NanoClaw Creator Lands Docker Deal After Six Weeks

0:00It has been an absolutely crazy six weeks for the creator of NanoClaw by Gavriel Cohen. He created this tool basically in 48 hours on his couch, and it has now led six weeks later to going completely viral and creating and having a deal with Docker. So today on the podcast, I want to break down his story, how he built this product, what it does. It's basically an open source version of OpenClaw, which is, you know, the viral tool used to create AI agents that everyone is talking about and using. I want to break down the story of this company because I think it is a phenomenal meteoric rise of a really incredible tool that a lot of people have fallen in love with.

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1:27Gavriel Cohen:So go check it out. Links in the description. All right, let's talk about this crazy week that they're having over at NanoClaw the last six weeks. Basically, in early January, Cohen went and dropped a post on Hacker News where he introduced NanoClaw. This is a really small open source alternative to OpenClaw. And he built this basically in, you know, I think 48 hours straight. He said he sat down and just cranked this thing out. uh it eventually you know this thing snowballed quite big but it was originally just started as a small side project a few weeks later after he made you know a post um andrew carpathy of course the famous ai researcher was saying you know like hey this thing's pretty cool it went super viral when he did that he posted on x and this basically put it in front of thousands of developers and from all the attention that that got it got more than 22 000 github stars it had 4 600 forks and dozens and dozens of contributions and collaborations on like new features that people wanted to add to it.

2:21And that's the cool thing with open sources, you put it out there, if people find it useful, you're going to get a ton of help building it up and making it, you know, a really useful, great product. I think that's when things started to get really serious after that kind of initial wave. So last week, Cohen actually shut down the AI marketing startup that he launched with his brother Lazar, and he is focusing exclusively on NanoClaw. So he had something else going, realized this thing had so much momentum, he shut that down. Right now, both of them are building a company around the project called NanoCo.

2:51And this is usually how these open source projects go, right? Because technically, open source means they're giving the code away, anyone can use it for free or kind of with a license. I mean, there's different ways you can do open source. But you know, you really are trying to give this away for other people to use. But you typically will create a company around it where you host it on your own server and usually have an API and people don't want to kind of run it on their own hardware, they can still get access to it through you.

3:14Gavriel Cohen:So on Friday after, I guess they hit another milestone, Cohen announced that Docker, who is of course the company behind all of the container technology, it's used by millions of developers around the world, just partnered with Nanoclaw and they're going to integrate Docker sandboxes directly into their platform. And for a project, I think that began, you know, this is basically a weekend experiment six weeks ago. This is moving very fast. One thing that I do think is interesting here is kind of the idea of Nanoclaw, how it came out. There was a real world problem that they were trying to solve.

3:47Cohen and both, I think him and his brother have been running an AI native marketing agency. They use AI agents to do a lot of different tasks, right? Like this thing like market research, blog writing, you know, GDM analysis. They were doing all of that. And the model was working well, but they already and they already had like a bunch of big customers, they were on track to reach a million dollars in annual recurring revenue. And he said, I'm a big believer in AI native service companies. They can operate with the margins of software companies while still delivering service. But there was like a big thing they said they were missing.

4:17So the agents that Cohen built could, you know, go, they can make any sort of tasks that you ask them to. And by the way, like I listened to a ton of podcasts and this is kind of the trend everyone's seeing right now is these kind of creating these agents to do a lot of things in a lot of different industries. But marketing is a huge one that I hear people just, you know, spinning up tons of these agents and they're giving them like, do all my LinkedIn outreach and customize it to the user and go do a bunch of custom research on them and make it really personalized and look at all this kind of these, all these different data points, um, go to all these different websites.

4:45So these things can be quite powerful,

4:48Gavriel Cohen:but, um, the problem is that they could not schedule work in advance or, and they can't really connect super easily to messaging platforms like WhatsApp to get assignments. So when Cohen discovered OpenClaw, he was like, Oh my gosh, this is kind of like the the golden ticket for that. He said there was an aha moment and then it basically connected all of the workflows that he'd already built. So he was already doing a lot of this stuff. He got OpenClaw and is like sweet OpenClaw can now like kind of manage it all. And I think for a while OpenClaw was working perfectly for him. And then he realized like there was a big piece missing to even that.

5:20Gavriel Cohen:So while he was kind of looking at some of the performance issues, he realized that OpenClaw's agents had downloaded all of his WhatsApp messages and then stored them locally as plain unencrypted text, which, right, I mean, these are, WhatsApp is famous for being encrypted, and now you got them all as unencrypted texts, you know, just stored on your device, and so I think not just, you know, his work messages, it had authorized, that he, like, told it, you know, it had authorization to access, apparently it had actually went and downloaded his entire messaging history, so all of his, like, personal conversations, like, everything, it downloaded it, and I think at that point he was basically realizing that it pretty much confirmed that a lot of different developers were already saying, right, this open claw architecture could expose a lot of sensitive data.

6:03Gavriel Cohen:You know, I've and I've also heard like all sorts of things that go wrong with this, where people stick it on their personal computer and it like went and deleted all their family photos for the last 10 years. And they're like, couldn't figure out how to restore them. So, you know, there is definitely some risks with that. And so I think the security angle there, he realized was a serious problem. And so when he was kind of looking at their code base, he realized that it was an issue that was across, you know, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, There was countless dependencies. At one point, he said he even saw a small open source PDF editing tool that he had personally written months before.

6:33Gavriel Cohen:It was buried somewhere in the project. So like OpenClaw was using some of his stuff, which is hilarious. He said at that moment, he basically realized that no single developer could realistically audit the entire stack. Like this was just so there was just so much going on. So he decided he wanted to build something simpler. He took what was 800 ,000 lines of code and he brought it down to 500 and was really just trying to create an absolutely minimal and secure alternative to OpenClaw. And so that's what he built with NanoClaw. I mean, that is insane. 800 ,000 lines of code down to 500. It was a super stripped down framework.

7:11Gavriel Cohen:It was written, you know, very, very concise. And so instead of relying on this kind of massive dependency tree, it used containerized environments that would isolate AI agents and then strictly control what data they could access. Originally, he just built it for his own startup, right? Because, I mean, he's doing like a million dollars in annual recurring revenue on his company. And he's like, OK, sweet, we can build this for us. He did decide to share it, which I think was, you know, huge kudos to him. He's just trying to help people out. Maybe he thought, oh, it's just 500 lines of code. Like, what's the big deal?

7:41It went viral overnight. and I think a couple of weeks after he posted it to Hacker News, his phone was ringing and it was a friend calling to tell him that Andre Karpathy had retweeted it, which is huge. And then I think within hours, the project really exploded in the developer community.

7:59Gavriel Cohen:So tons of people were retweeting about it. Programmers were posting YouTube breakdowns. There was a bunch of articles that were starting to appear. A whole bunch of people started to talk about it. and I think there's funny it's funny because there was a domain squatter that went and grabbed nanoclaw.dev before he could actually go and get it and so I think there was a lot of momentum that was really kind of just like building up inside of it especially from engineers inside of Docker so Oleg Slyjev is a developer at Docker he I think he originally reached out after he saw it kind of going viral on on x or whatever and he's you know i think cohen was really receptive to this right off the bat he's like look this isn't just my personal agent running on a mac mini it's like a whole community using it so he's like okay maybe i should start making some partnerships on this so now they are going about turning this into an actual company it's called nano co they're i mean they're obviously in the process of trying to figure out how to make money in order to do that they said that nano claw is going to stay free it's going to stay open source So anyone that is currently any of the developers that are currently kind of helping this project take off, they'll still get access to it.

9:08And they're just going to be funding the development of the next phase of this through a friends and family round. They're going to kind of figure out what the long-term business model is. I think one of the most likely directions is basically building like a commercial platform around the open source core. But then they're going to offer kind of an enterprise service, you know, security hardening, forward deployed engineers who can help companies design and manage their AI agent systems.

9:32Gavriel Cohen:Now, that whole market is a little bit crowded, if I'm being honest, but I think right now there's like tens of thousands of developers that are playing with Nanoclaw. And because they have some of these growing partnerships, right, companies like Docker, I think that they are going to be able to turn this into something a lot bigger. And I think that, you know, if the last six weeks are any indication, the Nanoclaw story is just getting started. Like this is obviously a company that's growing very fast and we're seeing a lot of exciting progress here. So I'm super stoked to follow along and a huge congratulations to everyone at the Nanoclaw team.

10:00Gavriel Cohen:I mean, particularly to Gavriel Cohen. Great work on this product and excited to follow it in the future. Guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If this was an interesting story following the rise of this new AI company, make sure to leave a rating and review on the show if you enjoyed the episode. Helps to show out a ton. I appreciate them all. And make sure to go check out AIbox.ai if you want to get access to all of the top AI models in one place for$8.99 a month. It's an awesome value and saves you a ton of money on subscriptions to, you know, I haven't done subscriptions to a dozen different platforms.

10:32So I'll leave a link in the description. Thanks for tuning in. I'll catch you in the next episode.