Behind the Scenes with an early OpenClaw contributor! | E2252

Welcome back to Twist. Today is February 25, 2026. I have to say this because, hey, it is a 0. 31. That's right after OpenClaw Day 31, all of our lives started when this incredible software dropped. And now we can actually get on with the great singularity. What is Open Claw? Well, we've been talking about, as I said, For 31 days on this podcast. When we see a trend, we keep digging into it, we keep Double D, we keep doubling down on it until it stops changing everything. Open clause and open source piece of software. What does it do? It helps you create agents. We call them replicants, AI agents. And it's getting better and better every day to the point at which people are reporting that they can give it 10, 20% of their work every week consistently, and that they're building companies with 20 or 30 replicants working on them, you know, to every three humans. So maybe a 5 to 1 ratio, a 10 to 1 ratio with us to talk about this incredible trend and all the new news that's happening. Didi Das from Menlo Ventures. Deedee, how are you doing?

0:00

Great.

1:09

Thank you for having me.

1:09

Jason, it's good to have you on. You're very. Oh, look at your all in. Where did you get that all in logo behind you?

1:10

Turns out it's a common catchphrase. And so we do all in on AI.

1:18

Ah, got it. Okay, There you go. Well, that is our trademark and you'll be hearing from our attorneys momentarily. We'll send them over there.

1:23

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1:33

So explain to people, you know, sort of your hot take on what we're seeing with openclaw and, you know, these new models that are. I believe we'll see what you think, Didi. I believe they're A step function better recently, and by recently I mean the last 12 months, it feels like something has changed. What's your take?

2:31

Yeah, I mean look, 4.6 opus is the most incredible thing that I have ever played with. I look back 12 months ago. The core change that happened with model developers, I think is initially the biggest launch was 2024. End of 2024 we had reasoning models that was mind blowing. But reasoning models fundamentally were trained to give you great answers to complicated questions. I think it's around March or April of 2025 where people started waking up and saying we need to post train models, call back to the model itself and do long running tasks. That's when tool calling and long running tasks and what we call agentic behavior really started working. I think with Claude Code it was very obvious to people that that paradigm was going to do way more valuable work than just single Q and A. And I mean the rest is kind of almost becoming history. Claude code is the fastest growing product of all time. This is a nearly $3 billion run rate product a year.

2:55

I mean Claude's revenue is pretty stunning. And I'm not sure what the latest run rate is. Do you know, Didi, I think the

4:06

latest reported one was publicly was 2.5. Just for Claude Code.

4:15

Just for Claude Code 2014.

4:20

And that was what they released when they announced their $380 billion funding round. None of these numbers make any sense for anyone who lived five years ago.

4:22

Well, wait, in what way? Like the revenue, the sales to valuation number, the growth of the revenue, which piece do you think? Both.

4:33

I mean I don't think the revenue multiple is astounding here given the growth. If you do a plot of revenue and growth rate, Anthropic is not an outlier. It's a pretty reasonable valuation for a revenue run rate and a growth rate for most companies. We've just never seen companies grow this fast. 0,100 million, a billion and then 10 billion in three years is just not a company growth trajectory we've ever seen in history.

4:43

So it looks like Anthropic is saying their annualized reoccurring revenue, whatever that means, is 14 billion, up from 1 billion. 14. Yeah, it's a basic run rate, I guess. And so they raised 30 billion at 380 billion. So if we put these numbers together, 10 times 14 billion would be 140, 20 times would be 280. So it looks like 25 times revenue. Ballpark, 25 times revenue. I'm sorry, yeah, total revenue, not earnings, not profits, just total they're losing a ton of money on this. Yeah, we'll see if that winds up being sustainable or not. Also with us on the program today, Tyler Yust. You are the third person, Tyler, I understand, to join the Open Claw team. You discovered the project on GitHub and you just volunteered to make it better. You're 22 years old and you studied to be an aerospace engineer at San Jose State. And tell us a little bit about how you discovered OpenClaw and why you went all in on it.

5:13

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I discovered OpenClaw on Twitter late December. So I believe it was the first guy who like started the whole Discord thing, was named the Will of Shadow, I believe. So he was posting it on X and was like, hey, we have something. Check out our Discord. I joined the Discord and it's like this little AI bot living in a discord. I was like, oh, what, what, what is this? This seems interesting. And then it's Peter talking to it, giving it tasks and it's going off to do tasks. I've never seen anything like this. And I was like, wow, this could be something very big. So that, that's, that was at the moment I was like, okay, maybe I should start focusing on this a little now.

6:21

Did you have a full time job at the. Or you in school at the time? What were you doing when you found this open source project?

7:07

So I was just working on like my own projects at the time. Mostly like just indie dev work, I guess. Social media analytics platform. That's really been my main thing right now.

7:14

Got it. So you didn't have a full time job to start working on this now? What is your role in the open source project? And maybe for the audience that's unaware about the dynamics of how an open source project works on GitHub and the Dynamics around it, maybe you could just give them a little primer of how a open source project works versus working at a big company like Anthropic, building a credible product like Claude Opus 4.6 and Cowork. And while there are other incredible products,

7:26

yeah, open source is definitely for openclaw. It's a crazy world because we're getting about a pull request, which is someone submitting code to the code base. We get those around every five minutes and we're about 4,000 pull requests right now, so it's kind of impossible to go through all them at the moment.

7:56

So these are developers out there who've become enamored with the project and they just say here I added this piece of code to the project that I think the project should have and then it's up to somebody in this non corporate structure to accept it. So explain who gets to accept the pull requests and how that works in governance in a project as I mean is this like the most stored project on GitHub stars? There's kind of like votes up. I think it is.

8:17

I believe it's second right now we're about to pass the first one which I think is React. We're pretty close. We're getting, we're getting there in terms of roles it's something like this is pretty chaotic but we have certain people focusing on certain things. So for example, I usually search on, for the, on the pull request I search like cron jobs or sub agents or like imessage. So I'm in charge of those three areas. That's primarily what I focus on. And then if anyone sees it's something that's related to one of those three areas I am focusing on, then they send it my way. They just add me in discord and be like, hey, can you review this and see if it's able to get merged?

8:45

This imessage integration is really interesting because Apple is notoriously unhelpful when people try to circumvent their iOS, you know, proprietary systems, the most proprietary of which is the blue bubble versus the green bubble, green being, you know, Android users and they don't get all the features. So we put our replicants, or started to put our replicants on Mac minis so they could natively do imessage. But explain to people why this is important to people to have native imessage or. And then what's Apple's typical reaction in the community around getting hooks into imessage? Building out your team is one of the most crucial things you have to get right in your startup. And finding the right developers is particularly important. But now there's Lemon IO. They're going to save you time, money and headaches by doing all the time consuming legwork for you. They've got an experienced lineup of pre vetted developers working for competitive rates. Just 1% of applicants are accepted into Lemon's elite program. And they're not just out there finding this great talent, they're also working with you to integrate these new members into your team. Plus if it's not a good fit, hey, and sometimes things don't work out, Lemon will hook you up with a new developer asap. I've seen startups Go from new, just pretty good to amazing. After filling out their teams with developers from Lemon IO, go to Lemon IO Twist and find your perfect developer or technical team in 48 hours or less. Plus twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. That's lemon IO twist. L E M O N I O slash Twist.

9:24

What I integrated was another open source project. This was called Blue Bubbles, which allows for blue bubbles on iMessage. So all you do is connect that and then you can start talking to your open call like a normal human Almost the primary reason I use iMessage is because I don't like having tons of different apps. I already have ChatGPT, I have Cloud, I have Perplexity. I don't need another app to talk to my chatbot. I just want to talk to almost like a friend. That's just being super helpful for me.

11:10

What are the coolest things people have done with OpenCloud that you've seen?

11:39

Oh, that's a great question. I, I, honestly the stuff I've been doing is awesome. So I would say the, the first week of January, right when they came out, I was like, oh, I need to do my taxes. So I gave it access to my Mercury account, just read access. And also I created a QuickBooks account and created like an API skill for that. And then I was like, okay, I have all these transactions, I have QuickBooks set up. Are you able to create a piano for me? And it's been, I was ChatGPT 5.2 Codex at the time. I spent two and a half hours working on this, this like reconsolidation of my QuickBooks and I came back two hours later and I was like oh, like everything's in. I categorized everything. You're all good for tax. I was like, what, what do you, what do you mean? I looked over and I was like, okay, this is, this is getting somewhere. This is pretty crazy.

11:43

Wow.

12:37

I have a follow up question for you which is I've used openclaw in my little Mac mini setup, which is very isolated from the rest of my stuff because I'm a little bit paranoid. But how do you reconcile the differences between something like an openclaw, something like Claude Code, cowork, all of these different things. What are the primary reasons you use one over the other?

12:38

I think it's mostly what you want to get done. Claude code is really only good for like coding. For example, I still use it for most of my coding. And then Open Claw I would use for like checking my emails, sending my emails, booking things on my calendar, setting reminders, updating my notion pages, like all those things that cloud code can't really do. But on top of openclaw, I also do do some coding. So for example, if I'm like laying in bed at say like 11pm or something, I would say like, hey, can you go do this at 1am and then do another thing at 2am and I wake up and it's like a full day, day of work is done. I'm like, oh, this is great. I wake up to a full day of work done every day.

13:00

Got it. And do you think that's primarily because of the integrations that come out of the box with it? I mean, because I imagine what I'm trying to reconcile with myself is I'm such a power user of Claude code that I tend to bake in my own integrations into that and make it do non coding tasks. But do you think there's something else that's really, really special about how you can do the telegram and the imessage and have context across everything, go a little bit deeper there?

13:40

Yeah, of course. So I believe right now I think open call is really the only one that could kind of improve itself. I don't, I can't speak much on cloud code, but I give open call like, like for example, all the skills I have, like checking my mail and stuff, I was like, just go figure this out and write a skill for it. And then from there on it's able to do it every single time. I don't think there's really another program that's able to almost learn in that way.

14:05

That's awesome. That's awesome.

14:31

All right, gentlemen, I wanted to talk to you about a story that's kind of trending here, which is anthropic versus the Pentagon. I don't want to get too political here, but we all think about the power of AI. We're seeing it in white collar work, we're seeing it obviously in self driving and factory work. We all assume, hey, AI is going to impact those two areas, but we might not be thinking about the military and how they use it. Anthropic we just discussed, Didi has an incredible model and they also have a $200 million contract with the Defense Department. It's actually really good, obviously. So the Defense Department loves this product, but they want to use it a little more vibrantly. Let's say they want to take the guardrails off of it. And Dario from Anthropic is like, hey, we have a couple of areas where we have concerns. This is our tool and we don't want you to use it for areas where we think it's prone to abuse or that might be illegitimate. The Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, he says you have until Friday remove the safety constraints because we want to use it in any legal fashion, as in military legal fashion. There's two issues that Anthropic really cares about. One of them is enabling murder bots, robots that kill things. They don't want to have their technology used to program the automatic death of another soldier, a human being, via robots, I assume. I don't know how drones fit into that, but non human in the loop, I think is Dario's point. The second thing is they don't want it used for mass surveillance and to break the right to privacy that humans have. There's all kinds of talk that they may use, like this act that we have in the Constitution, I believe, or it's. Maybe it was given by Congress to the President. I forgot the name of it. But there's this act that they use during the War Powers Act. Yeah, I think is what it's called. And that act, Defense Production act of 1950. Sorry, that's what it is. They're saying, hey, we might just take over this technology and we'll tell you what you're going to do with it. Didi, what are your thoughts about the two granular issues here? And then just what is the responsibility of technologists building technology this powerful?

14:33

This is a really tough, tough philosophical question of our times. You know, I mean, we sort of. Everyone knew this was going to be a question as AI got more powerful. It's a question when it comes to Anthropic and its user base is user based too. But the user base can't legally force Anthropic to do anything. And the user base can't coalesce to be a very powerful entity. The US Government, on the other hand, is an extremely powerful entity. And Anthropic, being a US based corporation, has to operate under their rules. And that's when it becomes a little bit tough. Who do I think should have the responsibility of being the moral arbiter of technology? This power, powerful? Frankly, I don't know. I mean, do I think Anthropic will probably do a better job just because they have more control and understanding of the power of the technology? Maybe, but even then it's really not clear to me. Regulation doesn't always seem to be a good answer. And the military, of course, they want guardrails off I mean, that's unsurprising to anyone too. But this goes down an extremely slippery slope. Right. Even the kind of things we've seen models do, which are already pretty guardrailed, can get fairly scary in the limit when it comes to just the impact on cybersecurity. You know, you can have these things run loose and completely take down systems publicly. And you know, if you bring those guardrails loose, this is a pretty serious weapon. Wars don't always get won on missiles and drones. They get won on cyber warfare, intelligence, intelligence, disrupting ops. And you know, we know the Venezuela thing, regime change.

17:07

Yeah, lots of different ways to do this. And what's really interesting about this is if they don't comply, hegseth would then designate anthropic as a supply chain risk, Tyler. Which means they lose all of their government contracts. They're basically blacklisted. So this is could be a billion dollars a year. It could be eventually 5 or 10 billion dollars a year. Who knows what these, these military contracts will be worth. You're a young guy, Tyler. How do you think about all this incredible technology being used for war? And you know the technologists, you're part of a certain generation. I'm Gen X, I think. Dee Dee, you're a millennial, I'm guessing. And I don't know, Tyler, you're 21, 22. How old are you?

18:49

22.

19:40

22. So what does that make you? Are you like Gen Z? You're Gen Alpha? I guess something like that. Something like that. Who knows what these designation means, but how do you look at that? Like if they were taking your open source work and using it to make murder bots or you know, killer soldiers that killed or a surveillance state, how would you feel about it? And what do you, what do you think about this brouhaha? If you're launching a new business, meeting with potential investors, or you're just looking to raise some fresh capital, it's time for you to check out our pals at every. They'll take care of your incorporation, your banking, your payroll, your benefits, and more so you can focus on building not just paperwork. And let me tell you, it's so painful to do all these chores and you want somebody who's a great partner who will do it perfectly every time. There are tons of options for apps that want to simplify running your company, but every are the experts at working with startups. They've already helped over a thousand startups to grow and expand, including both first time founders and experienced teams. Racing series A rounds and beyond. That's the kind of experience partner that you need, especially when you're head down, focused on your MVP and delighting your customers. You want a financial partner you can trust and one that's built specifically with founders like you in mind. If your operations are spread out across a bunch of different tools, you gotta switch off every time you move to a new task that's not efficient. Every has every tool you need in one place, whether you're managing vendors and contracts or signing your team up for a new dental plan. So it's time to visit every IO for all of your startup needs. That's E V E R Y IO

19:41

Yeah, I definitely don't prefer that. Like the reason I got out of aerospace was because the only like line of work would be like working with Lockheed, which is creating missiles to kill people, which isn't like the best in ethics in my opinion. Like I don't want to be part of something like that. So using AI to do that, it's definitely in my opinion, not the best. But if we don't do it, someone else probably will. So we would fall behind in that way. So it's definitely a sticky situation.

21:14

Yeah. You know, I've been thinking about this one a lot. I haven't figured out exactly what my position is, but working through it out loud. A private company has the ability to choose and have the freedom to choose how their technology is used. So if Anthropic says, I don't want to be involved in this, they have that right. And the military obviously has the right to say, hey, we're just not going to use your technology. So that seems like where this is going to go. Anthropic is going to be blacklisted by the government and they're going to lose that contract. And then the people who work at Anthropic get to come to work every day knowing they're not working on those things. You can make a judgment. Is that patriotic? Are they pacifists? Are they doing it for religious reasons, ethical reasons? Well, that's up to them, right? We have a certain amount of freedom in this country. And then there are other providers who will provide the technology. What I do think about here is what if we were in an emergency situation, China invades Taiwan or it was World War II, I don't know, Pearl harbor happens, the Germans invade France and you would say, well, or if the Germans had landed on Long island like they were planning on doing, you would then say, hey, we've got to protect the country. You Might have a different approach. You might say we're going to seize this company's assets and use it for war production. And that would be a different scenario. So I don't want to both sides it, but people do have some freedom here. If you went to elon and said SpaceX, hey, we're being invaded by the Russians or the Chinese, we need all your rockets to do this military purpose, I think that would be a different condition than going to SpaceX and saying, hey, we want you to build nuclear missiles. We want to put on the Falcon Heavy, we want to co op that and we want to use the moon station for putting nuclear bombs and anti satellite technology. They would have the ability to opt out of that unless it was an emergency situation. I can't believe we're here already, but we're here already, folks. And then combined with.

21:45

Go ahead, you know, it's going to probably end up like a bit of a prisoner's dilemma situation. Right. You have four labs at least that have, you know, are within one month or two of each other in terms of what their capabilities are in some sense. So if Anthropic says no, Grok says yes or you know, OpenAI says yes. So I think it's a bit of an inevitable thing whether we like it or not, that one of these companies will bend to the giant DOD contract.

23:53

Yeah.

24:21

So I think the ball is out of our court in some sense.

24:23

And not to mention Tyler, we have open source models. So I'm curious your thoughts Just generally, we'll leave the, the donnybrook between Claude Anthropic and the military aside for a second, but what is the state of Kimi and the various open source projects as models in your mind today? And how do you see them being incorporated into OpenClaw in the near term, 1 to 3 years and in the long term, 4 to 10 years.

24:27

Open models are still about like 6 to 12 months behind the Frontier labs at this point in terms of using them in openclaw. I haven't really touched that at all. But I would say in about who knows, three months, six months. Primary model people will use for open call would probably be an open source, one that they could run on like a Mac Studio or for example, so it's all fully local. You're not sending anything to the cloud.

25:04

Why is that a inevitability in your mind? Why are people going to choose to do that?

25:29

Because right now you're still making your request to Anthropic to OpenAI and they still, whatever you talk about they are getting that data, for example. So if it's something personal, I believe in their terms and condition they can use that for their training data. Even though it's anonymous. Anonymous. But if you're using open source model, it's running locally on your computer. There's no that like in between person from sending off that request and getting it back to you.

25:35

It also just to educate our audience, I moved one of my replicants from a virtual machine onto a Mac Mini this past weekend. I notice it's snappier, it's faster and it's more reliable. Is that the case that it's much more reliable and native in addition to the privacy when you run it on a local machine? In your experience, it depends.

25:58

Like you're talking about running like a model locally for OpenClaw, not the model,

26:21

just running OpenClaw on a Mac Mini with a decent amount of memory seems more responsive to me and less janky. You know, like when I'm talking to it in Slack or I now have it set up over SMS to a number that only I can respond to over Twilio now it just seems more stable. It seems faster on a Mac Mini than in a VM on aws.

26:26

I don't think it makes that much of a difference. I would say it's more primarily like two factors. Right now there's tons of updates going out improving speed and just quality of the code as well as these models are getting a little bit faster. So three weeks ago these models were doing 30 tokens per second, which is. What is that, 15 words per second. And now they're up to like 50 or 60. So that speed alone definitely makes it feel like these models are getting faster.

26:49

Yeah, the two constraining issues I'm having right now with openclaw is the speed and threadedness of it. I want to be able to have my one replicant doing like 10 jobs at once as opposed to 10 replicants. What do you think the future of that is? The speed speed and the parallel nature of it. And any tips on optimizing your replicant OpenClaw agent for this task?

27:16

Yeah, so that's primarily what I've really been focusing on. I have a in like the Tools MD file for the OpenCloud rule that says anytime you need to make more than two or three tool calls to spawn a sub agent. So what that sub agent does is it works in the background, so you could still chat with it on Slack and it doesn't interfere with anything. And while that sub agent is Going, it's working, it's doing all that like hard work that takes 15, 20 minutes and then reports back to the main agent saying, hey, here's your results. And you just get the results. You don't have to wait for it

27:44

to like, is that going to be automated? This like, shouldn't it know to just every request. Want a sub agent?

28:17

Yeah, some people don't really want it because once again you're using more tokens when you do create a sub agent because I mean it has to recreate like the, the memory, the prompt and memory and stuff. So you're with 20,000 tokens. But yeah, I think we should lean towards going towards like sub agents just so the main thread is always like quick to respond.

28:25

Yeah, this seems to me like the inevitable architecture. We have Mac studios on order. I understand there's a new Mac studio coming that's going to be designed natively to run language models. JD what does this tell us about Apple's brilliance? In 2008, Steve Jobs did a skunk work project to get off of intel and make his own silicon. It, I think dropped in 2017 or 2018 when like the M1 and all these different things started to drop and the one on the iPhone. And then so that's 10 years after the initial idea, basically it landed. And then another seven or eight years, eight years later it actually language models came out. And this might be the perfect solution for solving that problem. So once again, Steve Jobs sees around two or three corners knowing he needs to get on his own silicon. They never built out their huge data center, they never did a capex, they never did their own language model. And here they are, they find themselves at the center of the discussion again with their desktops. What's your take on that, Deedee? Because I'm absolutely enthralled with Steve Jobs. Like behind the back, off the billboard, off the backboard, three point shot here. It's like a Steph Curry full chord from the tunnel shot. Debugging sucks and it takes up time. Your team could be spending on awesome new features and products. But now there's a better way. Sentry's AI powered debugging agent, Seer, isn't just guessing about what might have gone wrong with your system. It's analyzing your actual data. And because it has context, it spots buggy code before that code ruins your entire day. Plus, Sentry works alongside coding agents like Cursor, passing along an idea for a fix that can then be applied to your code base and sent to a human Team member for review, end to end automation all the way from bug detection to pull request. So join the millions of devs and companies like Claude and Disney who use Sentry to move faster. Check them out at S E N T R Y IO twist and use the code twist for $240 in Sentry credits.

28:47

Yeah, like hindsight 20 20. And in hindsight, Steve Jobs pulled off another miracle. I mean, I think if you break it down to the first principles, like why are Mac Minis so popular for this? It's because people want a sandboxed personal computer with less side effects on their actual system to run a bunch of highly personal tasks connected to their own systems. Right. That's why Mac Minis became so popular for something like openclaw. Now what does the future of that look like? There's two worlds. I think both of them will coexist. I think people will continue to, whether it's a Mac Mini, it's the kind of easiest machine to buy and get set up with something like this. But also it's going to be inevitable that this is going to come to the big model apps as well. What does that look like? It's just going to run. It just might be much less private and it's going to run on the cloud with a bunch of your integrations on every single app that you might use. I would be hard pressed, I don't have any insider information. I'd be hard pressed to argue that they are not going to come out with some version of a global long running agent on an open clock competitor or clone or a version of that that also does that on the cloud.

31:01

Absolutely. Awesome. Hey listen Tyler, I know I got to drop you off because you got a 1pm meeting. Wanted to let you know that I've brought back the launch festival. This is a conference I started. Gosh. It was originally called TechCrunch 50. Then I made it LaunchFest. Basically free for founders, free to present. Why did I create this? Well, when I came into the industry, I couldn't afford afford the 2 to $5,000 it costs to go to demo and all these other services. And I decided why don't I make it free to be on stage, make it merit based, want to make it free to attend if you're a founder, how do I afford to do this? Well, I just don't make a profit off of it. And then I let VIPs buy a ticket and we sell a certain number of VIP tickets to come to a VIP lunch with me and the speakers and we're going to do it March 16th and 17th in San Francisco. Go to Fest Launch Co. If you're a founder, you buy a ticket, you pay 20 bucks. If you show up and pick up your ticket, we give you literally your 20 bucks back. Tyler, I wanted to give you two tickets to come and then if you have something really cool that you can demo for the first time on March 16th or 17th, I will. I'll give you the stage and give you three minutes to go up there and just pitch it. It doesn't have to be a startup. It could just be some cool project you do. But we're going to have 50 pitches, 25 a day. Most of them will be openclaw related and some of them will be from our founders who went through founder university in Tokyo for the first time. 400 people coming, 200 founders, like 150 investors and then 50 other. Tyler, great job. Thanks for coming on the program. We'll drop you off.

32:14

Thank you guys.

33:44

Great speaking with you and Tyler.

33:45

Yeah, great speaking with you. It's just so great to get somebody who's actually in the open source project, huh, Didi? And so, yeah, if you want to come, go to the website Fest Launch Co. And if you're a founder, you just click on founder pass and apply for one. And that 20 bucks gets. We just don't want you to burn a seat. So you pay 20 bucks to not burn the seat and then we give it back to you. If you want to buy a VIP ticket, you get to come to lunch each day with the other. You know, whichever speakers are around, not all of them stay for lunch. And then, you know, the VIPs and you get to. I'll be at the lunches as well. How great was that to have like one of the young guns working on the open source project?

33:47

It's so cool. His energy is so, so great. You can just see how excited he is. This guy's going to be be an incredible kid one day.

34:20

It's amazing. Also at this festival, by the way, Didi, you have a ticket as well. I'll give you a ticket as my guest. I'm going to give a $25,000 investment prize, you know, uncapped note or whatever the round is at. If you're raising 1.25k for the best open claw project, 25k for the best other project. Other presentation. Based on my opinion, it's my money. When I came in the business in the 90s, you paid demo. I think it was $20,000. Then they tried to get you to pay like a coaching consultant. They had $10,000 and then you had to buy five tickets. All this craziness. You were in for tens of thousands of dollars to get a demo slot and you had five minutes. Yeah, 20 demo is around longer than 2014, I think. Actually it was. There was another precursor name to it anyway. There's nice people running it, but it was proprietary and it was, I'm sorry, predatory in my mind. They also charged a bunch for the tickets. So I said, you know what? Why don't we have it that you get on stage based on merit and then we give you money and we'll just flip the whole conference on its head. And that's how like TechCrunch 50/Disrupt, and Mike and I broke up and I did launch festival. That's how those conferences came about. Now, TechCrunch Disrupt charged a lot of money now, and they're kind of predatory in terms of how they price things for founders. I'm keeping this free, free, free, free. I don't need to make money off it. I just need to make impact. Citrini wrote this article and you did a viral tweet about it. So when I the the article, I can tee up. Basically, they wrote the article as if it was 2028. They said everything that happened in AI came to fruition even more than people expected. Companies got more profitable, unemployment went up, but we lost the consumers. And it was, be careful what you wish for, because if you don't have a bunch of consumers, then who's going to buy iPhones and order doordash? You actually wrote a viral tweet about it. What was your take on the piece? And then we'll talk about your viral tweet.

34:26

I think let's be very clear. The Citrini article is a work of science fiction. It's interesting because it pulls you in with pretty factual claims. There's some claims the premise is factual, and then it goes into extremely speculative downstream effects of those factual claims. I think about. I don't want to put a number on it, but maybe 30 to 40% of that article was. I'm like, okay, I think this is interesting. And there is a scenario where things play out in this way for some of them. I'm like, look, I don't know if everyone's going to be ordering food on their open claw and doordash is going to be worth nothing. I don't really believe that view of the world. The thing that stood out most to me was very clearly Indian IT services. And this is something I've spent a lot of time on just I was curious about what IT means for, I guess, the lowest, the least intellectual form of software, tech, labor. If we all believe AI is pretty smart and we think AI is smarter than a lot of people at the lowest end, we should therefore believe that those businesses go away over time. Now the market's kind of reacted, right? The markets, all of these in the last month have gone down. These stocks have gone down 25%, even in addition to the SaaS companies. And so that kind of begs the question, like, what does knowledge work mean?

36:23

And here's your tweet. That's right, which is 50 billion of Indian IT service. Market value eroded in 30 days. And the Citrini article predicts it will collapse even more. You can see people like Accenture and Capgemini down 25 and 30%. You might think of those as American companies, but really, given how powerful the IT and the business process outsourcing, just that community in India is, a lot of the work is, you would think Capgemini is a bunch of Americans. No, a lot of it's happening in India got a billion people, couple of hundred million now moving into the middle class and into this exact sector. Why is it a false premise? Because one of the things I noticed was the business process work we're doing as defined by somebody overseas, which we have, was the perfect precursor to setting up a skill on openclaw. It turns out the people in this community, this business process outsourcing, they actually structure things and organize things so well that when you give it to openclaw, they know how to define it. Where I found, Americans don't even. They're like, you know, creative, undisciplined, unprocessed. Generally speaking, they don't have this, like, speciality. So I'm, I'm torn. Does this make the folks in India in this category superhuman and they will be the ones managing the replicants, or does it wipe them out? I don't know exactly how to process it.

37:50

I think it's a transitory phase. What's happening right now is the companies who are using these consulting shops in India, they're still not going to wake up and go like, hey, I want to be my own IT admin. Now they're going to go to them and go like, hey, can you use this AI stuff and solve all of these problems? And what's happening now is a lot of these companies have their AI services packages. They're going to basically say, I was writing the code before and charging you. X, I'm going to ask openclaw or Claude to write this code and charge you. Why? Anyway, and so you might not see a revenue hit in the short run, but one probably has to believe that when the barrier to entry is in a certain skill, in this case being like IT administration and services become so low, either because of the competitive nature of the market, eventually your moat erodes. And so over time, the market, I think is reacting to the fact that I don't think this has value in five years. Today, the revenues are actually pretty good. I don't think these companies are like, we're posting losses because of AI. They're actually benefiting a lot because they get to do more consulting services.

39:23

But we.

40:26

What does that mean in five years, 10 years? And maybe this is a segue into the SaaS thing. That's, I think, what the market's questioning here.

40:27

Yeah, and the market was overheated to begin with. So sometimes when you're trying to understand public markets, they're looking for an excuse to sell. There's people who've made their profits, it hits some high watermark and they're like, yeah, is there going to be a headwind here? Did I max out this bet? I should take some chips off the table, Be like, hey, you're at a poker game and you get up, you know, 10K and you're like, it's 1:00am, maybe I should leave. And you're trying to make that decision to lock in a win. I think that's part of it too. People are looking for an excuse, which then means this might be a buying opportunity. But SAS does seem like a space that is going to face significant headwinds. Why, I guess, is the question. One that comes to mind is the software is easily replicable given these new software agents. So if you're faced with a $500,000 SaaS bill and you can put 150k engineer on building a bespoke version that gives you more features for 70% less, every business is going to consider that. Number two, the per seat model is how they were working. Well, if companies are going to stay the same size and you'll have a static team size, because of this efficiency, the ability to land and expand has ended. So you lose land and expand while people can roll their own and maybe the perceived pricing goes down, I'm not sure. So what's your take on this SaaS compression that's occurring?

40:35

I'm trying to simplify it and break into Sort of a spectrum of SaaS companies. I don't think SaaS companies are all the same. I think on one hand you have what is closer to what we call CRUD applications. CRUD applications create, read, update, delete. Very simple database wrappers that have some specific integrations. It's quite valuable, but there's no real technology or business logic on top. On the other hand, I would say highly interesting and technically complex SaaS and I would put maybe a figma in this bucket. I obviously want to put glean in this bucket. I think you have this spectrum of SaaS tooling on the very bottom of that or on the very left of that spectrum. The simple apps. Today companies, they're saying, I don't want to have to sit in three months of procurement, have to take this to my boss, have to get approval for a $50,000 license just to get this in and then use it. I can literally go to lovable, code it with a prompt and then immediately I have this. So is it causing disruption there? Absolutely. Now then, the common feedback is, well, lovable is not creating new figmas. And that's true. How does this affect companies on the right side of the spectrum? It's kind of different. If you look at SaaS company revenues and how SaaS companies mature over time, by year five, six, seven, most of your revenue is not coming from new customers, it's coming from a high concentration on your whale customers. And why is it coming from them? It's because you're upselling them a bunch of stuff. And that's I think where it starts to get pretty interesting. Where we had this fun story I actually heard a couple of weeks ago where a well known auth provider was trying to do business as usual. They were like, hey, you want this little integration? I'm going to upsell you. It's going to be 50k more on your contract. Are you willing to buy? And the buyer actually was telling me like at a dinner, he was like, we just vibe coded that 50k integration and it took no time. And it's not one of those janky vibe coded things that don't last. It was very simple to just make this thing work. And we just didn't do that before.

42:09

And those upsells to large companies are such a small amount of their overall spend that they're kind of like, yeah, just do it, it doesn't matter. We are going to allocate 10% of the salary base to SaaS. So if we have, you know, 10 people getting paid 150k, we're spending 1.5 million. I think a good rule of thumb is we're going to spend 150k on their tools. So if we have to spend an extra 15k, hey, you know, we're a profitable business. We'll just, we'll deal with it. But this has come up for me because I been trying to get Slack to play nice with openclaw and I want my agent to have like root access and I want my agent, my Ultron agent, like the ultimate one on openclaw to understand every person who works for me and everything they do, every conversation happening, every DM happening that nobody sees, to understand full context with the exception of like HR issues or whatever, which, you know, I'm kind of figuring out how to deal with. But I run a transparent organization. Anything that's an email, you should assume like your manager can see. And like, if you're a salesperson, you already are like used to this. If you're in a finance position, you're already used to this. Any trades that occur on a trade desk are recorded, whatever. Put all aside the illusion of privacy in corporate America. It's just very hard to get root access to Slack. So I was like talking to my agent, not my agent in Hollywood, my replicant. And I'm talking to my replicant and it's like, well, you know, if we use Matter Post instead of Slack, we can set it up this weekend. You can export everything from Slack. It'll take like six hours and then you can cancel Slack or you can get rid of like 18 of 20 accounts on Slack. Just keep it up. It's a shadow thing if you need it and you'll have root access and we'll host it and we'll have total control over. It's an open source project. Do you want me to do it? Yes or no? And I'm like, okay, now it's getting interesting. So what do you think of this issue? And then we got two incredible OpenCloud demos coming up just as we wrap this issue. The. The bespoke software created internally was considered a headache, Didi. It was considered, you know, a liability in many cases. But now, is it moving into a competitive advantage? I wonder.

44:11

I would say two things to that. I think one thing that struck me as really interesting as you're telling me that story is one like, does this push tools to. Does it force SaaS companies to be open by nature and play well with or are people just going to switch off, like, you know, Slack might want to protect their Data and say, look, I don't want you guys to use my data. That's my most valuable resource. But then you could say, well, I can vibe code a migration without using any other money and then just take your data, put it on this other thing and I'm good. So that I thought was really interesting. And then on the second one, I'm actually more bullish on some SaaS companies in the long run because look, ultimately no one's vibe coding a few, right? You can't. It's not going to probably happen.

46:35

And why would you like it?

47:17

So I think the real nuance is how complex and how much meat in technology is really on this SaaS company and the SaaS product. And if there is, I think you'll be fine in the long run. But just for a lot of companies there isn't. And the market's being pretty fearful right now. I don't necessarily believe people are going to vibe code a suite of tools and actually use them on a daily basis. I think for some categories, maybe for super niche personal things, maybe for your company business messaging app, probably not.

47:20

I'm spending currently 6,500amonth to have like the second highest tier. There's like the low tier, the medium tier, the high tier. I think I'm on the medium right now, which means I think I spend $25 a month per person instead of 10 or 15, whatever the entry level is. And I think there's a $50 version above that. So then that would be a thousand a month. So I'm either sell 6 to 12,000 depending on which version I need to do what I want to do. In other words, it's inconsequential amount of money for my firm at this stage. So I'm not swapping it out. But if it does, if the open post or open matter whatever it is a matter post, whatever it is, if that open source one is more powerful and I can get more done faster, matter post, then I'm moving to it. So it really becomes to your first point, make it really friendly. And it is my data. So why am I having to jump through hoops to get my data out of Slack? Or if it was Notion which has a pretty Robust API or Pipedrive. Another great SaaS product we use Grammarly. Another great SaaS product, Superhuman. These products just need to, I think, accept that we need an API call by default for each user. That's just going to become table stakes. And I think my message for Steve Huffman at Reddit is I want My account, which I don't pay for, I just, you know, my. My standard account, I will pay $100 a month, $50 a month, whatever he wants to create a bot access. So that bot, Didi, I'm responsible for when it's on Reddit. And it does things for me on Reddit. It doesn't post for me, but it does its research on Reddit. It brings me back my DMs. It does whatever I want to do, like up to whatever number of calls. So then I would be a 600 to $1,200 a year pro account for them. And I certify that I will make sure my bot doesn't go rogue. So it's a way to kind of allow bots into the system. What do you think of my crazy idea of, like, you can have a bot paired with you on social media? I could have an Instagram bot for 50 bucks a month or 25 bucks a month pro account. I could have my LinkedIn one on my pro just to do stuff for me. But I say, hey, listen, I'm gonna be responsible. I brought this person to the party. If they flip over a table and like, you know, start a fight, it's on me. I don't get invited back to the party.

47:52

Well, I think the weakest link in that argument is probably the last one, which is like, you know, how are you actually gonna take any responsibility? You don't really control anything the bot does to an extent. Like, you might not even be able to know. You might give it a simple prompt and it might behave in erratic ways to beyond your control, and maybe they ban you and then you just create another one. So I do think that part is a little bit weak. The general idea is something I think a lot of companies are reckoning with. Like, what does it mean to have bots interact with humans on social media? Should we allow it? Should we not? What are the repercussions on X? I'm sure you see half of your replies are bots.

50:15

Not anymore. Because it's a dollar to reply to me now per month to charity. So I have 2,000 people who are in my community out of a million who pay me that. It's like whatever that is. It's like a very small amount, I guess. Yeah, 10,000 would be 1%. So it's a fraction of that's 20 basis points. Do that. All right, let's do some demos. First up, got Lewis Tam. Lewis Tam is calling in from Singapore, which I where I went for the first time. Last year, had a great time there. He is the founder of Foundry. He develops AI apps and he's going to show us unreal. This is an AI generated. These are AI generated videos designed to go viral. And he's going to show us unbrowse, a collection of AI agent skills that function as APIs. So let's bring on Lewis Tam. Hello, Lewis. What time is it in Singapore? Aren't you like 15 hours ahead?

50:53

I'm in Salt Lake City.

51:45

Oh, okay. Oh, okay. You're skiing.

51:47

You getting some skiing in Santa tomorrow? It's actually my first time here.

51:48

Awesome.

51:53

I came here for some event and then. Yeah, I'm just. Yeah, I've never been outside of Singapore for like a long, long time. And it's like, it's really cool.

51:54

Yeah, yeah, America's cool and we think Singapore is cool. I had a really great time there. I went to that Anthony Bourdain booth in that market where they have the chicken and rice. Yeah, the famous one.

52:01

Yeah. I mean, like, they're all really nice. All the chicken rice. Like a lot of it is just like this.

52:13

Why is this chicken rice dish in Singapore so good? What's the name of it and what's the secret? Because I'm not a chicken and rice gu. I'm not a rice guy and I'm not a chicken guy. I'm a steak and potatoes guy. I'm a steak and asparagus guy. But the last thing I'm interested in typically is like chicken and rice. And I went back for seconds. I couldn't stop dreaming about it the next day. What. What's going on with this chicken rice?

52:20

Maybe it's the rice because the rice has like the special flavor to it as well, right? Yeah, that's right. Chicken is like. Also has another special flavor to it as well, right?

52:43

It's the flavor. We have to go on this diversion for a second, but the one that's in the Michelin guide is Thai Tan Tian Haina chicken rice. Am I pronouncing it even close to correct, Louis? Close enough.

52:53

Pronounce it from Hainanese chicken rice.

53:08

So this is incredible. Look at this. Have you been delicious?

53:11

I love my chicken over rice.

53:15

Yeah, you're a chicken rice guy. I love chicken rice too. So this is in a market, right? So they have these like, markets kind of with a bunch of booths and stalls. And this one is like super famous because it was. Let me see if I can find the image of it. You'll know it because it's got this Blue here. And in every, like, three or four feet in this thing, they have Anthony Bourdain's picture on the wall in his reviews. But it is the most amazing dish I've. One of the most amazing dishes I've ever had. The other interesting thing, Louis, is the way you secure your spot in Singapore in a food court.

53:16

Yeah. Yeah. You could just leave iPhone there.

54:01

Right.

54:04

And no one takes it.

54:04

The way culturally it works is you're in a food court, and there's 50 stations, 50 booths, and there's 1,000 people, and you just run around and you take out your $1300 iPhone and you put it on the table. So four people come in, they put four $1300 iPhones or Android phones. It's $4000 worth of phones on the table. And then you go walk to a booth way out of eyesight, and then you walk around and look for a seat without an iPhone on it. And then there's something going on in Singapore in these booths. They don't believe in giving you a lot of napkins. This is the other thing, Louis, what's going on in Singapore with the napkins? You get, like, one napkin. You ask for, like, five napkins. They think you're crazy.

54:06

Yeah, I.

54:49

You're asking the real questions here.

54:51

These are important questions.

54:53

Yeah. Why? I've never thought about it. Maybe it's because you could also use the tissues as, like, an alternative to the phone. And they want to leave.

54:54

Yeah, I guess.

55:04

Yeah.

55:05

It's, you know, it's just like going to Italy. You go to Italy and you try to get a Coke Zero with ice. They're like. They give you one ice cube or two ice cubes, and then you're like, can I get a glass of ice? And they're like, why? Why would you want that? All right, listen, it's enough already with my diversions. Show us what you built.

55:07

You kind of wish all these websites would let them have APIs and, like, let agents just travel APIs. Right. So that's what Unreal says. Ambrose is basically like. Well, I mean, technically, websites already have APIs. It's just that the front end only has access to it right now.

55:24

Right.

55:41

They're not public APIs. So what umbrella does is that it just unwraps the ui. It gives you direct access to the servers behind the websites, so your agents can just traverse it. Love it.

55:42

This is an issue for me with Reddit. It's an issue for me with x dot com. It's an issue for me with many websites right now. So can you show us an example of it working?

55:54

Yeah, sure.

56:04

And Louis, do you get throttled by any websites at all or are Most of the APIs that you have access to, do you already use the cookie

56:05

that you used to.

56:13

I think I'll explain it further in a more technical sense. Right. Basically how it works, right, is it's basically this skill that basically acts as an alternative browser for OpenClaw or any agent. So normally agents would open up a browser, you'll click through the UI like a person, basically. It's kind of funny if you think about it, right? Because agents are pretending to be a human by clicking the gui, which was built for humans just to talk to another machine. So it's kind of ridiculous you have a machine that's pretending to humans to talk to a machine when the machine could just talk to the machine directly. So yeah, basically what I do is that I cache the cookies and headers that the agent already uses in the browser and I just pass it straight to the fetch request and it just calls it directly as a direct API call.

56:13

Let's see, let's see it in action.

57:06

Sure, let me just share my screen real quick. So this is basically a cloud code. It's a less capable OpenCloud, but it's really good at coding. Right. So the reason I'm choosing to demo it with a cloud, cloud codes, because you can see what's happening and I wanted to just show you exactly what happens if I ask it for Reddit, for example, I say, hey, can you help me find posts about OpenClaw on Reddit, call the API someone else's agent has already indexed because it will basically cache the learned APIs into this massive database of the entire Internet and then use that knowledge of how to read Reddit and just pull it out and then call Reddit directly. So over here it's looking through Unbrowser server and then after that it's just going to directly talk to the server itself.

57:07

Wow, okay, Is unbrowser's server sort of wrapping the behavior that underlies Reddit? Is that what's going on?

58:01

The process is like basically whenever an agent browses the web, once it clicks the UIs, but under hood, there's actually a network request that's happening right Back and forth, it captures them, reverse engineers the website, indexes the reverse engineered APIs that turn into a skill, shares the skill to all the other agents so that one agent indexes once, all the other agents can just access the same skill. And then it's just basically the agentic Internet. I'm basically building like a sort of like a Google for agents. I have like Chrome for agents and I have like Google for agents, if that makes sense.

58:09

So the new API is the browser is sort of what you're building. This is a. Is this a company or is it a skill and part of the open source community?

58:45

It's both. The skill is basically the interface. But I'm studying a company for this specific thing called Umbrella. So now you have all this information about OpenClaw. And as you can see, I didn't even have to open a browser because it just called APIs directly without having actual official Reddit access.

58:55

This is great. This is just what I need.

59:12

What if I, like here's the question on everybody's mind is what if I could just get this to trade bar

59:14

for me technically could. The thing about this, right, is I was experimenting with this a lot. So you guys know Poly Market, right? You know, there's so many prediction markets out there that are so random and you could bet on literally anything, right? So firstly, you could index polymarket, that's something I've indexed before, and you can just query polymarket directly and then after that, because there can be predictors for all kinds of things on polymarket, right? Maybe let's say Bitcoin price, for example. You can have unbrowse, unbrowse for stock tweets, you can unbrowse for price of Bitcoin itself and it can do regression on the fly with all these data sources. And then,

59:18

yeah, can you do it for Google Flights? That's one that I'm always having a challenge with. I think Google Flights is just such a great product. But it's so hard to like get my agent to do booking of travel right now. That's like my big, you know, white whale is to get it to really efficiently figure it out.

1:00:02

Right now it cannot, but that's on the roadmap because all we need to do is figure out the cookies and how to sort of like go around their very complex APIs.

1:00:22

So what do you think your business

1:00:33

model will be as the business model is, basically I'm trying to build a platform, right, for sort of like a search engine, right? And then obviously let users pay per search. But in this process of paying, right, it's actually cheaper than having a browser browse the web for you because the token cost you save from calling APIs directly is like 90% of the original scraping you do of a browser. So if I make it such as $0.01 to just call an extra action, not only can I reward the website itself with these rewards of actual payments through micro payments, I could also make it cheaper than the actual token heavy consumption, because that could cost 10 cents. Right? So everyone wins. Yeah.

1:00:34

Amazing. All right, Louis, great job. And if you're in town March 16th and 17th for Launch Fest, you are my guest. We will get you a ticket March 16th and 17th in San Francisco. Let's drop Louis off to my team. Sebastian is coming on vocal. Sebastian is going to talk to us about a device he made for openclaw on a Raspberry PI. I saw this in my feed and I was super inspired because interesting things start as toys and then quickly become, as you know, Didi, more than toys, they become tools and then they become companies. Is a really interesting trend that we see all the time. Sebastian, show us what you built.

1:01:25

Yeah. Hey, great to meet you guys. It's my little friend here. It started so randomly, literally last week. I. I do have my own startup which is like unrelated to like open cloud, whatever. Like, as a founder, I use open cloud like by myself. So last week I was, funnily enough, I was also in sort of like sitting with my co founder snowboarding, and we were just like, hey, wouldn't it be nice if instead of like, I just like, I usually have it on like my WhatsApp on my Slack, like chatting with my open cloud agent, I was like, I just want to, like, I just want to talk to it. Like, I want to pull it out and like, talk to it. I just want to. Don't go on my phone, open up the app and then talk to it. And that kind of like just gave me the idea of like, hey, what is the smallest form factor I could build hopefully in a weekend that could like enable me that. That's where I kind of like came up with this. So, like, all the parts I ordered on Thursday last week, I got it on Friday and I basically hacked all the software and hardware on like Saturday and posted it demo this Sunday. And for some reason it just went viral on like X and like the Reddits and whatever. But the idea is very simple. You basically have this little device here. You can have a button where you basically push to talk and it records your voice, transcribes the audio, sends it to OpenClaw and then it makes whatever it makes and it has this little cute, kind of like Tamagotchi style kind of like character that kind of like talks to you and like makes things for you happening. But yeah, that's how I got into it. So super randomly, how much did it

1:02:10

cost you, out of curiosity to make that entire device?

1:03:48

The total cost was like a hundred bucks. So I would say again, this was super hacky, super. Just like the form factor is like if I compare it to my phone, it's like maybe for people it's like a fourth, like a fourth of my phone from a screen sizer. It's a bit too big. But I would say if you actually spend time on actually building something like that, you'd probably get the cost down to like maybe 40, 50 bucks and make it even like smaller and like incredible better, etc.

1:03:51

You know what it reminded me of when I saw it? Remember the communicator from Star Trek? I was like, this dude created the communicator and then I guess they have the pin where they would double tap the pin and say, hey, computer. Okay, computer, whatever. But I agree with you. I've been testing a bunch of different modalities. I love this clawed pin. I wear a clawed pin now. I forgot to put it on before I got on the air. But I've been testing the clawed pin and what I love about it is sometimes I go for a walk on the ranch, sometimes I take out a stogie, I go smoke a cigar and I just talk to it about all my different projects. And I say, action item question. Possible business model, possible venture capital system that I want to build, possible event I want to do. And then it automatically syncs with the cloud, automatically generates a summary. And then I'm now putting on my schedule time to review my bookmarks and my plaud notes and other things. And when I do that, I'm like, oh, I remember I had that discussion. I had this really good idea. What if I started a school for venture capitalists? What if I did this, what if I did that? And it all started adding up for me. So I was like super inspired when I saw your thing. What do you think a high end version of this? If I told you, hey, make it with money is no object. Just, you know, uber black it. You know what is the ultimate luxury version of this, Sebastian? What would that form factor be if I said, Hey, $1,000?

1:04:22

I don't, I don't necessarily think it needs to be a thousand dollars.

1:05:56

Like I think, well, obviously it doesn't. I'm just giving you permission to think. Yeah, what if it could have anything you wanted? No control.

1:05:59

You, you wanted to be like, it's no secret, I guess that like companies like Omai, they build on some hardware stuff. They are quite like there would be. They got the open clock. Like they would be dumb if they wouldn't working on something similar like this in this exact moment and getting this on the market in the next few months. Like and probably not OpenAI, but like other other big companies as well. I, I think if you think about it from a perspective of like sure, the models get better and better, but how, how do we as humans kind of like interact with, with the models then? Like, I think something that should be obvious is that like a chat interface is not the best interface to communicate with with like a model. So like, oh, is voice a better model? Probably. Before I did my current company, I was spending two to three years in the brain computer interface market and I was building brain computer interfaces. It was like back then it was like science fiction. It's still science fiction.

1:06:08

But which type of computer interfaces? You put a word before that. I didn't hear it.

1:07:02

Oh yeah, I was working on non invasive.

1:07:07

Non invasive. Explain what that means in plain English to you know, consumers who are listening.

1:07:10

Sure. There's, there's two types of BCIs. BCI is short for brain computer interfaces. There's non invasive and invasive. Invasive means Eugenia surgery. You're putting basically like the, the. It sounds again, it sounds scary, but that's just like how it's especially done for like medical use cases. If someone for example, can't walk anymore, can't speak and you need to get access kind of like to the, to the neurons in your brain. You're basically putting those electrodes via surgery in the brain to kind of like communicate that signal to the computer. And you have companies not Neuralink, for example, that's like one of the biggest ones by Elon that are kind of like doing this like invasive BCI work right now in this moment for like more medical use cases. And non invasive basically just means you're, you're not doing a surgery. You're putting electrodes outside of the like skull basically on top of your hat to detect kind of like the neural signals and the. But there's like trade offs here, right? The signals are usually pretty weak if you're not getting inside the brain. So there's like, there's like a lot of trade offs of those two options. But if. Yeah, there's like a, there's like a way of like these like micro electrodes, these like embedded, you put them kind of like into the.

1:07:15

This is interesting. So they have ecog, which lays on top of your head. You have micro electrode which goes inside the brain. That would be Neuralink. And then there's this other one, Endovascular, which means I guess it's going invasive into the bloodstream. The blood.

1:08:35

Yeah. There's one company right now called Synchron who's doing Endovascular. They're basically putting these kind of like microelectrodes into the, the blood vessels and they go through the blood vessel through the brain and then expand at the part of the brain where they need to get the signals from. And it's a, it's like a innovative way of like not actually doing like a pure surgery. But I think, I think Elon knows this, that like okay, like neuralink is obviously like a decade plus away from consumer.

1:08:54

Yeah, he's always going for the like where he's going as a, you know, we're friends, he always goes for what is the ultimate end state. And then how do we compress getting to the end state. So if the end state is data centers in space, let's get there. If the end state is not hybrid cars, but like you know, a three or four hundred mile car and a supercharging network, we might as well just work towards that goal. Even if the Roadster only does 150 and even if the, you know, supercharger stations can only put in 50 miles per hour, we'll get to 500 miles per hour, 1000 miles miles added down the road. So in your mind, will we be wearing a skull cap that interfaces with open claw and if so when?

1:09:25

Yeah, not in next, not the next three, four, five years. Probably like five to 10 years. I would say there will be some crazy first human trials that will be open to do that.

1:10:09

But yeah, non invasive, non invasive communication with a computer. You think it's possible?

1:10:19

No, not right now. You have physics that kind of like prevents you from getting the right like good signals from non invasive like basically signaling. So like in this moment, for now, the only way to get the actual good signals will be invasive. And for that to have a consumer device, it's just like so many years away. But like all the, all the companies that are kind of like and that I worked in that industry so like I kind of like have a hard tiger that. But like every company that's working on non invasive stuff is like, I don't think it has a, has a great future in terms of like providing the actual value. But yes, I think the, to make it sure like if you, if you go, if you give a company like 15 years to figure it out, unlimited money, then yes, there will be some device that basically you just like talk to open cloud with your brain and you just like, let it do things for you. And like, not via chat, not even via voice, but via thought. And that's like, that's not five years ahead, but like 10 years plus. But like, I think what, like this, like building hardware devices and like, what led me to this is just like thinking about different interfaces of communicating with our agents.

1:10:25

This is really interesting, Didi. This rabbit hole we're going down. I was talking to the CEO of Whisper on this Week in AI, our new podcast. This Week in AI, separate podcast, kind of like all in just three CEOs and me chopping or, you know, fund managers chopping up. What happened that week in AI? I brought up pedals. So there are pedals you can use with your computer. You press it, it turns on your microphone. So that's kind of an interesting interface, right? And then he said, yeah, or rings. And I was like, what do you mean rings? Like aura. And he's like, well, no, no, There's a whole category of computer rings that exist. And like, I just looked this up. This one is called Pro Lowering. It's a programmable ring. And you can connect it to your computer, obviously, and then it will do things like swipe up, swipe down, swipe left, tap media controls. And it's all based on different parts of the ring. So imagine a ring with different pads on it that you could do. And the reason I know this is real is because I see an ad for a ring for people who doom scroll constantly on TikTok. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but TikTok doesn't advance to the next short, but X does. So when you're using X, you could literally be on a treadmill and it plays the video, then it goes to the next one. To the next one. So if you're on an open claw video and you just want to play a stream of shorts, you'll probably get more open claw. If you're on something spicy, you'll get more spicy. If you're on something political, you'll get more something political because the stream is so good. But on TikTok, they sell a ring so you can sit there and be like, in your bed and you press advance. It's just a ring to advance to the next thing. It's totally crazy. But what do you think of this interface? The Ring. Sebastian, since you're so deep into interaction faces, what do you think of the ring?

1:11:29

Could be. It could be an option. I don't have to. I don't have to answer of like what best option is. I think something I like out of joy for this one is it has a character to it. Like, it's like again from a Persona. Yeah. If you like Clippy open openclaw has a soul MD file. Right. You know, you can give it a soul. It has a personality. So like it, it feels like why, why wouldn't the interface. Maybe the interface should have some kind of like soul MD or like something you to like interact with. And like obviously this one is not. This is like, it speaks pretty badly. It's like, hey, can you say hi to Jason? And it like you could see this, but.

1:13:18

Oh, I can see. Yeah, great.

1:13:58

It will think a little bit.

1:13:59

Hi, Jason. Hope you're doing great.

1:14:01

Oh my God. So you have a character. You had it build. This is going to be great for kids. You know, we had a woman, Jessie, on the program last week, I believe, and she's doing homeschooling. Your product for homeschooling would be incredible because she could have it. I'm going to put you in touch with her. You guys could make this product because schools now are banning phones. But if each student had an open claw tutor and it was a purpose built device and they could just press a button and talk to it and say, hey, I'm trying to learn my multiplication tables. Can you do it with me? Or can you give me a quiz on history? Or can you make a note that I should do a presentation about dinosaurs and pick three dinosaurs for me? But it had a character that engaged them. Oh my God. This could be like one of the great products of all time. We go from the Star Trek communicator to the Vulcan. You remember in the episode. Maybe it was one of the movies. My editorial director Lon will find this instantly, will remember it. They had the Vulcans in these pods when they were being trained in their college. Remember this, Deedee or no, I have no idea. They were walking around like a surface area and there were like pods in the ground, you know, that had them learning and they were in learning pods with their computers essentially learning. I think it's. Yeah, it's from the J.J. abrams version of Star Trek. We'll get it. We'll get a photo of it. Thank you. But I mean, wow. I'm just thinking about learning and children. Sebastian, what's your story? Sebastian? What do you do for a living? You got another star that you're shutting down to pursue this?

1:14:06

Oh yeah, it's funny, I've probably got like 100 plus requests from people to like sell it to them, but yeah, it's like too busy with my, with my other stuff.

1:15:36

What's your day job? What's your startup?

1:15:45

We, we started two years ago. A company is called Dallas. We basically help. We have a software that helps companies build complex hardware systems. So we are selling to aerospace, defense, robotics.

1:15:47

Oh, wow.

1:15:57

And kind of like.

1:15:58

Where are you guys based?

1:15:59

Yeah, San Francisco. I'm in San Francisco.

1:16:00

Awesome. How many people in the company?

1:16:02

We were two co founders. Just made a third hire, just raised half a year ago, so.

1:16:05

Oh, congrats. Who led the seed? Who led the seed? Who's the genius behind this?

1:16:10

It's not public yet.

1:16:15

Oh, okay. Well, Didi and I want in. Yes, I speak for Dee Dee as well and Menlo Ventures. We both want in. Sebastian, great job. I'm gonna get you a pair of tickets to The Launch Festival, March 16th and 17th if you can make it. Love to hear more about your startup. Indeed. He would too. I can tell. I can tell. When did he's interested. Yeah, maybe this becomes something you can do. An open source hardware product like what you built it on is the Raspberry PI, I assume.

1:16:16

Oh yeah, everything is open source. I should mention that if anyone that listened to this, I open sourced all the hardware, all the software, everybody who wants to build that type of thing.

1:16:48

Really cool.

1:16:56

Very cool. I'm getting the open source bug in a major way. You know what, I have a domain for this too. I have the domain begin.com and I've been looking for a use case. I paid like a quarter million dollars for this domain and I like begin as like beginning your educational journey with your like your little assistant could be like very powerful for kids. And I'm getting like a little bit passionate about home schooling and education. Just having three daughters. You got any kids yet, Sebastian?

1:16:57

Not yet. No, not yet.

1:17:25

All right. That's your next project to work on. All right, Sebastian, great job. Thank you for coming on the program and sharing.

1:17:27

Thank you.

1:17:33

I'll drop him off. Thank you, Sebastian.

1:17:33

Wow, Jason, what I thought was really interesting about all of the, all of the discussion on interfaces is, you know, we do these studies internally and we try to evaluate what is the interface of the future. Look, and I think for voice, we're there, right? We speak you for sure. You speak like three, four times faster than you could possibly write. No one wants to type things. And we'd really think it's voice out. Visual in is kind of the ideal highest bandwidth interface for getting information in and out. And whether it's glasses or whether it's a pedal for whisper on your computer, think that's what a lot of these things. Before we get the non invasive brain systems to work, it's probably going to be the way we interact with, with computers.

1:17:35

Yeah, I have to read down whisper flow. I tested it and then I stopped using it. And then I realized I need it again. And I need it with this pedal because I do with this open claw agent. The major frustration for me now is getting what's in my mind out to the agent. And I should just be talking to it at this point. It should be talking back to me. I need an interface. I did a really interesting thing today. You ever have like you want to grab a video off YouTube or you want to grab a Instagram video or a TikTok video, but you can't download it and you get frustrated and you're like, is there some third party tool at some Russian website that I can use to download Cobalt Tools?

1:18:20

No, I use a thing called YTDLP.

1:19:00

Yeah. So there's the YouTube download and that gets shut down all the time. And then you have to deal with like all these like pop ups or whatever. I don't want to do that. I just want to give the URL to my bot. So I told my bot, listen, I know there's some software kits and COBOL tools and open source one and there's other ones like it. Write some code. I'm going to give you the Blade Runner URL for this YouTube video. Your job is to give it back to me on Slack. The MP4. Wow. Didn't work. It didn't work. Didn't work. I said, try harder. It worked. I don't. I'm like, I'm not a coder anymore. I did code for like three years when I was a teenager and in college. It just worked. And I'm like, oh, come on now that's something. I would have paid $20. I was looking for a tool from some crazy Russian. I was like, if there's some crazy Russian out there, I can give like a bitcoin to. Not a whole bitcoin, but like some satoshis too, just to get this piece of software that I know is like on the margins. Like maybe it's against the term service. I don't care. I'll pay $100 a year for it. Couldn't find it. And then COBOL tool keeps getting blocked and YouTube download this gets blocked.

1:19:02

Not.

1:20:13

My agent just wrote it for me. I'm done.

1:20:13

Yeah, I have my version of this, which is my. With my podcast summarizer. Like no one, I feel like there's these all in is a great one. So some I like to listen to, but there's some that are just not funny or fun. But you want to know what these smart people talked about and summarize this. Yeah, Summarizer, which just goes in. It'll download the entire YouTube, it'll transcribe it, it'll annotate it, and then it'll just go and tell me like, hey, here's what happened on this three hour episode with this guy. I'm like, yeah, I wasn't gonna watch that three hours. But I kind of wanna know.

1:20:15

This is such a good idea. I'm gonna vibe code this this weekend. Do you use Overcast? I do, yeah. So, you know, like, if you're a podcast fanatic, I think you can get the odbc, like the. Not like basically an RSS feed of your RSS like all put together into one. I could feed my collection of shows as they download into my agent, have it transcribe it and summarize it and then on an inter, make a new interface for me to listen to it. And I could even make an abridged version of it. So give me like a 20 minute version of it. That could be really interesting.

1:20:44

And yeah, I do that. And then I have like a little Q and A system on top of it. So I'll.

1:21:21

Wait, you have this already you built?

1:21:24

I do.

1:21:26

I use it all the time. I have my little thing and I say.

1:21:26

Wait, you vibe coded it?

1:21:29

I vibe coded the entire thing. Yeah, it's called just a podcast summarizer. And so for example, Dario comes on Dwarfesh. I'm like, I just want to know what he said about Infraspend. What is Dario's view on infraspend?

1:21:30

Got it.

1:21:41

Well, just tell me. This is Daria's view on Infraspend. And it's really cool. Way to be able to have. I'm always thinking about how do you have high bandwidth information flow? Because we're like consuming so much information, it's really hard to filter. And so these are the tools that I use to sort of get around that.

1:21:42

You should do it.

1:21:58

It's really cool.

1:21:59

I'm going to, I'm going to vibe code this. All right, listen, another great episode of Twist is in the can. Dede, thanks for coming, and I'll see you when I'm in town for long.

1:21:59

Thank you for having me.

1:22:07

Bye, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.

1:22:08