the sequels, then he got to renegotiate and negotiate over and over and over again for, and he funded them himself. So you take more risk, but you gotta, gotta, gotta close around this week, next week. You gotta have a great lawyer and you have to, you gotta just tell them what you're looking for and why. And then call it a day. I would, this is what I would do if I was him. I would pick two top firms. Give them 40% each. I take 20% and then I would go to all the top influential people. I'm talking my own book here, but people like me or whatever and say, hey, I have 500K for you.

• 57:41Jason Calacanis?

  And you get, you know, if there was $4 million, you get eight people to put in 500K or 16 to put in 250K. And then you can always call them or email them and say, hey, J Cal, uh, you know, hey, you're an investor in this. Can I come on this week in startups or can I get a shout out on All In? Or can you come speak at my Clawbot conference, you know, whatever it happens to be. That's, that would be the high art is to have two firms, two board seats. They each get a board seat. You get the other four board seats. You have super voting or the voting shares and then, yeah, you go from there.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  So when we often see open source projects, Jason, the company built around them is often offering a hosted version with, you know, enterprise security and so forth. You also mentioned the App Store idea and that's proved to be a very lucrative method of monetization for Apple and Google. What do you think is the best way for the people behind Open Claw to monetize this product? Cause I'm kind of torn about which way I would go if I was them.

• 58:37Jason Calacanis?

  You go, you do both hosted and pro. Then I would do a services company, uh, to help people implement it. And then I would do the App Store where there, these skills are subscriptions. So last 30 days is, you know, X amount per month, per year. And you just pay for it as you go and they take 30%, super easy. And for that 30% or 20%, whatever they choose, they have a dev team and security team that reviews the code and make sure it's on the up and up and easy to install on the hosted version. And then they could do a deal for the hosted version and a licensed version for CloudFlare for, you know, with support and everything.

• 59:19Jason Calacanis?

  So it's usually the support, the services, the App Store, the updates is what people will pay for.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause if you told me that I had to pay for the last 30 days, I would just go make it myself and then run it myself. I think, I think now that I have the capability to create my own software on demand with funny little jokes with Claude code, my interest in paying for software has gone down dramatically.

• 59:36Jason Calacanis?

  People can and do fork WordPress or install their own version of WordPress. And then there are people who use hosted WordPress. It's really that simple. You make the decision. For some people, it's well worth the money. For other people, it's not. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. And here's your Polymarket, fun Polymarket. Show them the Polymarket, Alex. Pretty good.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  All right. So the name here is a little bit dated, but roll with me, everybody. Today's Polymarket is quote, malt book AI agent sues a human by February 28th, or by the end of this month. And the reason I picked it, Jason, is it has an 83% chance, according to Polymarket Sharps, and oh, nearly $300,000 in volume. So a good amount of volume. And they really do think that someone's AI agent from Open Claw is gonna sue a human. And I would take the no on this, but I wanted to get your take on who's right here. And we'll talk about the rules after that.

• 1:00:26Jason Calacanis?

  My understanding is a lot of these agents that are talking to each other on malt book, which is like Facebook for the agents are being prompted and put up to like their conversations. It's not just organic stuff, but sure, somebody will train their agent to file a lawsuit and it will sue somebody. Yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Is it ethical to create a skill that has your agent sue someone so that way you can win the bet? Or is that unethical in a predict? Cause you're not predicting?

• 1:00:57Jason Calacanis?

  We're in uncharted territory here, Alex.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  That's, that's why I'm asking. I, I mean, cause I just, I just realized that I could spin up a Polymarket account, drops in USDC and they're bet on yes, and then sue you for fun. And then.

• 1:01:10Jason Calacanis?

  I think the fun thing to do is to connect it to Polymarket, put some money into the account, and then have it look for wagers to place. And then just, cause people have done this already with the API. They're already doing quantitative, you know, betting. But now this opens it up to everybody. So you could come up with all kinds of ideas of how to bet on markets. I want to bet all the long shots and say they're not going to happen because they're long shots and just make very small amounts of money. Tons of different ways to do it. All right. Listen, I don't know what to tell you, folks. This thing is taking over the industry. I predict it's not going to stop. I think this is going to keep going. I was just thinking, I have this really great domain name, begin.com. And

• 1:01:53Jason Calacanis?

  maybe that would be a good way to do a hosted version of this. I don't know if there's a founder out there who wants to do a hosted version of this, or like make a verticalized version of it for small to midsize enterprises. But pitch me on that. We'll incubate it. And I have the, the best domain name ever, begin.com. All right. We'll see you all next time on Twist. Bye bye.