6 ms·
Did this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?
by piker 9mo ago
Did this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?
- hu3 9mo agoWhere do you guys get the 1b exit from? I didn't see numbers yet.
- geerlingguy 9mo agoIt's AI. Take a sane number, add a 14,000x multiplier to that. And you'll only be one order of magnitude off in our current climate.
- upmind 8mo agoIt was reportedly acquired for 30M (source: Twitter), the 1B number comes from people stating it could be worth that much on Twitter in the near future.
- softwaredoug 9mo agoI literally had begun to wonder if OpenClaw had more of a future as a company than OpenAI
- senko 9mo agoHow do you know it was for less than a billion?
- piker 9mo agoThe sentence ended with a question mark.
- senko 9mo agoI don't know the answer, but considering Meta (known for 100m+ offers) was in the rumors, and he mentions multiple labs (and many investors), and all the hype around openclaw ... I can easily see 9 figure, and would not be surprised by 1b+ "signing bonus", perhaps in the equivalent number of OpenAI shares.
- mjr00 9mo ago... Why would they pay 9 figures? It's not like Openclaw required specialized PhD-level knowledge held by <1000 people in the world to build, and that's what Meta and the other AI labs are paying ludicrous salaries for. Openclaw is a cool project and demonstrates good product design in the AI world, but by no means is a great product manager worth 1 billion dollars.
- senko 9mo ago1) there is only one OpenClaw and only one Peter; 2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google 3) the top paid people in this world are not phds 4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year) 5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free. need I continue?
- smnplk 9mo agoplease do continue. I like your points.
- mjr00 9mo ago> 1) there is only one OpenClaw and only one Peter; Again, Peter is a good/great AI product manager but I don't see any distinguishing skills worth a billion dollars there. There's only one Openclaw but it's also been a few weeks since it came into existence? Openclaw clones will exist soon enough, and the community is WAY too small to be worth anything (unlike, say, Instagram/Whatsapp before being acquired by Facebook) > 2) at least half of the money is to not read the headlines tomorrow that the hottest AI thing since ChatGPT joined Anthropic or Google True, but not worth $100 million dollars - $1 billion dollars > 3) the top paid people in this world are not phds The people getting massive compensation offers from AI companies are all AI-adjacent PhDs or people with otherwise rare and specialized knowledge. This is unrelated to people who have massive compensation due to being at AI companies early. And if we're talking about the world in general, yes the best thing to do to be rich is own real estate and assets and extract rent, but that has nothing to do with this compensation offer > 4) OpenAI is not beneath paying ludicrous amounts (see all their investments in the past year) Investments have a probable ROI, what's the ROI on a product manager? > 5) if a perception of their value as a result of this "strategic move" rises even by 0.2% and the bonus is in openai stock, it's free. 99.999999% of the world has not heard of Openclaw, it's extremely niche right now.
- orsorna 9mo agoWas the project really ever valued that high? Seems like something that can be easily replicated and even properly thought out (re: pi). This guy just ran the social media hype train the right way.
- bbor 9mo agoWasn't this the same guy that responded with a shrug to thousands of malware packages on their vibe-repo? I'd say an OpenAI signing bonus is more than enough of a reward to give up that leaky ship!
- linkregister 9mo agoReminds me of Facebook, there was nothing particularly interesting about a PHP app that stored photos and text in a flat user environment. Yet somehow the network effects worked out well and the website was the preeminent social network for almost a decade.
- rockwotj 9mo agoTechnology does not determine the success of a company. I’ve seen amazing tech fail, and things strapped together with ducktape and bubblegum be a wild success.
- CuriouslyC 9mo agoExcept in this case there's no network effect for autonomous agents. In fact, Peter is going to be working mostly on an OpenAI locked down, ecosystem tied agent, which means it's going to be worse than OpenClaw, but with a nicer out of the box experience.
- mentalgear 9mo agohow is it a "startup" if all ip is open-source. Seems like openAi is just buying hype to keep riding their hype bubble a little longer, since they are in hot water on every other front (20Billion revenue vs 1 Trillion expenses and obligations, Sora 2 user retention dropping to 1% of users after 1 month of usage, dense competition, all actual real founding ml scientists having skipped the boat a long time ago).
- hadlock 9mo agoEveryone is going to have their own flavor of Open Claw within 18 months. The memory architecture (and the general concept of the multi-tiered system) is open source. There's no moat to this kind of thing. But OpenAI is happy to trade his star power for money. And he might build something cool with suddenly unlimited resources. I don't blame the guy. OpenAI is going to change hands 2-3 times over the next 5 years but at the end of the day he will still have the money and equity OpenAI gave him. And his cool project will continue on.
- casualscience 8mo agowhat is the memory architecture, doesn't this already exist in claude code?
- elicash 8mo agoMaybe there's a liability moat where large companies can't ship something that's risky enough to be useful?
- elxr 9mo agoThe fact that 1 billion is the threshold you chose to highlight shows the ridiculousness of this industry. Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering, but I can't imagine OpenAI/anthropic/google not being able to compete with it for 1/20th that number (with solid hiring of course).
- piker 9mo agoIt was more of a reference to the YC partner who suggested a one-man unicorn was on the horizon due to AI.
- huflungdung 8mo ago[dead]
- ttul 8mo agoThe game theory here is that either OpenAI acquires this thing now, or someone else will. It doesn't matter whether they could replicate it. All of the major players can and probably will replicate OpenClaw in their own way and make their thing incredibly scalable and wonderful. But OpenClaw has a gigantic following and it's relevant in this moment. For a trivial amount of money (relatively speaking), OpenAI gets to own this hype and direct it toward their models and their apps. Had they not succeeded here, Anthropic or Google would have gladly directed the hype in their direction instead, and OpenAI would be licking its wounds for some time trying to create something equivalently shiny. It was a very good play by OpenAI.
- r0b05 8mo agoI tend to agree. I don't know whether it's Altman or someone else who makes these deals but OAI have made some brilliant moves and partnerships. Anthropic's tech is great but the OAI makes great business moves.
- thatsit 8mo agoAltman is the startup idea king. He should definitely know his moves. Even worse for antrophic is the renaming from clawd to openclaw. It is almost comical now that Peter had to rename it and now it sounds more like OpenAI
- Aurornis 8mo agoI keep reading takes about OpenClaw being acquired, but even the TLDR at the top makes it clear that OpenClaw isn’t part of this move: > tl;dr: I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent. I’m sure he got a very generous offer (congrats to him!) but all of the hot takes about OpenClaw being acquired are getting weird.
- dbbk 8mo agoNo because this was not a billion dollar business
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Yizahi 8mo agoYeah, shows he is smart, in the current market state.
- ifwinterco 8mo agoWe're at the point in the cycle where if someone offers you decent money you take it. It might run on for a while longer but you don't want to be that guy who had a £100m net worth in 1999 but failed to monetise any of it and ended up with nothing