Kill Your Startup’s Knowledge Chaos with OpenClaw (with Oliver Henry and Jeff Weisbein) | E2254

18:42Oliver Henry:Yes. So then it's interesting on the call to action. I want to touch on that. So the call to action, Larry knows that if a TikTok gets a lot of views, but not many new users have the app because he's got all the context of what happens in the app, he knows that the CTA needs fixing. He knows if it got a lot of views, not many users download the app, the CTA needs fixing. If it got not many views, but a big percentage of those viewers downloaded the app, the hook needs fixing and the CTA is fine. So it's all iterative. This is all Larry making these decisions. And then he creates images using OpenAI image, chat GPT image 1.5, and he'll create the images to make his story from the slideshow and then overlay the text and post it using posters which is also where he gets the analytics from and all I have to do is for example there will be one ready so I can go to my TikTok I get this platform notification not this GenViral one but there'll be one from Larry somewhere so this is a an old one from five days ago that I didn't get around to posting.

19:49Oliver Henry:And I just click this and this is what Larry's created. And all I have to do is add the sound and a description. So he puts it in your draft

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21:13Oliver Henry:The only reason a human is in the loop because TikTok knows if something's posted through API. So this circles all the way back around to what you were saying about platforms not really catering for the APIs. TikTok will really nerf the amount of views that you get if you post through an API and you can't publish a slideshow with sound through that API. So the only reason I do this is not to get it checked. It is for engagement. So I can add the sound and I can show you that if I add the sound and then click next, Larry already has the description. So all I have to do is add the sound, press post.

21:49Oliver Henry:And I do that simply for engagement. And I can show you the, I won't post this one, but I can show you the profile, how it's performing. So the last one didn't do too good, but you can see that we've had 160 ,000 views, 130 ,000, 200 ,000. this one got 400 ,000 but then we try some and they don't work so this one gets 2 ,000 he tried something new now we know it doesn't work we won't try it again so every now and then he'll throw a new one in there to see how it performs and then we'll go back to what's working so there is some experimentation how did you do this how did you do this previously oh so this previously I was writing scripts to do this so I had a football related app soccer in the US and I would write a script to create hook and demo videos so I would record loads of hooks off my face have one demo of the app and then I would write us all my hooks in a text file and then the script would just mash them all together so put the two videos together and put different text and then I would bulk upload them to upload via API each time.

23:01Jeff Weisbein:So it was basically you were doing all this work. Now this is free to do it as the solopreneur.

23:07Oliver Henry:And it has saved me so much time. And over 3 ,000 people are now using Larry and the feedback has been incredible. So I really think I've done a net positive for OpenClaw and for a lot of people who also hate marketing as much as I do. Oliver, one more thing from you. So we were going over this in a pre-call and I was like, can you show it to me live and you said no because i'm using batch processing from i think it was through open ai can you just explain why you made that choice and why other people might want to consider using that in their open clause setup to preface larry doesn't just post slideshows he the core of larry is the full analytic funnel from top to bottom and no matter what your product is he can track um metrics to a website he can track downloads to an app he can track product purchases but you can create whatever content you want.

23:54Oliver Henry:I created it with GPT Image 1.5 because the app Snuggly is an interior design app that transforms your room using AI and it uses GPT Image 1.5. So I just wanted the content to match what the users are gonna see in the app. You can use anything you want. I use the batch processing because it's recently come out from OpenAI and it just saves money on the processes. So the benefit is Larry can then post, create all the slideshows in the morning to post throughout the day. And it just saves me a ton of money posting them.

24:28Jeff Weisbein:I mean, this is creating them at the time. And it's literally, I think when people, the reason I'm so stuck on this, Alex, and making sure we show over and over and over again, how people are building this to people who are the tip of the spears is we're going to see this solo entrepreneur movement or just, you know, two, three person company. but instead of doing what they used to do, which is having to hire people to do all these job functions, the last three years, what I saw founders doing was asking chat GPT. And they would ask it, how do I write a press release? How do I do a job description?

25:04Jeff Weisbein:How do I negotiate a convertible node? What's the difference between a convertible note and a safe? How do I file a trademark? How do I negotiate a domain purchase? All this stuff. And they would get educated really fast. So they became like superhuman. It was like Keanu Reeves in the matrix, sitting down, they plug him in and he wakes up and he knows Kung Fu. Now this is totally different. This is like, I'm going to make a replicant who goes out in the world and it goes and learns and it goes and does something. And the foul, the, the failure of humans is our inconsistency and the success of computers is their consistency.

25:42Jeff Weisbein:And that's why it's been this great collaboration for the last 50 years or so. But the challenge has always been the computers aren't very creative or iterative and that you, it's hard, you have to write code to get them to understand it. Now you don't have to write code, you talk in English and it's recursive. And this is where we really have to pause for a second and appreciate what Oliver is doing. Oliver is building this right. He's having Larry, his replicant, recursively learn how to get better and better and better at the job. You and I, Alex, if we were going to do a job, like we try to get better, but we forget.

26:18Jeff Weisbein:We got lives, we got kids, we got sleep, you got to eat. Sometimes you get sick. These things are now going and learning. Now, Oliver, are you doing any other like training for your replicant other than just on its own work? Because what we did is internally, we set up every Sunday and Saturday, that one of our replicants goes and does the latest research for only the past week on how to do better titles, how to do better thumbnails, et cetera, et cetera. He came back this week and said, Mr. Beast released how they're doing thumbnails now. And it summarized it for us on Sunday. And I saw it. I would never, I wouldn't have remembered, oh, I got to get better at thumbnails.

26:58Jeff Weisbein:And it said, oh, Mr. Beast is using a heat map piece of software that's available. They put 50 thumbnails in it. They test it across X number of people. Then they take the top five thumbnails and then they do a second test with those top five and see which ones do better. And I was like, oh, heat maps for thumbnails. That might be a little too much for a podcast, but that's kind of interesting, right? So we're having it go out and teach itself, Oliver. Have you thought of that? Like go out on Reddit and X and YouTube and find people talking about how to get better at a skill?

27:30Oliver Henry:Yeah, so not particularly the skill, but when I first created Larry, I installed him and I headed out the house. I went to a soccer match and I was in the stadium knowing exactly what I wanted to do, texting him about the goal of this marketing that I wanted to achieve. And the first thing we did was sent him into the world on X using the bird skill before it sort of got became a gray area with x and sent him the accounts that I follow that show post slideshow content marketing content for apps and I had him just research all that data and see what worked just to get to a point where we could start and now I don't really have to do that anymore because he's he's building his own data and of course this is going to vary by product to product so you just have to start and if you're not getting the hundred tens of thousands of views to start just wildly create different content tell your agent use the larry skill say create different content until something works at the very bottom of this page we experimented with faces so people with different reactions they didn't get any views and then as soon as we posted this one 20 000 views and we would double down and it's taken off so just do it until what works and it will learn itself it's pretty pretty special jeff this iterative process we're describing reminds me a little bit of your your core loop setup that you have as part of your open claw guide here one thing that i was curious about is how you have humans built in here this is you reviewing and kind of course questioning what your agent does so can you talk us through the core loop and then um we have that demo plan let's let's do it yeah okay so so basically the way the

29:12Jason Calacanis:core loop works is i am still involved in the process but the but the process is is everything is is run through open claw so i essentially text it through i message uh i will send it screenshots of the apps i'm working on all the all the things i'm working on bug reports any kind of console logging and then it just kind of figures it out what i've realized is when i used to do this manually before OpenClaw existed 30 days ago, 29 days ago. I would have to manually think of an idea of how I wanted to build a feature into my app, kind of run through Claude code with it and have it spec it out and figure all this stuff out.

29:51Jason Calacanis:But what I'm realizing now is when a computer is talking to another computer, I feel like it's just smarter. They get each other better for some reason. The features that it is producing are of much higher quality and better value, less bugs right out of the gate than when I'm prompting it. It's insane.

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31:13Jason Calacanis:So what I've done in my system in OpenClaw is I've built in additional memory that logs every day. If it's not written down, it's not remembered. So everything that I send it, it's remembering. I just built in recently share core memory that between the different agents that I have, I have four. I have Fubbs, I have Quill, I have Patches and Scout. And those guys now communicate with one another. So wouldn't it be helpful if the code knew what the marketing agent was doing? So that way, when it wrote the copy, that it actually wrote copy that was aligned with the feature set.

31:51Jeff Weisbein:So how do you sync that memory file between them or just point them all to one file? Because that's not default in OpenClaw, is it? Because each one has their own memory.

32:00Jason Calacanis:So that's actually, I sent a link to Alex earlier to an open, the MyStarterKit that I built out and put on GitHub. And it has all that kind of built into it. Essentially, what we're doing, because as you noted, the memory doesn't exist in like the vanilla OpenClaw. it's a memory.md file and basically you know it it gets more knowledge every day and as you maintain it um and you feed it more information like i'll send it links uh tweets or articles that i think uh that are worth reading that it should know about and now proactively when i'm building in the future it'll know about that article or that tweet i sent it and it'll be and it'll say well here's what you know jason said on twitter about x you know the future of open claw and where it's headed and maybe you should consider this before you build this feature you know uh type of skill uh so it it's i think the i think getting it to be as proactive as possible is really more important than automating as much as possible so to speak you want it to make your life faster easier and the and the and the real the real kind of throttle is how fast you can make good decisions you know at the end of the day so show us uh fubs you have a demo of

33:12Oliver Henry:that from iMessage and how you use it. And same thing with Oliver, just make sure you sportscast as you talk through what you're showing us.

33:18Jason Calacanis:Sure. I'm going to share my iMessage window with Fubbs right here. Hold on one second.

33:24Oliver Henry:Jeff, I'm not going to lie. I have to ask, why is it called Fubbs?

33:29Jason Calacanis:Okay. So this is pretty crazy, but I started a web forum called Best Techie when I was a 13-year-old kid and uh on the web forum there was a guy who registered and his name was fubs and i always thought it was a great name and i just stole it i'm sorry fubs um here i'm sharing my screen now um so what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna start recording us talking and if jason or alex want to give out you know essentially what you want to build a landing page to talk about whatever it is you want to talk about.

34:03Oliver Henry:Oh, all right. I'll take a stab at that. Fubs, could you build me a landing page that describes how Jason Calacanis should ski safely in the future to ensure stability here at Launch Company? Cool.

34:18Jason Calacanis:All right. So I'm going to save this. I'm going to send it to Fubs.

34:22Oliver Henry:So while we're waiting for that, Jeff, what is the method by which you're getting the audio handled on the OpenClaw side?

34:30Jason Calacanis:so the audio this is just standard uh through iMessage audio uh it basically OpenClaw I think I believe does have um I you know sometimes I forget what what comes out of the box but I believe you can send it messages out of the box oh I didn't know that I learned something I'm not sure exactly if that comes out of the box or not but it you can't you can do it um essentially so So while I just talk to it, usually via text, I don't talk to it that much. Although talking is, I think, honestly, the future where we should be looking is a lot of voice-based stuff. I agree with you.

35:08Jeff Weisbein:I'm starting to now get frustrated. This is how entitled I am with my open claw. I am getting frustrated with having to type and instruct it. And I'm literally like, let's skip the voice and just put it into my brain. and like give me a neural link so I can just think what I want. But I think this is a short-term thing because onboarding these is like, I think like onboarding a new employee, but an employee who works infinite hours at an infinitely faster speed. So I guess we have to maybe just accept the fact that it's going to take, you know, 30 days to obsolete ourselves, which is like kind of feels happening.

35:54Oliver Henry:We had Matt Van Horn on from last 30 days a couple of times. And I think he was the guy using a specific mic on his desk, Jason, and then whisper flow to talk to it. And in the moment, I was like, that's a little bit fussy. Why do you need that? But I've also found the same thing that when I'm typing to any AI, not just OpenClaw, but even like a chat GPT instance, it feels incredibly slow because I can talk, I think, a little faster than I can type, even though I can type pretty quickly. And so suddenly it feels like I'm walking through mud. And that's not how I've ever felt before using a computer.

36:24Oliver Henry:I felt fast before, but now I feel slow. So I think this is like demanding new interfaces.

36:30Jason Calacanis:I joke now that I could only, I'm moving at the speed of compute because I can only go as fast as the computer lets me go sometimes. Yeah.

36:38Jeff Weisbein:All right. Here we go. Keep Jason safe on the mountain. A website.

36:41Oliver Henry:Yeah. So this is a pretty simple demo, Jason. But what Fubbs can do and what Jeff showed me offline was that he's also using it to hunt down bugs and build features and that sort of thing. but that's not very visually appealing. So we settled on this to show it off in practice. Love it.

36:56Jason Calacanis:So essentially what this did was it put together this entire website for you. I can send you a link. I'll put it in the chat. But basically, and then it spun it up on Vercel. And and now it's available for everyone to visit. But a lot of the stuff that I'm doing is really like troubleshoot, like doing things in real time. So like, I don't think pull requests should be a thing anymore. You feel to fix things pretty much instantaneously. if you feel if you see a bug and that's pretty much what I'm doing. And so, for example, I can I can show you the fave icon on my website for cackles, which is my social app, wasn't working.

37:32Jason Calacanis:So I said, fix the fave icon on cackles. And this is what it did. It found the issue. There's no fave icon. And then it pushed a push and update. And I have to press any more buttons. It was live just like that. I asked it this morning. Is my app down? I can't log in. And And it just happened to be a bug that it found because it logged me out overnight. Feature requests. I was able to build feature requests. This was also this morning. And this happens, like, this was just the other day. I fixed 10 bugs in a matter of a few hours. It's amazing the amount of how fast I can work using OpenClaw technology here.

38:14Jeff Weisbein:How much faster if you were to just put a number on it?

38:17Jason Calacanis:how much faster you're going in terms of the dev side of the business yeah i couldn't code before but from the marketing perspective it may like i'm doing full outreach to people with research on them understanding who they are why we should reach out to them what copy we should say what platforms to reach out to them actually automating the out the output and sending it to them like i'm like that would take days weeks you know by myself maybe more you know to find all that this is going

38:46Jeff Weisbein:to be an interesting moment in time when people have so many replicants out there contacting humans and then humans are like, you know what, I need a replicant to get in my email box to respond to these. And it's just going to be like a constant back and forth. Very cool uses there.

39:02Oliver Henry:So we have a lot of questions from the audience about memory inside of OpenClaw. People are really fired up about this. So a couple of questions for the room here. Jason, And this one's for you. Big Will 0504 says, I want to hear about long-term memory management for Ultron, which is the launch meta-shorping claw setup, has performance degraded at all over the last few weeks as context balloons.

39:25Jeff Weisbein:Yeah, TBD. We are waiting on our Mac studios and I'm on a Mac mini right now. So I've just gotten on the Mac mini and it's helping me get to different pages. What I was going to show actually is a good segue there. This is what I'm having my replicant do just for me. I gave it access to the entire company's Notion, the entire company's Slack, and the entire company's Google Docs. So for myself, I said, hey, just every four hours, summarize my email and tell me what I should be doing. But I realized if I show this on the screen right now, it's going to show like people's, what companies we're investing in.

40:09So I said, just replace any company with color and names

40:13Jeff Weisbein:of people with animals. So what you can see here is like Moose at Moose Consulting about cobalt, circle back next week, yada, yada. This one should be archived. It's just a billing, et cetera. So now I'm starting to put into its memory all the important emails. And then I said, hey, do this with Notion as well. Give me the last 10 Notion pages from the last, which is just from the last 14 minutes in our company. And it says, oh, there's an untitled page here by Hummingbird. It's empty. Here's a chartreuse one. Now, these could be private pages. These could be pages I don't know about. This is the last 10 pages.

40:50Jeff Weisbein:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this is incredibly powerful for the CEO to just understand the pulse of the company. So now what I'm doing is, and then here it says, oh, here's this one. This is a company report. We just did our first call with Jaguar. And here's what they do. And they've got 91 % trial conversion. All this stuff is coming in. So now I'm saying, hey, number this stuff. I'm going to ask you questions about those. And then it will fire off. I had it fire off over the weekend. Just email everybody on the, or Slack everyone on the team and say, do you have any questions for Jason? And is there anything that's blocking you from getting work done?

41:30Jeff Weisbein:And it just sent it to everybody. Now it's going to put into its brain, what are the blockers that we have for the company? then I'm going to take the team report. So I'm going to have the investment team, the podcast team, and the sales team. And I'm going to make a ticker, a live ticker, where we all see each other working in the hive mind. So Alex, when we had this issue with, I think you were producing Monday show and maybe Jacob was doing Wednesdays and we invited the same guest and there was something. So the solution to that is everybody's emails in real time to everybody's notion page to everybody's slack messages you already see them but then having the agents say hey uh we've got four discussions going on with companies that are negotiating term sheets and it's dragged on past the average of three days hey we've got no we've got too many guests on the show we get too much booked you know we're going to need some help over there.

42:29And the idea is to have everybody sharing all information and then having that

42:36Jeff Weisbein:one Ultron becoming the ultimate CEO. So I don't have to be the CEO or hire a CEO. They're just CEOing. They understand the entirety of the company. And then they will ask questions to each member. Hey, Alex, anything blocking you? Oh, Alex is like, yeah, you know, my computer's slow. I need a new computer. Great. All of these questions will come up and it's a little bit creepy, I guess, because people have this sense that like, oh, their documents or their work product, like, oh, I'm not ready to share it now, whatever. That's kind of over now with this next generation. They all live in public.

43:12Jeff Weisbein:They all work in public. They all live stream. So for old heads like me and Alex, like Gen Xers might be like, wait a second, like my email's my email. It's like, Nope, that's your corporate email. And we're a finance company. So I don't know, maybe a year ago when we had to lock all the computers down because of some partners we have, many partners we have who require like a certain level of security because of documents we have, like legal documents. We gifted everybody their old computers or told them like, just don't do anything on your corporate computer ever. That would be embarrassing to you and or the company, the corporate communications all owned by the company and it's all stored forever.

43:51Jeff Weisbein:This is like standard for JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs, but at a startup or a venture firm, you might not think it. So we've been very, it's very interesting. We've been very clear with people to be very thoughtful about that. So now with the sales team, I was always asking questions to the sales team. Now I don't have to answer questions. If I want to know if a contract's been signed or not, Ultron knows. If I want to know if we've talked to a client and when we last talked to them, I don't have to ask the salesperson or the sales manager, hey, these five clients, when's the last time we talk to them, it will just tell me.

44:22Jeff Weisbein:It knows. It knows everything. It's the Oracle. It's the Ultron. And that's what I think is going to change, is the whole communication friction and the processing of it and the understanding of what the organization's doing is going to just instantly be removed. The number one complaint people have about their company, the highest performing companies, the lowest performing companies, and everybody in between, you ask any employee, what do we need to do better? And they say communication. They say, absolutely. It's like always communication. Oh, we got to communicate better. I didn't know about this.

44:57Jeff Weisbein:I didn't know about that. Now it's like, you know what? You got your wish. Ask the Oracle. The Oracle knows all. There is nothing in a silo. Break all silos.

45:08Oliver Henry:Yeah. No, it's interesting. It feels like the age of transparency is kind of upon us so long as our agents can access the information in question. Jason, you're talking about Notion and Slack. These are products that are kind of tech first, if you will, tech forward, tech friendly. They have ways to interact with them. A lot of stuff out there doesn't. So do you think that in time, we're going to see even legacy software create like agentic hooks? So that way you're going to have to or else to be out of business. It's a great question.

45:34Jeff Weisbein:I mean, if you don't have a hook, I was like literally trading a text message with Mark Benioff about Slack and he's got Slack bot, which is getting better and better. But Slack bot compared to Ultron is like Superman compared to like, I don't know, like an average barista at Starbucks, like one can make coffee and one can save the world. Like, it's just, it's not comparable because of the context and the information it has. So either you're going to need to make Slack bot be able to read everything else in the world or notions AI to read everything else in the world. Or I think these companies are going to become the systems of record, but the open claw will come in and be able to do it.

46:18Jeff Weisbein:And there's a limitation on Slack. Like we don't have like true API access. We need like a really root level. And I think we have to pay$50 a month per person up from 25, up from like 10. Come on, Mark. Well, anyway, it's fine. I get it. Like it's software. People pay for it. It's worth what you pay for it. But then OpenClaw told me, why don't you use Matterpost? I was like, here's what I want to do. And it's like, well, why don't we just fire up Matterpost? And I was like, what's Matterpost? And I was like, oh, I remember that. Matterpost is an open source version of Slack. And it's like, I can set that up for you this weekend.

46:52Jeff Weisbein:And I was like, huh. And I was like, well, what about our history? He's like, oh, you can export everything. And if you don't have the business account for Slack, here's your hack. go on to the business account for one month upgrade and then export everything then cancel or just get rid of the number of users and you can export the entire you know even the thumbs

47:14Oliver Henry:up and emojis on your slack post you're starting to make me think that the sass crash isn't uh

47:18Jeff Weisbein:irrational jason by talking like it is not irrational i think we should open up that topic to the team uh do you want to do that now or because i was gonna you guys give me feedback on what my vision is here for the all-knowing CEO and the ultimate transparency organization.

47:35Oliver Henry:I think it's both a good idea and the future. I think people have become incredibly accustomed to transparency at work. When we did swap to the software that tracks what we do, it was weird for like three days. And then I realized that I'm the world's most boring person. And so it doesn't really impact me. Like, oh, Alex is looking at Slack again. Woo, you know, it's not so big. but Oliver weigh in for us on on memory long-term memory and how it's going to impact corporations because you do have a day job so I presume this is top of mind for you as well yeah honestly it the tools that are coming out especially internal tools exactly what Jason's described every company I believe who is ahead of the curve right now is creating tools that are specifically beneficial to them and the way of which we are working has massively accelerated.

48:27Oliver Henry:There are ways that you can implement different tools to fit your exact workflow. I think the age of transparency is very much among us because for what you lose in your transparency and your secret emails with clients, which is not very secret anyway, you gain so much back in the time, the efficiency and the way you can do your job so everyone says ai was going to replace people but i think for a lot of people it is going to help secure their job because one good employee is now 10 times better with the help of ai well unpack that a bit give us like some examples in

49:06Jeff Weisbein:your mind of which i'm sure as alex is going hey if one employee if we start seeing one employee be able to do the third job, the fourth job, the fifth job, that may not mean I cut the other people, but might it mean I don't hire the 11th person? So walk us through your thinking all over here.

49:23Oliver Henry:So my feeling is that the better AI is getting, the good employees that have great work ethic, get things done, are going to become better employees. But I do think there's going to be a point where those employees are going to be even more hireable than what they currently are and then the employees that don't cut the slack are going to become less desirable to companies so there is going to be a trade-off in terms of the people getting hired but I think as long as you're utilizing the tools to not not just keep at the level you are but use it to accelerate where you are I think that's going to massively help companies and that that is the goal of AI I don't think the goal of ai in the short term is to completely replace people at their companies it's just to help enable the the better employees to get more stuff done because what do you think you want your best players in the team at all time yeah yeah no but i i do worry about the b players like i i as a society we cannot only have an economy for a players and this is me just worried about we've all had a friend who has an iq of 95 what are they gonna do and i'm

50:30Jeff Weisbein:I'm on the pod. I'm the host of the pod.

50:33Oliver Henry:I would have rounded up if I was talking about you to a solid 97.

50:37Jason Calacanis:I would say what I would really be concerned about if I was a person who had a, you know, a software engineering job or just any job really, is that it's not just that you might be replaced by an agent. What does it cost to hire an agent, essentially, for that person who's already working for you? Versus replacing them completely versus hiring an additional person. There's an actual cost to this agent stuff. It's not free. You can't just run this stuff for free. so it costs me money every month to be able to do all the work that i'm doing uh in addition to you know you know paying myself or paying whoever uh there's an additional kind of allowance you need to set up for your business that equates to tokens essentially yeah we talked about that on all in

51:32Jeff Weisbein:it's just the token cost getting out of control but we have a plan for that which is you know we got Mac studios and I'm just started to pencil out like, I think we need like five mega replicants and we're going to put specialization into each one. I think that actually is the best way to do it just because we don't want to hit upper memory bounds. We don't want them to be slow and grinding to a halt. And it'll create like pools of excellence where I can put two or three employees who are responsible for the first calls at our venture firm or the three or four people who are in charge of sales and advertising on This Week in Startups and our events, put them just in charge of that.

52:14Jeff Weisbein:So if they're just in charge of those things, they can scale up. And like buying two Mac studios for 10K each and whatever, or spending 25K for four or five or six instances, 100K, 200K, who cares if it makes everybody that much faster because you spread that cost over four years or five years and you're golden. The issue around SaaS, I think, is a big one, Alex, that we should discuss. And there was, you know, this something is happening post from a couple of weeks ago, a video I did with the Bulwark where I said, listen, I think Amazon employees are all gone by 2030, 2035. And then this one came out, which is titled...

52:57Oliver Henry:The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis from our dear friends at Citrini Research.

53:02Jeff Weisbein:Yeah. So, I mean, their basic premise is around SaaS. And they're basically saying, hey, when people got on the calls with their SaaS salesperson, they were asking for the standard 5 % increase in cost. And the CFO who was working with the CTO said, hey, we love your software, but we're thinking about spinning up our own, which we can do with our frontline developers. Therefore, we'll keep your software, but we want a 30 % discount.

53:28Oliver Henry:There you go.

53:29Jeff Weisbein:And they make the meta point that all these companies then cut headcounts, start using AI tools to make, you know, let's say Salesforce or Asana, I think they used. Let's make Asana, let's make Salesforce more efficient as a company. And in the short term, their profits went up. But in the long term, they fed the AI how to build their software, where I think they kind of imply this. I kind of read into it, that the more you use these tools and the better they get, and the more you invest in them, the more you accelerate the compression of profitability of software. Does that make sense, Alex? Am I explaining it correctly?

54:05Jeff Weisbein:It's like super deflationary.

54:06Oliver Henry:It's super deflationary because one thing people forget is that SaaS was super popular for a couple of reasons. One, it was recurring, yes, but also people hired more people over time. And so you would sell more seats and you could raise these prices and what they did was give SAS companies a really beautiful tailwind Jason it meant that you could invest today a flywheel even you can invest today in sales and marketing burn some cash but who cares because you know that that contract will grow by 10 15 every year and so the money always made sense but the moment you start moving that number down suddenly your cac looks terrifying suddenly you're worried about your marketing efficiency suddenly you can't count on your revenue the way you could and SAS is not durable in that context it's a sponge you can squish And the thing that I like about this piece, Jason from Citrini, is that it's not Doomer in that, you know, AI will fail or open clause, you know, a hype fad or whatever.

54:58Oliver Henry:But instead, it's like, what if it all goes right? What if AI is powerful? What if it is as strong as we think? And I think more people should be thinking about that.

55:06Jason Calacanis:So I've actually been thinking, I have two SaaS businesses that I built, the Who Covers It and the Wizard RFP. and essentially I've been thinking about well now I gotta agent-fy them I gotta figure out a way to to make them so that way agents like another agency's agents can talk to them uh and just basically work through the whole process in a couple of chat messages as opposed to traditional kind of click here click here type a few things hit a button wait a second and then it loads you know that's just not going to cut it anymore um and i think i think as more people start moving towards this environment where like i think about computing how how it's evolved and it's crazy because we're we're we know we were we were pointing click and type for a while now we're tap tap tap on a screen where we're you know um and and and now we're just and we've actually compressed our entire computing environment into just a chat message now like we you know we used to be in every different apps windows things like that one of the big complaints for the iphone originally i think and still to this day is that it's not good at multitasking really same with the ipad but now it doesn't really matter because we're only we're all living in one window so i mean i

56:23Oliver Henry:remember when my parents uh they had a small business and they upgraded their office suite from like i don't know from 2003 to 2007 and they introduced the ribbon interface and they were freaking out because they'd used word in one way for their entire life and they couldn't take the changed where their buttons were. What a silly conversation today, because we don't need an interface the way we used to. People talk about how apps are going away, everything's going to become atomized. But I think the phrase agentify your SaaS is going to be a little clunky phrase there, Jeff, but I like it. I think that's going to become a theme for 2026.

56:56Oliver Henry:This is also my big thing at the moment. There is definitely going to be a time that there is going to be a side of the internet for the AI and a side of the internet for humans and the goal for the AI would just be making the making everything as easy to find as possible and I've got a demo based on what we've been saying where I think the future of SaaS is heading because with these servers we've got I'll show you with these servers we've got in our homes now we don't have to be worried about hosting costs. We don't have to be worried about any of these things. Here we go. Here's Chrome. So you don't have to worry about domain costs.

57:37Oliver Henry:You don't have to worry about hosting costs. With these skills, this is a skill that I've created that scans Twitter for mentions to particular accounts and creates tickets all based on Larry so that you can see the channel is from X. Larry assigns an urgency to them. I can click into the tickets and then Larry suggests fix for me and then I can set it solve I can make Larry fix it and the future of SaaS is just making these skills as searchable as possible and I've sort of moved towards this with my product Larry Brain so you can ask your agent right now to install the Larry Brain skill and what the skill is is it gives your agent context of we're gonna we're gonna come to skills in just a second but first we do have to take a look at our final live thing of the day so can you stop screen sharing for a a moment I'm gonna do this and we're gonna get right back to skills in a second all right Jason there is a company out there that we talked about on the show it's called discord and they are currently in the middle of uh blowing up their reputation by demanding that everyone scan their face which people don't want to do and so I was curious what the sharps over at polymarket are doing when it comes to their IPO prospects and you might be shocked to hear this but uh they're relatively stable uh except for one important thing during the great brouhaha and blow up of discord people claiming they're going to uninstall it stop using it the people were betting quite heavily on that it would not go public essentially and then suddenly that's changed again but it's fascinating to watch people kind of like vet the news items against the ipo prospects and this is actually i think one of my favorite use cases of polymarket because i know what i think about a couple of news points that might tell me where the world's going in the technology space but i love

59:19Jeff Weisbein:to see kind of the aggregated wisdom of the crowd the poly market for the discord ipo closing market cap if we put it when did the news drop this dropped today yesterday a week ago oh this was

59:32Oliver Henry:jeff back me up here uh when did discord say that we're going to do the facial scanning thing a week

59:36Jeff Weisbein:or so ago about a week or so ago so put it on one week let's see one week all right here's one week week and the top choice of 15 billion, 32%, that didn't really change.

59:51Oliver Henry:No.

59:52Jeff Weisbein:It may have gone down a little bit in the beginning of the week, it looks like, but not much. So the second one is the one that seems to have been volatile, that blue one, which is no IPO. So there was a group that thought maybe it would not IPO because of this or it could get pushed back in 2016. But then that came back down too. So yeah, the news is, what do they say? Sell the news? No, buy the rumor, sell the news. Sell the news, right. Like the news doesn't matter, I guess. But maybe the news is always bad. Anyway. Or it's priced in. Or it's priced in. So why would you buy on it? You know, this is interesting.

1:00:32Jeff Weisbein:Why do they want to scan people's faces? Is this because of the new kids regulation or because of bots?

1:00:38Oliver Henry:It's the kids thing. And the fact that people are doing nefarious things online without proper oversight and countries like Australia are banning social media. So you need to know how old people are so they can't join your products. And so this is kind of the future, which is oddly retro. But I do like to see how regulation and product changes impact people's IPO prospects, Jason, because what's my favorite thing? IPOs.

1:01:01Jeff Weisbein:Yeah, I am. I am a fan of restricting kids under 16 on social media. uh, severely. I think it's incredibly bad for their health. And I'm really happy that a lot of the schools, including ones I go to have a no phone policy now. Uh, and that's all happened in the last two years where phones get checked in at the front desk. Kids don't use them during the day. They can go check them if they have to call their parents for some reason or whatever. And they get them on the way out and kids hate it for three days and then they become kids again. So it's incredibly reversible, you know, what we've done to kids, but being permanently online is the issue and we really need to figure out ways to turn off internet access in fact that just reminded me i have a router where i can pick everybody's devices and i should be able to turn their devices up but then i just realized they have 5g connections on some devices so we have a basket in the kitchen where you're supposed to put your devices at the end of the day

1:01:58Oliver Henry:we're literally getting one of those for our house yeah it's it's time but i was about to say jason you should just open claw the wi-fi access on a per device basis using your home mac studio i can do that.

1:02:08Jeff Weisbein:I can do that now with my Unify router. The problem is if your kid has 5G as well, you can't turn it off, but I guess I can use the max settings to turn off the phone, you know, at a certain time at night. Anyway, this is all very complicated. Um, but in your world is the, I guess the facial scanning does a good enough job knowing age that they think that this would be a plausible

1:02:31Oliver Henry:way to age gate is facial recognition is plausible. I think it needs to be good enough as an age gate mechanism to get regulators off their backs and also good enough to get parents out of their legal filings. But I don't think they're shooting for 100%. We were about to talk about skills. And this is something that I've been thinking a lot about in the open clock context. I've done some homebrew hacking of skills myself. But one thing I've been thinking about is that people love to say, oh, you know, I now have five, you know, agentic employees. One's a marketer, one's a copywriter, one's a developer.

1:03:02Oliver Henry:And to me, that is predicated or depends on there being a, an ample library of skills that are very good at the thing you're trying to automate, but often people will automate or try to get open cloud to do things that are not good at. Like, I don't know, software development's one example, but how do people ensure that they have the skills they need and when should they build their own to make sure that what they're putting together is a direct fit for what they're trying to accomplish. So this is an extremely interesting topic and it's one I struggled with when I first downloaded OpenClaw myself.

1:03:36Oliver Henry:I knew that skills were a thing, but finding them was very difficult. It was very hard to search through the Claw Hub marketplace at the start. So I created Larry Brain, which is a skill in itself that searches the Larry Brain marketplace. But as soon as you install it, whenever you ask your agent a question, it will say, hey, there's a skill available on Larry Brain for this. And it's what I was showing before. So these can be web interfaces hosted locally because you've got a server in your room. That's Larry behind me. So he can host these web services. And again, you no longer need to pay for cloud costs.

1:04:14Oliver Henry:You no longer have to pay for domains hosting. the skills can be a variety of things whether it's as jason said earlier plugging plugging into the matrix and learn teaching your agent kung fu or a whole tool that you can use to monitor your your current product it's incredible how powerful these skills can be it's the enablement of finding them that i think a lot of people have found as a as a struggle especially people who aren't familiar with computers than downloading open claw so claw hub's gotten better it's not great it's definitely an improved state over where it was when i first started to play with it so why do we need uh larry brain which is a sas product as far as i understand it to help us find skills and does that not go against a little bit of the open source ethos that's powered the open club boom so i'm all for open source i think i was the first one of the first people I published Larry on Clawhub uh the Larry skill which was the marketing we discussed earlier but it's just the discoverability of Clawhub and then of course people still want to make money from these skills and Larry Brain enables you to monetize your skills so you can publish to Larry Larry Brain get a similar revenue share model that X would use so the most popular skills will get the most money but I think there is definitely going to be paid skills premium skills and open source skills i would pay for skills for sure especially if they

1:05:35Jeff Weisbein:continue to be updated and i trusted the person making them and so i really need to have that trust layer and i want to see like i don't know every 10 days you tell me hey here's how it got better and that would make it worth paying for in my mind for sure because i'm trying to teach it you know if somebody made one how to evaluate startup companies i'd be like well i have my own methodology, but why wouldn't I pay$1 ,000 a year or a month if it was good to add it to ours and say, hey, we have our score, give me your score. Just like there's a Rotten Tomatoes and there's a Metacritic score. If somebody came up with those for scoring startups and there were five different people who made them, I would run all five of them.

1:06:19Jeff Weisbein:And then I would have my age in Ultron look at the five scores and say, how does this apply to our methodology and our experience right and i would i mean i might pay a hundred thousand dollars a year for a skill that

1:06:30Oliver Henry:was actually that good yeah and more secure uh we just had a comment from uh westock over on x and he's like skills are the number one attack vector do not auto install skills by default definitely but but jason if you pay for a skill and you're paying for that trust layer that should come with

1:06:44Jeff Weisbein:some cyber security protections built in yeah yeah i want to know who's me who's making the skill why they're making it, what their perspective is. I would, it's almost like, you know, you can, the story behind the restaurant or the story behind the album is as important as the food or the music. Sometimes like understanding, uh, this artist who just went through a breakup, I forgot her name, uh, English actress, uh, English, uh, she is an actress too on Broadway. Um, anyway, she just came up with an album about breaking up with the guy from stranger things. and uh lily allen thank you yes uh so lily allen's album is about this like personal heartbreak and whatever and this is all very dramatic whatever but the intent behind it matters same thing with a restaurant you go to a restaurant and the person says hey listen i went to japan and i really enjoyed this type of sushi really high-end sushi served in a pretty fast casual way and a small number of items, but done really well, like this guy, Philip, I know, who's a chef here, is doing.

1:07:52Jeff Weisbein:And the intent behind his restaurant made me want to go. So the intent behind the skill and the person and their perspective and why they're creating it really matters.

1:08:03Jason Calacanis:We're so far from that. I think having product experience or just general market experience in a particular industry is critical, more so than being able to code now, certainly. If you can figure out how to code, vibe code it or whatever, it's... So when does the 10X...

1:08:27Oliver Henry:But Jeff, when does the 10X marketer make the 10X marketing skill? When does the 10X, I don't know, public speaker make the public speaking skill? Like how long until we get like the best skill made by the best person who can vet it and verify it as the best at its task because like you wouldn't want me to make the sushi skill because i don't eat seafood you know right right no it has

1:08:51Jason Calacanis:the proliferation of open claw or similar type products that that come out uh will make this happen faster as more people get this stuff in their hands the faster we'll see stuff created

1:09:04Oliver Henry:and the better it'll be i think we need like a rating system i i love what oliver's doing with Larry brain. I think it's a really cool idea and I hope it succeeds, but I think we could also use like a, like a Yelp for skills because right now on claw hub, I know I can see downloads and I can see the little virus scan, but past that, I'm just reading the skills.md. You know, I,

1:09:23Jason Calacanis:there's a popular skill that's going out. Uh, it was on X all over the place for a couple of weeks called Claude mem, I believe. Anyway, it's like, it's like a, it's like a crypto, uh, scam thing. They basically are crypto. And I ran it against Fubbs to have it check. And he's like, don't install this. This is bad. I was like, I'll leave a comment to let everyone know. But they already have hundreds of retweets and stuff. This stuff is out there. You just have to be careful.

1:09:53Jeff Weisbein:Amazing. Let's drop off our guest, Oliver, Jeff. Great job. Where can people find out more about what you're working on?

1:10:00Jason Calacanis:Yeah, you can find out on x.com at Jeff Weisbein, which is just my name, one word. and you can also find me at Cackles Club on X as well.

1:10:09Jeff Weisbein:Okay, we will put both of those in the show notes. Oliver, where can we find you?

1:10:13Oliver Henry:You can find me at Oliver Henry on X. I post all my Open Claw findings and discoveries on there.

1:10:19Jeff Weisbein:I'm going to do like a little mini launch festival. I used to do that. It was pretty big, but I'm going to do a little mini one for Open Claw and some of our other startups, especially the ones from Japan who are in town, March 16th and 17th. I think that's Monday and Tuesday, March 16th and 17th. So if you made it to this point in the show, we have Open Claw at Launch.co. I think I have like 400 seats in the auditorium, 300 seats. And I'm going to just look for maybe 30 demos of Open Claw stuff. And I'm just going to do an old school demo, like a demo or die kind of thing. And the dates will be...

1:10:53Jeff Weisbein:March 16th, 17th is the Monday Tuesday. Perfect. March 16th, 17th. I have a location in San Francisco in the city. and if you want to come, I'm going to sell some tickets to folks and then I'm inviting investors and some founders. If you have a demo, OpenClaw at launch.co if you want to sponsor a lunch, OpenClaw.

1:11:14Oliver Henry:Now, Jason, at the very top of the show, the very top, you said you were building something that is scary and every CEO's dream. Did we touch on that already during the show or do you have yet to show it off?

1:11:23Jeff Weisbein:It was sort of like what I showed there. And so what I think is going to happen is I'm going to have this Ultron CEO be able to look at everybody's work product and then coach them and say, hey, here's your day. So we do self-reporting, right? Start a day, end a day. What I've started to realize is like, okay, that's fine. But what if you actually had a coach who was like, here's what you did in the game? Like if you're a basketball player, professional basketball player, when you finish practice, they tell you how you did. They give you some tape. They give you some notes. When you play the game, they give you a lot of tape, a lot of notes.

1:12:03Jeff Weisbein:Hey, you played the game for 36 minutes. Here's your shooting. Here's the times you took. These are the shots you took that were wide open. Great. Here's how you got wide open. Here are the shots you took that were challenged that you should have passed. And here's the passes you missed. Here's why you missed them. Right. So they get like really studied. Right. And the job of management is to kind of study the team members and say, hey, these are the highest performing ones. These are the lowest. Here's how you can reward the highest, get them into their natural positions and double down on their skillset.

1:12:32Jeff Weisbein:Here's the lowest. You need to cut them or they need to move on to do like some other function at the company. That's starting to happen here in real time. As just but one example, I had every time we meet with the founder, three days later, they rate the call. Turned out a huge disparity in the top performers and the low performers. And we kind of put things into buckets. Tomatoes and like cheers. Under seven and underscores are tomatoes and eight and above are cheers. Kind of like the net promoters group.

1:13:04Oliver Henry:Yeah, I was going to say.

1:13:05Jeff Weisbein:So now that we're tracking all that, I need to know like why? What's going on on the phone calls? I need to analyze the phone calls. I need to coach people. But it's very, people get very sad or thrilled if you tell them, hey, like, look at your score. It's not good. They can get freaked out. So now having a Ultron robot, that's just looking, hey, you produced today's show. Here's how the guest did. Here's that number of comments. Hey, this show, these four shows had the most comments. Here's what you need to learn from that. The demos in this show were mind-blowing. The demos in this show were solid.

1:13:42Jeff Weisbein:The demos in this show were bad, whatever. Boom, it just tells you. this like self-coaching or this uh replicant coaching you and coaching your team members and holding them accountable then takes the human out of it and the bias out of it because there's always been oh this person's popular yeah oh this person uh defends their work better than this person defends their work you know you always get into that situation where you're in like some meeting. Oh, you know, I deserve a raise. I've had people who like, you know, are the squeakiest wheels who put in half the amount of work as the quiet people.

1:14:20Jeff Weisbein:And when I discovered this years ago, I was like, wait a second, I need to have a better way of separating performance from performative, from, you know, hard work, from and hard and effective work from, you know, I'm just chilling at the office, but I punched a lot of hours, but they weren't productive hours. So all of that, a replicant taking over that management coaching position should take all that dicey energy out of it, I think. I think you're right.

1:14:56Oliver Henry:Okay, go ahead. Yeah. I think you're right, but I think we're still, this is something I was trying to get to in today's show. I don't think I I fully nailed it, but like we are depending on the intelligence of the models in question to be nearly superhuman. Because what you're saying sounds amazing. I would love to get, you know, non-human feedback. Like, okay, Alex, you said this word eight times in the show. Don't do that.

1:15:19Jeff Weisbein:Yeah, you had ums and ahs as a performer. Sure, sure, absolutely.

1:15:21Oliver Henry:And it will sting less coming from a robot than from a human that I know and have a relationship with. But it's going to have to know what to look out for. It's going to have to know to make the decisions how to be this Ultron CEO. And so that's either going to be done by increasing an incredible intelligence at the model level, powering these agents, or through increasingly intelligent and specific skills that people who are already experts have imparted their human knowledge into. And so to me, there's two different vectors by which we can get to what you're saying. But we are implying in our enthusiasm, frankly, that both things will improve in tandem.

1:15:57Oliver Henry:And I think that's right. But I also think there's still a lot more work to be done, especially on the second half of that equation.

1:16:03Jeff Weisbein:Yeah, the skills is kind of like a new concept, I think, for all of us to grok as a business community. We've previously had like an app, a piece of software that can accomplish things. But if you were trying to get this intangible, like a skill, okay, how do you know somebody has the skill of podcasting? when you look at the ultimate output but there might be precursors to it like picking interesting topics having hot takes the cadence the whatever but you're right in addition that like well you don't just want people spewing conspiracy theories to get a bunch of people retweeting them saying that's a conspiracy theory right the incentives do matter how you train it's going to matter but brave new world folks if you are not using open claw listen i can tell you this feels a lot to me like the beginnings of Bitcoin, which nobody owned, but profoundly changed, I think, a lot of people's fortunes, literal fortunes, and also how we think about currency and just all the things that came downstream from Bitcoin, stablecoins, DAOs, everything.

1:17:11Jeff Weisbein:OpenClaw may not be Bitcoin. Eventually, it could be remembered as like DAOs or something, but it is definitely the start of something. these self uh you know improving replicants that have the keys to the kingdom that are dangerous to use but could uh replace you ultimately and then leave you with hours a day to go i don't need to do this reporting anymore and that was three hours of my job what could i do with those three hours exactly maybe the four-day work week arrives you know we have to think about that or people are just able to do more human things. This is what I told my team. Learn how to use these things.

1:17:51Jeff Weisbein:Get rid of your chores. Increase the amount of face time with founders. We've got bigger issues to think about, which we'll probably talk about on Wednesday's roundtable. The thing I'm thinking about is what's the future of venture capital? What's the future of venture capital in a deflationary period like this? Especially like, do people need large amounts of money? Yeah, to do rockets or cars, sure, military weapons. But for software, which is 90 % of the business, do we need late stage venture capital? Do we, we probably need early stage and accelerators, but do we need, how much of the rest of the stack is going to be necessary?

1:18:30Oliver Henry:And how much capital is going to be necessary? The shift from software is cheap. Everyone can make it. You don't need capital to hardware is hard. Now we have to only invest in exits. What's left is going to mean a lot of MBAs are going to wish they had PhDs. yeah mechanical engineering or just how to deal with the real world right yeah where where the where the hype literally touches the world but we should stop jason okay as always a treat all right we'll see you soon bye-bye