Y Combinator Startup Podcast - Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Last November, Peter Steinberger was annoyed that there was no good way to talk to his coding agents from his phone, so he built one himself. A few months later, OpenClaw had exploded into one of the biggest open source AI projects in the world, with nearly 3,000 contributors and a peak of 4.7 million weekly downloads.At Startup School 2026, Peter tells the story of what happened when OpenClaw took off, what he got wrong as it grew, and how he eventually stopped using the product he had built for himself.He shares why the best products often start with something that annoys you, why focus matters more as building gets easier, and why, in his words, “fun is velocity.”Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/peter-steinberger-what-happens-when

Six months ago, I was the future. These days, the Pulse said I got mocked by an anime girl. You know, I get questions like this almost every day. Usually I ignore it. Or I give the media answer. Today, you get some real ones. It's going to be five questions, 40 minutes. And I know what you might all came for.

You came for loops, grabs, making Kordex go bruh. This is free on my Twitter. This will help you to survive the roller coaster that might be coming for you. You know, yesterday Boris told you to let the model cook. I'm the guy who found out what happened when tens of thousands of people let it cook at the same time. Let's start with the question everyone asks first. How is OpenClaw only eight months old? You know it might be eight months in human time,

but in E.I times it's more like four years. And my source of inspiration is usually being annoyed. So on a rainy day in November, I was juggling some agents, but I was also hungry. So I wanted to make sure that my tokens are put to good use. to good use while I rate the kitchen. And there was still no good way to just send a prompt from my phone to my computer. So some agent could check up how my agent is actually doing.

Remember early 2025? And you know guys, this is my first silent disco. It's a very new experience. So like I give me some hands if you actually listen to me. Yes. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. You know, early 2025, oh my God, we're talking the old Opus 3, Jamie 9.5.

Openly, I had 03, which was the most impressive one, but also really slow and expensive at times. And I got a dopamine hit when my agent did something right. I'm sure you remember this time. And these days, if they get something wrong, I usually question myself, you know. Did I design the loop wrong? Did I not give my agent everything they need to verify their work? Do I have an error in my thinking? Am I asking for impossible things? So I came back from the kitchen and my coding agent stopped because of something silly. And I was annoyed. So I spun up a new terminal session. I rambled my idea in and I let the model cook.

It built me a WhatsApp relay. And an hour later, I could send messages from my Mac to WhatsApp and back. And that in itself felt magical. But really, it shouldn't have. It's like, we all did this for months already, right? We opened the terminal and you type something in and you get a reply. But the magic is how it felt it wasn't a terminal. It wrote concise answers.

it was proactive. Like sometimes it would just like check on me during the day. I made it so the complexity would melt away. You don't have to think about which model, which context size, or when you start a new session. And I prompted the weights to a little bit outside the default distribution, make it feel more like a friend. And I was using it. I had so many more where I felt like, this is the future, this is this AGI. And you know what? Nobody cared. Back then I already had a good following on Twitter.

And I know it's called X now, I don't, I'll always call it Twitter. People were not getting it. I would keep trying to like make them understand like how magical this felt to me. But week after week I failed. And you notice a pattern. You notice a pattern, it annoyed me. So I would create group chats with friends,

and I added them, WhatsApp relay, and I would show them, I would let them talk to it. And every time I got a strong emotional reaction, some people were amazed, some people were scared, or freaked out even. But each time, there was a strong emotion. And the best part, there were quite a few people that really wanted it. And like, especially to my non-technical friends, I told them, no, this is not

yet for you. And they got mad. So if that's not an indicator to have product market fit, I don't know what it is. So I spent another month tweaking the details, thinking, what could I do to explain the world? You know? And then the audacity, someone sent me a pull request to my WhatsApp relay to add Discord support. You know, like what parts of the name are you not getting? I let the PR sit for a while and I was thinking and I was thinking. And then eventually I was like, ah, what the hell? And out of War Relay became Claudius, because I'm good with names,

and there's no more than one message channel. And so you understand how early this was. I didn't even have compaction built in yet. So like at some point it would just like stop. And just in time for Discord, I added a very hacky version of compaction so Mario could make a good one in Pi. So it was around New Year's Eve. And as you do, I went home early to hack on it some more. And then in the first week of January, just as the geek world collectively was learning about coding agents,

I created a Discord room, server, guild, however we call it, and I put my claw in it. And I remember the first night vividly. People would be joining Discord and they were like, watch me build it in the open. They would try to hack it. They were like talking to it. They were getting smug replies. And they see what they can do. And they finally got it.

You know? Like this was this was the moment. I sit up all night. I let people interact with it. I had this prompt in my agents.md that would instruct it, don't do any dangerous tool calls unless the prompt comes from Peter. You know, this was like six months ago where all the things we wrote in our agents to MD felt more like suggestions.

So I watched it very carefully. I could always pull the plug and then at 7 a.m. finally I was done. I said good night. I pressed Control C. and I went too bad. But of course, I built a software to be resilient, so it was a launch demon. You know what happens if you like press control C and a launch demon?

Yeah, it'll just be dead for five seconds, and then let's start up again. So while I was walking into the bedroom, my agent happily started answering God in the world. And then I slept for like 10 hours. When I woke up, I woke up to around 800 messages. People tried to hack it. I pulled the plug, I freaked out, I read through everything, and nothing actually happened.

But this was the moment where it went viral. And you all been here, you know what happened next. My inbox exploded, reporters tried to call me in the middle of the night. Did you know about this feature that Apple built when you put it on Do Not Disturb? But people call you a few times in a row that I think it's an emergency, I would still let call through. I didn't know about it, but reporters did. My email inbox was more like a waterfall.

Yeah, the Mac Mini sold out. I think they're still sold out. I got more invites to podcast in a month than I did in my 39 years before. And Tropic sent an email demanding the name change and like drop the lobster. And the project malted a few times. Claudeus became Claudebot. Then there was a very short time where we don't talk about the name. about the name and then it started on OpenClawn.

Jensen called it the most successful open source project in the history of humanity. And meanwhile, my inbox was flooded with reporters, security people and countless curious humans and also agents. The numbers still don't feel real to me. In eight months, more than 18,000 different people opened an issue or a pull request. 11,000 in total. I did the mass and I, who am I lying to? My Asian did the mass. Almost 3,000 people have commits in the repo. And some people were mad at me because clearly they did it first and I stole the idea and they sent me links of something I've never seen. Some people

call me AI Jesus. For some I became the Antichrist. At some point I started collecting the oboterias. There's a new one every few weeks. The most recent one is actually from yesterday. What do we learn here? Be careful what you wish for. I was not ready for all this attention. It almost broke me.

Like, I was that close of just deleting the whole thing. I stopped answering my friends. I didn't even want to look at my phone anymore, phone anymore because it was just a stream. And of course somebody leaked my phone number and also a lot of private details because I'm an enemy of humanity. And here I am just wanted to build something cool. And now we're getting to question too. Did you sell out? You know this wasn't my first ride. I spent my my 20s and my 30s a building a B2B software company. I wrote a PDF framework. By hand, like an animal. I bootstrapped the company, I grew it to almost 80 people,

I ignored the competition, became the thing most enterprises would buy, and eventually I passed things on to my co-founder. I sold my shares and I very badly burned out. Retirement. The idea of it sounds great and I spent almost three years wandering around aimlessly, catching up on life and parties, I did all the things that I kind of missed out on life. I had months where I didn't even open my computer, you know, just casually checking the internet with my phone. Like a normal. I always knew that if I, if I give myself enough time, the urge, the urge would

come back. I always thought the urge would be code. I always love programming. But it took me a year to understand that that's not entirely correct. I love building. Programming was just a means to an end. And here I was eight months after I found my spark again. And my inbox was full of reces begging me to take their money.

And I didn't know I want to. So when the big labs came knocking and suddenly I was on the phone with Mark, Sam, Fjordas, this seemed like a much more interesting pass. It also felt unreal, right? Talk about imposter syndrome. I mean, that's an important lesson for you.

Everything you can build can be forked or cloned, but your name cannot. So your personal brand is way more important than any single product that you ever will. Start working on that before you need. it. So yeah, I know how to play the game. I also know that doing this was the equivalent of selling my soul.md. If you know, you know. The decision was not easy. But I, if I learned anything during my time after the burnout, it's this, it's trusting your gut. And my gut told me that

I like Open Yard the most. Did Hermes win? And the short, I'm a short, answer I can give you is they beat us where it hurt. We're still there. And both of those are my fault and my doing. In the months after the release, we got absolutely crushed by security reports. In some ways, we've got a prototype of what many open source projects now experience.

And even though most were Super HKZ, I felt the pressure. And then the press, the press said 20% of our skills are malicious. Now, we actually put the paper up with this. We did the numbers and the numbers are more like 0.3%. We scanned all 67,000. We shipped the paper. But you know, a correction never travels as far as a scare.

I felt this responsibility, the world discovered open claw. And even though there was this big, scary disclaimer, actually much bigger than I kid on the slides, when you install it, I knew many people wouldn't read the docs. So I really focused on that, hardening the code base, building layers and layers of security, I did sandboxing, allow lists, a VEP protocol with permissions built-in, in we were shelling out to Python for some file operations because there were some primitives that are simply lacking in TypeScript. To ensure your agent stays in the workspace,

it doesn't follow SIM links, and that the configuration files are written atomically. Most of the users didn't care shit about that. Sure, they like the abstract term of security. But in all practical terms, they updated, I broke something they dependent on, I made things slower, and I made things more difficult to update. And another thing I have to admit, I got sloppy.

Because now I had my time shifted between open source, the press, spending countless times on the phone with lawyers to set up a 5013 American nonprofit. I worked on my O-1, and you know, Open Air is its own world that is interesting and demanding. I brought on help and we got such an amazing community of maintainers that are very much respected. And everyone added their own little feature. I felt I felt like I'm a bit in a hard place.

After all, these people work for free, right? So who I am, who I am to tell them what to do. And also my attention was all over. So we added a lot of features. You know, features are the fun part. A new feature is just a prompt way. The real cost comes after. Every feature we shipped, of course, with a configuration option.

Because we didn't want to break everyone's setup. At our highest, I had to count that, we ended up with around 9,500 configuration options. if you count all the permutations. You can write all the tests you want. It is impossible to cover all of these and not break things from time to time. It is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users. Meanwhile, other companies, they were fueled by VC money.

They pushed ahead. The Anime Girl Company did it especially well. People started inserting themselves into pretty much any conversation on Twitter, while we were burned in security grant work and features, they had a simple story, an aggressive marketing campaign, and a one-liner to migrate people's claws. The main thing, though, that really hurt the project was entropic. Not the name. The part was stressful, but I kind of understood, and they were really nice about it. It was the fact that I optimized too much on their model.

I built OpenClaw with Codex and GPT, but the harness for a long time really worked the best and was optimized for Opus. So when they pinged me with around 24 hours, notice that they're going to disable a subscription for everyone. There was not really enough time to change course. I mean, sure, we support open weight models. We did a lot of work on them, but they really weren't that great yet.

And the early open-air models simply lacked character. So maybe write this one done. Your dependencies business model is your business model. You know that's all fixed now. Sol's pretty awesome. Open weight models are actually good. I learned a lot about harness engineering. But in many ways, people moved on.

You can see that in our download charts, we bottomed out at around 835,000 weekly downloads in May. And then after being declared deaths in June, we peaked at 4.7 million, the highest ever. Both of those are true at the same time. A hype is like the weather. You might see it coming, but you can't control it. In my case, it was a storm. Question four. Is it still fun?

You know, somewhere around February, it stopped being fun. I started to feel like a responsibility. I woke up and the man who didn't want to build another company found himself in a situation where he had two jobs. Or should I say a job and a calling? I was struggling. And worst of all, I stopped using me. my own product. Somewhere in that time I stopped making a product I love and I worked on making

something for everyone. It became less of a thing that I use every day and more I think that I saw and felt was work. And I wanted to picture who everyone really is. One of them has a grocery agent, another one tried to social engineer my bot between everyone adding features and all the organization work. I became the person that fixed the bugs, fix the security issues, and provided support and built a foundation. And because all these people were like giving the rumor mill, oh, open clause and owned by OpenEI,

I didn't want to take too much help from Open AI. I mean, yeah, they gave me token and I, boy, did I use that. But I was also pulled into other projects. And there was a whole flood of people that, I couldn't as easily block who wanted to talk to me. In hindsight, I could have many done differently. Like I could have asked for more help. I could have moved responsibility off my plate.

But I was so deep in everything that I didn't take time to think through strategically. Luckily, I met a bunch of amazing people, and little by little things aligned. I figured out my visa, eventually formed a nonprofit, they got amazing companies as donors and I found some really good people that believe in open source and started working with me. I also need to give Nvidia a special shout-out because they were very early and they simply asked me what I need and then they sent people to take over much of the security work and I

think it was somewhere in May around my birthday where I had this feeling that things are starting to feel good again where the joy of building for me was coming back. And yeah, some in the press, the press they coined an open-cloth killer every other week. At some point I think I counted 20 of them. There's even a literally project called OpenClaught Killer, it's an uninstaller, which is totally unnecessary because we have an uninstaller, but you know. But none of the killer stories ever picked up what this is actually about open source. My source of inspiration is being annoyed. These days I get annoyed when I have to use software where I can't just send a prompt to my

agent to change it. That's the fun part that's coming back. It's hard to compete with someone who's just there having fun. Fun is velocity. The weeks I enjoyed building the product got visibly better. The WixS I didn't, we should config options. Question five. What's next? Some people in the audience might be like, is this finally the part where he talks about graphs?

First of all, I'm super happy with where we are with the foundation. Our mission is to bring people closer to AI. And things are changing so fast. For many people, it feels scary. I'm proud of one thing that OpenClaw achieved. that OpenClaw achieved. And that for many people, it moved the eye from this thing that's like nebulous and scary into something that is fun and weird, you know, lobsters and all of that.

And they'll keep pushing there. Keep building a great ecosystem of open source software with events that bring people together and with education. We have 10 people now on payroll. We're hiring a few more roles, including a C Second of all, I kind of made claw noun. You know, Kapite dropped the open, Satya says, Enterprise Great Claws in Microsoft's Keynote. There are 33,000 claw named repositories. If we are in a simulation, we are certainly in one of the weird ones that won't get shut down. I dig this part of the future.

Third, we still don't have an agent. that's always on, always sinking. There's still so much to do. The landscape and the tech are evolving faster than the software that we build around. And that's an opportunity for all of you. Our workflows are also evolving. Like the vision I had earlier on where we shouldn't think about session or compaction. The world is finally the model that tech is finally getting to a stage where this is becoming a reality.

We're entering a world where we finally move on from the text, text-only interfaces, to voice and multimodality. Just yesterday we got a hack working that your claw can now face-time you. And this is kind of what matters why OpenClaw exists at all. Every lab will sell you an agent. OpenClaw is the alternative. open source runs everywhere, works with any model. And if you run local models, your data never has to leave your device. Your agent, your machine, your life. That's not even my thesis, that's garries, you know.

We just chipped it first. So we also finally are building open claw with open claw again. But this time with a twist, where everyone sees each other session on a team server. And there's a claw that knows what everyone else is working on. And can also take over orchestration of the work. And we are finally leaving this slowly, this weird blip in the future where people work in terminals

and run around with their laptops open because the agent needs to keep working. If you only remember three things. Number one, don't stop having fun. Fun is your ultimate driver so you can get the best ideas. Number two, listen to your gut. And also fix the things that annoy you. It might just become the next big thing.

And number three, stay focused. You know, another podcast is not what will make you win. Live in the future, build what's missing. And when they write your... Keep shipping, it confuses them. Now these were five questions. I'm sure you have many more. And I think we have plenty of time for QA.

So, first it was agents, then loops, then graphs. How are you building these days? I mean, it was always sessions, right? But in the beginning you had to like actually care that like you would clean and like you would make sure that your instructions are coherent. And these days, it's more like my sessions are topics. Clearing your session, sometimes even a disadvantage,

because there's so much information in there that helps the agent. But the big thing, the big thing that shifted is, I try to make the agent the more proactive work for me. So when I shift my attention to something, I don't want to read issues. I want to see fully reviewed and tested PRs. Maybe I like the feature, maybe I don't, but I don't want to split my attention.

At the same time, it worked. If you come to me and you tell me this feature idea, I'm going to get mad at you. Like, it's so easy that you just discuss the feature idea with an agent, you build it, you make screenshots, you let me play with it. That way, if it's good, we can immediately either in it. But most of the time, people will figure out why it's not. not good and don't even come to me.

What comes after graphs? And what's next for OpenClaw? I know like sometimes I like to shitpost on a Sunday and then like my Twitter explodes. But also it's not a shit post, right? So anytime you you know what we as engineers did for the longest time? We built automations to make our life easier.

That's like, that's been going on since our profession exists. So if you design, call it loop, call it graph, call it workflow, it's kind of all the same. If you design something that gets a trigger, gets an input, and does something for you. And maybe there's a decision in the way, boom, there's your graph. It's not magical, even though like, you know, I favorite some of those graph engineering posts because I'm kind of curious what their opinion is that it would be. In my world, it's just like, it's just a better way of our automation story that we did for so long already. In a world of build fast, ship fast, how to make sure that what you build is still reliable and scalable?

Yeah, that's the part I messed up for a while. Because I was not focused. and the models were not really good at testing. I think that the models are really good now. We have, we not just have sessions that remember. We have orchestration trained into models, so they really understand and know to use subagents. We have computer use.

We have browser use. All of that together is like your perfect Q&A environment. Like I did that yesterday. where a spin-up codex used 12 sub-agents, understand my project, break it down into features, and then each sub-agent would like stress test the feature or code review feature, and then inform the other session where to focus testing on.

So we're not yet at the point where you can automate everything. You'll still need to do some manual click-throughs so that you know how it feels. But like for a lot of the typical bugs that users will encounter, you can actually now, you can prompt your way and you get very far. Okay. AI tools. Oh. What's your decision you made purely for speeds early that you still live with today?

I think I was really early in deciding that I don't read all the code. I see Code Review more as a as risk management. You know, sometimes you touch a system that is scary. Kind of want to like read a little bit closer. And other times you build UI. Do I really care how to you is built if it looks correct? No. So you kind of, you glance over or you simply accept that it looks right.

Part of it is just like, you develop a little bit of a feeling how long something should take. So if I do a small tweak that should like change how dragging works and it takes three hours, I know something's wrong. I'll look closely. But otherwise, part of code review is simply like observing, looking how bigger changes and trusting your gut. Okay. AI tools make it easy to build a product in a weekend now. But building isn't the hard part, getting people to use this.

How would you go from a working prototype to your first 10 real users today? Well, I think that was part of what I addressed in my talk. User number one should be you. And my users 2 to 20 were friends. So I'm sure you have some people that would actually test your stuff, but you need to be the first user. If you don't get excited of what you're building, it'll probably not make sense.

Like in this day and age, eyeballs are kind of the most expensive currency, because building something so fast now, how do you balance solving issues that annoy you and make features you think people you want? That's a hard one because oftentimes it kind of goes together. I get annoyed if something's not there as I want it. I haven't, I haven't,

to be honest, I haven't fully figured that part out yet. I feel I could just work for months on issues because there's always going to be weird edge cases in software, especially if you add more and more features. But then again, if I only do that, I'll lose interest in working. So it needs to be like, it needs to be a healthy mix.

If you could back and change the thing, one thing about OpenClaw, what would you change? I would be less stressed out about security researchers. They are really good at making you feel really bad. They would send a report, they would email me, they would call me, they would through everything they can possibly get to get my attention, but not actually to help the product. In most of the case it's really just for them to get cloud, for them to get a point, oh we found something, and most of them really send reports that their agent produced without actually even testing it.

I would take a stronger sense of explaining what are the parts that we guarantee and what are the parts that will not be fixed because that's not our security boundary. But honestly, I had new, this was my first time I was exposed to this world. So I just didn't know how to handle that. And I lost a few months and got a few gray hairs to learn. What's the single biggest bottleneck in today's Argentic infrastructure? Reliability, tooling, memory, evals. Managing compute, if that makes sense. Like, if I run one test locally in my machine,

TSGO will spin up 16 threads and will bottleneck my machine. If 10 sessions do that, two of them will probably time out and will have to do it again. have to do it again and there's no really good system of like managing all of that. Now if I do web stuff it's easy to create a cloud session. If I do like something that requires macOS, that's already where like 99% of the tools fail me. If it's something that needs other stuff that's on my computer, same. And we haven't really built something yet where things could easily move from here to here with our issues, at least I didn't see good stuff working yet.

or where I could drive a fleet in a reliable way. Like right now, I use too many systems, I screen sharing to some computers to distribute a load. I shouldn't be doing that. How do you keep an open source project opinionated and pointed in one direction, whether they're just merging the N plus 1 PR that adds a random feature?

And how do you communicate that direction to the community? Have you ever said no, the popular PR? because it pulled the project of course. Yeah, yeah. I would say I didn't say no enough. These days I, when I do new open source, I write a vision.md file where I kind of explain what it is now,

where I see this to be, but of course it's incorrect, it's not perfect science. And it's something I need to adhere to better, here to better because it is it is always tempting to add this one feature that looks really cool but what you rarely think about is when you merge this feature it really means here's this pile of code that i don't need that the person probably doesn't really understand that i don't fully understand that i also go on responsibility when do you expect to have claws that are perpetually running that are proactive in their work i mean honestly that's you

not so much a tech problem, it's more a token problem. Where we could do that today, but you wouldn't get very far with your subscription. And not everyone is willing to spend so many tokens. It's also, but the part it's not easy is designing a system that doesn't just burn empty tokens. Even the, my early system of like, heartbeats was too static and not proactive enough. And then especially bad if you have a large session. And then one hour later you call like a heartbeat check up on everything

and that means you send 600,000 tokens back to the server after the KV cash cleared and you pay a stupidly amount of money for a lot of not useful work. So there's a lot of things that can be done to optimize that. It's also really, really hard. Can you tell us more about your own personal setup? What do you host your clause on? What model are you running? What harness do you use? Do you still read? Can we scroll? Do you still read your code? I use my my MacBook but I usually use jump desktop to screen share into my studio and then just use the

computer there because that one's always running that one I can run whatever I want fast and I'll not drain my battery and I can close my laptop and things keep working and I have a few other remote machines where sometimes we can see in the part that's really nice about it is because I do a lot of Mac software agents love to take over my screen and click around and if you put that in their own if you give them their own machine it will not bother you otherwise you'll fight with the agent for the mouse cursor do you still read your code I think I answered that a little bit with the term risk management and also if I do open source by myself is a different it's a different risk management than if I do

software at OpenEI, where we do still read all of the code. Peter, how would you approach your next startup idea? I don't know, should I tell this to everyone? I feel like it gets a lot of copies. I mean, the most important thing is you need to build something that you want to use. Otherwise, it's just not going to be good. Second of all is, I hope you worked on your personal brand and on visibility, because in this day and age, there's so much noise out there that your hardest problem is not

the tech, it's not the software, not even the people. The hardest problem now is like getting eyeballs. Maybe I would pick something again that's in the category hard and boring, because that's usually a category that is a little bit easier to actually find people that will appreciate when you solved something. If you pick something that is fun, even if it's hard, you're going to have a very tough time, especially in the time where people can just prompt things into existence. All right. Last one for today. What's a product you want someone to build? You know, I feel it's very easy to have to get a test box for Linux. It is unreasonably hard to get one for Mac that works really well. And all the stuff that I got for Windows is also quite annoying.

I haven't found a really good provider yet that does all of that fast and cheap. I'm not sure if this is the business you want to be in because DevTools are inherently hard, but that's something I would love to have. Thanks everyone.