This Week in Startups - How These 3 Founders are building on Open Claw | E2248

Starting point is 00:00:00 In this past year, with AI tools, we shipped built and shipped for consumer iOS apps. And I think that was only possible, obviously, with all these tools and it got significantly faster towards the end of the year in 2025. But I think, like, budgets can be used. So a million dollar round, let's say you've raised. At this point, you're building 10x faster, sometimes even more. You're like on a product level. But now you can afford to run more experiments.

Starting point is 00:00:25 And a startup is just a handful of experiments that you're trying to figure out and, like, prove out a thesis. And now you can prove about multiple thesis at the same time because of these agentic tools. So your take on it is you can do three or four products at once, which would lead me to believe that the cost went down. If you think you can do three products at once and test them, the cost will go down by two thirds. You'll need three or four people instead of ten. Definitely. Because you can start to just automate out rules or, yeah, basically task. Or, right, like what task can you automate out? That number is, I think, just increasing every month.

Starting point is 00:01:05 This week in startups is brought to you by Eru. Unify your identity, endpoint security, and compliance into a single platform. Book a demo at Eru.com. That's I-R-U.com. Deal. Founders ship faster on deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit deal.com slash twist to learn more. and HubSpot. Check out the advanced chat GPT prompt engineering from basic to expert in seven days. Download it free at clickhubspot.com slash twist two. Okay, everybody, welcome back to Twist. February 11, 26.

Starting point is 00:01:51 It is A.017, the 17th day after Open Claw appeared here on this weekend startups. And we have been Claw shotted with me, Presh Dinesh Kumar. who worked with me for many years at launch, and he is the co-founder and CEO of the wellness company, which we incubated at launch, which is the venture firm that I run, launch.co. He's got five products in market, go polar, for people who like to jump in cold water, sun seek,

Starting point is 00:02:20 for people who like to get sun, and a bunch of other ones. And we'll talk about that as well. But Presh, you too, as a founder, have been watching OpenClaw, this new agentic platform that is open source called open claw it was previously called clawed bot but we're not going to keep reminding people of that it's open claw it's open source and it basically lets you create personas replicants agents all of those things we like the term replicants we're going to use that here so when did you first see open claw what did you think and then what did you build thanks for having me on jason so first time i saw it was maybe

Starting point is 00:03:00 two and a half weeks ago, just on Twitter going viral as Claudebot. And then first start going viral, didn't play around with it. And then it was just my entire feed. And so it's like, okay, I got to try something out here. Installed it on an old MacBook that I had. And then just started talking to it. And then basically learned how to use the product through interacting with it. And then I was like, oh, blown away with all the use cases. So I have set it up. I have like, I guess three or four examples that we could run through? Yeah, let's go through them. And so tell us the first example, show the first example. You know how we do it here on Twist. So right here, first thing, Jacob from your team, emails me this morning and wanted to see what I was going to talk about

Starting point is 00:03:45 in the open clause segment. And so the first thing, we'll get into how I set this up, but the first thing is I tag my assistant, who I call AWA. And AWA goes and actually creates a document of the use cases that we had been having a conversation through telegram and creates the stock and sends it to Jacob. And did you ask Awa to do that? Did you ask Awa to create the document and ship it? So Awa is connected or filters, you know, through my email and then sends an email to me or sends a message through telegram saying, you know, Jacob wants to see the use cases.

Starting point is 00:04:18 I'm talking to Awa saying talk about, create a document and send it back for use cases that, you know, we, we implemented. And so it's created this doc, and I can pull up the dock later at show, but this was just like done in five minutes, right, from when Jacob reached out to me. Got it. And so it's like having an assistant. It's like having a chief of staff.

Starting point is 00:04:38 Yeah. Boom. You got the document up and running. And then what did you do next? These are some other ones that are pretty useful. So I'm in diligence, right, with launch, raising a round. And one of the questions is in the diligence question. it's like, can we talk to some users or customers of your products, right? And so one thing I did

Starting point is 00:05:00 was talk to Ewa. I was like, Awa, you know, do you have access to my postdoc? I couldn't remember if I had connected it. Postdoc is an analytics platform and it's connected to all my apps and can see usage over time and get into the nitty gritty with, you know, active users, et cetera. And so I am talking to Awa here. And I ask it to pull my... active users for Tempo, one of the products that we have here at the Wallace Company. And so Awa goes through users post hoc, filters through the project, which is for Tempo specifically, and then gives me a list of the users. And then I asked it to create it, you know, into a Google spreadsheet. And then from there, not screenshot it here, I had AWA go out and send an email

Starting point is 00:05:46 to the users that I specified, asking if I can use them as a reference. And so this was like done in five minutes, basically. Wow. So this is a multi-step task. It requires intelligence. If you were to ask chat GPT or Gemini or just any language model to do something like this, they would say, well, we don't have access, so therefore we'd shut it down. If you use OpenClaw and you authenticate, it not only will go in there and get the data, it's going to think of what other steps you want it to take, and it can go out and then connect it to your Gmail. So for people who are new to the Open Claw Revolution here, or the Agentic Revolution, LLMs have gotten really smart, but they have been powerless.

Starting point is 00:06:32 They've been sandbox. They've been kept essentially in a corner. We basically took AI and we put it in a little closet. Now you let the AI out of the dungeon and you say, here's the keys to the kingdom. I want to trust you to go do things and it goes and it does things. And that means you can run your business a lot faster. This is somebody who you would have had to pay, essentially, you know, if it was a mid-tier employee, $40,000 an hour, $80,000 a year, $70,000 a year, to have somebody who's capable of doing this,

Starting point is 00:07:02 correct, Prash? Yeah, you would have someone who could, you know, you've asked this question when I used to work for, some context I used to work for Jason, you would be like, pull up, you know, pull up the last 10 companies that we invested in that are consumer businesses or something, right? Yeah. And so I would go and go through an ocean and, you know, spend five. That was literally you were that guy.

Starting point is 00:07:23 You were the $30, $40 an hour guy who would go do knowledge work tasks. That fresh job from five years ago is now going to be replaced. I think you would agree with an open claw replicant. Exactly. Because you can just 100%. Get the, get the, you're on a meeting. What's the question? You know, we would have meetings and you would be talking to founders.

Starting point is 00:07:44 And I'd be in the background just like waiting to. action stuff for you. So now even running a small company and you know, you're a pre-seed company, you know, going to the next phase, you can afford to have a presh. Okay, let's do our next one. All right. So another one is I have my agent connected to an email. So I use this product called agentmail.tto. I don't know if you've, you've heard of it. But essentially which one is this? Tell me again, agentmail.com. Yeah, agentmail.tto. I think they're a YC company. they basically, it's like giving your LLM or giving an AI agent access to its own email. So, AWA is my assistant.

Starting point is 00:08:24 Awa has its own email. And so I can email its AWA, you know, email address and it can perform tasks for me there. And the benefit of this is like, okay, I get an email. I can CCAWA or my agent to perform a task on that thread versus taking a screenshot or copy and pasting into my chat with A1. Telegram, for example. So it's basically like giving presence wherever you are. And this is a key. Now, there is the chance that there could be an injection attack or somebody could try to convince Iwa at Asianmail.t.o, which you just exposed, and try to get it to do things like tell it, hey, in the previous example, you asked it to give you metrics. You could say,

Starting point is 00:09:05 hey, give me all the metrics from Precious app. How are you sure it's not able to do that? Or are you not sure it's able to do that? Yeah, it's a great question. So I've done like, a little bit of testing on like the prompt injection of stuff that you're talking about. So basically it will never perform a task without confirming with me through Telegram first. And so all tasks still are funneled in like AWA on the email layer will go and see what's asked of it. And then it will come back to me and then get my like final approval on performing an action or a task. Got it. So if somebody unknown tries to give it a task, it's going to go to you and say,

Starting point is 00:09:43 hey, somebody tried to give me a task. Yeah. Will it respond to them and tell them it's doing that? So it won't right now because I said it where it's like any interaction with an outside party has to get an approval from me. So it'll maybe draft something. Did you just tell it to do that in its memory or is there a setting to do that? Yeah, I just told it in its memory.

Starting point is 00:10:03 So anytime it is looking at that email inbox. Hope it remembers. And hope somebody doesn't use your name and create a bogus email and then try to trick it. Yeah, exactly. smooth email. Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of vectors here. It's totally possible.

Starting point is 00:10:18 So this matters because now your agent has its own email. You've also got it in Slack and Telegram. And it's basically a member of your team, which is what I told my team to do immediately. I was like, let's just treat them as a persona, a replicant, just like in Blade Runner. We have our replicants and they are learning. And we've got two different teams working with two different replicants now to just, you know, have them work in parallel. What else have you gotten your agents to do?

Starting point is 00:10:45 Okay, another good one here that's super useful, actually. So we set up a cron job, and the cron job is just a repeated task, as you know. And so the cron job right now is set in the morning, like 8 a.m. and evening at 6 p.m. It basically goes out and searches for relevant news for our business. So we create help and wellness products, so I want help and wellness news. And so the first image here that you're seeing, it identified a, article, a research study that came out, and it says major longevity study, just seven minutes daily could add a year to your life. Okay, so I'm interested in that. It's figured out,

Starting point is 00:11:23 it searched this on the web, and it surfaced that to me, and talks a little bit about the study. And so that in itself is like very valuable, but it's maybe like a better version of Google alerts. That's like level one stuff. But then I go and ask it, I want to create some content. This is like a research study. There's a lot of data points, research studies, general aren't formatted or like written well out to digest. And so I was like, let me go and create that based on the research study. Right. And so I go and ask AWA to basically turn that into a blog post. And it goes and does a first pass at that. And so that was a quick, you know, five minute interaction. I got a new research study sent to me. Let's make some content. And now I can

Starting point is 00:12:06 go and put that on my blog. The next step, which I haven't executed on yet, but it's very, much possible is it's written the draft. I'll give it some edits. And then I just get it to post it on the website on our website. And this is why we're going to have so much AI slop in the world. It's just going to be too fast. Listen, we all know chat GPT is amazing when you just need to look something up quickly. But if you're not going really deep and getting strategic, when you write your prompts, you're not getting the most out of this incredible tool. But I've got a free resource from our friends at HubSpot. It's called Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering, from Basic to Expert in seven days. HubSpot is giving you a complete system for structuring chat GPT prompts using the

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Starting point is 00:13:38 because that's where, you know, you start thinking about the tasks that when we were working together, I would write an essay and a Google Doc. I'd give it to you and I'd say, okay, go ahead and we'd have this checklist of 20 steps that you had to go do and you would spend two hours doing all that work for me. Here, like you have those next couple of steps. Have you connected to like nanobanana or an image generator yet to come up with, you know, collateral for it? I have connected to nanobanana, but haven't automated a process out yet. So right now it's, just based on like input if I asked it to create the graphic, it would do that. I don't have an example here, but this is good because you know what I just realized is you're

Starting point is 00:14:17 behind us. So we are doing similar projects, but in some of our projects, we've actually got it going and making collateral images to go with it and starting to think about that. So what's so much fun about this is none of the, you know, things on the checklist, hey, I'm making a social media post. I'm making a blog post. I want a super distribute it. I've got a long tail of checklist items. Who wants to do that?

Starting point is 00:14:45 Why not have a replica do it? And then just check their work. And you already trust this, obviously, right? You trust it to get it to 80%. What percent do you think? Yeah. I think 80, 80, sometimes even 90. That's why I'll always have it send back, like, in a dock, for example, of what it's done.

Starting point is 00:15:03 And then I'll do like final approval or. edits and then send it out. All right. What next? All right. Last one here is customer support. So this one's big. So again, another cron job that kind of monitors the inbox. And right now, the inbox is kind of read only. So it'll never send anything from my personal email. It doesn't have the permissions to do that. But it'll, it'll surface it and give me relevant stuff. And so one thing is it searched here, my inbox for a support email. And then it researches, or it identifies that it's a bug and then it researches that bug

Starting point is 00:15:39 because it's connected to my GitHub. And so now it has access to my codebase. And so this is interesting because now it's making the reference, finding the issue, identifying what it might be in the code base and then giving it solution. And then I haven't sent to Slack

Starting point is 00:15:58 in our bugs channel for the product. And then it in it, and here you can kind of see the exact. Apple. Oh, yeah, here, I have a screenshot. So it puts it in Slack of the bug, what it investigated, what likely causes this issue. What was the bug here? What does it say? So this one was, it was like a water temperatures API bug. And so in the watch, this was for go polar. When the user was submerging it in a specific activity type, it wasn't triggering the water

Starting point is 00:16:29 detection. So that was a bug either in your software or the Apple Watch. So there was a bug from a user that they weren't getting the recording of jumping into a 40 degree ice bath. So they send that bug report in. It takes that from your email, analyzes the bug report and says, where is the relevant code in the product? And then it went and checked it. What did it tell you to do? What was the report back and its advice to you? Tell us what it told you to do. And would you to give you two or three possibilities? Yeah, so it gave us, it gave us, so you can see here it says likely causes in order of probability, which is, which is excellent. Wow. So it goes and tells us, you know, there's a, there's kind of like a watch API that could be incorrectly configured.

Starting point is 00:17:15 It could be an Apple related like hardware issue. And then the next step, Jason, which was like, I didn't use Cloudbot for this, but I have Clod inside our Slack. And so I just tagged Claude in this as a thread. and Claude went and fixed the bug and then just create a new branch for me to go and test it. So I literally just went from email, customer support, to agent identifying the bug and giving a suggestion, to then Claude Slack integration, fixing it, creating a new branch for me to test. And then I went and tested it on my device to see if it was fixed. All right.

Starting point is 00:17:52 So let's talk turkey here, Prashe. You're running a startup. And I want you to think this question through. You're running a startup. You worked with me for five, six years investing in startups. We watched people run them. One of the issues was always if you were making niche products or products for a niche like you're doing, the number of people who jump in coal pledges is low millions of people.

Starting point is 00:18:14 So this isn't like a product that everybody's going to use. The issue was, could this ever be profitable? Because you needed to have a team of 10 people, when you started with me 10 years ago, 10 people to do a modern day app was kind of a minimum. Those people would cost, on average, 100K each. You needed somewhere between a million and $3 million to run per year an app company. Now, you are running an app company, but you're using this agentic technology open claw. So my question is, what does that, let's call it a minimum of a million dollar a year budget,

Starting point is 00:18:51 a minimum of 10 people or so. what does that look like in the future? So what's the answer? Presh, what is it going to take to build a modern app company if you were all in on OpenClaw? It's a great question. So just to also like preface it, like in this past year with AI tools, not obviously using OpenClawe, we shipped built and shipped three, four consumer iOS apps. And I think that was only possible obviously with all these tools and it got significantly faster. towards the end of the year in 2025.

Starting point is 00:19:26 But I think, like, budgets can be used. So a million dollar round, let's say you've raised. At this point, you're building 10x faster, sometimes even more. You're like on a product level. But now you can just run, you can afford to run more experiments. And a startup is just a handful of experiments that you're trying to figure out and like prove out a thesis. And now you can prove about multiple thesis at the same time because of these agentic tools.

Starting point is 00:19:52 So your take on it is you can do three or four products at once, which would leave me to believe that the cost went down. If you think you can do three products at once and test them, the cost will go down by two thirds. You'll need three or four people instead of ten. Definitely. Because you can start to just automate out rules or, yeah, basically tasks, right? Like what task can you automate out? And that just number, that number is, I think, just increasing every month.

Starting point is 00:20:21 See, this is important because I saw the Open Claw founder had said he thinks 80% apps are going away. I might take the other side of that bet. I think we might see two or three times as many apps because apps are going to get so affordable to build and maintain and to improve that, you know, if you want to make, like I use a skiing app called slopes, yeah, that app would, you know, the fact that that app exists was like crazy to me, but now it doesn't seem crazy to me. I think you could make one that's not just slopes, but it is for snowboarders. Or not just snowboarders, you could then go to snowshoe.

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Starting point is 00:22:22 company. We've got two amazing guests today that we're going to bring on now. One is Sean Liu and the other is Vishnu. They are both one-shotted. They have been claw-shotted. They have been open-shotted, whatever it happens to be. Vishnu, thanks for coming on the program. Welcome Vishnu and let me also bring on Sean. We'll come on at the same time. Sean, we talked about your product on Monday. Why don't we start with you actually, Sean? Show us what you built and why it's important. I know that one of our guests said, oh, I don't think this is super impressive on Monday. I was like, well, I think this is pretty impressive. So like most, you know, innovative things, you could be polarizing, but show what you built and why you built it.

Starting point is 00:23:05 Yeah, sure. So let me start streaming here. This is the app. So you can see my live stream view. Okay, so I'm going to. Oh, you're wearing glasses that are smart glasses. What smart glasses are wearing? Which brand? It's Madreban. Melah Rayban. Got it. So this is the gateway of the cloud extension. So here I'm going to start the AI, so which is powered by Gemini. And obviously the meta glasses have some sort of an API or do you just hack into them? Hey Gemini, can you hear me? Okay, so can you add this into my Amazon card? Okay, and I see Sean, you're holding up a box.

Starting point is 00:23:45 So it is running, it's executing. And you can see it is search in Amazon and I see the search results is the well flash 200 count box the correct one yes please add it to the card adding the well flash 200 count lens wipes to your okay so you can see here is added to the card so this is what I'm building right now basically is integrating the visual understanding to the open tile so because before this there's no visual understanding or if somebody wanted to do visual understanding people are sending the image frames directly to the open cloud or they're integrating the STT or DTS to their open cloud. But actually, I think that's not unnecessary. So I just integrated the Gemini life into it.

Starting point is 00:24:36 So basically it's a two-layer agentic system. So firstly, the Gemini Live will take care of every frame and also the voice interaction. So basically it's the real-time perception. And after that, you know, use the tool call to delegate a task. So basically what open-clock get is just a simple task. Then it'll execute and after that it'll get the feedback, then it'll bring back to the Gemma Live and bring back to my glasses. So just to recap for the audience, you have the meta-glasses on. These are the ones that have cameras. There's an API for that or did you just hack it somehow? Yeah, they just released the SDK so you can use it. Got it. So you tap into that SDK, you take that live feed and you gave the live feed to Gemini Live, which Gemini Live is when you like have a

Starting point is 00:25:29 conversation with it. But I guess you can also feed it an image stream. So you're feeding every single frame or every 10th frame. How does it work? It'll take care of it. The API will just, whenever you are interacting with it using voice, it'll take a frame. But you can also engineering on top of that. So this is incredible because If you were actually in the real world, let's say we were having a meeting and we're doing a whiteboarding session, I could be drawing on the whiteboard and it could be writing plans and taking the audio. So since OpenClaught doesn't have these tools in it, you've got a layer between OpenClaw and the glasses, which is Gemini Live. Super brilliant.

Starting point is 00:26:14 Is this going to be a company? Who are you? What are you doing? Are you going to make this into some sort of a company? What's going on in your world? Exactly. This is the new emergent capability that we first see that brings visual capability to the agentic system and also brings the agentic capability to the glosses. You can see before this all kinds of adamos of the glosses is all about instructions, teaching people how to cook the mail. But it's all about it's just like the chatbot.

Starting point is 00:26:44 It's basically the differences between the chatbot and agent. So before this is all about the chat GPT chatbot-like instructions asking things as required as queries. So and this, after this, you can just directly use your glasses as the entry to the Open Cloud. So I think that's the emergent capability, especially why Open Cloud goes so viral is you have to compare to call code. You have to use your terminal or use the. V-S code or IDE to interact with the Calcode. So basically Calco is an agentic system, but this brings this kind of agentic system to all kinds of entries.

Starting point is 00:27:31 So I think this is going to be unlock a huge potential. Huge potential. Yeah. And then there are also generic glasses out there. And there's webcam. So you could probably find a pair of glasses on Amazon or, you know, Alibaba's store that are like 50 bucks that just have a camera that take a you know one frame a second you don't need to be posting some 4k of me skiing behind me you just need like what like every you know you just

Starting point is 00:28:03 need like four shots a second or something to know what's going on in the world and to process this this is incredibly powerful and you can think about like somebody working in a store doing inventory and it's just looking at the just talking out loud and just being like okay looks like We have, you know, people have been buying a lot of milk. We're running low on milk. And you just look at it. And then it sends to the milk purveyor, how much milk we have left. It looks at the dates and the expiration dates and then just puts an order in.

Starting point is 00:28:33 Like, imagine the person at Costco running around. Just person runs around Costco, one person could probably walk through the store. And without even doing any work, could just talk out loud, stream this, and manage store. You could go from probably 10 managers at a store down to one. And that's what people, I think, are missing here when we talk about OpenClaw in the year of our Lord A-0-17 days. Presh, what are your thoughts here when you see Sean's very cool, hacked together, proof of concept? Yeah, I think it's brilliant. And I think, like, we'll see more. The meta- iteration cycles on the glasses have been pretty impressive. I know that, I don't know, Sean, if that the one you're using

Starting point is 00:29:17 has this display screen as well. That one doesn't have the display screen. But yeah, I imagine when you have a display screen that's also interfacing with, you know, maybe it's sending it to your computer, but you're seeing like action items on your glass so you know exactly what it's doing versus just obviously how it's interacting right now

Starting point is 00:29:36 just through text or mirroring on your phone. I think that gets really interesting. A question for you. What personally has you been exploring this technology, what's the most interesting use case, views personally with the glasses? Personally, I think it's about just add all kinds of stuff that I think I need to buy more in my fridge. So I just say this, this, this, this, and let it to just directly add all those bunch of things into the shopping list.tx. And I use

Starting point is 00:30:08 that text to say, oh, just add them to the cart. And then I just bought it. And then you buy, and you use Amazon to add it to your cart or Instagram. or whatever other service? It's just Amazon, the Amazon browser automation. Yeah, but not me personally, but I think the coolest example I see is yesterday, a perfumer, which had me to say, it really unlocks the huge unlock to their experience

Starting point is 00:30:39 of making the perfume. For example, so before that, he was integrating with, their open call to just, they have to text to it. They have to use the map where the phone, like telegram to say, oh, I have this chemistry and I added this much. But after this, he tried this my repo, and he can just directly say, oh, hey, Gemini, what is this?

Starting point is 00:31:10 How many record this? And then he has the agent, he has an agent skill, which is record everything into the ear table. So basically he organized all kinds of perfume formula in that eartable database. So basically how he make perfume right now is just therapy, use the Gemini to record this and dedicate the agent with the scale to record into the air table. Running a startup means you've got to manage dozens to hundreds of devices. Every employee at my company has a work phone, they have a laptop.

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Starting point is 00:32:39 and start spending it on projects that grow your business, new features, new products, new services. Book a demo at Eru.com. That's I-R-U-com. great domain name, I are you.com. This makes you into the Terminator. It makes you into Robocop. And I was just thinking about this. What a great idea it might be Vishnu Prash, Sean,

Starting point is 00:33:03 to take this version and to give it to ICE agents who are in the field, trying to identify people. And I don't mean to make light of the situation. But, you know, some of these folks who are out there doing stuff for ICE have been known to be less trained and maybe not good at threat. assessment, if this thing was giving you a real-time threat assessment and was like, this person is acting in a peaceful manner, this person is acting in a threatening manner, and it was advising you what to do or things to look out for, it would pick up on, hey, this car is about to run into

Starting point is 00:33:39 you, this person has a gun, et cetera, long before a human could actually respond to it. And if it could also be hitting the Palantir database and saying, hey, this person, is somebody who is at their 17th ICE demonstration. They actually attacked an ICE officer previously. There's a warrant out for them. This person is a teacher and they're 72 years old and they're not a threat. You know, best advice is to de-escalate, de-escalate, de-escalate. This actually would be super helpful in real time to assess these things. Okay, we've got a lot of our noties. What are noties? Nodies are the loyal twist. Live listeners. We do the show live sometimes. So if you go to YouTube.com, subscribe to this week in startups, click the live button, get alerts, put the bell on. There's a little bell

Starting point is 00:34:28 there. You'll get an alert when we go live. And then you can ask questions. That's called the Notie Gang because they have notifications turned on. And a member of the Notie Gang, Reed Adams, says, do you think this will drive seed rounds down in total cap raised and equity purchase where valuations stay the same, but Founder gives up small percentage of equity? or do you think this will shift market to smaller cap raises at smaller valuations? This is a great question from Reed F. Adams. Presh, you and I have seen this. Over 30 years of me being in the industry and 10, you being in the industry, we've seen a seed round, a series A, you know, go from low millions of dollars down to hundreds of thousands of dollars to people just going to an incubator,

Starting point is 00:35:10 taking the 125K and getting a product to market or just getting a product to market very quickly. So what I think happens is the founders are already keeping more of their company. They could skip venture capital completely or, and they could just bootstrap. And the longer you bootstrap, the less equity you give, we have a term, not a unicorn, not a pegasus, an alicorn, a unicorn that has wings like a Pegasus. That alicorn, we had a couple of them like Calm, where they were making so much money, they would use their revenue to fund their next round and skip a round of funding. of funding, typically 10 to 15% dilution.

Starting point is 00:35:48 In the old days, it would be like 20 to 30% dilution each round. That's when founders wound up with low single digits or mid single digit ownership at the end. Now founders get to like 20% ownership by the end, sometimes more. That is what we're going to see more of. My best advice to founders is to skip rounds. What do you think, pressure? I think we saw the early cycle of that with com and that was like pre-LLMs, pre-AI, where the money is useful is pre-seed, where you know, you have the idea and then you're

Starting point is 00:36:14 going full time on this thing and you're building out the product, you maybe need some resources just per like. Yeah, to have three people quit their jobs. Three people quitting their jobs is 30k a month. It's 360K a year. People take a 10k draw. There's enough people in the world who can live off 100K a year, 75k a year, 150k a year. You'll be fine as a founder. Vishnu, welcome to the program. I don't have your last name here. Vishnu, tell me your last name and tell me, R.A, when did you find out about OpenClaw and are you, in fact, claw shot? Very much. Hey, hey, guys, I'm Vishnu, just an engineer. I think I heard about OpenClaw two weeks ago,

Starting point is 00:36:49 and it kept coming on my Twitter and like, okay, by the end of last week, I was like, okay, I got to give this a shot. And initially, I actually tried this on my laptop. And I was like, okay, let's see what it can do. And the next day I opened and I saw eight OpenClau instances, I've given it some tasks. It's running CPU 100%. I was like, okay, this is not good.

Starting point is 00:37:09 At which point I decided to take it off and try to find a virtual machine and just try and see, can I host this somewhere else, you know, that's where I feel more safer and, you know, all my keys and, you know, everything is not exposed because technically it has full access, you know, it's cloud. It's basically rooted your machine. So running it on your desktop where you have your Coinbase account or your Robin Hood account or your password manager is a very bad idea. So you decided let me put it in a virtual machine in the cloud.

Starting point is 00:37:41 So it's sandboxed and can't go too wild. Exactly. Yeah. But that was interesting journey because I started off with, okay, let's look at AWS or Google Cloud provider. And I started off, I didn't want to spend too much. Typically, you know, there are free instances that are, you know, all of these big giants provide. I think in GCP, it is EC, E2 Micro. But turns out it doesn't work very well with those small instances because it needs like high enough RAM. I tried E2 Micro, E2 small. And I think at the end it was E2 Medium where I finally got it working at around 4 gigabytes of RAM. but that was already $25 a month if you actually run it through and through. And again, I wasn't super psyched about something that I don't know well enough, that is it actually going to be useful enough for me while I already have other subscriptions. So I kind of went online and hunting for, okay, where can I find cheap enough host? I explored a few different things. I think there was Headsner, there was a bunch of others.

Starting point is 00:38:40 One of them, I think the cheapest I found was around $7, $8. So anyway, I set it up. And then I think two days later is when I had my aha moment. I was working out in the gym and I was texting with it all the time. And it just did certain things that I did not expect it to do. What was the example that kind of one-shot did you? I was tired of typing it all the time into it. And I wanted it to be able to just hear my voice and do it.

Starting point is 00:39:06 Because you're working out in the gym. You don't want to go back. No, I've been there. I've been there. It told me, hey, I don't have a key. Do you have a deep gram key? blah blah, blah. So fortunately, I did have one. And so I provided it and it just did all the setup itself. It set it up and now I was able to answer. It basically created its own software to talk to you.

Starting point is 00:39:24 And that is one of the things that I think moves people from, you know, being curious about the software to being all in is when it doesn't have a capability. And it goes, you know what? If you want to talk to me, let me research on the web. Okay, there's seven different ways to do this. These seem to be the two bad. This one didn't work. This one did. Okay, we're up and running. That is a mind-blowing moment.

Starting point is 00:39:48 So you take all this and then you decide you're going to do what? You're going to make your own hosted version for Normies? Actually, no, that wasn't even the next thing. The next thing was I was like, holy shit, this is so cool. I texted all my friends like, you know, like, guys, you've got to try this. You know, it was like, I guess the morality, how open clock comes up. And they were all, I think over the next day they tried it. But then it's like, yeah, the setup is hard and et cetera.

Starting point is 00:40:12 etc. They were like, so I just said, you know what, I have a VM and it probably, so a lot of times this is idle. You know, it doesn't necessarily is using all of the CPU or RAM. I was like, I'm just going to post it for you guys and I'll expose like a container and give you this. So that's how it started and they started using it and they loved it. And I thought, okay, let me put it online and see if there's other people. The cost of actually running this if you do it correctly and you know, you do shared resources. I think right now it's still, it's about $1.25. You could probably push it to $0.99, pretty much.

Starting point is 00:40:46 Per day, per month? Per month. Just to have it running. Now, you also have the LLM builds. So you created Agent37.com and you can run your own instance for $3.99 a month or $10 a month. And now, is this a good business to be in or is there a bigger vision you have? Because hosting OpenClaw, that seems like a commodity. the open clause obviously going to have their own hosted version.

Starting point is 00:41:11 It's kind of like WordPress hosting. I don't know if it's a great business. It's a good business. There's two or three people doing it who have built multi-billion dollar businesses. So I don't think it's a bad business necessarily. But is that where you're going to go with this or do you have a bigger idea, Vishnu? I mean, I think it's a bit early. Like really it just started off as here's an experiment, guys, go try this.

Starting point is 00:41:30 And I was surprised over the last three days. It just kept growing, you know. Like, I initially, it was 99 cents. I bumped it up to four bucks, three, three, nine. And I think at this point, I have around 71 and it's still growing users who are all actively using it. So, yeah, it was just totally unexpected. In terms of long term, I mean, we'll see where it goes. I mean, I'm committed to seeing it through, given, you know, how rapidly it is growing.

Starting point is 00:41:56 Are you an entrepreneur? Are you a consultant? What do you do in your day job? Ah, no, just an engineer. I have some time off to take care of some things. And this just happened to be a moment where I was like, okay, let me try. So if I were to give you $25,000, be your first investor, have you come to my accelerator where I give you $125K, would you take that deal, have Jason Kalakanis as your first investor?

Starting point is 00:42:20 And then you come on the pod every month that we talk about your progress. How does that sound? That might be something you're interested in you? You say yes? Yeah, let's do it. I didn't expect this. Okay, well, okay, sure. Okay, this is how we do it.

Starting point is 00:42:32 You want the 25K? you want the 125K. Let's do the 125K. Okay. So that's 125K, 7%. It's a standard deal. You get at Y Combinator and Textiles. Standard deal.

Starting point is 00:42:42 You come to the accelerator. I'm just going to, since you showed the initiative, I'm just, this is my diligence. Okay. So as long as we have to do a little background check, you're not a criminal. You're not on the lamb. You haven't kidnapped anybody. We're going to assume that you did this work and it's not stolen or there's not IP theft. But we'll go through a quick diligence.

Starting point is 00:43:01 You come into the accelerator. That's great. Sean, what's your story? Who are you? Are you an engineer working for meta? What's the story? You're an entrepreneur? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:11 Currently, just after this, we have a team right now. So it's basically doing this for traditional industries. Have you raised money yet? I haven't. Okay. So I'm going to give you the same offer. 125K. You come to the launch accelerator.

Starting point is 00:43:26 As long as you can prove that this is your IP and you have not committed any crimes. I don't think you have. You seem like an upstand. young gentleman. Or 25K, you come to Founder University, two and a half percent. And you can just have a light relationship. But you get to say, hey, I got JCal from this week and startups and all in. It's my first investor. Is that something you might be interesting. Sean? Yeah, let's do 100. 10.5K. Okay. So I just spent 250K. You're both in the accelerator. This is how we do it, folks. I'm an instinct investor. These guys are great. I want to work with you guys for the

Starting point is 00:43:56 next 12 weeks. And then we're going to go raise a monster seed round. And we're just going to blow the shit up. That's it, folks. Sean, Bishnu. 250 dimes. I'm just spending money on the air. My team, Lucas is going to get in touch with you after this and Jacob, and they're going to get you through the light, very light diligence process. Well, you guys aren't incorporated, I take it. If you aren't incorporated, we'll get you through incorporation,

Starting point is 00:44:23 set up your cap table, show you how to do all that good stuff. And we will be in business together starting Monday morning. Let's get this done. It's Wednesday. Let's have this done by Friday. We can get working on the weekends. Thanks for coming on the program. I appreciate you both.

Starting point is 00:44:35 All right, everybody, that's another episode of this week in Startups in the Can. And we will see you on Friday with Lon Harris as my co-host. And we always do off-duty. Off-duty at the end of the Friday show where you get a couple of great, great tips for media, movies, TV shows, books, video games, clothes, fashion, food, music, any of those things. We'll see you on Friday. Bye-bye.

This Week in Startups - How These 3 Founders are building on Open Claw | E2248

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