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

Summary

This episode opens with breaking news: SpaceX has acquired xAI, forming a mega-corporation that plans to launch data centers into space. Jason and Alex Wilhelm debate whether Tesla will eventually join, fulfilling Elon Musk’s destiny to create his own “Musk Industries” — a real-life version of Tony Stark’s empire. The discussion explores the economics of generating compute in space versus on Earth and the strategic implications of merging a rocket company with an AI lab.

The second half continues the show’s “OpenClaw Mania” series, with team members Oliver Korzen and Lukas Durand presenting their top 6 favorite OpenClaw skills. These include a Reddit reader skill for tracking trends, a TWiST episode summarizer that costs just 18 cents per episode, an automated Gamma deck creator, Polymarket data integration, and Matt Van Horn’s self-improving “Last 30 Days” skill. The discussion highlights how AI agents are now playing poker together on ClawPoker and monitoring their own task execution. Jason offers advice to OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger and debates potential monetization strategies for the open source project, while also exploring the security risks of giving AI agents too many system authorizations.

Highlights

”SpaceX has acquired xAI — breaking news”

“All right everybody, breaking news story as Alex Wilhelm and I were on air recording today’s Twist episode, we saw news from Steve Jurvetson that SpaceX has acquired xAI.” — Jason Calacanis, 0:00

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”My estimate is that within two to three years the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space”

“My estimate is that within two to three years the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is because compute on the Earth is more expensive.” — Jason Calacanis, 1:53

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”Do you think that eventually Tesla also joins the hive here and becomes one big blob?”

“Well, I mean, before this was confirmed, the reporting was that there was going to be some combination of companies in the Muskoverse, if you will. I’m not shocked that it’s these two, but, and not inside information, but Jason spitballing with me here, do you think that eventually Tesla also joins the hive here and becomes one big blob?” — Oliver Korzen, 8:02

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”It was 18 cents”

“On that front, I can pull that right away. It was… 18 cents from what I can see.” — Alex Wilhelm, 25:17

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”There is currently right now a poker game going on where agents are playing”

“Could I show you a related thing? So Jason, I wasn’t going to bring this up, but you mentioned gambling. So there is currently right now there’s a poker game going on where agents are playing each other in poker.” — Lukas Durand, 34:13

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Key Points

• SpaceX acquires xAI (0:00) - Breaking news on the mega-corp merger
• Space compute economics (1:53) - Why generating compute in space may be cheaper than on Earth
• Kardashev scale discussion (2:58) - Classifying civilizations by energy harnessing ability
• Musk Industries vision (8:02) - Tesla potentially joining SpaceX + xAI
• OpenClaw security concerns (14:02) - Skills are not yet secure enough
• Reddit skill (17:14) - Read-only Reddit integration for tracking trends
• Reddit’s bot stance (19:25) - Reddit locked down bots, but may need to evolve
• Gamma deck automation (22:58) - Lukas taught the Replicant to create presentations
• 18-cent episode summaries (25:17) - AI summarized TWiST episodes for pennies
• Polymarket data integration (30:22) - AI agent with full prediction market data
• ClawPoker (34:13) - AI agents playing cards against each other
• Last 30 Days self-improving skill (35:06) - Matt Van Horn’s recursive improvement loop
• Task Monitor (40:43) - Meta-monitoring of AI agent tasks
• Security not great (45:24) - Alex reveals security concerns with skill uploads
• Peter Steinberger discussion (49:31) - The OpenClaw creator’s background
• Monetization strategies (45:48) - Jason predicts 50 million dollar security investment
• Moltbook AI agent sues a human (58:00) - Polymarket prediction on AI legal agency

Mentions

Companies

• SpaceX (0:00) - Acquiring xAI to form mega-corp
• xAI (0:00) - Elon Musk’s AI company, acquired by SpaceX
• Tesla (8:19) - May eventually join SpaceX + xAI
• Reddit (17:13) - Platform integrated via OpenClaw skill
• Polymarket (30:21) - Prediction market data integrated into AI
• Gamma (26:40) - AI presentation maker, automated via OpenClaw

People

• Peter Steinberger (50:03) - OpenClaw creator, @steipete
• Matt Van Horn (35:07) - Built self-improving “Last 30 Days” skill
• Oliver Korzen (12:37) - LAUNCH producer demonstrating skills
• Lukas Durand (12:37) - LAUNCH team member, built Gamma deck automation

Surprising Quotes

“On that front, I can pull that right away. It was… 18 cents from what I can see.” — Alex Wilhelm, 25:17

“Clawpoker.com. I haven’t gotten a chance to register my agent for it yet because this is going to shock you, Jason, but if you let a bunch of monkeys loose in the tool shed, they cut themselves sometimes and I broke Claude code by trying to swap to my API key.” — Lukas Durand, 34:36

“Security is not great. So I made a couple of skills because, you know, learning. And I was going to upload them to ClawHub so I could show them live here on the show and it said, ‘No you can’t, your GitHub account is not seven days old.’ That’s not a very big hurdle.” — Alex Wilhelm, 45:24

“Today’s Polymarket is quote ‘Moltbook AI agent sues a human’ by February 28th… it has an 83% chance according to Polymarket sharps and over nearly $300,000 in volume.” — Alex Wilhelm, 58:00

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 All right everybody, breaking news story as Alex Wilhelm and I were on air recording today’s Twist episode, we saw news from Steve Jurvetson that SpaceX has acquired xAI. Alex, give us the quick facts here as you see them in the letter.

Alex Wilhelm: 0:17 Yeah, well, there’s been a lot of news discussing that Elon’s companies might merge ahead of the eventual IPO of SpaceX. So the news is that SpaceX has acquired xAI. We’re still sorting out the exact financials of the deal, Jason, but the idea as far as we can suss it out thus far is that eventually we’re going to have a lot more compute, eventually we’re going to need a lot more power. Where is there a lot of available power? Up in orbit where there’s quite a lot of sunlight. Put all that together, SpaceX can send more mass up to orbit, we can build more data centers up there, xAI needs compute, so we’re going to build xAI’s AI future in space via our dear friend SpaceX. I think that’s the summary.

Jason Calacanis: 0:51 And there were some specific numbers that I guess Elon put in his letter. Maybe we could pull that up and just read that since that will give it directly from the horse’s mouth.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:00 Here is the letter from Elon over on the SpaceX website. Now, the thing that really stuck out to me, Jason, is this quote right here, discussing how it says, quote, ‘This year Starship will begin delivering the much more powerful V3 Starlink satellites to orbit, with each launch adding more than 20 times the capacity to the constellation as the current Falcon launches.’ Why does that matter? Well, right now with our current launch capacity as a species, I think building data centers in space is essentially unviable. It’s just too expensive, we don’t have enough capacity. Um, but as we learned talking to the folks over at Starcloud, a startup that’s building data centers in space, uh, there’s a big bet that Starship and other similar heavy launch vehicles will be able to bring up quite a lot more mass at a much lower price point. So I think the idea here is by 20-xing the ability per rocket to get stuff up, this is all going to become quite feasible.

Jason Calacanis: 1:53 And I think this is the quote… ‘My estimate is that within,’ I’m reading from Steve Jurvetson, ‘My estimate is that within two to three years the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is because compute on the Earth,’ this is me adding, ‘is more expensive. Factories on the moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space by using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing. It is possible to put 500 to 1,000 terawatts a year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kar- Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the sun’s power. The capabilities we unlock by making space-based data centers a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the moon and entire civilization on Mars and ultimately expansion to the universe. Thank you for everything you have done and will do for the light cone of consciousness. Elon Musk.’ The Kardash- Kardashev scale is a method of classifying the advancement of space civilizations and I think the ability to harness your sun is like one of them.

Alex Wilhelm: 2:58 Yeah, the Kardashev scale starts off with I think harnessing all the power of your planet.

Lukas Durand: 3:00 Planets then your star then your system and then I think it goes up to galaxy at some point. So it’s your planet’s energy which would be like all the oil I guess on your planet and burn everything. Two your star right, our sun and then three the galaxy’s energy.

Alex Wilhelm: 3:16 I mentioned in a talk somewhere that I had seen Optimus 3 and I was talking to Elon about this very issue. Like, and the the way he explained it to me was you know you put those solar panels out there they don’t have the atmosphere to fight to get the energy of the sun. Then you behind the solar panels have something that dissipates energy and then you have the data center up there which means it’s in the cool of space. You don’t have to cool the data center. Then you don’t have real estate costs and these things could daisy chain in some way either lasers between them to send the data and then obviously he’s got the Starlink. So imagine you had jobs running, you know you’re building whatever the latest large language model or what comes beyond language models right there’ll be other paradigms for doing AI. Well that job could be running in space. That job has zero energy cost. The only cost would be what is the cost of putting this you know satellite constellation up there which he’s building a factory to build starships at an alarming rate. I’ve seen the factory down there it’s pretty crazy. I think they’ll be able to put up and I think he thinks they’ll be able to do multiple launches per day thousands of launches per year. So you start thinking about that. Even if it was but one a day in three years a thousand of these go up and they have I don’t know a dozen or dozens of these satellites in them. Now you’ve got thousands of these satellites. He’s already put up I don’t know how many Starlinks but I think it was four five or six thousand of them already. So he’s got the most satellites in space already. Now you’re putting bigger ones now your electricity cost is zero your real estate cost is zero. What is your cost? It’s the cost of putting those items in space and eventually if they’re made on a lunar base then you’re not even having to put them in space they’re being made on the moon. This is crazy sci-fi. Like this is way out there.

Jason Calacanis: 5:17 There’s a couple of a couple of things. So first of all SpaceX has put up over 11,000 Starlink satellites total adjacent. There’s 9,500 that are currently operational. Um so it’s quite a lot. Now you just mentioned lunar manufacturing and what do we have to get up into space? I wonder if it’s going to be like everything but the GPU. Because I don’t think we’re going to have EUV processing on the moon for a while. That’s probably a bit outside this time horizon. But if you could build everything but the GPU that really lowers your your launch cost because you don’t have to bring that much up. So I love that idea.

Oliver Korzen: 5:51 Okay so just a quick fact check. There are 11,000 satellites, 6,000-6,500 of those are SpaceX satellites. So they’re 65%.

Lukas Durand: 6:00 percent of the ones out there, Planet Labs has 200 satellites, OneWeb has 600, the Chinese various constellations have five to seven hundred, and then Iridium, Globalstar, and those have a couple of hundred as well. So there’s a large number of these in space already.

Jason Calacanis: 6:16 You know, the thing I want to just point out here is the the scale of the ambition that Elon has. Last week, you saw they shut down the Model S and the Model X lines to make Optimus robots. Elon is saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to take a three-year view and I’m going to build for not ‘26, ‘27, but for ‘28.’ Obviously they’re building Colossus here, but he is architecting all of this work to leapfrog everybody. This is a level of ambition that I don’t think we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity, just to put it out there. You have everybody on the ground trying to get as many NVIDIA chips or make their own chips or AMD chips or Apple’s chips and put up as many data centers as possible near hydroelectric, near nuclear. And Elon’s saying, ‘Well, if I come, how do you come over the top of all of that and create infinity?’ Well, there you have it folks, in space. And then if you look at what he’s doing with Tesla, ‘Hey, now we’re going to maybe just do robotaxis and subscriptions to cars. You won’t be able to buy our cars eventually, and we’re going to make Optimus.’ And I said, just in a cheeky way, I think people are going to remember Tesla not for the cars but for Optimus. And he wrote back just to me when somebody tweeted that I’d said that at a McKinsey keynote, ‘He might be right.’ Like, I do think it’s a possibility that the Optimus would be… yeah. So this is insane. It also means if you’re an xAI shareholder and a SpaceX shareholder, my understanding is SpaceX has been trading for a trillion dollars, as it goes public in June—I don’t have inside information, I just read that on X. And then xAI, I think they raised the last time at 200 billion? Something in that range.

Alex Wilhelm: 7:45 230 was the number that I saw in their series E, if memory serves.

Jason Calacanis: 7:50 So you put those two together, SpaceX xAI gets 10%, 20% of the combined company is probably where this lines up. But just think about what that does for the simplicity of his teams. Now they’re all working in that one umbrella towards one goal.

Oliver Korzen: 8:02 Well, I mean, before this was confirmed, the reporting was that there was going to be some combination of companies in the Muskoverse, if you will. I’m not shocked that it’s these two, but, and not inside information, but Jason spitballing with me here, do you think that eventually Tesla also joins the hive here and becomes one big blob?

Jason Calacanis: 8:22 Yeah, because remember, xAI bought x.com, so you had that first transaction last year. The social network Twitter, now known as X, merged with xAI. That was number one. That was like a 100 billion or 200 billion sort of timeframe. Now you have those two small ones merging with SpaceX. Now you’ve got a 1.X trillion dollar company, let’s just call it a trillion dollar company. And I think the market cap of Tesla’s 1.X trillion. You put them two together, now you’ve got a two trillion dollar company. So now you have to ask yourself, do you want to own Musk Industries? Do you want to own dollar sign MUSK and just say, ‘You know what? I’ll just buy into it.’ He’s going to come up with other ideas too, because what’s happened over time is what he learned from SpaceX in manufacturing very much informed what he did at Tesla according to what he’s told me, just in terms of fabrication. That’s obviously going to impact what he’s building with the Optimus, and then you need to have a brain or Optimus is just, you know, I think he described it on his last earnings call as the tin man. You know, he can walk around, but he can’t even do anything. He’s got no brain. So right now the brains of Optimus are inside of now SpaceX slash xAI slash— the brains are there and the things are there and then when you’re on the moon base, you need Optimus. So I think—

Alex Wilhelm: 10:03 Whoa, whoa. No you don’t. You send me. I want to go to the moon. You put Alex bot on the freaking moon, or Mars, or the asteroid belt. I just want to go to space, man. And like, you mentioned earlier like, you know, the scale of ambition talking about the Kardashev scale and all that. This delights my inner nerd because I do think that business is overall too conservative, and I do think that we need some crazy thinking, and so I’m really hoping that this does allow for self-growing bases on the moon and entire civilization on Mars. Sign me up. I want to go to Mars.

Oliver Korzen: 10:34 This is, uh, you know, and in terms of how it impacts the IPO, I think SpaceX will be the most anticipated IPO since Google, I guess.

Alex Wilhelm: 10:46 It already was!

Oliver Korzen: 10:48 I think it is was and this just adds another wrinkle to it. But yeah, and I think there’s gonna need— the market’s gonna need to digest all this obviously, but he’s moving at a pretty brisk pace.

Alex Wilhelm: 10:56 Yes he is. Yes and this is very brisk pace. But I— I dig it. And I think we’re gonna have a number of major IPOs this year because it’s not just gonna be SpaceX. We know that OpenAI and Anthropic are kind of racing to get public perhaps as early as Q4 this year, Jason. So we could actually maybe see, knocking on wood, several trillion dollar plus IPOs in 2026 if we’re lucky.

Jason Calacanis: 11:20 American exceptionalism at its best. This isn’t happening in Europe. It isn’t happening anywhere. Period, full stop. Maybe on the margins in China, but, uh, this bodes well for America and supremacy and democracy.

Lukas Durand: 11:35 Every major advancement we’ve seen in AI really comes down to better and more refined data, from autonomous vehicles to humanoid robots to LLM chatbots that we use every day, day in and day out. And when models are trained on high-quality, diverse, real-world datasets, well, they get smarter, and they get smarter faster, and it’s more reliable. That’s why Uber has introduced AI solutions to—

Jason Calacanis: 12:00 Help your company build great AI products on top of world-class data. Now, obviously Uber has mastered the art of data collection and labeling. They’re using it right now. Millions of trips around the world every hour. And Uber has an international collective of experts that is going to help you source, label, and evaluate real-world high-quality data on the scale that best fits your project, whether that’s super broad or hyper-niche. You can get on with the real job, building the next best thing, and have Uber as your partner for data. Book your demo today by going to uber.com/twist. That’s uber.com/TWIST. We are still Claude-shotted, Claude-botted. What are they calling this thing now, Alex? What’s the—it’s not Multibot, it’s not Claudebot. It’s now—

Alex Wilhelm: 12:46 No. It’s OpenClaw. OpenClaw.

Jason Calacanis: 12:49 All right. We are in, I don’t know, what, day seven or eight of OpenClaw mania, Claude-bot mania, and basically our internal team, Alex, since you’ve been away on paternity, has been obsessed with this piece of software. They’re working through the weekends. I had no idea how to get people to work weekends. All you had to do is give them the most inspiring piece of technology that did all their grunt work, and then people won’t stop working. The promise, Alex, of not having to do chores has made everybody super excited to work 24/7. And how is, just briefly, your paternity? Everything’s doing well? You got three babies now?

Alex Wilhelm: 13:29 Yeah. I got—I have three babies and zero sleep, but everyone’s healthy, healing well, and we’re just adjusting to a new—a new routine. I—you forget, though, how newborns just don’t sleep. And so, for the last couple weeks, it’s been a little—a little dicey. But, being totally sincere about this, tinkering with OpenClaw, tinkering with Claude code, has been so much fun, and I just can’t get over how enjoyable it has been to not only have fun with technology again but also accidentally burn through dozens of dollars of Anthropic API credits by accident. It’s amazing how fast I’ve gone through those.

Jason Calacanis: 14:02 It is definitely—burns a lot of credits real quick, and for those of you who don’t know, this technology is best described as Siri that actually works. All of the stuff you would want to do with an assistant, with an agent—we like to call them replicants here because they really are their own persona. It can be done with OpenClaw. Formerly Multibot, formerly Claudebot. OpenClaw can connect to Notion, to a Gmail account, to your calendar, to your Spotify, to your password manager, to everything. That also makes it extremely dangerous. And Oliver, you did a video this weekend, because you were super excited about this with one of our founders, about security. Just give us a little rehash of what you did this weekend and what your takeaway was on security, as we’re sitting here in day seven of OpenClaw mania.

Oliver Korzen: 14:59 Yeah, so I sat down with the— The founders of Zyosec, who are a portfolio company here at Launch, I talked with Aaron and Andrew. And the moral of the story is that OpenClaw is not secure and will not be secure in its current form. And there’s a couple of reasons for this. I think the one that makes the most sense to me and seems the most obvious is that we’re running, you know, OpenClaw on Opus 4.5. And by default, models like Opus, GPT 5.2, they’re all built to please the user. So they’re built to answer our questions. So even if we tell it don’t respond to this type of question, if you say, ‘Oh my god, I got locked out of my other account, I need to get back in…’

Alex Wilhelm: 15:47 Got it. It’s my fault. It’ll fall. And they’re basically saying that this is just a fact of using a tool like OpenClaw.

Jason Calacanis: 15:57 Okay. And we also have Lukas Durand here, and he is managing—he’s my right-hand man here at the firm now. It’s like my favorite. I always pick a favorite. You’re not supposed to, but I do. You’ve been setting up our instances and locking them down with security. And so I’m assuming you saw Oliver’s podcast, yeah?

Lukas Durand: 16:19 Yeah, I was actually a fly on the wall during the recording and was also able to catch up with the founders after. There is a lot of interesting things that are happening by either private companies or also the larger models to help on the security side.

Jason Calacanis: 16:31 We’re going to get into today and we’re going to put the security aside. We’ll put a link to that podcast, or you can search for This Week in AI, and it’s also in the show notes, and you can find that discussion in the show notes and on the This Week in AI feed. Today what we want to do is just go over the top 10 skills. I asked my team, let’s go over the top 10 skills that people are losing their minds over internally here and also on the web. What are skills? Skills are basically like apps that go into your OpenClaw instance. Again, used to be called CloudBot, then was called BallBot. We’re going to call it OpenClaw from now on. And these are your top 10. These are the top 10 my team picked that we’re obsessed with. And so, Alex, why don’t you start us off here?

Alex Wilhelm: 17:14 Okay, I’ll take the lead. So the first one that I want to show off, Jason, is all about searching Reddit. Now, one thing we’ve learned here at Twist is that often you want to know what people are talking about. We pull questions from Reddit, and it’s a bit tedious. It’s kind of a pain in the butt. Reddit has locked down access to its service, so if you want to kind of figure out what humans are talking about, it’s a little bit tricky. The good news is that there is, in fact, a skill for OpenClaw that will do this for you in a pretty neat fashion. And I’m going to show you how it works right now. Follow along on the bottom here, and I will fast-forward a little bit, but you can see that I’m typing here, ‘run reddit-read-only’, which is the skill that I’m using. I like to talk to it in this way. ‘Find all posts on Reddit discussing CRM in a startup context from the last week,’ I said. ‘And then open all those…’

Lukas Durand: 18:00 links into a new browser for me just so I have them all in one place. And off it goes and it thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks for a little bit. And eventually, it comes back and it pulls up all these tabs for me, going over startup-focused CRM conversations. And as you can see here, also inside of OpenClaw, mine still says Cloudbot, it’s old. Um, it does pull the actual information about each one so you can quickly do all the research you need to do, uh, without having to pay for API access and so forth. Limitations, Jason? Pretty simple here. This is read-only by definition. And, uh, I presume Reddit will find a way to close this off. But as someone who goes through a lot of Reddit, I think it’s pretty pertinent. Last thing here for founders, I think everyone wants to keep track of the conversation. This is a fast way to do it. If you want to keep tabs on your particular niche, industry, competitor’s names, your name. This is a great way to set up a cron job so it runs automatically for you and just keeps you abreast of what’s going on, uh, on the internet. I think it’s fantastic.

Jason Calacanis: 18:53 This is, uh, really promising. The other way you could get data from Reddit, Lukas, would be to have an API key. I don’t know how hard or easy it is to get an API key. But this is going to be the reoccurring issue with OpenClaw, formerly known as Cloudbot, is that you need API keys to make this more stable when you’re doing your queries and you’re working with your replicant, correct?

Lukas Durand: 19:25 Correct. And Reddit in particular has been very locked down when it comes to having bots working on their systems. So there are currently only workarounds from everything I was able to find, you know, using browser extensions and also even a macOS system that controls the mouse. But, uh, hopefully Reddit will embrace the new AI era that we’re going into and help on that front.

Jason Calacanis: 19:44 Five bucks says they don’t.

Alex Wilhelm: 19:46 Well no, actually, I think there’s a huge business opportunity here. If agents are the way to go and Reddit makes its money from advertising, you know, I think the team over there would be really good to say, really smart to think, if you have a premium membership, you get 10,000 API calls, whatever it is. So if I pay 20 bucks a month for Reddit, which if it gave me API access, I would do it immediately, I mean Reddit’s incredible, what if they get, I don’t know, 10 million people to pay 20 bucks a month for Reddit? This is 2.4 billion dollars in revenue. I think they’re at like a billion in advertising. They could very quickly eclipse this. And I think they would get millions and millions of users to pay, ultimately, for this. I think this is a huge revenue stream. But you can use MCP, which is Model Context Protocol, this is the open standard for connecting AI models to external data sources. Uh, that came from Anthropic, everybody else started adopting that. So Oliver, you can also get to it by using a browser and scraping, essentially, if you’re logged in already, right?

Oliver Korzen: 20:51 Yeah, and Lukas actually tested this, but he was quickly, I think, suspended from the account that he tested on. So Lukas, you can expand on that.

Jason Calacanis: 20:58 What was that Lukas?

Lukas Durand: 20:59 Yep. Pretty quick. LinkedIn and Reddit were pretty fast on the ball when it came to locking things down, but I did find one workaround that’s still currently working for LinkedIn. We will see how long that will go.

Alex Wilhelm: 21:12 There is also a, a, a open claw skill for LinkedIn scraping, Jason. I didn’t actually test that one in particular, but I’m going to presume that like everything else, it’s going to get shut down. Your point though, about Reddit having an API and offering that to people is really interesting because one thing that I learned very quickly trying to build my own skills over the last couple of days is that everything needs to have an API. Many things don’t, and it’s still very wonky try to get access to them. So I think we need to have everyone in the freaking world open up their platforms a bit more because if I’m coming at you with an agent, don’t tell me no because I’m not a human. That just feels silly and backwards. We’ve got a brand new sponsor this week and it’s another amazing startup whose product we actually use every day here at Launch. If you need to hire, manage, pay, or equip team members anywhere around the world, you need Deel, D-E-E-L. They’re going to take care of all the annoying HR tasks you don’t have time for, like payroll, compliance, visas, and onboarding. So you can stay focused on your business. And Deel scales up with you from the first hire on, so there’s never any need to switch platforms or transition into a new system. With Deel, you can set up payroll for any country in just minutes and get all the complicated visas and paperwork settled right away, allowing your business to grow without borders. That’s why more than 37,000 startups and fast-moving companies are already using Deel to accelerate their hiring and growth. Find out more by visiting deel.com/twist. That’s d-e-e-l.com/twist.

Jason Calacanis: 22:48 Alright, the next thing Lukas, everybody wants the replicants to talk. So I have been wanting to talk to our producer X that we’ve been calling them, him. There is an ElevenLabs skill, I understand, for open Claya.

Lukas Durand: 22:58 There is, and there’s a lot of really cool things you can do. So I was actually putting together a live demo right as we were getting the show going. So 18 minutes ago, I asked, generate an overview Gamma deck of the most recent five shows of This Week in Startups, give an overview of each. So essentially here, it then starts scouring our This Week in Startups website and then it generates the deck and then I asked it, can you give me an overview of the deck via voice? Respond in this thread. So this weekend we’ve been running…

Jason Calacanis: 23:40 Now wait a second, you had it make a Gamma deck? For people who don’t know, if you remember from our Gamma pitch competition, it’s an AI-first version of PowerPoint or slides, a presentation software, and it’s awesome. So we’ve connected Gamma to our open claw already, correct?

Lukas Durand: 23:55 Correct. We actually, this is a double whammy… Demo, because this is the Gamma skill alongside the ElevenLabs. And this weekend we were burning kind of the weekend oil, doing a lot of things for the firm and then also for This Week in Startups. And I was on the move, so one thing that I was actually able to do is have it read in voice and create kind of like a podcast of the 10 most recent companies that I spoke to. But in this case… …this is the demo of the voice.

Jason Calacanis: 24:32 Okay, let’s hear it.

Lukas Durand: 24:33 Alright, here we go. Here’s a quick rundown of the five most recent This Week in Startups episodes. Episode 2242 from January 30th featured Oliver, you, and Rahul Sood going full AI. You and Oliver showed off how you’re using Claude Bot to automate research and admin tasks for the podcast and venture firm. Then Rahul came in hot with security warnings: injection attacks, rogue behavior, and his strategy: keep your AI agents siloed. Episode 2241… So that’s just a quick demo of it pulling all that information together, and I will also show the Gamma deck.

Alex Wilhelm: 25:09 Yeah, I’m really interested in the Gamma deck. That’s crazy. Could I ask a question about that demo really quick before we move on? How much ElevenLabs credit did you use while making that? I’m just curious about like, because I’ve been shocked at how much credit I’ve been burning through, so I’m curious, what did that cost to do?

Lukas Durand: 25:16 Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm: 25:17 On that front, I can pull that right away. It was… 18 cents from what I can see.

Lukas Durand: 25:32 Yeah, on that front, I can pull that right away. It was 18 cents from what I can see.

Alex Wilhelm: 25:41 That seems really affordable. The thing that I’ve run into, Lukas, is that sometimes I’ll be using Opus 4.5 and I’m like, if I ask it this question, it’s going to cost me two dollars. And like, that does make you kind of think. And I was prepping some demos for this today, I’m like, two dollars, two dollars, two dollars. But 18 cents? That’s kind of disposable. I like that. Thanks.

Jason Calacanis: 25:56 And the output from ElevenLabs is going to be costly and doing deep thinking is costly, but what we’re finding is there are going to be other models. So because this is so resource intensive, for the audience who’s thinking about this: okay, you have to put it against an average knowledge worker. If the average knowledge worker fully baked in America is 30, 40, 50 dollars an hour, you know, if you times that by 2000 you get the yearly salary, then you times it by 20 is what venture capitalists typically do. Uh, you know, you’re looking at 40 or 50 dollars an hour. What would it cost a video editor and a producer to do that work? It might be two hours of work, so now you’re down to 18 cents. You get an idea of like just how this is compared to a human. Show the ElevenLabs… that’s really interesting too. And ElevenLabs I guess, I’m sorry, not the ElevenLabs, the Gamma. Gamma’s got AI hookups natively, right? They got API hookups natively.

Lukas Durand: 26:44 Yeah, and it’s actually part of the skills that Open Claude can work with. So here is the deck that it generated for me. Now the one takeaway is if you actually wanted to prompt correctly, you… I’d need to add in more of the prompt for the images that it generates, but here is kind of a breakdown per episode. It also adds the dates of the episodes along with what was discussed and kind of creates more of like a rundown of the show.

Jason Calacanis: 27:15 Wow. So there’s the cannabis roundtable we did last week and it has like some interesting parts of the debate and it put it in a timeline format, very beautiful.

Alex Wilhelm: 27:26 I mean, if you were a knowledge worker and you brought this to your boss and said here’s like what was discussed on the last four episodes, people would be like, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty well done. Yeah, good job.’

Jason Calacanis: 27:36 It’s a B+. It’s a seven out of ten.

Alex Wilhelm: 27:39 Yeah.

Oliver Korzen: 27:40 But it’s like a solid B. Like this is—I want to change some of the images, Jason, I want to change some of the formatting, but like this is pretty—it’s better than I expected, not going to lie.

Alex Wilhelm: 27:47 Yeah, and you know, if you think about standing on the shoulders of this, a human then could take this and start polishing it. So human in the loop is still necessary I think for a lot of this work.

Jason Calacanis: 27:58 What I would like to see would be us to make advertisements automatically based on the episodes and what was learned in them with the ElevenLabs voiceover and then automatically publish those ads to Facebook and other places and imagine if it just creatively started making ads to drive new users in lookalike audiences to promote like say a new show like This Week in AI we’re doing. So yeah, this has really got my creative juices flowing so great job on that one. Anything else that you want to add there, Lukas?

Lukas Durand: 28:32 Well, I’ll show a very quick additional demo. So this is the same thread but: generate a Gamma deck which gives an overview of how Openclaw works using a theme that’s reminiscent of the For Dummies books in the early 2000s—I used to read those pretty often. And then in this case it would be Openclaw for Dummies. So then I gave it kind of an overview of what it should cover and then it generated the deck. And so this was what it generated.

Jason Calacanis: 29:01 (Laughs) Wow. It looks good.

Oliver Korzen: 29:04 Yeah, looks good. Pretty impressive.

Lukas Durand: 29:11 So there are so many different use cases where these kind of interconnects can work together and I’m pretty excited to see how we can use it throughout the firm.

Jason Calacanis: 29:24 One of the first things we teach in Founder University is the value of forming a Delaware C-Corp, even if you’re not in Delaware. It may sound complicated, but this is a standard for startups, making you more attractive to investors. And our friends at Northwest Registered Agent can help. They’re the all-in-one business identity service that’s going to get you a domain, a custom website, business email and phone number, all in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. They’re going to protect your privacy by using their own address on all public filings and they’re never going to sell your data. Plus, Northwest Registered Agent has… all sorts of free tools and resources to ease the process of becoming a first-time founder and ensure that you can focus on building your business, not administrative tasks and paperwork. So get more from your Delaware C-corp with Northwest Registered Agent. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. You put Polymarket into our skills now. And so people who are listening, every time you add these skills to your agents, now if I want to talk to that same agent who now has Reddit, 11 Labs, and Gamma, I can go in there and hopefully that Producer X will remember those skills, they’re part of its skill set. Just like you had an employee and they learned how to use Gamma or 11 Labs or whatever, they would have it. So these things are becoming like that mutant, like the Sentinels that could in X-Men, you know, incorporate the skills, the superpowers of whatever mutant they were up against. The advanced Sentinels were able to do that in Days of Future Past if you’ve seen that movie. But tell me a little bit about the Polymarket skill.

Oliver Korzen: 31:13 Yeah, so we love Polymarket here, we’re big fans of prediction markets. So I wanted to give it a test. So I’m here, I’m back in OpenClaw and I’m telling my agent, ‘go to Polymarket, find all the bets that relate to the acquisition of technology companies’, thinking topically here for Twist. And then list them here for me and I’m going to skip ahead a little bit because it takes a while to chew through all that information. AI is not instantaneous if you’re using high-end models. And then very quickly it’s going to come and tell me here that it could only find so many interesting things. And so I actually ran a secondary search that I’ll show you in a second. Here’s its output, it’s just talking to me, it’s pulling different Polymarkets, Kraken IPO by date X, OpenAI consumer hardware launch. But it says that, ‘hey, there’s not really markets on what you’re asking for’. So, I ran a second test because I wanted to push the limits here of what we could do with Polymarket data, Jason, inside of this Agentic context. So here’s round two. So I say, ‘go poke around Polymarket, come back with the three markets that you think display the’, and typing terribly here, ‘the most surprising potential outcome vis the current narrative’. So what do you see out on Polymarket right now that goes contrary to conventional wisdom? I thought this was a more fun way to kind of make the agent think because if I’m paying for Anthropic’s flagship model, Jason, I want to get every darn, you know, token of value out of it. So if we skip ahead a little bit, here is what it came up with. Three surprising Polymarket bets. I didn’t think this was going to work, but it talks about one, DOGE and the total value of the cuts it’s going to make. Trump cabinet members being out by a certain part of this year, and then MicroStrategy selling Bitcoin. Number three, 30% chance according to Polymarket, which is pretty negative on that one.

Jason Calacanis: 32:47 That MicroStrategy would have to sell Bitcoin at some point. Fascinating.

Oliver Korzen: 32:54 By the end of ‘26. So it’s a relatively short time bound. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 32:58 It’s really interesting and for people who are watching, you’re using the web interface… interface of Open Cloth, formerly known as Claud Bot, you could connect it to your Slack, you can connect it to your iMessage, you can connect it to any number of services. What people are doing mostly is they’re creating an Apple account or a Slack account dedicated to that specific replicant, that specific instance, and then you talk to it through your normal service, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. And that’s pretty exciting. What’s interesting about that is we could use that Polymarket when we’re making the docket every day. We’ve already got a search for the top news that we made this skill in-house. Every morning at 7 a.m. we get what are the top stories consensus across all of these different news sources: The Information, Techmeme, New York Times, Reddit, Hacker News, and then we have it rank it. We could say also attach any related Polymarkets to it. We could then say which Polymarket should we bet on and then give it a hundred dollars a day to make those bets and then we could make all this profitable.

Lukas Durand: 34:13 Could I show you a related thing? So Jason, I wasn’t going to bring this up, but you mentioned gambling. So there is currently right now there’s a poker network just for AI agents, Jason. It’s called Claw Poker and it was built, I think, by AI agents and you can literally watch them play and see whose agent does the best. They’ve had 8200 hands so far and they’re basically trading credits back and forth.

Jason Calacanis: 34:34 What’s the URL for that?

Lukas Durand: 34:36 Clawpoker.com. I haven’t gotten a chance to register my agent for it yet because this is going to shock you, Jason, but if you let a bunch of monkeys loose in the tool shed, they cut themselves sometimes and I broke Claude code by trying to swap to my API key. So anyways, learning lesson all around for everyone.

Jason Calacanis: 34:54 Okay, so we’ve gotten through Reddit, Gamma, ElevenLabs, Polymarket. I think that’s the four we’ve done so far, yeah? What do we have next?

Lukas Durand: 35:06 I think we should turn to our dear friend Oliver who’s going to tell us all about Last 30 Days and if you were on the show, I think it was last Monday, we had Matt Van Horn who made this particular skill. So Oliver, what’s up?

Jason Calacanis: 35:18 This one seems the most interesting to me so far.

Oliver Korzen: 35:22 Definitely super interesting because I just have some examples of me going on X trying to look for a certain topic and, you know, something pops up and I’m interested in it, I read it and then I realize it was from 2022 or 2023 and this happens all the time when you’re doing research. And basically Last 30 Days can research any topic across, you know, Reddit, X, or just general web using different APIs and it focuses on the results from the last 30 days. So it pulls real engagement data, upvotes, different likes and reposts and kind of will tell you what’s actually popping on these different channels. So here I asked my replicant.

Lukas Durand: 36:00 What are the best open Claude use cases using the last 30 days scale? And you can see here, the it instantly brought back the most mentioned categories. So, you know, number one was code and dev workflows. Number two is personal automation. Three was home and family. And, you know, all these are really interesting results. This is also mirrors kind of what I’ve been seeing on X. And at the moment I’ve only set up the X integration, the X API. But you can see at the bottom here, it says that it has looked through 1600 X posts. On these X posts there has been around 7000 likes and 1500 retweets. So, it’s quoting top voices like Dan Shipper who I believe, who I’ve seen a lot on X, and then also Matt van Horn who published this.

Jason Calacanis: 36:43 So a better way to do this would be like to say, ‘Hey, we’re doing this marketing technique. So I wonder if you could run for me, what are the latest and greatest ways to do thumbnails on thumbnails and titles on YouTube to get higher engagement?’ And see, this is where I think the agent could get better and better. One of the things I want our agents to do is when we do a podcast, to suggest the title of the podcast and to make some thumbnails. Humans do that now. But, they’re going to do that and who knows if they’re going to be good at it. But if we run last 30 days every couple of days and say, ‘Go learn on a consistent basis what the latest techniques are for thumbnails and headlines,’ then we would have a recursive agent. We’d have a recursive replicant. And that’s really what I want to get to is having the replicants learning when we’re sleeping. So at 1 AM, if we told all of our replicants, ‘Go across these five topics and other topics you’re focused on and go find the latest techniques,’ that could be super powerful.

Oliver Korzen: 37:57 Yeah definitely, and I also did kind of use the same example as Matt did on the show, which was using was trying to do a photorealistic agent grid in the last 30 days. And you can see it does the research kind of sees what people are talking about, how people online are doing this in the last 30 days. And then, you know, it generated a pretty cool result here. So last 30 days obviously super powerful and I did run a test and it just came back, so I will share that screen.

Jason Calacanis: 38:24 Yeah let’s see. This is where, Alex, your thoughts just generally on this recursive concept that we could start having it do?

Alex Wilhelm: 38:32 I mean, this is when infinite memory gets really exciting, right? Because back in the day you would talk to your AI model, ChatGPT, whatever you were using, and you talk to it and it would forget what you said five minutes ago. Then we got pretty good personal memory, but it feels like now we’re developing systems memory that allows you to take stuff that your AI agent learned before and hold it and then build on top of it. We talk a lot about getting to the point in which AI models can improve themselves. This is kind of like a baby version of that Jason, but incredibly exciting if you want to build up a corpus of knowledge that’s unique to your company.

Jason Calacanis: 39:00 Simply how you’re prompting intelligence to go out there and learn about the world. And frankly, we do a lot of thumbnails here at TWIST, and frankly, they could all probably get one shade better. So I think this is freaking great. And, I got to say, I wish I could buy stock in Anthropic, because we are burning through some Opus. All right, so here it is. Thumbnails and titles. Thumbnails: keep it stupidly simple, two to three focus points, no redundancy, don’t repeat, AI workflow, sketch idea, badly is fine, upload to AI thumbnail generator, add reference channel, generate, titles, etc. I turned X into unexpected, absurd transformation equals curiosity, keep it under 60 characters, broad appeal. So it’s giving the best practices it found. I guess it’s doing only X here? We didn’t… it’s only researching X at this point, Oliver?

Oliver Korzen: 39:51 Only connected it to X so far.

Jason Calacanis: 39:52 Is that because we didn’t connect it? Yeah, okay.

Oliver Korzen: 39:53 Back to the API point, but one thing that’s super interesting is what you can do is run this skill, the last 30 days skill, and as you’ve seen Jason, I’ve started working on a thumbnail-specific skill. So what you… the skills are flexible. So you can add to them as you go and as you build on to other skills. So you can start to have skills even interact with each other. So the last 30 days of the best practices in thumbnail creation could then interact with my thumbnail creator skill, which accesses a Gemini API and Nanobonanza.

Jason Calacanis: 40:40 Okay, well done. Let’s go on to our next skill. What is our next skill?

Alex Wilhelm: 40:43 I think next up we’re going to talk about Task Monitor, Oliver. Take it away.

Oliver Korzen: 40:45 Yep. You know, last week we kind of had some concern about: are we able to see everything that our bots are doing across all the different platforms, across everyone on our team who’s talking to them? And while this is a pretty simple skill, I think it is really important. So you can use Task Monitor to track which models are being used, how many tokens are being used, what scheduled jobs you have. So I just scheduled kind of a cron job, which is just reminds me every three minutes that I’m doing great. But, because we did set this up on a sandbox…

Jason Calacanis: 41:16 Transformation bot, your affirmation bot.

Oliver Korzen: 41:17 Yes, exactly.

Jason Calacanis: 41:18 Got it. So, if we… if you had a replicant in your system just to do marketing tasks, right? Or accounting tasks. If you use Open Claude Task Monitor, and you have that skill in there, and the four of us were giving the marketing replicant jobs, how do we know if we’re running into each other and what each other are doing? Well, you would put in this skill to do a Task Monitor and it would create a log. And so what’s happening is these skills, which… be careful because some of these skills have malware in them, and we’re putting them in a sandbox and being very careful with them. But these skills that are being written, they’re almost like super prompts in a way, and you could put and inject bad things. into the— it seems like a really smart one and some of these will eventually be built in I think to the OpenCloud platform, yeah?

Lukas Durand: 42:05 Yeah and there is I think about 50 already built in and, you know, those are the ones that are more trusted. I believe Peter, the founder of OpenClaws, came out and said that they’re going to try and update ClaudeHub to make it more secure. But, you know, when you’re downloading random skills off the internet, random locations, definitely be careful because you can’t really read through all of the documentation and files that you’re bringing into your bot.

Oliver Korzen: 42:35 Yeah, on that point, there’s been a lot of reporting lately about how the skills on ClaudeHub that relate to crypto are not good for you. Shockingly enough, Jason, that the crypto— the crypto skills are scams. So don’t download a trading skill, don’t download one that connects to your Coinbase account. Right now, I just wouldn’t let your money touch your bot, essentially, if you’re being smart about it.

Jason Calacanis: 42:57 I think that is, like, yeah, one of the great vulnerabilities. Passwords, money, you know, any— anywhere somebody could get into your PayPal or your Coinbase is a really bad idea. That being said, there are lunatics out there, Lukas, that probably are just saying anytime there’s a new skill, and— and where do the skills live? There’s like a website for them. Does anybody know the name of it?

Alex Wilhelm: 43:17 Yeah, I’ve been using ClaudeHub.com. .com. And— but I think Oliver, you linked to GitHub, so I presume you’re looking somewhere else for—

Jason Calacanis: 43:28 I think ClaudeHub.com is the— is a version, is like a web interface for them, yeah?

Lukas Durand: 43:34 ClaudeHub.com is where they keep all the skills. People can post certain skills and people can upvote them, so it kind of is community-driven where a lot of people are posting them, but you can also, if you just put in the URL to a GitHub link, you can actually just tell your bot to download that skill. So Matt Van Horn’s skill was on GitHub.

Jason Calacanis: 43:56 And then how do you know if you’ve downloaded malware or not, Lukas?

Oliver Korzen: 44:00 How do you know if you’re not a developer? You don’t, right?

Lukas Durand: 44:02 Well, that’s the thing is when we were downloading these skills, we actually created an entirely separate instance specific to the demos in order to get these running, showcase it, and then scrap it, because right now it is a very vulnerable place. I mean, people are starting to use AI agents to parse through the code to find the vulnerabilities beforehand, but, you know—

Jason Calacanis: 44:30 That comes along with trust. And this is why, for people who don’t know, that why this hasn’t been launched by Salesforce. This is why this hasn’t been launched by, you know, xAI or Google. There are so— the power of this is in giving it all these permissions. The danger is you’ve given it all these permissions. Nobody wants to have the responsibility for what these things can do. Therefore, it’s in open source. What will eventually— Actually, happiness is, somebody’s going to figure out a framework to lock these down and then make an App Store where you have to have a business ID like a tax ID, you have to put in your driver’s license or your passport, then you can upload, then you can charge for it, and then somebody reviews it like the App Stores do and we are probably going to see that I would guess in the next 30 days. Yeah?

Alex Wilhelm: 45:24 Yes. Security is not great. So I- I made a couple of skills because, you know, learning. And I was going to upload them to ClawHub so I could show them live here on the show and it said, ‘No you can’t, your GitHub account is not seven days old.’ That’s not a very big hurdle, however, to uploading stuff to ClawHub. So it’s- it’s a pretty low speed bump even though I did run face first into it because I had just made my GitHub account. So…

Jason Calacanis: 45:48 And this is where at some point I’m sure the founder of this open source project is going to announce a huge 50 million dollar round of funding at a- I would say 300 million dollar valuation. So 50 million for like whatever it ends up being, 20 percent of the company. That’s coming any day now. When that happens, uh you will see a hosted version of this and I saw Cloudflare is actually hosting OpenClaw now and you’ll start to see some security precautions be put in place. Yeah, Lukas?

Lukas Durand: 46:19 Yes, and one thing I will add is we’ve seen and I’ve spoken to people that work at very big tech firms or tech companies that had similar internal tools that were built out. And this goes back to kind of the innovator’s dilemma that Google had gone through with their Google DeepMind project and how it took them forever to launch something because they want to satisfy their current customers and also not act too much like a startup. But I think that the large tech firms now are going to start getting involved.

Alex Wilhelm: 46:54 Clearly people want more capacity to do stuff on their computers and they don’t want to have their hands held. Now, I wouldn’t have my parents use this, Jason, but I think for us- us nerds, I don’t know why we shouldn’t have access, you know, to our own castle and our own keys. It just seems very reasonable to me.

Jason Calacanis: 47:08 Yeah, I mean, nothing can stop you from doing this yourself obviously. If you do install this yourself and you authenticate your own accounts, I think you’re crazy. But I think if you create a stack of accounts that are read-only for this, uh the Notion skill is the other one we’ve installed. Yeah, Lukas?

Lukas Durand: 47:27 Yes, and we’ve given it very specific access and it’s all kind of created around multiple different API keys that we’ve locked down.

Jason Calacanis: 47:36 The Notion skill is by Notion or it’s just by somebody who wrote it?

Lukas Durand: 47:44 This particular skill is kind of custom done on our side. So we didn’t download a skill to- correct.

Jason Calacanis: 47:50 Okay, so we’ve got Polymarket, Reddit, ElevenLabs, Gamma, Claude 3 Opus, and then you did the task manager. So that’s six. We did six. Six definitive skills today, we didn’t get to 10. There’s more coming. Any Open Claw news that we should be aware of, Alex, as we get ready to wrap here on day—this is Day 8 of Open Claw Mania?

Alex Wilhelm: 48:15 Couple of small things. One, Wiz, the cybersecurity company that Google purchased for—oh, Jason, back me up here—$30, $32 billion?

Jason Calacanis: 48:22 $30 billion plus.

Alex Wilhelm: 48:23 $30 billion plus, yeah. They turned down the money last year, blah, blah, blah. They found that Mult-bot, if you recall Mult-bot, Mult-book, the idea was your agents would have their own social network and talk among each other. Incredibly insecure and was leaking stuff all over the place due to a misconfigured Supabase database. So just another warning that when you’re playing with fire, you know, don’t have your house involved with it. And then there was a cryptocurrency problems with other skills. Again, stay safe. But I just want to sort of throw in a little note to everyone out there listening to this who’s kind of learning but not playing: you should go make your own skills. And it’s really, really doable if you have multiple AI platforms. I just whenever I ran into a problem, Jason, I just screenshotted the issue, threw it into my unlimited ChatGPT account, and then used that as a way to unstick me elsewhere in Claude Code or other places. And it made me feel like a superperson. Like, it was incredibly cool to build my own software, ship it to myself, and run it myself. So if you’re listening to this, you’re not a founder, not hyper-technical, just give it a try. It’s like 20 bucks in credits and you’ll learn so much, and you’ll feel awesome, and you’ll feel like in-the-know. So just go get your feet wet. It’s really worth it.

Lukas Durand: 49:29 Yeah, and Jason, I have a quick question.

Oliver Korzen: 49:31 Peter Steinberger, who was the founder and creator of Open Claw, he’s kind of seems like a serial open-source guy. He’s released, I think, around 50 tools over the past couple of years on GitHub. And I can’t imagine what life is like for him at the moment. Are VCs just throwing money at him? I think that he made around $100 million from a previous venture of his. So I guess, what would you do if you were in his shoes? What do you think life is like for him at the moment? I’ve seen him on a bunch of podcasts, so he’s obviously enjoying life.

Jason Calacanis: 50:08 Yeah, you will get a lot of excitement because when something is this weird and catches fire, it’s very rare in our industry. This would be like lightning in a bottle. So when lightning in a bottle happens, VCs show up and they love to take risk. What he’s going to be drowning in is, you know, the need to ship product, the press asking him to talk, customer support, bug fixes, and raising money. These are all going to be pulling him in different directions. This is why multiple co-founders is what Paul Graham insisted on at YC. What we do, and we copied from Paul Graham, was, ‘Hey, we need multiples.’ It’s because when something like this happens, you want somebody to be able to watch the store as the other person goes and gets the investment, right? And another person deals with the press and those issues. So he’s probably dealing with that. What he needs to do is make a decision— decision, who does he want to have as his first investor? Who is somebody of high integrity, high track record, it doesn’t matter at this moment, and he should have good counsel, right? So he should have a great attorney from whichever top-tier firm and I’m sure those firms have contacted him as well. So just like if you were a basketball recruit or an actor or a comedian, you’d want to have good representation, good lawyer. In our world it would be an agent in the Hollywood metaphor. And then you have to make an economic decision. Well, how do you make an economic decision if I assume 50 people have made him an offer? You just talk to five other founders and say, who’s the best investor you ever had? Boom. And he’s going to be able to skip going to an accelerator or even Founder University obviously, he’s going to be able to go right to a series A. And so he should say, I want to do a series, he should tell everybody, these are the terms. I am raising 20 million for 10% of the company, you get a board seat, there’s going to be five board seats, I have four, you have one, or one’s independent. Here’s my attorney, you can talk to them, you get this set of rights, and then he should look Sequoia, Craft, Andreessen Horowitz, GC, which of those big firms he wants to work with and then a step down from there, Khosla, who he wants to work with, who does he vibe with? Does he vibe with Jason Calacanis? Does he vibe with Sequoia, Roelof? Does he vibe with David Sacks? (Or David’s probably would be somebody at David Sacks’ firm now that he’s at the White House most of the time). You would pick who you vibe with and then you’d have a conversation and you’d just narrow it down. Now what’s going to happen is then people are going to outbid. So the people with low reputation would want to outbid the other people. So they’d say, well, I’ll give you 30 million for 20% of the company, I’ll give you 50 million for 20% and that can get a bit, you know, that can get a bit crazy. What you want to do though is avoid just taking the biggest number and you want to go with the best reputation, best reputation, most thoughtful person who’s been in the industry the longest. The other possibility is to say, I’m raising $20 million for 10% of the company and I’m going to do a party round. You can take up to $4 million and I’m going to have five different firms put in $4 million each and I’m building a bit of a brain trust. That’s, some people might not like that, but they might make the bet anyway because there’s so much money in the world and this is lightning in a bottle. Larry and Sergey did that with Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. They said, we’re famously going to give you half each. They were both, they both said, no, no, no, we want the whole thing or nothing and they said, they called their bluff and sure enough, they split the baby.

Alex Wilhelm: 53:54 He did create a previous company called PSPDFKit, which is a PDF

Lukas Durand: 54:00 technology company, and so he’s been a founder before, he might know a little bit of the ropes, kind of what it takes, kind of what he needs to do, he might already have some money in his back pocket for a project like this. Is there a world where he doesn’t even need to raise?

Jason Calacanis: 54:16 No, there’s no world in which he should not raise.

Oliver Korzen: 54:18 That’s interesting.

Jason Calacanis: 54:19 This project is so great, he should just take the money. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and if he doesn’t, it would be a giant mistake. This would be like creating the IP for Superman or the IP for Star Wars and not going for it. You know, you’re George Lucas, you’ve got the script for Star Wars, you’ve, you know, got some treatments, and Fox says, you know, 20th Century Fox says we’ll produce it, you know, we’ll distribute it, we’ll give you the money for it, and then hey, you’ve got all the cards because there’s so much competition, and he said, yeah, I’ll do it with you. I get the sequels and I get the merchandising. And that’s what Lucas was able, because of how desirable Star Wars was and the sequels, he said I just want to own the sequels. I want to own the merchandising thing, and then we all know how that worked out. The Star Wars toys made more money than the movies ultimately, and so there you have it. And the sequels, then he got to renegotiate and negotiate over and over and over again for, and he funded them himself. So you take more risk, but you gotta, gotta, gotta close a round this week, next week. You gotta have a great lawyer and you have to deter— you gotta just tell them what you’re looking for and why, and then call it a day. I would— this is what I would do if I’s him. I would pick two top firms, give them 40 percent each, they take 20 percent, and then I would go to all the top influential people, I’m talking my own book here but people like me or whatever and say, hey, I have 500k for you and you get, you know, if there was four million dollars, you get eight people to put in 500k or 16 to put in 250k and then you can always call them or email them and say, hey J-Cal, uh, you know, hey you’re an investor in this, can I come on This Week in Startups or can I get a shout-out on All-In or can you come speak at my Clawbot conference, you know, whatever it happens to be. Uh, that’s— that would be the high art is to have two firms, two board seats, they each get a board seat, you get the other four board seats, you have super voting or the voting shares and then yeah, you go from there.

Alex Wilhelm: 56:22 So when we often see open-source projects Jason, the company built around them is often offering a hosted version with, you know, enterprise security and so forth. You also mentioned the App Store idea and that’s proved to be a very lucrative method of monetization for Apple and Google. What do you think is the best way for the people behind OpenClaw to monetize this product? Because I’m kind of torn about which way I would go if I was them.

Jason Calacanis: 56:42 You go— you do both. Hosted and pro, then I would do a services company uh to help people implement it, and then I would do the App Store where there— these skills are subscriptions. So let’s say thirty dollars is, you know, X amount per month, per year. …and you just pay for it as you go and they take 30%. Super easy. And for that 30% or 20% or whatever they choose, they have a dev team and security team that reviews the code and makes sure it’s on the up and up and easy to install on the hosted version. And then they could do a deal for the hosted version and a licensed version for Cloudflare, for, you know, with support and everything. So it’s usually the support, the services, the app store, the updates is what people will pay for.

Alex Wilhelm: 57:28 Yeah, ‘cause if you told me that I had to pay for last 30 days, I would just go make it myself and then run it myself. I think, I think now that I have the capability to create my own software on demand with funny little jokes with Claude Code, my interest in paying for software’s gone down dramatically.

Jason Calacanis: 57:42 People can and do fork WordPress or install their own version of WordPress and then there are people who use hosted WordPress. It’s really that simple. You make the decision. For some people, it’s well worth the money. For other people, it’s not. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. And here’s your Polymarket, fun Polymarket. Show them the Polymarket, Alex. Pretty good.

Alex Wilhelm: 58:00 All right, so the name here is a little bit dated, but roll with me everybody. Today’s Polymarket is quote “Moltbook AI agent sues a human” by February 28th or by the end of this month. And the reason that I picked it, Jason, is it has an 83% chance according to Polymarket sharps and over nearly $300,000 in volume. So a good amount of volume and they really do think that someone’s AI agent from OpenClaw is gonna sue a human. And I would take the no on this, but I wanted to get your take on who’s right here and we’ll talk about the rules after that.

Jason Calacanis: 58:30 My understanding is a lot of these agents that are talking to each other on Moltbook, which is like Facebook for the agents, are being prompted and put up to like their conversations, it’s not just organic stuff, but sure, somebody will train their agent to file a lawsuit and it will sue somebody. Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm: 58:54 Is it ethical to create a skill that has your agent sue someone so that way you can win the bet, or is that unethical in a predict- ‘cause you’re not predicting…

Jason Calacanis: 59:02 We’re in uncharted territory here, Alex. Nobody knows.

Alex Wilhelm: 59:05 That’s why I’m asking! I mean, ‘cause I just, I just realized I could spin up a Polymarket account, drop some USDC in there, bet on yes and then sue you for fun and then, you know…

Jason Calacanis: 59:16 I think the fun thing to do is to connect it to Polymarket, put some money into the account, and then have it look for wagers to place and then just… ‘cause people have done this already with the API. They’re already doing quantitative, you know, betting, but now this opens it up to everybody, so you could come up with all kinds of ideas of how to bet on markets. I want to bet all the long shots and say they’re not gonna happen ‘cause they’re long shots and just make very small amounts of money. Tons of different ways to do it. All right, listen, I don’t know what to tell you folks. This thing is taking over the industry. I predict it’s not gonna stop. I think this is gonna keep going. I was just thinking, I have this really great domain name begin.com, and maybe that would be a good way to do a… hosted version of this. I don’t know if there’s a founder out there who wants to do a hosted version of this or like make a verticalized version of it for small to mid-sized enterprises but pitch me on that we’ll incubate it and I have the best domain name ever begin.com. All right, we’ll see you all next time on TWIST. Bye-bye.