Is Anthropic Making the Biggest Mistake in AI History | E2258

All right, everybody, welcome back to twist. It's March 4, 2026.

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Yeah, wow. I know. Still feels. Still sounds weird. Still sounds weird.

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But it is AO39.39.

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Post@LinkedIn.com twist 39 days after we first started talking about OpenClaw here, it's been a full one month and one third and it is still sweeping through the Internet. It's become the number one, number one open source project in history based on people following it, you know, stars like kind of situation.

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The stars exceeded react. Now the.

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So we have a full docket for you today. Lots of demos, lots of discourse, the investment opportunity, the efficiency opportunity, the entrepreneurial opportunity, all of that. And when the world is this chaotic line, you know what I like to do? I like to go over here to my plot pin.

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Oh, there you go. There it is. I got one.

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Yeah, that's my plot pin. Now, what is that? You say this is the greatest device ever. I. I press that button and now I'm recording and there's a red light on it. So I'm not invading anybody's privacy, but here I am. And what happens is I can say something lon to you, like make a note. We need a landing page for hiring the two new researchers we need for the new this Week in AI paid newsletter. And that this Week in startups paid newsletter. Some ideas, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, at the end of the day, I've done this 25 times. I never have to reach for my pen, my pad, open up an app. It just happens I'm on the ski slope. I was wearing this. So when I almost died on the ski slope in the blizzard two weeks ago, you would have had my final words transcribed and perfect. And I also would make a mind map of Jason's final thoughts and practice.

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As you drift away, you're speaking only to Plot. Slowly drift away. Yeah, I'm sure that's the image Plot

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wants for their commercial.

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I want, of course. No, no, but keep this on you

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in case you die.

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In case you die. You have your plot? No, but it's so helpful for Me. And they make one that magsafes on the back of your device as well. Everybody should try this. I've been using it for months. I'm obsessed. And then they said, hey, we heard you're obsessed. You keep talking about this on your podcast. Can we partner with you, sponsor the podcast? And I said, sure, go ahead. Here's the team who does partnerships. Where can people get more information?

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Lon, if your work depends on having conversations, just like Jason said, said, interviews, conducting meetings, taking calls, you need to get one of these Plaud note pins. You check it out at plod AI twist. That's P L, A U D A I slash twist. And if you use the code twist, they're going to give you 10% off.

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It's that easy. It's that easy, folks. And you know, you can clip it on. I don't know if you know about this though. You can use the clip or you can use the magnet. Yes. So if you don't want to like damage your nice suit, put it on like this and then the magnet.

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But look at this, we got two guests. Well, first joining us from Fin Capital, he's the founder and managing partner. Give it up for Logan Allen joining us, also an investor in Circle. Welcome back, Jason. And I'm told here by the docket, crypto, not the community app. So just keep it safe to keep it straight, everybody.

3:19

Not the community app. Circle. Jeremy Allaire's company. Correct.

3:36

The stablecoin interest, not the, not the. So Community one.

3:40

I, I've known him for so long, I just interviewed him at Davos. I don't know if you caught the interview I did with him, but I did an all in interview with him and Stable coins. You were so early on that, huh? How's that as an investment going?

3:45

It has been good. I mean obviously the company went public, it's back over above 100. You got more clarity on the legal framework. Right. That was a big catalyst for the stock, which is banks and Tradfi actually being able to adopt stables. We've got some noise around how stables and deposits are actually going to work together and you're seeing that play out on socials now vis a vis the Clarity act. And hopefully that comes to fruition here in the near term, albeit the country's got a lot on the plate right now. So we're big fans of stablecoin, big fans of Jeremy Allaires and think there's a lot to come in terms of treasury money, movement, yield and so forth in that world.

3:55

When did you Invest. And what was your original thesis?

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So we actually invested fin invest from pre seed to pre ipo. So on this one we got a little late to the party. We were pre IPO and then picked up some secondary and we're very aggressive about our secondary purchasing. And the thesis was back in, in the post FTX circle was being sparked world. And we were saying, look, we think stablecoins are the way money will move digitally. Obviously we didn't have agentic commerce or anything along those lines, but we felt like digital money was going to be important to that future as well. But the baseline thesis was tradfi is going to adopt this. We're going to need to move money cheaper, faster, better. Everything from credit card settlements to sending wires and remittances are going to be far more efficient on these rails. And that was our thesis.

4:34

Great thesis.

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We view that as having played out but still early innings.

5:25

You know my thesis, Lon, what's that look to what the criminals are doing? Do they adopt the technology? And we did have that with other stablecoins that were offshore.

5:29

I think you're talking about tether.

5:37

Well, I don't want to dig anybody, but it was, you know, human trafficking, allegedly, some of these things.

5:38

Allegedly. A lot of that dark web stuff you hear about.

5:44

Yes. Then you have the next group of people, which is maybe they're discreet, not illegal, but they're moving money around for discreet things like wagering.

5:47

Right.

5:58

So when it came on my radar was after, you know, the tethered truthers going wild on social media, coffeezilla, all this stuff tracking. It was when I saw people trying to settle, you know, wagering on sports or poker in this. And then you start to know it becomes legit when people who do a lot of transactions and are actually looking at the number of basis points, etcetera, start adopting it. Which is what happened with Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, people who cared about the 5%, 3%, whatever, you know, a visa was charging. People who are sensitive to that, your gardener, your handyman, whatever it happens to be, they're like, hey, can you do me a favor? Send it on PayPal Friends and family or Venmo friends and family so I don't have to pay fees. That's when you know something's starting to get there. And stablecoins have just started to hit that. And I think we'll start to see when you're gardener or your handyman or handy person, you're handy person. I mean it sounds so weird. That's when you know, it's gonna be right there. And I think we're right at that moment in time. Let's introduce our next guest.

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All right, up next, we've got Eric Voorhees. He's the founder of Venice AI. Now, they've been in the news a lot recently, Jason. They are an AI chat platform that doesn't log conversations, no safety restrictions, no censorship, guardrails. But also, briefly, they were the sort of default model being used by OpenClaw. OpenClaw has since sort of gone back, and now they don't want to play favorites. They're sort of neutral Switzerland. But for a short time, Venice AI was the default OpenClaw model.

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Welcome to the program. Eric. What's the vision here for what you're doing? And are you one of these, like, libertarian privacy nuts who just is making a point, like. And I love these guys. This is my favorite. You know, this is my favorite. What are the things between superheroes and supervillains? There's, like, the anti heroes, the folks who. They're not anti heroes, but they kind of like Ashoka. They're not Jedi. They're not Sith. They kind of chart their own path.

7:30

Right. Mavericks.

7:57

I find the libertarians who don't want to be part of the two different parties, or Ashoka, who doesn't want to be a Jedi but is a force wielder. I feel like, Eric, you might fall into this, which is chaotic. Good.

7:58

Yeah, Yeah, I think that's fair. But first, I'm just curious how the stablecoin investments are doing so well. I must be doing something wrong because all of mine have stayed at a dollar.

8:10

Hey. Hey. We were talking about investing in the corporate company, but you are correct, they are pinned to a dollar, and that's where I'm doing. He's going to be here three more nights. Take care of your waitresses.

8:23

I will say, this was also very confusing to me in the early Stable code era. It's like, why. How do you. You can. You don't make anything. You're just. It's. It's a dollar.

8:35

It's the idea. Tell me who you are and why you're doing what you're doing. I want to, like, get to first principles here. Yeah.

8:44

I am of the crypto world. I am currently a tourist in the AI world and have been building Venice for the last two years. Venice essentially is meant to be like, a private and uncensored version of ChatGPT. So when I started it, realized that, like, the principles that I felt were important from the crypto world, namely like user sovereignty, the right to privacy, free speech, lack of censorship. These were entirely absent in AI and realized that I should be the change that I wish to see in the world. And so started Venice.

8:49

How did you wind up getting so early into openclaw? I'm curious.

9:22

I mean we're an AI company, so like we pay attention and we're an open source, you know, like we love open source companies and projects. And so we were aware of it very early. We made a few pull requests like right when it came out and Venice was added as a model provider within the flow of setup. So basically if you want your claw to run on private inference and not have like every detail about your life and business going to Sam Altman, then we were a good alternative. So that's how we, that's how we ended up there. And we in the company, we've been huge users of Clause and it's been quite an amazing phenomenon. I love that you've been covering it so much.

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10:08

Yeah, so we, we actually passed on the proprietary alums which I'll call a you know, anti portfolio at this point. But our view was that open source was going to meaningfully catch up and close the gap around intelligence, speed and price. Right. And you've seen compression and the closing of that gap and particularly with Claw as well as, you know, players like a Gemini, like a meta etc. Investing heavily into providing these capabilities out into the market and then you've got all of the China based players as well emerging. And our view is that now you're seeing Claude and certainly OpenAI start to produce at the app layer. They always said look, we're going to be the chassis, you guys go build on top of it and we'll stick to our knitting. Now you're seeing them need to monetize on applications and suddenly whenever Claude announces an application it quote unquote destroys or cooks some company and I think that's obviously overbor. And our view is that the AI first companies that are producing revenue through a product, less so on the OPEX reduction, I think that's more short lived and more transient. You have to be AI first, you have to be producing revenue through that product and it has to have domain differentiation, workflow and data integration order to be sticky and to have moats around it otherwise you're very quickly going to get out competed.

12:03

Yeah. And the fact that small organizations are adopting a technology that to me is always one of my early signals. When people who are tinkerers, hackers, DIY people, Eric, they start tinkering. I take notice, I get curious and then when I see startups adopt a technology I get really curious and then when both do it, I become obsessed or I should say maybe the third factor is when I start tinkering, I get obsessed. Those three circles have now happened for me. So Eric, how do you think about openclaw, this open source project and then also crypto and privacy. How is this all going to come together and what are your circles? When you are evaluating something might break out your early signaling your like these

13:30

tools are obviously so powerful. They are, they are magical in many ways. And yet people have been led into this paradigm where like everything they think and do is being absorbed into several central repositories where it will live forever. That to me is just so obviously dangerous. And I find it kind of ironic that many of these frontier labs, when they say they care so much about AI safety, are kind of missing like the most near and present danger, which is the mass surveillance of all humanity. To me that seems like a danger. And so yeah, I'm glad that there are alternatives.

14:22

Eric, I am shocked right now. You're telling me that these entrepreneurs running the largest and fastest growing startups in history are saying one thing but doing another. The thing they're saying is they care about safety, but then they are doing things that are not safe and that are the basic blocking and tackling, which is there's no need to take my queries and ingest them into your learning system if I don't want that. And I certainly don't want you keeping my history and giving it to the police. You could easily have a button or a checkbox, Logan, that makes this very easy for consumers to not be involved. And there are in fact companies like brave, like DuckDuckGo, NordVPN, other VPNs, open source projects like the Tor project that are designed from the bottom up to be privacy first. So what's your take there on is this a missed opportunity for those large language models to incorporate this kind of thinking that Eric?

14:59

I think so. I mean I was just learning about Venice and coming into this discussion and think what Eric's doing is super interesting and obviously Tim Cook and Apple have highlighted this in terms of we want to maintain privacy and we want users to have privacy control over their data. I think, you know, largely privacy is very hard to come by these days and I think we should all assume our data is everywhere. But I do think first principles wise building with that in mind. Jason is absolutely right, particularly if you're going to touch end consumers. We're more enterprise driven and so we're looking at companies that are helping encrypt manage pii, obviously manage users use of AI. Our view is that this crossing the chasm moment for the enterprise and adoption of AI actually is going to be driven predominantly by cybersec. And so we announced an investment recently with Ashton and Sound Ventures in Witness AI which is focusing on how do employees use AI in terms of tools we give them, but also employees bringing AI to work. Everybody would talk about, you know, bring your device to work type type dynamics. Now people are bringing their own AI to work and that has huge implications for what proprietary data is being added, what documents are getting added and so forth. And until you can control that experience in the enterprise, you're going to continue to, to have meaningful lack of adoption.

15:59

Eric, I want to, I want to jump in here and ask you about your. You have a token? Venice AI has a token dollar sign vvv. So explain to us like how the token interacts with the AI product and like how, how people are using the token sort of as credits on Venice AI.

17:18

I'm a crypto guy, so of course there's going to be a token of all natural. In our case, the token allows you to get access to the API for free. So basically, if you're a human or an agent and you want marginally free inference, like free at the margin where you're not paying per call, you can hold the token for that. So it's a different pricing model and we think like whenever you can reduce friction, you find interesting new use cases. And so that was the impetus behind it.

17:35

And there's, there's some degree of like, volatility. Like I'm, I'm reading here from our notes, like after it was made the designated model for Openclaw, your token surged 35%. So are you, is that, are you keeping that in mind as you guys are running this AI company? Like, what, what, what's the price on the token and how that's, is that impacting decision making day to day?

18:04

Being in crypto since 2011, like, if I cared too much about the price movements, I probably would have like had to shoot myself.

18:22

Yeah, fair enough.

18:28

So you got to like, you know, keep a little, keep a little distance and not get distracted by the noise. And there's a lot of noise. Ultimately what we're trying to do is like build a super useful platform for humans and agents to interact with all the leading AI models in a more private way. And the token needs to be able to support and make that mission more feasible.

18:29

And is it using the infrastructure of Bittensor? I'm not sure if you mentioned that, but this Bittensor and Tao projects I think are super fascinating. I don't know if you guys are keeping up on them, but I invested and helped co found this fund that Mark Jeffries is running, Mark Jeffries is running that is exploring all these subnets. And the idea is to do distributed computing and provide an LLM or Resources or storage, whatever it happens to be, and then have a flywheel way to make money. Almost like, I think it's kind of like the next bitcoin in this way. Because it has an application tied to it. Have you been following it at all, Eric?

18:48

Yeah, I'm generally familiar with Bittensor. We don't have anything to do with Bittensor. We are not a decentralized protocol. We are a centralized company that offers inference, both API and app for normal humans. So yeah, our token is meant to enable people to access inference for free. And if that is appealing to you, then it's worth looking at.

19:29

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19:54

Yeah. Basically we have a sub token called DIEM. DMS are created out of VVV and DMs. Each one that you have gives you $1 per day of credit. So it's like a renewing resource. You can think of it like a perpetuity. So you can value Diem as a perpetuity on Inference. And if you hold these, you get a dollar per per day of credit in the web or the API. And Venice is willing to offer that even though it's a pure liability to us because we can control the supply of those. So you can think of it, you can think of it as like a mechanism that we, we can influence and we can constrain. But anyone that has these things, it's very valuable to them. And it's been interesting to see like how the world thinks such a thing should be priced.

21:22

That's fascinating. I have hit a wall or a big challenge which is we were trending towards with our Open clause about $500 a day in tokens.

22:08

This is somewhat my fault. I apologize. I've been teaching Gaff a lot about YouTube descriptions.

22:20

Yeah. And because it wants to please you, Open Claw Logan. It will not use the most efficient query. It will do more than it's asked of. And then we got Kimmy up and running on my Mac studio and we have one on the cloud and we're starting to play with that. But it's not very good at complex tasks. Sometimes it bottoms out. But it does some things very well. And that's what we're trying to figure out is when to route it. We may start intelligently routing things saying this is a Kimmy task. This is a Claude task by putting a keyword at the end of a sentence like use Kimmy or use kkk. Oh, don't use that. Use Kimi.

22:26

Pick a different one.

23:07

Use like some triple letter vvv.

23:07

But that one doesn't work.

23:09

You know what? That one doesn't work. Let's keep that one off the table. But I think that might be the future is trying to intelligently route jobs. But I'm super fascinated about any way to get these costs down while we wait for the next step function down. But I am living Logan in Jevons paradox now because I couldn't get anybody use our enterprise ChatGPT that we're like barely using it. Then I get open claw and I'm pointing it to our Claude opus and I can't get people to stop using it. This is like a very strange thing. As a business owner, it was trending to beating and being more than our payroll.

23:11

Wow.

23:54

Over to you, Logan.

23:55

I'm not sure what that says about what you pay people, but we'll leave that as a formula.

23:57

I mean market. Market.

24:00

Yeah, exactly. I think so. For us, as we've shared on past shows, we built a platform called Lighthouse AI and that has been our operating system. And I think as we all know, the tools for GPS generally in the market aren't great. And so you kind of have to build it. And now the experimentation with openclaw. We use Claude as a firm universally. It's pretty incredible. And there's been some posts on X and I saw Alexis Ohanian retweet this this morning and I totally agree with this. Which is the future of venture firms is very senior. It's almost like the old school benchmark model, right. Bunch of very senior partners who have deep relationships and can really manage through and then a huge hundreds of agents that you're, that you're operating and those are looking for stealth founders, those are monitoring your current portfolio from a financial metric and team growth etc. Perspective, those are looking at new themes, doing deep research, et cetera. Like there's just so many permutations of that. And so I just think venture firms are going to continue to get leaner and probably more effective overall. And we built a Gen AI model we call Founder DNA Score, which was a mix of research I'd done at Stanford with Ilya Striblev. And it's so highly predictive now of early stage founders in the model we've built, the back testing we've done that. We've come to really rely on it from an investment committee perspective, particularly in our early stage deals. Obviously less signal as the companies get mature for more of the late stage work we do. But we're really excited to have been adopting AI since 2018 when it was back in predictive and we named ahead of AI in 2021. And now you're seeing, I think you know largely every BCMP firm name ahead of AI. But I'd like to think we were one of the first.

24:03

What is in that formula? What are the variables and how are they weighted? I'm assuming this is like open research at Stanford.

25:49

It was. So Ilyas Jubileev who wrote the Venture Mindset is now more well known for that book. But back then he was doing research and highly recommend following him on LinkedIn. He puts out a lot of studies on is there a correlation between where you went to school, where you're building, the degrees you had and so forth? So we actually use about 40 weighted criteria and we've adjusted those weights using Gen AI and putting more and more data through that, which is by the way where a huge amount of our expense comes from and just training this model and then deploying these agents and and I would say for us the big factors are repeat founder.

25:58

Sure.

26:37

Average average age of our CEOs is 45. If you were a repeat founder. Were you CEO? How long were you CEO?

26:37

Whoa, that's an interesting one. I've never heard.

26:45

Yeah.

26:48

So did you stay in the CEO slot is predictive of future success?

26:48

It is, yes.

26:53

So not highly removed is another way of saying it.

26:54

Yes. Yeah. Did you stay in the slot? I mean if you, if you stayed in the spot in the seat and then handed the baton to somebody to take it public or, you know, you transition to another role, there might be some signal there. But generally speaking, if you were in the CEO seat and you exited and this is the other big one. Right. What was your track record on the exit? And there's actually, you would think that the best CEOs are the ones that had the biggest prior outcomes. It actually just the fact that you had an exit whatsoever is highly predictive of future success. And the ones that had smaller exits or were acqua hired, who are still hungry and want to build for more and have more to prove, are actually more successful in our market models in the future. And so we've done a lot of this work historically and continue to run data sets like Y Combinator, CB Insights, Stack Ranks, you know, fintechs and crypto companies and software companies. And we run all that data through and then we do back testing on our own founders. We've also integrated personality tests, which I think is really interesting. And you can get AI driven personalities, archetypes now off of just public data. So how are they? Entj, Right, exactly. Entj.

26:58

Every CEO Eric wants to be entj. It's not the only model. There's INTJ as well. You got the Jacks, you got the Sergeys, The Larry's are INTJs. And some people, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, more ENTJ. They're a little bit more extroverted in their approach. One thing I wanted to get your both of your takes on is what happened with Anthropic's revenue ramp. This is unbelievable. A bunch of information leaked. La', an, give it to us. This leaked tweet.

28:08

Yeah, well, Bloomberg, it's from a Bloomberg article that was published on Tuesday and then a lot of people are now tweeting about it. Anthropic on track to generate annual revenue of almost 20 billion. That's a projection based on their current performance, more than doubling their run rate from just late last year. They recently surpassed 19 billion in run rate revenue, up from 9 billion at the end of 2025 and roughly 14 billion just a few weeks ago. Jason, It's a sign of how strong the adoption has been for toting tools like Claude Code and the other Anthropic projects. And it's also a sign that maybe this Pentagon deal is sort of fueling growth from the public.

28:41

Absolutely. Any public battle for an emerging company drives consumer adoption, business adoption. I think there's two things mixed in here, Eric. Open claw and the battle with the government. And then there's some number of folks who are like, why are we even supporting. Why should we support what's going on with OpenAI versus Anthropic? We should go with the peacenik one, the one that doesn't want to create murderbots. What's your take on that whole beef? Back and forth. And then, Logan, I'll go to. To you in terms of the revenue ramp.

29:23

I mean, first, the revenue ramp clearly happened before the controversy, so it'll be curious or interesting to see what happens after it. I wonder if the incredible growth of that revenue is what gave Dario a little more confidence in taking the position that he took personally. I found it. I found it brave. It's very rare that any company is willing to do anything against what the federal government says. Like, I've come from a world where we continually battle regulatory agencies, and it's a. It's a total nightmare. And most companies just comply. They just comply.

30:00

Easier to bend the knee.

30:38

You always. You always bend the knee. Your shareholders want you to bend the knee. Like, you always comply with the government because the government's right, and that's how order works. And it's a bunch of bullshit. And so whenever anyone is willing to stand up to it, it's. It's inspiring, frankly. So I liked seeing that, and I'm curious, like, what effect it'll actually have on their business, good or bad.

30:40

See, Eric, this is such a good insight, because if Dario had shown up for all those Trump CEO meetings, if Dario had given $5 million to the Trump PAC, like I think Greg did, I just want to make sure I got it right. Greg Brockman gave 5 million to Trump's thing. Hugely unpopular, I'm sure inside of OpenAI to do that. Even Tim Cook went and gave a gold bar and came to the Melania screening, which I think was more painful probably. You know, you have to play the game on the field is the common thinking. And I heard Logan on CNBC or Fox News, one of the two. An investor in Anthropic said, hey, listen, Dario's got to play ball. Like, you have to win the deal, play the game on the field. I think this is a lesson for him as CEO. Your take, Logan, on taking a principled stance and winning the crowd, right? Win the. Win the crowd, win your freedom. Gladiator style. He got the crowd to use the product. They became Number one in the App store versus bend the knee. Where do you stand on this, Logan? It might seem like your startup can save some money by using a cheap tool for your device management and security, but you'll eventually end up paying out the difference and more in time and frustration. Take the guesswork out and trust our friends at ERU Endpoint Management. ERU is going to automate your device management end to end, so you don't have to worry about onboarding endless app updates and enforcing all of your company's various policies across your entire team's Mac, Windows and Android devices. This is going to cut down all the time it takes you to deploy new devices, from hours to just minutes. And that means less time troubleshooting, fewer tickets, and better security for your company's valuable data. Everyone at launch has a phone, a laptop. I'm even buying these kids plod devices now because they're so good. You think I have time to worry about what apps they're installing on these things and what websites they're visiting and all the error messages they're going to get? I gotta make podcasts all day long and make angel investments. Without eruse system, my team would be wasting hours policing everybody's hard drives instead of doing valuable work that actually moves the ball forward. Twist listeners get 20% off when they book a demo at iru.com twist that's iru.com/twist.

31:01

I think some of the the thinking behind the negotiation was a little flawed in the sense that if you're going to work with the military, you know, and they're out killing bad guys, you probably have to accept that your product's going to be used to go kill bad guys. So like going into that and saying well actually we want to use you to use it in the following ways is a bit odd. I think Keith on X used the analogy of that's like giving the Department of War a Mac and telling them how they have to use it. Right. I think that that was a little short sighted in that regard. They could have been probably more balanced. But yeah, short term upswing. And I think it goes back to the productization of these apps. On top of Claude Claude code being number one for them, I read somewhere that that's about 2.5 billion of the current revenue, right? So cloud code is the fastest growing product, but every new product and app that they they spin up is, is generating stickiness and it's because of their enterprise first orientation and that enterprise, those enterprise relationships are over 80% of their revenue today. From the numbers we've seen and OpenAI, that number is less than 5%. Right. And so I think all those things are incredibly valuable. And then we talked about it earlier, which is the usage based pricing model. Right. Going to value based pricing is such a huge aspect of the asymmetric growth. But it's been astonishing, but I think well deserved overall.

33:25

I got to push back on Logan a little bit here.

34:54

Do it. Yeah. This is an important debate.

34:56

Yeah. I mean, Anthropic wasn't trying to tell the military how they can go kill bad guys. That's a bit disingenuous. They had two prerequisites, two terms in their terms of use that were relevant here. One was that they did not want their technology used for autonomous weapons, meaning weapons where there was no human in the loops. Yeah, Call them what you want, like autonomous weapons, because they don't know that their technology is safe enough to use in that kind of capacity yet. I think that's an eminently responsible way to treat things. And two, their other requirement was you can't use it on wholesale surveillance of Americans. Basically all they're saying is like, we want you to abide by the Fourth Amendment. That was not acceptable to the military. And so the military not only is like canceling the contract, but vilifying them and saying that other companies are not allowed to work with them either. It's that latter part, I think, that was quite gross. If the military doesn't want to work with them on those terms, that's. That's perfectly fine. But I think it's a good nuance.

34:58

Eric, you're 100% correct that the framing was, as a provider of technology, this is new technology. These are not batteries that have been around for 50 years. And we know the circumstance under which they overheat. And you shouldn't have them under the airplane in storage. And you should follow these precautions with an electric car. This was, hey, we've invented this new battery, this new computer, and we as the creators of it, don't believe it's ready for prime time. We believe that it will accidentally murder someone. Second, hey, we live in the United States. We hear about the Fourth Amendment. We don't want this being used internally in the United States to create a mass surveillance state, because this technology can do something that the camera at the 7:11 can't do because it doesn't have a brain and it's not connected to every other camera on planet Earth. There's something between, I think, your two positions, which a reasonable group I Think you're both right. And a reasonable administration would have said let's handle this behind closed doors. But instead this is a performative group of individuals and their core belief inside this administration is to never apologize, never be reasonable. In fact, attack, attack, attack. So when somebody doesn't get an alignment line, correct me if I'm wrong. The operating system of Trump as outlined in his that movie about him, the documentary was you're supposed to attack.

36:00

Yes.

37:36

And Dario is the 1 Internet CEO of NatScale Co. I believe perhaps the only one that has not bent the knee.

37:36

Yeah, I think a lot of it actually comes down to approach and tone more than the actual lines in the deal or the contract. I don't know if you guys saw Washington Post quoted a Pentagon official has said they they proposed to Dario during this meeting a hypothetical they said would anthropic let the military use Claude to shoot down a nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missile aimed at the US and apparently according to this Pentagon source, Dario's answer was, well, you could call us and we'd work it out, which they did not like. So to me it feels like if that answer had been 10% more political, we might not be in this situation right now.

37:45

Logan, in all honesty, there was only one answer to would you save American lives from a nuclear holocaust? The answer is yes. Give it a shot.

38:25

Absolutely.

38:35

That was a self fail. Or he could have said if that's technology you want to work on, I think we should sit down and actually build it for you because we want to make sure it works when it does happen because we all don't want to die in a fiery nuclear ball. But what do you think, Logan? If you were an investor in the company and Dario said what could I do better?

38:36

I think Dario has tended to politicize this a bit and has set a little bit of a trap for himself which is we want AI to be safe. I'm concerned about what AI is doing to society and it's going to eliminate jobs and all these things. And he's kind of talking against his book in order to support his book in some ways. And he got, got caught in a little bit of a trap here in the sense that he tried to politicize in a conversation where frankly, you know, as you said, these guys are not going to stand for that and they're going to then showcase why they're right and they're going to pound their chests. And I think he walked right into that, unfortunately to the detriment of the company from a long term Perspective, because as Palantir has demonstrated, the government could be their largest customer.

38:53

Eric, you want to give us your final thought on this? And Lon, I'm going to let. I see Lon is. I see the steam coming there.

39:39

He's got.

39:46

Yeah. I think you have one thing you want to. Eric, then Lon, and then we'll move on to our next topic. This is a fascinating one. Yeah.

39:46

I'll just say that the whole thing is interesting. I think there's going to be more of these conversations, and I'm curious what Anthropic would have done if Kamala was in charge. I'm not confident. I'm not confident that they would have had the same resistance if their people were running the things. So I don't know that it's a matter of principle on which this was done. Maybe. Hopefully. But in any case, it's refreshing to see business leaders stand up to the federal government in any capacity ever. I think the United States needs much more of that.

39:52

One of the great things about America is that we can have major debates and still come together as Americans in good faith. It's one of the things that's been lost in our current political climate where these two sides never think, hey, maybe we could go have dinner together as rivals, enjoy a nice steak and then smoke a cigar, have a scotch, debate it all, and then come to what's in the best interest of all Americans.

40:25

Yeah, I think we kind of had.

40:53

The esprit de corpse is over.

40:55

There was this moment. I feel like that was Joe Biden's sort of 2020 pitch. Mitch was like, hey, folks, let's stop all the. All the fighting. Let's come together. Let's all be recognized. And we just. We've now fully rejected that. We're like, no, we didn't actually want that. We don't like that. We like Donald Trump's winner take all style. And I think America sort of turned away from that, and it's a little bit of a shame. Should Anthropic be forced to comply when choosing to save the U.S. that's an interesting question.

40:56

I don't think that they should be forced to comply unless we're under attack, in which case the war powers thing comes in and, you know, if you're Ford, you're making tanks now, not Model T's.

41:23

Right.

41:31

It's just the way it is.

41:32

Yes. I mean, that. That is sort of a very classic American idea.

41:32

Obviously, they should be forced to comply. This isn't Soviet Russia, except after Pearl

41:36

harbor or well, Hitler invades Paris or Poland.

41:42

Fair enough.

41:46

Should we. Should we take a look at this poly market, Jason?

41:47

Oh, I love a good poly.

41:49

Speaking of things I don't think we should do, Polymarket is asking, will the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amadeus be arrested? Only 5% chance. So the smart money apparently still on not being arrested for saying the government can't use his technology to make kill bots or spy on all of us.

41:51

I know we have some demos in the wings.

42:11

You want to see? We got some. We got two demos. You want to take a look at these?

42:12

Oh, Logan does. Because Logan and I want to play some bets. All right. That's what we do for a living. We're bringing up yumskis. We like to play as bets. Logan, if you got something good, we're in.

42:15

Who knows? We've got two eager founders. First up, we're going to bring up David Kaufman. He's the founder of Sightline. This is a launch port code, Jason. So you did already. Oh, you've already thrown a little. A little cat.

42:25

I got my slice.

42:35

Part of LF4. Sightline tracks agent behavior on websites. It's sort of like Google Analytics for your agents. So, David, welcome to the program.

42:36

Yeah, thanks guys. Happy to be here.

42:46

David, show us what you're working on.

42:47

Yeah, of course. As mentioned, we are Sightline. We are an analytics tool focused on on agent visits coming to your site and how to capitalize these, what they're doing, where they're getting blocked. As you all know, people are searching more with agent agents themselves or in agentic ways. ChatGPT. Obviously it does searches and query fan outs, but oftentimes it will go visit sites in real time. And the reality is most websites are just not prepared for the agentic web. They've set up fancy UI that you know, is nice for humans, but oftentimes will get in the way. And so these agents get blocked, they get confused. Maybe they're spinning up and trying to look at screenshots. But the reality is most people don't even see this traffic because a lot of them run server side only and so they won't show up in traditional analytics tool. And so our goal is to give people visibility on the agents that are coming to their site and then figure out how to capitalize on it, figure out what they're looking for, what they're interested in. Right now, a lot of what agents are doing is reporting back to the humans that delegated them. But we feel that over time this will shift and become More and more autonomous and they'll start taking actions, they'll submit demo requests, they'll start doing bookings. There's agentic commerce in the wings. And so we want businesses to be prepared for this new customer source and be able to, you know, present themselves in the best light and drive growth from it.

42:49

Logan, your honest opinion as an investor. Yeah.

44:18

So who is the ICP here? Like who are you finding that you're selling into predominantly and how, what channels are you using?

44:22

Yeah, so at the moment a lot of ICP, it's mostly SaaS companies and oftentimes a more technical profile. So we work for some authentication tools, B2B SaaS. Really this is because they, their customers, so procurement internally, for example, are already adopting Agentix search in a lot of ways. So when you're evaluating a bunch of options for your company, it's more than just Google, it's, you know, customized. As far as what is your tech stack, what are your requirements, what you've been doing in the past. And we found that resonates the best just because their customers are already there and they're a bit more ambitious and ahead of the game. I'm thinking about this new paradigm because it is fairly new as far as doing growth marketing not only for humans, but also for agents.

44:29

Super interesting. Yeah. I was reading the other day that a massive part of Meta's revenue these days is AI monetization driven and they're at a 60 plus billion dollar run rate on revenue as a result. And it feels like, you know, how do I understand my reputation, how do I understand the analytics from that? Growth marketing is incredibly important, particularly as you, as you grow monetization there is that kind of what you guys are finding. Yeah.

45:18

And I think one unique challenge to this new world is that the attribution question is even tougher. And there's a lot of SEO geo tools out there that kind of say, like, hey, Are you on ChatGPT? Are you pinning an answer? But it's really hard to track that fully through, let's say the purchase funnel, because often there's people that are using ChatGPT to do research procurement. But then the ultimate last step is to come in and navigate with Google and still come through that way. So we're trying to get a good feel on what parts of your site are being visited. There's different types of agents too, some that are directly triggered by humans. And then you can do the whole funnel from I'm being ingested, I'm being cited as an answer, I'M being mentioned in the answer. And then finally humans come on through and I can actually tie this back to new customers or orders or what have you.

45:45

That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think agentic search and agentic commerce are the future, so having analytics around that makes a ton of sense. I really like what you're building.

46:37

This is fantastic. I've already sent it to my claw actually to implement in Venice. We absolutely need this. So yeah, we've already ingested it.

46:45

What do you guys think of Eric? I don't know if you've seen this, but our friends over at Cloudflare and I talked to the CEO when I was in Davos about it, they have a really interesting concept which is pay per crawl if you want to come in instead of just robots. Txt. So Eric and David and Logan will go in that order. What do you think of the pay per crawl concept?

47:00

Obvious and inevitable. That's very smart.

47:22

David, your thoughts on the paper crawl? I'm sure you're watching Cloudflare, watching Cloudflare

47:24

closely on this and actually we integrate with Cloudflare in order to see the visits. I think it makes sense from a public sure standpoint, an author standpoint, someone that needs to capitalize and monetize their ip. From a business standpoint, it's kind of the opposite. They're telling us we want to encourage as many bots visits as possible. We'll even pay to have more of them them because they want as much exposure as as they can and they want it to be ingested, they want to be recommended, etc. So I think it depends on the context. Obviously if you're a journalist, I think there's some upside there on projecting the IP and what you're producing. But from a business standpoint, they kind

47:29

of want to open the floodgates and

48:07

I prefer more conversion orientation to like, you know, we're seeing Agentic in the checkout now. Right. So pay for crawl I think you're going to have at different levels of that. So, you know, did you land on the page? How did you interact? How long did you spend? And it feels like at least with Sightline. David, correct me if I'm wrong, you're trying to build is attribution and kind of removing the black box orientation around that so people can actually monetize against those types of metrics.

48:09

I got a really simple solution here, Lon.

48:35

What's that?

48:37

What if I could set my crawl to be this website is crawlable however you Damn please for $500 a year, put in your credit card, do what you will. And if you were a substack and you had a thousand people or even 100 people pay 500, it could be material. This could just be a very simple solution. I know this because Microsoft went to Harper business, which produced Angelthebook.com and they said, would you accept to me $2,500? My agent called $2,500 for the next five years or something. 500 a year to put it into whatever Microsoft is up to with, you know, having a book in there. And I was like, if you. Sure. And are there 10 other people who would pay 2,500? This is inspiring to write another book because it's two swings at Batlon. One, I'm included in the crawl and maybe even featured, so it gets me prominence.

48:37

Right.

49:39

Two, if they link to the upsell, great. And if I got a little revenue stream coming in here, maybe it's time for two more books.

49:39

Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, there are a lot of these platforms and companies and even authors or media sites, they feel like their data is the value of the company. And if they sell it at any price and just let everybody crawl their stuff, like, that's why Reddit, I feel like, is so hostile to all of our agents because. Because the meat that's on Reddit is. That's what makes it valuable. And if we can all just crawl it unlimited, but for a lot of different kinds of resources, I think that

49:45

makes total sense for David. I'm gonna be hosting Launch Festival again. Launch Festival is a conference I created because, Lon, I couldn't afford to come to conferences as a founder, and they wanted me to pay $20,000 to demo back in the day to show my product. I couldn't afford that either. So I said, if I ever make it, I'm gonna create Launch Festival. It was originally called TechCrunch50. And then Mike and I broke up. I went to do LaunchFest. I'm starting it up again Monday, the 16th and 17th of March. Two weeks, 400 seats. It's like 50 investors, 250 founders. And I have 50 seats for sale for people who want to come to lunch. Thousand bucks. And that underwrites the founders who are coming. And, Logan, I would love if you would come. Are you going to be in San Francisco? Are you in the Bay Area?

50:10

I am going to be in. I was just going to say I'm in town, so I would love to.

50:54

Can I get you to judge a Panel with me and give somebody some feedback to founders.

50:58

That'd be fantastic. Looking forward to it.

51:01

I appreciate you. I appreciate you for doing that. I know time is limited and if anybody wants to go open Clawaunch Co. If you want to be involved or just on the website, you can do a bunch of. You can figure out. It's free for founders, by the way. The way I do it, Logan, this is my brilliant move. It's 20 bucks for a founder to reserve their seat when they pick up their badge. We give them the 20 bucks back. Then we don't have drive bys. It just creates just enough friction. David, are you coming? Are you in the Bay Area?

51:02

I'd love to. I'm currently in Telluride, but.

51:32

Oh, Telluride. Fuck you. Great skiing.

51:36

First time here.

51:40

Ever tell you the story When I almost died going into Telluride Airport, I almost went on the do not fly list. Wow, this is before I had kids. I'm on a little puddle jumper from Los Angeles. Pull up the Telluride airport video. Landing there, the most dangerous airport in America. You can find it on YouTube. To my team, Telluride Airport dangerous. This thing is on the Telluride Airport. David, you've flown into it.

51:41

Yeah, Flew into Montrose, but yeah, I'm familiar.

52:04

Yeah.

52:07

This is the worst possible airport you ever go to. It's in a box canyon type situation. And when you land at this thing, it's got a Runway that goes up and down. Why? Because it's so short you want to slow down. It's also windswept. And I'm coming in on this in a prop plane, but it's a commercial, but one of those small like Eagle kind of regional jets. And as you can see, this is like a little peninsula type situation. On three sides is a cliff. We come in, there's crosswinds. The plane goes sideways down the Runway. I think if this thing hits the tires hit, we're flipping and rolling, we're dead. We miss the Runway line entirely. We miss it.

52:08

It's like a movie.

52:53

And so. But he's already powered down the plane. So we fly off the end of the Runway, we haven't touched it and we start falling down into the town of Telluride. He powers the thing up, this plane starts shaking like crazy. We finally go back up in the air and I kid you not, we go back up. The guy says on the thing, the plane is bouncing around. He says, I'm gonna try one more time.

52:55

Yeah.

53:20

Everybody on the plane goes crazy. I tell the Flight attendant. I was like, listen, you try this again, the pilot's gonna get beat up by all these passengers. They say, hey, we're going to Durango. All of a sudden, 10 minutes later, we're gonna land in Durango. We go to Durango. My wife's like, did you threaten them? I said, no, no. I just warned them, like, listen, you're gonna have a mutiny. We land, two police officers get in. They block the aisle. They let the. They let them. The pilots off the plane who don't make contact with the passengers. They leave. Boom, they're gone. They don't want to confront the passengers. And then I'm like, oh, my God, we're going to get arrested. I'm going to get arrested.

53:20

Yeah.

54:01

You threatened to mute me.

54:01

They just let everybody off. We had to drive an hour and a half in. But, David, please, for the love of God, you promise me you'll never go in into that airport. Because I'm an investor in the cap table here, and I need returns. We need dpi, right, Logan? We need dpi.

54:02

He man risk and dpi, yes. Both are important. The only, only worst I've flown into that airport didn't have as bad of an experience, only worse. Landing in the entire world, in my opinion, is St. Barts.

54:12

And that is spicy.

54:26

Brutal.

54:28

Yeah. And by the way, the plane is like 30 years older than whatever you were in.

54:28

Is that the one where it goes right over the beach and, like, it's like, terrifying. Yeah, I think I've seen.

54:32

Oh, my God.

54:37

You have to nose dive in. Ye is basically what it is. I know a lot of billionaires who go there, and I had one billionaire who, you know, company goes public this 20 years ago, makes a bunch of money. He's a cowboy, he's a pilot, all this kind of nonsense.

54:37

Here you go.

54:48

And he starts talking about, like, this landing and how intense it is, and he says, yeah, you know, my new plan is I was talking to my friend in the CIA who's now on my security, and they are able to open the doors on a G650 and you can parachute out. They figured out how to do this on a private plane, and they slow down. And so I'm going to start skydiving to my. To my Christmas.

54:49

Oh, my God.

55:10

And I said to him, never. Hey, buddy, I know that you're a billionaire now. I know you have unlimited resources. Let me tell you about Eagle Computer and toxic wealth. Eagle Computer goes public in the 80s on the way to the IPO party. The guy who's the CEO buys a Ferrari, he flips it, kills himself in the cfo, I believe, tragically.

55:11

Wow.

55:29

And now they sit everybody down. You can look up Eagle computer on Wikipedia and the CEO dying. And ever since then in Silicon Valley, they sit people down when they make their money. They say, we know you can buy all the toys now. Toxic wealth. Don't kill yourself. You got kids?

55:30

Yeah.

55:47

It died in an auto crash hours after his company offered stock to the public for the first time, making him a multimillionaire. He was only 39.

55:48

Do you guys know this story? Anybody?

55:54

I'd never heard of this.

55:57

You heard this one, Logan, Eric.

55:58

I've heard that story because I grew up in the valley in the 90s. And there are other unfortunate examples about it as a result, like gps, depending on the LP base you have will literally have keyman clauses that prevent you from doing things like an NBA contract. You can't skydive, you can't go pick up, play pickup basketball. You know, GPS have similar, albeit, you know, for different reasons. Can't get on a helicopter, can't go skydiving. Can't do any of these things.

55:59

No scuba.

56:25

Risk averse. Yeah.

56:26

Is not for you.

56:27

Yeah, so I agree with it. I'm highly risk averse. Pickleball is about as extreme as it gets for me.

56:29

Some twisted ankles in that game. All right, David, this is great. You're in launch fund 4. What did I do? Did I put in like a little 25,125k check? What did I do? I can't remember.

56:36

125 at the full launch? Yeah.

56:49

Oh, okay, great. I need to get in on this. Maybe we need to do another round. Me and you and Logan can take this offline. All right, let's drop David off. Great job.

56:51

Thanks, David. Great job. We've got one more demo. We got. Welcome. George Pickett, he's the founder of OpenClaw Studio. They make OpenClaw user friendly for non technical users. We've heard from a few of these kinds of concepts. Openclaw can be, as I've recently experienced, very intimidating when you're brand new if you are non technical. And so openclaw Studio, one of these projects that's kind of easing people in getting them started with agents without having to do all of the complex setup. He was also a core maintainer of openclaw, met Peter Steinberger, self taught programmer who helped bring us openclaw in the first place. So thank you, George, and welcome to the program.

56:58

Awesome, thanks for having me and great to meet you, the world's greatest moderator.

57:37

Oh, it's not for me to say,

57:41

but it's for George to say.

57:43

It is for George to say. Thank you, George. Show us what you built.

57:46

Sure thing. So one difference with what I'm building here is that in its current iteration, you actually have to have OpenClaw installed on your computer. So this is for people who already have OpenClaw. Basically you can run NPX OpenClaw Studio with your existing OpenClaw setup and you get a really nice UI to view your openclaw. We're turning it into a SaaS product. I'm working with another one of the contributors from OpenClaw. And yeah, basically the idea here is that this platform provides guardrails. It's opinionated and it does some version control behind the scenes, but basically, yeah, my thesis is that basically all the benefits of AI agents have been accumulating to technical people and software engineers. So I want to make it really easy to chat with your agents and have some controls around them.

57:50

Very nice. So explain to us what we're seeing here. This is the interface we're seeing. You've got 10 agents, Bill Nye, SF events, OpenClaw use cases, latest AI news, growth engine, YouTube channel, all these things that might be interesting. Now, they're all agents. Each one of those is an agent running on OpenCL.

58:48

Yeah, exactly. So each of these is a separate agent. Usually this would be like a separate telegram chat for any individual agent. But what you can do here is each of these has their own separated memory. You can have different tools enabled, different permissions enabled. And so in the, yeah, like I tend to have different, different projects in, inside of different agents. I scope them like that. And inside of the settings here you can set up the capabilities so you can make it, you can kind of control the permissions like when it, when it's going to ask for your approval or not. You can configure skills on an agent by agent basis. You can set up cron jobs and like a pretty nice little UI here. So instead of chatting with your agent and telling it, hey, every morning at 7am remind me to do this or whatever you want your repeating. I call it timed automation. You can kind of set it up in a really nice, easy to use, kind of like more understandable way.

59:08

So this is like, this is like wix, Wix for openclaw, right George, you're making it easier for all of us non techies, non coders to build, I guess. Where's the use Case for R being polymarket. Because that would be like my first. That would be my first use case.

1:00:07

Yes, Poly Market Sharp. I was just thinking the same thing because Logan, so many people are doing repetitive work that if you did the Poly Market Sharp and you said to me, we have one agent doing this and all we do is focus on the Poly Market Sharp, I'd be like, that's worth $99 for me to throw into my, you know, agent cluster. So many different ways to win here. But yeah,

1:00:23

if I gave you my Poly Market strategy, you know, you guys would be taking my arbitrage, so I'm not going to give you that.

1:00:54

Fair enough.

1:00:59

But your YouTube optimization you might be okay with. What do you think of, you know, all the work that has to be done on an open source project to make it more accessible?

1:01:00

Well, yeah, it's cool to see this. George, Good to meet you. I, I actually had already come across this project and I had literally told my claw to install it and set it up. The claw failed and I hadn't been able to use it, but I don't think it was. The claw has failed in many ways. So I have to.

1:01:10

They do that sometimes.

1:01:28

I have to have a stern talk with it later this afternoon. But yeah, cool to see this demoed. Obviously useful. I mean like multi agent orchestration is the whole point and value of these softwares to make it a little bit easier or, you know, materially easier here I think to give you some visualization on the agents and to personify them a bit. Very smart. And I'm now renewed with the initiative to make sure the claw will get this thing installed so I can try it.

1:01:29

Totally. Yeah. And I mean the way I see it going is that you probably have in the tens of millions of engineers who are using agents. I think in the next two years we're going to see probably a billion people on earth using agents. But I really don't think it's going to be WhatsApp telegram. It's going to be some kind of interface. And I think if the answer, if the answer was Perplexity Computer or Claude Cowork, you would see an explosion of hype. But no one is using Cowork, no one is using Perplexity Computer. They're confusing. They're coming from this way of interacting with agents, from this really developer mindset. You know, they're showing you tool calls. I do in the current version allow you to see tool calls. Just because I'm a nerd and I like to see like okay, what's it, what's it actually doing? But in the SAS version of this, we're gonna, we're getting rid of tool calls, thinking traces. We have a really cool continual learning angle where it's gonna be learning more about you and retraining, which I'm really excited about. I'm working with someone else who's a core contributor of openclaw who so far doesn't want to be named, but he's just an awesome, awesome backend DevOps guy and has some really cool ideas around this continual learning stuff.

1:01:59

Georgia, is this a startup or are you doing an open source project? What's your aspiration here?

1:03:14

Yeah, totally. So right now it's totally open source. This project is just OpenClust Studio on GitHub. I've been working on it for about 5 weeks. 1.4 thousand stars. 1.4k stars. Nice start. Yeah, yeah, no, it's been going well mostly all through Twitter and I've gone, since I've started working on it, it's gone from like 1300 followers on Twitter to almost 5K. It's been super awesome. But yeah, we're working on basically a lot of these open cloth startups are they're wrapping the deployment for you and handling that so you don't have to deal with API keys, you know, virtual machines, all this stuff. I think that's table stakes. So there's no reason why someone should have to work like, you know, deal with aws. But I think combining that with a really nice UI where you don't have to think about tokens, you can log in with Google just providing a really simple way. And we're not calling it OpenClaw. The SaaS product, it's like it's totally separate from the brand of openclaw.

1:03:19

Love it. Logan, your best advice for open source projects, Tinkerers who want to then build a SaaS product and build a company,

1:04:24

what should they be thinking about who you're building for? George, is this something where you're going to individual consumers and saying, hey, you know, we want this to be open source and available to all of you. Are you trying to back into like a Dropbox style? Let's go to the developers who are then going to, you know, be in the side of these enterprises, tell everybody inside of the enterprise and we're going to back in effectively and to enterprise sales. Is that kind of your mindset from an impact perspective? I think having a view of who you're building for, how you're going to monetize and position it and then the third piece is like, you know, this freemium open source model and then you know, where do we go from there in terms of the premium models and how do we scale this from a product roadmap perspective are the three things I would think about.

1:04:31

I'd say on the open source side I'm going to continue maintaining Open Cloth Studio on the open source side because number one, I just find it fun to build for open source and kind of get that feedback on the target market. I have a couple different thesis. One is that there are a lot of people out there who are already really great with ChatGPT. They're good at prompting, they're kind of power users at ChatGPT, but they're kind of too scared to go set up a virtual machine. I think those people are the perfect kind of like maybe a technical product manager to start up up some like ops person people who really get AI and are using it a lot but aren't yet using agentic AI. I think that's the sweet spot. I'm giving it to my mom. I set my mom up with openclaw and she's doing genealogy, all kinds of random stuff. So I'm curious to see people who have never used openclaw, see what they do with it. So our first closed alpha is just giving it to, just giving it to people who have never used, used openclaw before and seen what they do. But yeah, my prediction is that it's going to be people who are semi technical but not programmers who are going to want something more than WhatsApp or Telegram and not have to deal with API keys.

1:05:17

Do you think the other part of this is just restricting what OpenClaw has access to on your box, in your files and what APIs you're integrating with it? I think that's, that's been one of the barriers to entry in the enterprise and certainly for us, like you know, do we want, do I want to just give it access to, you know, our desktop and let it run? I think that component would be really helpful if it's not already built in, just to help people understand the security components of this.

1:06:34

Totally that that's a huge part of what we're doing in the SaaS. Like in this Openclaw studio you can do anything you can in Openclaw. In the SaaS version of this, it's going to be a lot more restricted. It's not going to be able to do as much, but you're going to, it's going to be safe. Like, you kind of can't screw it up, so it'll be idiot proofing.

1:07:01

The data is super important. We'd be users, so I'd love to learn more. Thank you. George.

1:07:21

We're thinking about, it's like going from Linux to Mac. It's like Linux allows you to do anything and kind of shoot yourself in the foot. The Mac version, it's like, can't quite do as much, but it's really easy to use and fun to play with. So it's kind of how we're thinking about.

1:07:24

Well done, George. You're my guest at Launch Festival. If you can join us, launchfestival.com, march 16th and 17th in San Francisco. Right in the city. All right, we'll drop George off. Well done. And lon, we have a lot of notey questions. What's everybody asks? That's the notification gang. Those are the people who have notifications turned on on YouTube. You subscribe to the channel, but you hit the bell, then you go live. And the noties are the most loyal Fans. Exactly. Top 1% of fans who come and ask us questions inside the live streams on X on YouTube. But YouTube seems to be a good place to do it.

1:07:37

What does Eric think of increased bitcoin exposure to Tradfi? Will players like Jane street win? Is Do Kwon going to win their lawsuit? Eric, go.

1:08:10

Eric, you speak for all crypto criminal, unindicted, legit, everything in between. You are the spokesperson.

1:08:20

Crypto people love having one centralized spokesperson for all their opinions. So I will always happily take this mantle. I mean, the whole point, the whole point of bitcoin was to take over the global financial system. So you don't do that without the financial system merging with it. I'm glad to see Tradfi adopting Bitcoin. I don't trust all those firms. They don't deserve all the trust. But it's inevitable and it's a sign of bitcoin, you know, ascending to dominance. So I ultimately like it. As for the Do Kwon question, I, I'm not up to speed enough to answer that one.

1:08:27

He was on. And I, I didn't, I asked him like three times to explain staking. And I'm like, you know, I, I, I deploy millions of dollars a year as an investor. I've got lots of equities, I'm deep in finance. I can't understand this. One more time, explain it to me. And he couldn't. And then he got picked up on a tarmac. Wow.

1:09:03

Absolutely. Right. He was on episode 1251 back in July of 2021.

1:09:23

O. You should have the twist archivist put some clips from that one out because it was a banger. Well, let me ask you this then Eric. Do you have any thoughts on MicroStrategy? You know, basically buying. I don't know if he's up to 7 or 8% of the. Of the non dead float, you know, the active float, you know, not the satoshi wallets that have been dead since inception, but what has that done to the. The game, the religion, the project known as Bitcoin in your mind?

1:09:28

He is someone who has a. A thesis and has gone like full bore on it, which I respect. To acquire as much Bitcoin as possible is a very smart strategy. And I don't know all the nuances of like how the financialization of strategy itself works. But the thesis, the thesis is valid. The thesis.

1:10:00

Yeah.

1:10:26

I don't know Logan.

1:10:26

I'm not sure that anybody understands.

1:10:28

I've really tried.

1:10:30

Oh boy. There's layers and layers of ways to participate in the game known as MicroStrategy. Your thoughts, Logan?

1:10:32

Yeah.

1:10:38

So I'm. I'm a full disclosure, a holder of msty. So I've enjoyed in the. In the yield and right now just, just for the record, it is yielding 285% and so not financial advice, but I did play it that way because I did not want to have direct exposure or ownership because to your points, I have no clue as to how he's running this business. And it feels like. It feels a little challenging, a little pyramidy so to speak in terms of how he's floating his assets and, and recycling the proceeds and buying more. And now he's investing in these ETFs and raising new ETFs to finance it. So I think, you know, BTC HODL, you gotta be up into the right for this thing to work, otherwise you're in a lot of trouble.

1:10:38

Yeah, it's a. You know lan, when I look at any startup that I've been successful in, I've been able to explain the business model to my daughters, whether they're 10, 12, 16. I say oh yeah, Uber takes 20% of the ride and they match people together and, and Robinhood makes money this way and Thumbtack makes money this way. Calm charges for a subscription if you need Meditations offering. You want to have a nice interface. It's a great way to do it. And when I can't explain it or understand it, I tend to move on to something I can understand. And when I see multiple layers of creative financing or community based ebitda, like new definitions, these are the red flags for me. We work of course at community ebitda. Logan A new way to understand profitability is the value it has to the community. I haven't seen any other company take that on as their key metric for everybody.

1:11:27

What AI tool do you find absolutely indispensable? Which one are you using every single day? That's the question.

1:12:27

I use cloud every day, particularly for things like, well, two big use cases for me, just in saving time and so forth. One is board materials. So just being able to dump board materials into Claude, getting a nice summary. It's a great way to prep before board meetings and to at least you know, see the forest for the trees. And then two is data rooms and decks from startups because we get thousands of them per week and it's like I want to make sure we're doing justice to them. And as you guys all know, VCs are sitting there scrolling, you know, docsends and, and we're probably not getting as much substance out of it versus Claude. And then the third one, which you know, I was at a dinner last night, I will effectively take the list of dinner participants who I'm going to go meet and like if I'm going to a dinner party, whether it's personal or professional, and I'll put all their names in Claude and I'll say, hey, I would love the bios and backgrounds on all these people. And I think that the richness of the conversation and the engagement initially it feels a little creepy to them. They're like, whoa, how did you know where I went to school and why did you do all this diligence? And then I just come up front, I'm like, look, I put all of your names in Claude. Before this I wanted to learn who I was meeting and I wanted to have deeper, richer conversations. I think that makes sense and actually it's totally resonated. So I think, you know, there's, there's the double edged sword of AI, but, but thus far I'm seeing a lot of positivity and Claude is the number one tool I use.

1:12:34

Eric, what are you addicted to? What do you use on the daily.

1:13:53

I mean this sounds talk in my own book of course, but like I, I literally use Venice every day. But as a specific example to upload PDFs of like legal contracts and, and medical records like those, those two things which prior, you know, you would need Specialists to review. And sometimes you do still want specialists for sure. But to do cursory reviews and to get a. A gist of things with AI is, you know, 10 seconds now and can save literally thousands of dollars and often will give you better answers than professionals will do. I think that's an incredible use case that everyone should be trying, whether using that on Venice or any other platform. I mean, that's pretty much table stakes feature right now.

1:13:56

Yeah. My job, as you know, lon, is to stay super informed and have conversations. Obviously, those lead to a lot of investments. And one of the things I love is the grok button on threads, because a lot of times I don't understand the context and then it takes, you know, whatever one to five minutes to understand what. Who. Claviclear. Clavicle.

1:14:39

Clavicular.

1:14:59

I don't know. Clavicular. I believe it's clavicular.

1:15:01

It's spelled like clavicular.

1:15:04

I haven't heard gooning and looks maxing all this stuff. Like, I could wait, you know, 100 days for the New York Times to do the. The trends officially over, so we're covering it story. Or I can talk to somebody to explain it to me, or I just hit that grok button. Boom, I'm up to speed. The second thing I do, and I'll just talk about use cases because I. I think you can use this any way you like. But I had my Open Claw install on the Mac Studio, a way to rip videos. And I am a bookmark guy. So fashion, health, inspirational quotes, ideas for content here for the podcast health, all this stuff. Like, I have a bookmark list on TikTok, I got a bookmark list on X, I got bookmark lists on Instagram, and then I write my own stuff down in browser bookmarks. I'm a bookmark guy. So now what I do is I just ship the link to the video and my OpenClaw downloads the video, puts it into a Google Drive for me, then puts it on a notion page for me and gives me background on it. And I say, you're a curator when I send you this. This shoe. Like, I was looking at shoes, I want to get a new pair of shoes. And, you know, I was sending it some shoe stuff and it was like, okay, yeah, these shoes, you have Crockett and Jones shoes, you have diner boots. These are other boot brands. This is the history of the boot. This is why they're special. I was going down the pen rabbit hole, and I bought this new pen, this Zebra G750, you know, it's an eight dollar pen, but it's really quite nice. And I went down the pen thing and I said, hey, put this into my, you know, gadgets and things I like. So now it's become like my life curator of the bookmarks. And in just one zip, you know, like two clicks I can get it and save it for all time. Cause then I don't have to go find it. And what if like the bookmark, what if that TikTok or Instagram goes away? I own it now. I have it on my computer for all time in my memory, which I would never take the time to do that. Second, I don't know if you guys have a spouse or a significant other, but you got a significant other, Eric or Logan, and you watch that, you stream a TV show together and then you gotta find the next show to watch, you know, or the next movie to watch. So I just sat there with my wife and I think I did this on Gemini because it's very good for, you know, consumer y stuff. And I said to my wife, hey, we really enjoyed watching this show. We really enjoyed Get Em to the Greek. We like these stoner films, we like these comedies. We really enjoyed White Lotus. We really enjoyed this show. Give me other shows that we might like. We like Battlestar Galactic, Galactica. So we were going through all the shows that we love to watch over the last 25 years together and it started giving us ideas back and then it has it in memory. I mean this, it's doing my bit.

1:15:05

That used to be my bit.

1:17:39

It used to be your bit. But I don't, I don't. Can't bother you all the time. This has led to more joy in my life and this is my key thought. What do rich people have that everybody wants? You mentioned Logan, you know, understanding all the people at the party. That's called the Chief of staff. Chief of staff would do that for you, Huma. Ubuddin would whisper into Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton's, you know, ear like, hey, Jason Calacanis is here. He donated this amount.

1:17:41

Gary. Like Gary from Veep.

1:18:08

Okay, sure. Gary from Veep. I don't know that reference. But anyway, you got that Chief of staff, then you have everyone's personal driver, Uber. Then you have your second vacation home. That's Airbnb. The Chief of staff. Such a really interesting thing for everybody to have. And the other one is executive coach. So I started using my replicant to executive coach my team. So I tell it, give a. What did I call that acronym check in, report cir. So I say to my replicant and I cc somebody on my team do a CIR for Marcus while I'm talking to Marcus. And it says, okay, here's Marcus, well, as his schedule today and tomorrow, here's all the emails he sent yesterday and today, ranked by order and with a little summary of the emails. And then here's all the slack conversations that he's been involved in. Here's his zoom meetings and his, you know, Google calendar. So it gives a snapshot. And then I say, okay, looking at your time management, I can tell you these four things are not super important. Why don't we deprecate those? And then the two things I just gave you, when you complain you have no time now, you swap those things in and out. So an executive coach. And I said, anytime you're looking for executive coaching, run the executive coach cir. So this is a skill Eric that I'm going to refine over time for my team members, which is you have an executive coach, you have your cir, use your eccir to just manage yourself better and be a better executive and improve your skill stack. So anyway, those were mine. Just what does a rich person have that the rest of us don't? Those are awesome framework. Yeah, well, I'm building on yours. Right? The other one you said, like getting through all those documents, that was called an associate at a venture firm. And you mentioned earlier to go full circle. Hey, maybe the benchmark thing is better. No assistance, no analysts pairing. Just use your, you know, associate replicant to do it. All right. Lon, you got any as we wrap here? Oh, I mean, it's a lot of show.

1:18:10

We'll wrap. I do want to give a shout out to Notebook lm. It was, it was one of the first AI applications that I ever got really obsessed with. I still love it. I still use it for research all the time. And just today we had this in the news. We didn't get to it. They've added video overviews so, you know, you could put documents into Notebook Element. It'll make a podcast for you now. It'll make an immersive video presentation for you based on your documents.

1:20:04

You know what, this is great for your kids. So I have been working on this when I have a bulldog, Minty the Bulldog, that I tell stories to my 10 year olds for the last two years. And I will come up with ideas for Minty the Bulldog stories. He's a superhero bulldog. And just, you know, for me to be able to visualize. It would be like, oh, my God. I'm programming my kids, you know, education through Minty, the bulldog lessons. We'll see you all next time on Twist Friday.

1:20:27