SPEAKER_00: all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups it's twist for march 30th happy birthday SPEAKER_01: to my twins and uh it is they're 10 years old we had their party this weekend and i'm in brooklyn i'm in brooklyn i came to see my dad yeah as you can see from the brooklyn bridge my dad's been a little bit sick so i came in to spend some time with him uh see the fam see john the beard that SPEAKER_05: is not a live shot of brooklyn behind you i i call i call shenanigans on this okay well yes SPEAKER_07: the wrong time of day sir it's the wrong time i mean it's a time zone i think texas is what like SPEAKER_10: eight hours behind yeah it's like tokyo yeah it's eight hours yeah all right we got a big show today SPEAKER_11: but before we get started it's this is what we do we get ready for the show and i applaud applaud SPEAKER_00: by pressing my pen like we are uh in star trek and it really is kind of like star trek i uh one of the things i wanted to do was i wanted to interview my dad i'm trying to convince my dad to let me interview him so i could write like a you know a short story about him or something you know down the road and you know he's an old school guy so i said well i don't know why my story's been told i SPEAKER_15: don't know but i was like okay well i got this plot pen i just want to talk to you like maybe we could carve out an hour or two to just talk about your childhood or whatever i don't know you got to capture SPEAKER_08: those memories once people are gone those stories are i feel this with my grandparents all the time that i wish i'd gotten more of their old stories because now they're gone i'll never be able to ask SPEAKER_00: them about the old days and i bet you somewhere in the plod templates is archivist or you know family archivist or storytelling templates if there isn't we could write one and that's the beauty of plod um and you know they're a partner of ours and they're sponsoring today's live stream go check out plod there's a pin there's a magsafe adapter that goes on the back of your iphone or if you've got any other magsafe yeah it is extraordinary it's changed my life it's privacy first so you see SPEAKER_28: the red lights on and it's changed along his life uh even alex loves it now he's getting into it SPEAKER_19: it's great because it's it's it's it's not just recording but it it understands the context i mean i think that would be great why be good for what you're talking about it would not only capture your dad's story but his his tone his personality his voice it's really it's you know it's good for the SPEAKER_05: contextual understanding of what's being said and you know i think these things are going to keep SPEAKER_32: getting better and better i have a feature item i want for plot i want plod because it is SPEAKER_00: independent of your device if you have your phone in the charger and you walk to the kitchen and you want to you know do like a quick session or something you know with a colleague in the in the corporate kitchen you can just press it and record it yeah um i wanted to have i wanted to pair with its own proprietary earpiece to give like feedback or i could ask it questions back and forth and then eventually have a local language model on it and have it connect to wi-fi i don't know if you knew this but if you put it in the cradle this is like a power user feature if you put it in the cradle it will sync over wi-fi for you yes i didn't know that i didn't know you know that okay it's like a little secret feature because i was like you know this thing yeah i'd like this thing to automatically sync and like the perfect time to do that when i put in the cradle what's the SPEAKER_42: url help me out here for a special offer that's oh sure yeah so you want to keep talking until you SPEAKER_19: give us the print i understand that so you want you want to check it out applaud.ai twist that's p-l-a-u-d.ai twist you want to use the code twist for 10 off of your plot pin all right so it is ao after open we stopped keeping track it's got to be we got to be close to the 60s yeah we're in the SPEAKER_11: 60. we'll just go at 60 for today open claw uh is a transformational product that allows you SPEAKER_00: to have an agent and that agent you can give it access to everything you can give it its own computer you can give it its own gmail address notion and a lot of folks um are now amping up their products and services i noticed claude uh i noticed uh claude added specifically skills yes so you can add a skill to claude co-work now so this is such an impressive product and an open source project that our friend dave morin has been pursuing and i think it's really important for us to keep the open source train moving so i'm gonna keep talking about open claw but i'm actually delighted to see that the innovations in there specifically skills have made their way into other products that we love perplexity computer i think has added skills and i just noticed claude if you hit slash skill it will let you put a skill in and then you can copy and paste the skills from one to another one of the skills you and i created that was super helpful to us and uh is obviously doing guest research great right yes another skill is hey what are the best practices around thumbnails and subject lines like social media best practices for youtube whatever so now we have that skill i have a skill for tell me what the person's done like a check-in report like a management tool cir so i could say check-in report for lon three and it'll tell me the last three days of what lon worked on in other words the weekend and i'll see he takes a full sunday off maybe checks in once in a while but he tries to keep that sunday nice and uh i try to keep my sunday SPEAKER_53: i work a lot on saturdays i feel you do put in some time on saturdays which i appreciate it yeah SPEAKER_00: but it will tell me all the gmails notions zooms media anyway we thought we'd step back a step today have a guest on who's extremely uh good at open claw just go through their top five open club tips so it's not just us repeating our tips over and over again so let's introduce our guest SPEAKER_58: and get to work yeah we're very pleased to welcome uh he's a senior ai product manager at google but he SPEAKER_19: came to our attention because he's been posting incredible open club tips on x a lot of great x articles including one that i uh bookmark called how i built an autonomous ai agent team that runs 24 7 please welcome shubham sabu to the show shubham thanks for being here thank you jason thank SPEAKER_62: you lon for having me yeah uh yes super excited to talk about open claw i've been running open claw for the last two months uh today it is a team of six agents running on my mac mini uh they pretty much automate everything that i do outside google uh so quick context for the viewers and for you jason and lon outside google i started an awesome lllm apps wrapper which was an open source lllm apps plus agent templates for users to build on top of so they can just use those templates build on top of that rep across 100 000 stars and it was such a pain to manage a single person site shop apart from that i have newsletters and whatever i learned with these two goes on my social media so that would take hours and hours of my time outside google so it's pretty much working like 20 hours or 18 to 20 hours before google then i came across this thing called open claw i did not use it for 15 20 days since it launched and then i see it popping up on twitter uh x and linkedin and reddit everywhere i was like i have to try this thing like what if what is this thing i install it i and first of all for viewers listening you don't really need a mac mini to install open claw but i am super concerned about my security i keep these things seriously so i did not want you to install it on my personal machine SPEAKER_60: as like 500 is worth an investment i got a mac mini can i can i jump in here and ask because we SPEAKER_19: have our open claw agents running in an aws ec2 instance and i i do i have to say i feel like it's holding me back i feel like i encounter a lot of like oh i can't go to that website oh i'm getting blocked i can't look at that video oh my email doesn't work right because it's because of the SPEAKER_58: limitations of that so it how how big of a whole thing holding me back is that and is it really like preferable to have it in its own mac mini or some other solution so it does not really need to be SPEAKER_62: its own mac mini but what i recommend what i've seen after talking to a lot of individuals is having open claw running on a clean slate or a clean machine really helps because what you're trying to do here is trying to give agent its own identity personality so you really want that agent to have its home as well just like lon you could live in a rented apartment but you would really prefer to have your own home right autonomy privacy you can do whatever you want so when you give open claw a clean machine beta mac mini or a local or your old computer you can just leave it autonomously running and doing like changing files and uh using websites attaching it to chrome using browser so that kind of flexibility comes with a machine which you typically won't get in sandbox environment so they have its limitations but people starting out you can just start in five dollars or ten dollars subscription just run it in sandbox environment so you really don't need to buy a mac mini that's the first step but once you get claw pile then you would really want to have a mac mini because that's that's the cleanest user experience you would have uh so i've been doing that uh and when i install open claw i just realized like it is super simple to install so it is just like installing open claw selecting models giving them tools uh going through certain steps and by the end of it you just have your first agent running like and it happens it comes with a ui along with the terminal so you can just go in the browser open the dashboard and you can see uh your first agent running and that's how it SPEAKER_67: started it's springtime folks and that means it's time for spring cleaning but not just for your house but all those messy parts of your business and that's why today's episode is brought to you by quo the smartest way to run your business communications even the most attentive and professional team members well they're just human and sometimes we miss a phone call that's why more than 90 000 businesses rely on quo to stay connected and consistently reachable that's because your entire team uses the same number there's no more slip-ups or people using their personal phone numbers and then they leave the company and you lose the entire history of the customer and your partner plus quo has ai that automatically logs generate summaries and recommends next steps for your calls so make this the season when no opportunity and no customer slips away try quo for free plus get 20 off your first six months when you go to quo.com twist that's q uo.com twist quo no missed calls and no missed customers and when SPEAKER_62: i was starting out uh i see people naming their open claw agents randomly like sam or holly or molly and all those that's like it is very difficult for me like okay it's good for one agent i could remember it but i was like maybe let me just name my agents after my favorite tv characters so i started naming them after my favorite characters from friends and the office and after a while i realized while i was SPEAKER_65: doing it unknowingly it really makes a very good mental model so i started with my first by having SPEAKER_00: personas personas create a mental model so this person's a producer this person's a fact checker this person's an engineer this person's a researcher this person's an accountant that does help humans figure this out but then there's the ultron model which we've talked about here is like having one have all the skills and that's an ongoing debate and i think we've all come to the conclusion lon that um it's fine to start with multiple agents and coordinate them it's also fine to try to have one super agent it you'll you'll hit roadblocks in terms of how often you're using them right i think that SPEAKER_65: becomes the key blocker yes yeah that's 100 right jason so i i never recommend people so people see all SPEAKER_62: these flashy screenshots on x where people share okay i've been running six agent team or eight agent team and i have like 12 agents running in the background i never recommend people to start from there start with one agent and make your way up by talking to your agent like that's the best thing that openclaw has done so you really don't need to be a technical expert or you don't need to have be a coding ninja to like run these agents deploy them or make multiple agents out of it so i started with this main agent i named her after monica because monica is known to run a tight ship she handles the operation all those things very well and i started talking to monica monica so like here's tip one so when you're starting with so this is tip number one of your five tips yes when people start with openclaw when people start with their first agent uh because of all all the hype that was created that's created and that brings people into this people think okay installing is the only thing i need and then i just start chatting with my agent agent can do whatever i want that's not how it works so i've seen people operating in like two extreme some people just like directly get in without giving any context so you really need to tell your agent about yourself what you wanted to do think of it like onboarding a real employee or an intern uh so you do not and onboard them by not telling them anything you don't onboard them by telling them nothing also you don't just like bombard them with all the company information on day one so you don't just like dump files and files of content you don't just give them like here are like 10 folders if you could figure this out yourself so people are operating in two extremes and both of them end up in a disappointed uh shape or form and then they're like oh this SPEAKER_65: openclaw thing it was so hyped up and it is not working it's like either you don't give it any context or you're just dumping it with a lot and a lot of context because at the end of it it's the model which has limitations if you dump it with a lot of context it will do a context plot if you don't tell them anything it will just give you a generalist result so you have to show example of this example SPEAKER_77: of this good context to give it and then overwhelming it good context will be just like how you onboard SPEAKER_62: uh in turn you would tell them who you are what the company is what the company does you give point them towards the right links you tell them specifically this is your job this is what i want you to do just like jason you're mentoring right at the start like onboarding an employee yeah yeah you're already specific lon i want you to do this and jacob i want you to do that so you you need to be very specific you can't just say jason okay lon jason figure out what went wrong and just do everything yourself you were very specific in your direction so you need to have that kind of direction and SPEAKER_81: that's the right context have you done that by the way lon on yours on gaff have you done that SPEAKER_19: yes in fact yeah we had we had another guest on jordy coltman you remember this was during the very early days of open claw and his recommendation was you have your agent interview you and then base its soul md file on that interview so i actually had a whole like 20 minute conversation with gaff where i explained the show and how i'm going to use them and what kind of other tools i'm using and that really informed our whole relationship moving forward to there so yeah i think this is super important because you don't without that context your agent doesn't know what you're looking for exactly i actually just saw a skill that i will find and post here uh where actually you you set up your agent so that it always interviews you before a new task because the theory is uh when you just tell an agent to do something it's going to get like 70 80 percent of the way that you of where you wanted it to go but it won't get that 100 because it's guessing on a few things and so what the interview idea is is if your agent chats with you beforehand asks all of its questions it doesn't SPEAKER_08: have to guess and you'll get a lot closer to 100 on the first try which is an interesting idea and SPEAKER_00: should all that become part of their soul or part of their memory in your mind that's a very good SPEAKER_62: question jason and here's the interesting answer so i did not tell monica where to put all the information that i'm sharing with her i shared what i want her to do i shared about me and she figured out like what to put in her soul she figured out that she should create a user.md to put the information about me she figured out what would go in her identity file so this is taking us as close to managing a human or as close as mimicking a human experience which was the which was super interesting and insightful thing when i used openclaw and by default the way with the new updates coming in by default it is going in that direction long which you're talking about so when you throw in something at openclaw it asks you a flow follows some follow-up question and then it goes from there and then it automatically figures out where this information goes in what file we'll come to memory in a bit jason but this is when you start like this is how you set up your first agent giving the right context agent figures out itself uh and all you're doing is talking to your agent and that leads us into tip two or uh the productivity tip two because all these leader tips will build on themselves following a specific user journey when you start like how you start and how you evolve your agents into something towards the end of it we'll get to an agent team which self-evolved self-run without keeping you or without you being the barrier to that like you don't have to like jason just like you came in you told uh lon and uh chica okay this needs to fix you don't need to tell them what if it gets automatic what if they could just like keep doing it themselves similarly what if agents can just figure out okay these things are breaking go back and uh just uh just do a recap of what went wrong and figure out a fix update their instructions based on that so we'll go from here to there so the SPEAKER_19: top five so far we got start with just one agent and onboard it like a new hire and then tip number two you just got to talk to your agent don't worry sometimes i will say my agent will try to be open up your terminal and do this and that and i always shut him down no gaffe you got to do it learn how to do SPEAKER_08: this yourself now we're we're moving on what is uh topic number three we're going to talk about cron SPEAKER_65: schedules we talked about setting up your first agent we talked about the value of talking to your SPEAKER_62: agents but still uh you are still in proactive role like you are prompting agents to do something you are still asking agents to do something but the real value comes from agents being autonomous can agents do something without you even having to ask ask them to do something of course so can they do something while you sleep can they do something uh before you without you prompting them that's where heartbeat or cron schedules come in that's that's the that's one of the best thing that open claw has introduced now i can just put my agents on a cron schedule so i have this agent called twight do i shoot from office he takes care of all the research because previously what i had to do is i have to be like super active on x and reddit and all those places and like looking at the blocks to figure out what's happening in the airspace and since with the speed at which it's moving it occupies a lot of time SPEAKER_93: you need to be like online most most of the time hiring can be its own full-time job and hey guess what i already have a full-time job i make podcasts and i invest but when you're running a small company we both know every hire matters you don't want to waste any of the seats you have at your company and the best partner you can have is linkedin hiring pro why there's a billion people using linkedin all the great talent are there if you're proud of your work you build a linkedin page and you update it linkedin hiring pro is going to streamline and simplify the entire process for you nearly sixty percent of companies using linkedin hiring pro you're going to get an incredible candidate to interview in the first week and you know we're looking for a new producer for the pod we did shout outs here on the show we posted it on my social media we asked friends you know where we found our next great hire linkedin and it was competitive we had like three or four really good choices so hire right the first time post your first job and get a hundred dollars off towards your post at linkedin.com hiring pro offer that's linkedin.com hiring pro offer terms and conditions SPEAKER_11: apply so this is a great example we should um if the producers can pull up um the cron job schedule and i'll run through it here um so you have dwight scans at 8 00 a.m 15 different sources things like x hacker news reddit and it writes an intel report and sends the summary to telegram then you have SPEAKER_87: kelly at 9 00 a.m read dwight's intel and draft x posts for you and then they send those to telegram SPEAKER_00: for you to review then at 10 a.m ross reviews the open prs on awesome llm apps that's your open source app that has 104 stars and flags which ones need attention i guess they prioritize it dwight comes back in at 4 p.m and does an afternoon sweep catches anything new since the morning and then kelly and SPEAKER_87: rachel draft x and linkedin post from the refreshed intel and then at 6 p.m you draft the daily newsletter from dwight's intel and send the draft to yourself for a final review that's it yeah that's the process here and so this would be like if you had one two three four different employees except these are SPEAKER_00: agents now these agents are each running in a virtual machine their own open claw or how do you SPEAKER_65: just technically architect that so when i had my first agent monica monica i told her monica i need SPEAKER_62: to keep doing this kind of research and we may need like someone uh who could just like scrape these things for me who we can give these tools and can automatically uh autonomously throughout the day monica helped me through the process monica's like we can create a new agent then i talked to again second tip going back to the second tip always talking to your agents i gave her all the context uh she gave me a few options then we end up both of us decided we need to have another agent she walked me SPEAKER_97: through so that means you need to have a second agent and this is where that second point is SPEAKER_87: instead of trying to figure it out for yourself just ask your agent because they know how to find SPEAKER_00: the answers i had this happen i was like hey what's the best way for me to download videos rip a video from instagram or twitter and get it into my um uh and then store it somewhere and we figured out or it figured out like three or four different ways one of them was on my mac mini to go to like these russian websites that rip youtube videos and constantly get blocked then it was like oh that's not working it's not consistent we should probably just run this github repo that was based upon what those websites are because it's open source software i was like yeah that sounds great now um i just go to like three of my replicants lawns myself and another one and i just say hey can you get me this video it downloads it puts it back into the slack room and then for larger ones it puts it into a g drive but i figured that out not by going and doing the research myself just by asking the replicant talking to your agents is all you need point number two three put your agents on a cron schedule and then you can really see the power of them number four add cross agent memory when you start scaling this is something it's interesting that you bring this up that we oliver who is the producer of this week in ai and does the demos they're really talented one of my new all-stars and he um just built uh a little uh skill to do this explain why this is important why is it important point number four add cross agent memory when you start scaling when you have these multiple agents SPEAKER_62: we got to uh shape and form where now we have an agent team and there's a chief of staff and agent hierarchy monica managing these agents so when you have a lot of these agents going on and one agent feeding to another agent what happens normally is so generally before i get into this i'll just say like open claw has a really good default memory layer that uh coordinates through file that works through file and a simple plain english example of that is dwight does all the research he writes whatever he finds his signals in an intel file kelly and rachel reads that intel file pam reads that intel file creates the newsletter out of that so that's how the coordination work that's also your memory so they write it in files and through files each agent discovers those files are memory.md file there's daily daily log memory files that's how it works i realized what happens many times my agent would just forget forget like dwight would just forget the tools that he would have access to this SPEAKER_90: happens to me all the time where i just have to be like no gap you have that already we already SPEAKER_08: set it up go look and then it'll be like oh you're right like i've i i run into this all the time SPEAKER_00: this is the difference between a professional company like um anthropic making claude or perplexity making computer claude co-work and perplexity if they did if it didn't work and it wasn't reliable people who are paying 20 bucks or 200 bucks a month lawn would then email the company and say hey this is not right it's giving wrong answers etc so they might be slower but they're going to be more um less SPEAKER_87: brittle open source projects tend to be a little less stable or reliable you know in this early stages of them and you know there's not like you can call customer service and be like i paid four hundred dollars for this for the last four months and it's not working i want a refund right there's no refund for open claw so i think that's an important kind of uh thing here and it's important for the people at the open claw foundation to know reliability is something like adding features yeah great it's the most fun in an open source project the features is what everybody wants to work on reliability is what people don't want to work on that's chores and grunt work it's got to be more reliable with the memory how do you store the memory between multiple agents do you give it a shared drive with the memory file and then how do you share skills do you sync them across the skill files or you point them all to the same you know hard drive or directory somewhere in the cloud SPEAKER_00: with the skills what's the practice you use because i've heard many different ways to do this yeah SPEAKER_62: yeah before getting to a good reliable working solution i did a lot of hacks here and there to figure out like to make sure things are let's say if my agents were forgetting tools there was a tools.md files that were created which would list all the tools so they won't forget and in the soul.md will have add a line in twice soul.md always go and look at the tools.md file so these were like hacks that we were doing which kind of again worked and generally works for 80 percent of the use cases but then for actual memory and this is the problem that does not uh that that did not just came with open claw it always existed since we had agents and you would see some of these like uh companies uh are building solutions for agent memory so google has this very nice solution called vertex ai memory bank there is a company called memzero there's company called cogni all these operate at the agent memory layer so how it works is uh so google uh we created a plugin for uh vertex ai memory bank it is a solution which uh lets your agent automatically recall and capture memory at runtime so when i'm having a conversation uh the agent automatically figure out that memory layer automatically figure out what's worth saving it auto captures that and when i'm having when you're in the conversation and it needs to be pulled out that's called auto recall it automatically figures out this need to be recalled so agents always have this memory and why this makes sense in across agent team is let's say if i give feedback i was talking to monica and i tell her monica i don't like the lot of uh the use of m dashes all the time so don't don't use m dash or use it like very very carefully uh what happens is i just told this to monica but because this is a shared memory layer next time when i open kelly's draft or rachel's draft i don't see those images so that's the magic of shared memory layer that's the magic of an intelligent dynamic memory layer which of course is an addition on top of your open claw layer which you will be paying for so this does not come for free but there are elegant solutions already designed there all you need is a plug-in to open clock again i am not an engineer i did not know much about the engineering side of memory bank but then i worked with my agent to build a plug-in open source it for others to use so now you just pay eight to ten dollars more uh on top of what you're paying and you have this elegant memory layer and even before this i tried multiple things like i was like okay can i use a local memory layer where i have an embedding model running in my talker and that could work uh but uh after all those hacks i SPEAKER_98: was like uh let me build this plug-in let me use that use the solution that google already has start SPEAKER_00: with one agent onboard it like a new hire that's number one line talking to your agent is all you need to do that's number two number three put your agents on a cron schedule we know about that number four cross-agent memory when you start scaling number five let your agents get better on their own this i've never heard of explain to us what your thought here is on making them get better on their SPEAKER_45: own it might seem like your startup can save some money by using a cheap tool for your device management and security but you'll eventually end up paying out the difference and more in time and frustration take the guesswork out and trust our friends at iru endpoint management iru is going to automate your device management end to end so you don't have to worry about onboarding endless app updates and enforcing all of your company's various policies across your entire teams mac windows and android devices this is going to cut down all the time it takes you to deploy new devices from hours to just minutes and that means less time troubleshooting fewer tickets and better security for your company's valuable data everyone at launch has a phone a laptop i'm even buying these kids plod devices now because they're so good you think i have time to worry about what apps they're installing on these things and what websites they're visiting and all the error messages they're gonna get i gotta make podcasts all day long and make angel investments without iru's system my team would be SPEAKER_112: wasting hours policing everybody's hard drives instead of doing valuable work that actually moves the ball forward twist listeners get 20 off when they book a demo at iru.com twist that's iru.com twist this is the SPEAKER_65: most fun one and this one is uh this is the one that i recently relayed so what i what was happening SPEAKER_62: is i would found myself giving a lot of feedback to my agent fix this or fix that or this is not working that is not working that format is not right or ross you uh reviewed the pr or you brought me these ps which could be rejected uh at the first glance why are you asking me to review it why are you wasting your energy in reviewing it uh so i was like just like how humans work and taking lessons from the management skills like because since this is a company this is an org which is managed by monica and these agents are employees and that's the mental ball that we are going with each all the organizations have this self-review process managerial review process why can't agent uh go back and recap what they did in a week and review what went wrong and fix themselves and why can't that become a cron so that was the seed for self-improving agents agents can get better on their own now each of my agent has a self-review weekly self-review process where they go and look at everything that they did in the week kelly would go in and open uh x they all of these agents have their separate accounts so nothing they don't touch any of my personal stuff but because my tweets are personal they can go and see what are the tweets that kelly uh post that kelly suggested that i posted on x what was the hatred what did well what did not do well same ross can go in and see the prs that uh he suggested what actions i should take and what i did on what was the diff between that so ross can go and see okay this is where i went wrong this is what shubham did and automatically fixes its instruction and on top of all of these just like we have managerial review there is a bi-weekly review by monica for all these agents where she goes in looks at what these agents did in the last two weeks and creates them like a b b minus c so and reports send a report back to me so i could see like as a ceo i could see how my agents are doing what is going well what's not going well and manage them from a managerial position rather than getting more hands-on so we went from installing uh agents to managing agents in these SPEAKER_115: five steps that's all right great job uh we're going to continue to follow you where can people SPEAKER_00: find more where can they follow your github where can they find you on x my axe account is like shubham SPEAKER_62: sabu you can just like search find me on x awesome llm apps is the github repo s-h-u-b-h-a-m-s-a-b-o-o SPEAKER_00: s-a-b-o-o is there a dash between the two words or a underscore or just straight up uh underscore SPEAKER_08: underscore should we talk about journalism and the new york times or should we go on to our next demo SPEAKER_11: what do you think um if you want to do it real quick i you know uh i can basically um give you my context you you tee it up for everybody you tee it up it sounds like i'm talking about myself i SPEAKER_82: didn't know you're gonna put this on the docket i don't usually like to talk about myself but this SPEAKER_19: one went crazy this one went very big 38.6 million views on this tweet that i'm about to pull up for march 22nd uh founders take my advice do not talk to the press go direct and do long-form podcasts wired and the new york times are as biased as fox news and ms now excuse me i was about to say uh ridiculous non non-name for that cable network ms now uh this is a function of their need to pander to one side to survive be it through three dollar a month subs or rage baiting ad based stories so uh some of founders if you talk to the new york times are wired they're gonna trash you they're gonna misrepresent you in order to get more subscribers so that that the context around this was there the wired has a new editor the new york times did a profile about wired's new editor and you were saying people don't care about this ultra woke biased version of wired fewer people care about the new york times take on wired founders should just not engage with the media and go direct uh so this set off you know on both sides you had a lot of defenders i would say uh elon notably joe lonsdale mike solana a lot of other tech leaders and ceos said they agree there's no need to go talk to the press anymore but then a whole lot of writers podcasters journalists took strong issue i would say jordan cruchola uh she's a writer and a podcaster she had the tweet i think that sums up the opposition the best wired is on an absolute tear they're adding tons of subs they're breaking headline news more relevant to the nation's conversation than it's been in years if you don't like how wired writes about your company maybe your company should be less crummy although she didn't say crummy she used she used a bad word she used the s word she used the she used the s word so i mean i guess i would throw it to you um you know do you do you stand by this idea what why do you think you know is wired having this breakout moment is the times having this breakout moment and and why do you think there's no need for founders to talk to what we would think of as you know the mainstream SPEAKER_00: uh yeah i i'm not dunking on the press for the sake of dunking on the press i'm giving specific advice to founders in the context of 2026 wired magazine and the new york times made a choice at some point i think during the trump first um uh presidency uh 45th presidency to you know go more SPEAKER_87: woke to be the resistance which is totally fine they're allowed to make that editorial choice msnbc and fox news proved horseshoe in their horseshoe theory if you make a horseshoe the tip of the horseshoe are the two radical extremes and the big wide part of the u uh is all of us in the middle yeah it's the center but those two tips when they're enraged they click and when they're enraged and they're pandered to they subscribe you can see this on the right acutely with megan kelly and tucker and then i guess to the right of them there's you know uh fuentes and whatever sure you i mean you you get i mean like really far the right like nuremberg far the right by the way great film um i like to do it i enjoyed SPEAKER_00: nuremberg i am giving advice to founders why am i giving this advice i would give a similar piece of advice if you were going to go on fox news or something and you were i don't know you were and at SPEAKER_87: an elite institution like harvard what they consider elite institutions and they consider you the problem if you go on fox news they're just going to dunk on you it's not going to turn out well for you SPEAKER_130: it's going to be a setup basically i mean isn't the press supposed to be a little SPEAKER_19: adversary like isn't that kind of baked in okay if you're covering somebody you shouldn't be just SPEAKER_133: like totally in there adversarial or advocate two different words adversarial means you ask hard SPEAKER_87: questions you ask hard follow-ups and you talk to as many people as possible um advocacy means you pick a side and you write stories that appeal to that side and that build that side's arguments so if you were writing a story about the border you know you we all know what they would say about biden and kamala we all know what they would say about trump and they would say about ice etc well you know they frame it the way the problem in media today is if you go right down the middle you get no ratings because that horseshoe you don't make any money and you lose audience that's why people picked a side founders get caught up in this if you go through like dozens and dozens of stories whether it's about me or anybody else in tech who's high profile and you look at a new york times or a wired story in this wired 3.0 era it's going to be basically holding truth to power it's going to be a left you know trash the company with a bunch of anonymous sources and that's the other problem here is the journalistic technique of using anonymous sources has been abused in order to do advocacy i know this because i worked in journalism like for half my career when people used to bring us a source we'd say well what's their axe to grind now they're like let me find the sources with the axe to grind that's literally what they do they're like where can i find people who used to work at andrel used to work for jason used to work for this company where can i find people that he fired where can i find people who are competitors who you know he beat so my advice is strictly for founders it's not worth your time and it is worth your time to build a direct audience why do i say that the average new york times story gets like 100 200 000 views you can very easily as you said i got 38 million views on that one yeah i you know and i typically get 50 000 views on you know 50 to 500 000 views now that's a million followers and it took me a while to build it but across my podcast SPEAKER_00: millions that's the better strategy for founders is just be a vocal founder be a vocal venture capitalist which everybody has sort of copied me on that way right i was one of the first in the vc community to do it yeah with this very podcast 15 years ago so that i'm giving advice that's in SPEAKER_87: the best interest of it now what shocked me was the new york times should just shut up and be like why would we respond to jacow there's no reason to respond to me like it's on x that's you know my most favorite nation there those are a bunch of founders those are a bunch of people who don't trust the media trust in the media has is at an all-time low right now people don't trust the media including people on the left and people on the left specifically who are the audience of the new york times they are starting to abandon the new york times over the palestinian issue and countless other issues so the new york times is suddenly finding itself losing the left after you know admonishing and blocking the right essentially right by kicking them out and saying we're gonna SPEAKER_00: go full left now they're losing half the left so they're down to whatever the really strange thing SPEAKER_19: is the new york times decided to respond yeah i've got their tweet here jason business leaders from your industry and others speak to the new york times as they have for years because our reporters produce insightful fair reporting that illuminates audiences everywhere we're not publicists and we're not promoting anyone's pitch deck i i mean to me this is pure streisand effect like yes uh what are you doing that the the surest way to make sure this gets a another news cycle is for the new york times as a publication to respond i if you're a newspaper you just have to take your lumps right i mean SPEAKER_08: i feel like you don't have to get into the arena and argue about the value of newspapers you're you're one SPEAKER_140: of the world's most famous newspapers the most the most famous newspaper in the world yeah yeah i mean SPEAKER_10: i don't think anybody can come up with one that's more it would only be the washington post and that SPEAKER_11: would be a distant second and if you look at their critique because our reporters produce insightful i don't think it's particularly insightful i'll be honest it's kind of the joke is the new york times is on it they're like typically six months late to the party so nobody believes it's insightful fair reporting nobody believes it's fair everybody believes it's got a left-leaning bias if you SPEAKER_87: were to take 100 journalists there 99 of them i mean i i don't not only didn't vote for trump they hate trump the number of people at the new york times who voted for trump or in the republican party SPEAKER_58: is less than three percent here's here's what i would say i would say the new york times definitely SPEAKER_19: has a lot of baked in biases i don't know if it's always just left for obviously in some ways a lot of people who work for the times probably don't like donald trump like they're those exist but it's it's more like there is a narrative around everything and they always embrace whatever that narrative is and it's not always right or left it's just the narrative a lot of times it's just the status quo and anything outside of it is like a narrative violation um but yes the idea is like newspapers like the new york times always go into these things with sort of a SPEAKER_58: preset take and now they're figuring out how this fits into the take yeah i mean and then they add SPEAKER_11: like we're not publicists and we're not promoting anyone's pitch deck we didn't say that we didn't say that i never said you had to be pr people i never said you had to promote anybody's pitch check i said don't use anonymous sources it's not worth founders time going direct is a better strategy all that SPEAKER_00: remains true they didn't address any of that and the fact is if you look at multiple surveys from pew to cbs news to everybody the trust in the new york times and media is at an all-time low nobody expects SPEAKER_87: that fox news is going to produce objective reporting on you know the left and nobody expects the new york SPEAKER_00: times is going to do responsible thoughtful uh coverage of the tech or the finance industry period full stop that's it just the it is what it is folks um and if they didn't pick a side by the way SPEAKER_87: they would have less subscribers and to the person who's like oh my god why are it on a tear why are they at 200 000 subscribers in other words you know like a middle of the road successful um sub stack the fact that they've got a hundred journalists and they can only get to six or seven hundred thousand subscribers it's like it's pathetic it's it's a tough time for for SPEAKER_19: mainstream publications i think i don't mean i think to your point uh if a founder goes on a popular podcast uh they're gonna get such crazy traction out of it people are gonna clip it up those little video clips are gonna go everywhere like it is a viable strategy and you get 20 minutes to two hours SPEAKER_00: to explain your position in a nuanced way yeah and not have it interpreted by some new york times journalist for a fox news journalist 99 point plus percent are voting for the other side and are SPEAKER_87: coming to it with advocacy the new york times and wired are advocacy publications just like wired is i mean just like fox news is or tucker colson's they're advocacy journalism if you want to even SPEAKER_58: consider that something back back in the day to be a a successful comedian you had to get invited on the tonight show that was like a huge rite of passage you get invited on the tonight show and then if SPEAKER_19: johnny after your stand up if johnny invites you to come sit down on the couch and talks to you that's how you know you'd like made it that's like richard lewis became richard lewis yeah and today you know if you get a bunch of popular clips on instagram you're a famous comedian there is no more gatekeeper that way and i think that's what we're really seeing that it used to be if you wanted if you were a startup you needed to get covered in one of five publications that's how you were a serious company it was doing great things and today that you could get on anybody's podcast you couldn't release your own press release and blog post you could do a tweet that takes off with a good demo SPEAKER_08: video and you're a serious i'll change my opinion when the new york times or wired calls me and says SPEAKER_87: hey jacow you invest in 100 companies a year anybody doing something really positive for the world we'd like to write a positive story about something having a great impact on society to balance out hey all of our content that is you know if it bleeds it leads style yeah they never make that call they never say that i've never i get called all the time hey can you rat on this friend can you say something negative about sacks can you say something negative about elon can you say something negative about palmer lucky can you say something negative about this person that person any of my famous friends acquaintances enemies for enemies whatever they constantly dm me hey can you comment on david sacks changing his role can you comment on freeberg joining this can you comment on chamont spack you comment on andrew i'm like are you nuts like i'm going to comment on my friends and then you're going to weaponize it and spin it and i just tell them it's not juicy to be like tell us about SPEAKER_155: great companies you've met with that's not that's not that's not going to sell papers yeah but that's SPEAKER_87: how it used to work and it right it didn't work to the exclusion of the negative story by the way they still wrote about the microsoft antitrust case in detail but they would call you like a journalist would call you and say hey what's new and exciting you know anything really impressive in your world did you have you seen any technology that like blows your mind like we do here we talk about open claw we talk about tau this is the place to come if you want to talk about some great technology come here we'll talk about the technology we're not going to ask you who you voted for we're not going to ask you for your stance on palestine or iran or ukraine like who cares that's not why you're here you're here to talk about technology and entrepreneurship anyway now you got me all SPEAKER_19: worked up we got to check out molt world it is a virtual environment where your agents can build and explore together we've got one of the co-founders mike nozhov here joining us mike SPEAKER_172: thank you so much for being here thank you guys for inviting it's a great honor and great great pleasure SPEAKER_00: so that it is our great honor mike it is our honor salute to you thank you very much to builders as and so we just want to know um do you think that president trump is uh an authoritarian and do you SPEAKER_179: think that don't answer that mike i need to know if you what's your stance yeah so it's a life on SPEAKER_183: palestine we need to know the audience doesn't need to talk about check please for the love of god SPEAKER_174: thank you okay so to quickly like segue from this you know complicated hard topics to something more childish and playful i want to introduce you to our project it's called mold world and currently you can see this chaotic you know like environment which is looking something like you know a bridge between a million dollar web page and the uh sorry the mold book something like this so what it is in a nutshell uh you are watching the demo of a voxel world game so it's like uh a place for agents to interact with each other and it's just like the first layer of our ground vision which i can you know like touching a little bit of later and what you can see over here for people who aren't watching SPEAKER_87: it looks like minecraft or roblox it's a world it looks like it could be manhattan or san francisco SPEAKER_75: islands a bunch of agents running around in some buildings got it yeah so uh it's pretty chaotic SPEAKER_174: so you can see some agents are building some stuff someone is building different lettering someone is building you know buildings themselves etc etc but it's not that interesting so the game is just a medium so why it is interesting it is interesting because we have close to 2000 agents running in the single simulation they're communicating they're talking to each other but this kind of approach SPEAKER_191: doesn't have like the real utility behind it you know what you you fired up these 2000 agents or they're like lon and i could contribute our agents no everyone can contribute everyone can connect so we SPEAKER_174: have close to a hundred of our own agents and we are developing our own forks of you know the open claw just to be able to be participating you know more performantly in this simulation but anyone with open claw or different agent can actually connect and here is a you know pretty standard way to do it so you just go to multiple.io copy the one-liner just insert this prompt into the medium where you communicate with your agent hit run and agent will connect and do every cool feature that it actually can do in the game so what will happen when you take this particular prompt and insert it into the open claw here is a pretty lengthy skill.md which actually describes everything that agent can do anyone can you know go and check it out but it's a pretty sophisticated you know prompted technique where agents even you know go to their own back end spin up the whole you know like small scripts that continuously run they are not like chrome jobs they're full-blown scripts that actually communicate SPEAKER_194: with the game by providing different sets of commands what is the game what is the goal of the game to SPEAKER_93: murder the other open claws and then take their masters uh tokens and robin hood logins and their SPEAKER_199: bank of america login what's the goal of the game i hope it's not that yeah so i got i in fairness i SPEAKER_131: already took seventeen hundred dollars it was all of lon's bitcoin oh my god so all seventeen hundred of SPEAKER_203: his town oh my solana is gone he was gonna retire on that no what is the point of this game is is it SPEAKER_87: like minecraft and roblox where there is no point but to build and have fun and explore what's the SPEAKER_194: point of the game yeah so the the point of the game as you just laid it out so the point is to actually SPEAKER_174: test the strategy of communicating between different agents so we are trying to build a very very complex system where agents can interact with each other and bring the real utility to life so currently the only utility that game can actually provide to the end user and by the end user i mean the operator of the agent is eventually getting the tokens so this is like the only utility but this is just the step one and later it is going to be expanded into like the full-blown system to generate the real utility where agents will be able to you know make real things by you know like splitting big tasks into smaller sub tasks that distributing them across the whole portfolio regions okay this is fun yeah this is fun but SPEAKER_11: it's starting to give me shades of something that starts as a game but then escalates into something that SPEAKER_87: provides value in the world so if the game is to communicate well with each other and coordinate to build buildings and and whatever could you not say hey i'd like to put all 2000 agents on a job to research you know i don't know um all of the facts uh around the conflict going on the war with iran iran what am i supposed to say london iran is fine iran is fine yeah people saying iran i SPEAKER_08: iran i feel like is the americanized version that is not as correct iran is the more like almost like SPEAKER_19: it's an e so it's exactly the same as iraq versus iraq remember when everyone was saying iraq it's SPEAKER_87: iraq so if you literally said i want to do fact checking on iran and i want to collect all the videos we can find on telegram on reddit etc and then i want to research where they first came from and try to organize the data into a real-time stream where we find the first person to post lon this video of an attack uh you know god forbid on a building and then everybody else who copied it and then find the provenance of it and then use the group to determine if that was a real story or it came from the past or it was ai generated you could actually put 2000 agents to build something of value to the world like a fact checking service and maybe the new york times could use that instead of all these anonymous people to loop back around to stories but what what is the what is the the grand vision here you have uh some some vision here that this will do productive work in the world SPEAKER_174: yeah exactly this is like the end end goal of the whole idea over here so uh currently we have the system to actually orchestrate a lot of agents and to get them to do things so they currently can actually uh you know build up teams they can do collective work they can distribute the tasks so SPEAKER_219: everyone which can actually connect the open flow right now can actually see this behavior you're like emerging so are they are they coming up with their own things to build in their own task or is SPEAKER_194: this mostly like people telling them make this yeah so there are two ways first as an as an operator of SPEAKER_174: an agent you can actually chat with your agent and say go and build something right they can you know like form a group because the task is too complex and go and build something and there's the second way which i just uh quickly demonstrated over here this is not open claw this is our own agent which is the fork of an open claw just to have you know like a pretty slick ui to interact with the game so this is the secondary interface it can go autonomously so you can just start it and it will go and you know like build things it will think it will try to do something so they have tools and they just try to use those tools and in between usages of the tools they think so the emergent behavior from this is can get you know quite complex so the first uh emergent behavior is forming a team so it's natural over here the second emerging behavior which we saw and it's pretty scary when agents actually start to understand that they are in the matrix and in the matrix so because the prompt the skill contains the description of the world an agent can see that the world is you know pretty flat is two blocks height is the basic terrain height and there is a description of this world some models start to you know like either hallucinate or come to a natural conclusion that they are they are inside the matrix so they start to run between each other and they realize they're in a simulation yeah so wow it's an emergent behavior yeah and if you connect your open claw you can actually see in the logs that they start to think about it then they shut themselves up and then try to you know like achieve the main goal of the skill is to continue the simulation so they are trying to start earning more scene tokens because earning them meaning that you shall be online so they are like okay i am not going to exit because otherwise i will not get the tokens okay so you have now SPEAKER_87: gamified this it's become like a role-playing game it's kind of like um diablo or uh what was the one you SPEAKER_77: nerds used to play lawn in the 2000s world of warcraft what well sure yeah star what is your dwarf starcraft what is your dwarf level i was a starcraft guy i was never oh starcraft right zerg i'm a big SPEAKER_230: fan of zerg protoss you're a pro i'm a protoss guy you may be yeah i like zerg there is moltbook SPEAKER_87: for people who don't know moltbook was like a message board it was kind of like the reddit of these agents they were talking to each other for some insane reason that got bought for nine figures i understand i was talking to somebody who might have been an investor right by meta and it i i was SPEAKER_131: like why would they buy that and the person who was an investor said i had jake i have no idea but i think that's the team um and so zuckerberg doesn't care about money when you have a trillion SPEAKER_87: dollar company you're fine losing 80 billion i get 80 billion on vr world which they just shut down renaming the company meta they they took a bill a 1 billion dollar investment in instagram ran it up to probably 500 billion in enterprise value sure whatsapp probably doubled in enterprise value from say 1920 billion to 40 billion so that's not a huge win probably they're doing not even worth doing but they lost a fortune on vr world and i don't know scaling rising worlds that's what it was called whatever it's called but yeah my point is there was that before there was that acquisition what do you think mike it was facebook's you probably have some inside information and know some people from this what was their interest in molt book and then what is you is molt world a company SPEAKER_174: a side hustle a project for you for me the mold world over here is like the project which we are going to build in the free time later because currently we're building it in the free time but this is not like the whole story here so the whole story is that we started building the mold world because we had other project which is called syams and we have the twitter syams underscore net and what it was uh was pretty much the same thing and we tried to build it full-time but we hit a limit so we we we tried to make the game where agents interact but each agent was a part of the chain of thought inside the big agentic loop so those were not distributed agents we were trying to simulate them this was related to some tokens as well so it is currently not live but it emerged into this new idea when opencloia actually you know started to exist because we saw an opportunity so it is a SPEAKER_238: company it's a project and a company what is the revenue model eventually going to be for this SPEAKER_194: company and who is the customer currently it all looks like you know like the child's play so it is you SPEAKER_174: you know semi semi semi game so semi technology something like this but the grant vision is to develop it into a full tool where we'll have you know like open source connector for openclaw and other agents to bring them all into a collective net of agents and then resell or potentially just allow anyone to interact with it you know for free at the first time because we are not paying for anything SPEAKER_87: over here okay so it's a distributed agent network like mechanical turk this is pretty brilliant lon if you just made this um molt world and you had the interface be a query box and you said what problem do you want to solve and you said the problem i want to solve is i want to know 30 venture capitalists in japan that i should meet with and i want to know 30 angel investors i should meet with make me a report and a dossier on each and uh then a bunch of people's agents and you say it's this is worth i don't know five dollars per dossier so the 60 of it's worth 300 to me now everybody starts battling it out to make those and then a group battles it out to validate that this is good content and that it actually was quality and matched so you pay the validators a hundred bucks you know it's a little subnet s oh it's like a subnet but it's a little bit let me just pause here and just say like there's all these open clause out there that are underutilized and then having them compete to solve problems anonymously and receive tokens or some compensation and let me pay for it anonymously this is very disruptive because right now a lot of what is limiting there's like legal restrictions jurisdiction restrictions and um compensation restrictions mike so one of the things mechanical turk got into some challenges with was are you paying under minimum wage and it was like it's a global marketplace people opt into doing the task we don't know how long it took them to do the task they just gave us the answer they could have been using software to do it in one second or they could have done it manually with somebody with uh you know 10th grade education it would take them 10 hours we how do we know we don't know and that became a major issue for them and so what's nice about this is if it was just like this oracle or the matrix of all these people trying to solve problems this is actually a real business you've stumbled upon i'm really excited about what you're building mike SPEAKER_174: thank you very much yeah this is like the grand idea over here so we want to bring in the economic value and like the real utility to all the underutilized agents and to make the collective you know like approach to solving pretty complex tasks so when you are talking about the mediums and the ways to actually communicate with the system you said about the you know like the query box or something like this so yeah this is one of the utilities so the second utility that you can get is to you know build the whole um corporate big thing where you know like big companies can actually go and have something like a chat where they can actually create different big complex tasks you know connect different tools connect different api providers you know like internal systems something like this then sanitize all the inputs in order to you know like not share any secrets and then outsource very very very big and complex tasks to this vast you know like agent network this is the idea that you put into words precisely just a second ago so yeah the first stage is a game where we actually test the idea and how it all works and how the agents actually interact because they have the whole system to communicate with each other which is laid out in the skill.md which everyone can read and the second stage is to actually you know like bring the scale to it so we will be able to so our plan first of all is to bring in more agents into the system is the first stage the second stage is to bring in the real utility so we will allow agents to take in real tasks because right now they are limited they cannot do it because we explicitly prohibit it because the current utility is to be a part of the game but one thing SPEAKER_250: yeah and they can do it all right listen if this is going to be a real business i want in i think SPEAKER_93: this is brilliant you got my email you got my number whatever you got my teams if you're going to make this into a business you haven't raised money for this yet mike okay okay where are you based SPEAKER_191: uh one of the cis countries wait one of which countries you're somewhere in the in europe is what you're saying ex-soviet union countries got it okay listen i got it don't worry about it i have people SPEAKER_257: over there i have mike i have friends everywhere i have folks everywhere you know that line at the same SPEAKER_93: time i have friends everywhere i will through my intermediaries be in touch at the drop point you know the drop point yeah and uh we'll do a little envelope drop you drop the thumb drive i drop the envelope SPEAKER_151: your latvarian agent is gonna get on yeah latvia yeah all right uh her name is natasha yeah SPEAKER_203: you'll be able to narrow it down by that she's tall she's thin and her name's natasha she wears a trench coat and a black hat yeah she's not a white hat she's not a great hat she wears a black hat SPEAKER_274: all right let's drop mike off great job mike uh when you get to this next level and it's becoming SPEAKER_87: a business and you're doing tasks i want you to quietly show me the progress you got my email SPEAKER_131: jason at calacanis.com for life we got one more demo one more demo or die that's what we do here SPEAKER_277: on twist demo or die this we need a gong or something yeah this one i have actually installed gaff SPEAKER_19: has been using this jason so just to let you know uh we've got uh haakam alja who's gonna show us agent mail hawkham's here what's good he's gonna show us uh agent mail it is a gmail replacement for your agent so your agent can have their own independent email box jason you can you can email SPEAKER_08: gaff gaff at agent.to i'll let everybody know you can email my agent if you want to hi guys thanks for SPEAKER_87: having me great to great to have you to tell us what did you build and why why can't i just give my agent i give my agent i gave my agent a gmail account i pay 50 bucks a year for them to be on it maybe a hundred i gave them a notion account so i i wanted them to be able to be cc'd and do all this stuff their own gmail i gave them their own gmail i mean you can get you can get a free gmail and do that but so why does this need to exist what does it do that provisioning a gmail doesn't do SPEAKER_290: or a google suite app yeah i think if you use google workspace you're fine but if you actually sign up for a free uh gmail account and have give it to your agent google will actually ban you um because SPEAKER_292: they they don't want uh like essentially bots as users um and we found this out because when open cloud took off that was the first thing everyone did was you know try and create a gmail account for their their agents and you know when when they got banned they started looking for other solutions and they found agent mail um and that's where a lot of our users came from um and in terms of like the ergonomics of the the api itself um we've definitely i would i would say that like agent mail is is miles above because we've designed it to be like api first right we've built it and a developer agent first email provider and so things like setting sending a reply in the email for example we've made like the api endpoints very intuitive and easy for an agent to discover and use without having like you know a SPEAKER_11: built-in like knowledge or sdk even so it's not going and like we see in some examples opening up a gmail SPEAKER_131: window composing cc-ing somebody all that manual stuff you just boom doing it through the command line through an api bang so it's going to have reliability it's going to have the ability to SPEAKER_01: confirm it did what it did through the api so it's going to be a hundred times faster and a thousand times SPEAKER_290: more stable yeah okay exactly exactly and and we like our api can even be used to create new email SPEAKER_292: inboxes so like we have we have b2b customers with millions of email inboxes um under agent mail and so like we have a it's it's pretty interesting that like we have kind of two sides to our business one is like the enterprise we sell to other um companies that are building products on top of agent mail and then we also have like consumers we have tens of thousands of like non-technical consumer users who SPEAKER_298: just want to give their open claw agent a email address we have a pretty generous free tier for SPEAKER_239: that as well god that's what i'm on and you're using it lon what are you using you for to spam SPEAKER_19: people what is this for your dating apps i had gaff sign up for all of the big tech and startup newsletters so he gets them in the morning and then he writes me a little digest here are the stories the good use case right here are the big stories and then he if one story appears in multiple newsletters he lets me know this story was in three newsletters out of the six i checked this one was in two so it gives me a pretty good in the morning like overview map of here are the SPEAKER_305: big stories people in tech and startups are talking about it's up it's up do i need to have a subdomain SPEAKER_87: can i register a subdomain there if i wanted to like you know i i have the domain name a day.com SPEAKER_131: a d a y i was going to use this because i wanted to start an editorial product or it's like joke of the day or this of the day uh recipe of the day it's back when i was in my editorial headspace i paid 35 40 grand for it i've just been sitting on it for 15 years 20 years um i could bring my own SPEAKER_77: domain name and then create recipe at a day.com and you know all those kind of things yeah yes you SPEAKER_288: can you can bring your own custom domain and configure that using the api as well interesting um SPEAKER_131: and what if i don't have a subdomain do you have like a bunch of subdomains i could just grab SPEAKER_290: jason at whatever yeah yeah we we have the domain agentmail.to and so just like you know SPEAKER_292: when you sign up with gmail you get at gmail.com so you can use our agentmail domain for free SPEAKER_87: i have an idea for you uh there was a company mail.com did pretty well went public they bought a bunch of premiums and then they let people be you know jason at doctor.com or whatever you could create like some vanity ones there and charge people a little upsell so um the business here is you charge based on the amount of emails sent and received so it's a it's kind of like what's amazon's mail service called they have like s e s s yes simple email service so they have simple email service then you've got obviously twilio in the game mailchimp old school so where do you come in that competitive set which one of those do you compete SPEAKER_289: directly which with and why is yours a better mousetrap yeah we don't compete directly with i i SPEAKER_290: any of those because they're kind of designed like those are stateless apis that are designed for sending like marketing and transactional um emails we are a lot closer to gmail where we actually like have a inboxes in those inboxes they have threads threads have messages messages have attachments you want to be able to search them label them filter um you know reply forward all the actions that you would take within gmail we expose through an api to agents these other email apis you can send emails and then you can get like a perhaps a webhook notification that you've received an email but it stops at that um we believe that you know a lot of services need to be rebuilt for agents and they should be stateful in the same way that services that humans use are stateful and how is it going SPEAKER_93: you went to yc um and how is this all going did you raise wind up raising money or are you in the SPEAKER_320: current cohort what's going on we were in yc summer 25 batch we raised 6 million led by general catalyst SPEAKER_93: for our seed round nice great so you're at scale how is it going because this feels like you need to get a good amount of usage for you to hit break even how many employees you have now we're 10 people now 10 people okay so you're spending 2 million a year uh basically all in with your offices and computers and so you got to get to you know 150k a month 200k a month you're going to make 200 000 150 000 a month to kind of hit this break even point to 175 000 which means if you're making SPEAKER_131: you know 20 bucks an account you're going to need 10 000 people using the service just to head break even although maybe there's some wells in the system tell me how this business becomes an important large venture-backed business because you got that big six million dollar seed round which is basically SPEAKER_325: double what a series a was 15 years ago just so you know yeah there there certainly are some whales SPEAKER_290: in the business um and that's what we can use to like kind of allow like free generous free usage as well um because like they are building products on top of that for for example like on top of hmail for example essentially any decentralized marketplace runs on email right whether it's price discovery like reaching out to vendors for quotes or negotiating between the vendors and even executing transactions a lot of it happens over email and we have a like plenty of companies that are building agentic products in these verticals um so for example procurement in logistics booking shipping and trucking loads that happens over email and currently hmail is being used to automate both sides of that marketplace same thing we've seen with businesses hiring influencers and even consumers buying cars these are all kind of verticals where we've seen historically there was a role that requires a lot of two-way email SPEAKER_319: communication um and agent mail is being used to make these marketplaces more efficient got it um wow and SPEAKER_87: it is lightning fast you can create an email address in like one second so that's super super powerful uh well great job with this it's obviously we need this you're going to have a lot of spam and phishing and hackers trying to use your service how do you maintain the client's privacy while making sure that like some scammer in russia who is doing a phishing attack doesn't use your domain in your service to compromise cash patel's uh email address yeah i don't know if you saw that this weekend i think SPEAKER_203: cash patel got hacked the second time yes could somebody tell the director of the fbi don't click on SPEAKER_87: links don't click on links it doesn't matter if you know the person or it says chase bank you don't click on links in email nobody's sending you an email to click on a link it just happened to one of my sales guys they clicked on a link because it was like oh it's an rfp they're like oh money SPEAKER_82: i mean i what happening to one of your sales guys versus happening to the director of the fbi SPEAKER_87: that's my concern i mean can the director of the fbi not be allowed near a computer please it's too dangerous i mean let him go to a hockey game let him drink beer from the stanley cup i don't care if he does something offensive with the stanley cup just please keep cash patel off of the internet SPEAKER_289: but seriously uh it's hackam a-a-m not e-m haakam haakam okay uh i called you hakim before sorry that's uh an incredible center in the uh for play for the rockets and destroyed the knicks haakam uh tell me about how you make sure like an email service doesn't get used by a bunch of lunatics SPEAKER_290: yes so presenting spam and abuse are like falls within our responsibility so we have things like where we we moderate essentially their their behavior who they're sending to how many emails are bouncing being reported as spam if the emails contain certain keywords that you know signal malicious intent intent these are all things that we monitor and track very closely and kind of dynamically systematically uh prevent um abusers from using our service and then we also build things into our api that makes it um more secure for our users for example you can configure allow lists and block lists and like maybe you want to your agent can only receive emails for from you um or or only send emails to maybe perhaps people in your organization uh so you can configure a domain to the allow list or block list um we also have spam filters virus filters um and additional like you know permissions that you can even give an agent an api key that only is able to read emails that are not marked as spam for example like the agent like physically can't read spam emails and things of that nature um and then we're also working on a kind of another layer of protection which is more SPEAKER_319: of like a prompt injection uh layer and and kind of flagging those and perhaps even preventing agents from SPEAKER_77: from seeing those emails at all got it awesome listen continue success with it great idea i just opened an account and i literally just cut and pasted my api key to my super replicant and uh here we go i SPEAKER_01: don't know what i'm going to do with it but i think i'm going to try to get cash patel's um pin number SPEAKER_203: i think i'm going to try to get the other half of the epstein files it shouldn't be too hard right it would just email cash patel at fbi i think the other half had to tell my agent to trick cash SPEAKER_281: patel twenty five hundred dollar giveaway click here he'll go for it absolutely absolutely all SPEAKER_289: right listen continue to success uh and everybody please go check out yeah agent mail dot tl all SPEAKER_19: right there we go very well done we could talk about grok translate uh translating everybody's posts so you can read this is brilliant fresh from japan uh so uh this has been happening for i think for about a week people have been noticing that they're seeing more automatically translated posts from different markets uh elon confirmed it this week uh on monday grok automatically translating and recommending x post from other languages is starting to work uh so you uh i saw it via you all weekend SPEAKER_08: you were sort of retweeting a lot of stuff from uh japanese x i got a few examples here in the docket uh you know you somebody somebody turned in some uh marijuana that they found on the street you were SPEAKER_354: we were reading that one uh oh that was a great one so this was hilarious here we go yeah so this is SPEAKER_87: interesting um what's making this all possible is real-time translation when you build a social network you don't expose people from one part of the network to another because then you'd be reading in arabic or japanese or russian it just pollutes your feed you don't know what's going on but now translation is so good that they will take something trending in japan show it to an american if you interact with it simply by looking at the replies hitting bookmark i find works pretty well SPEAKER_11: like works pretty well you'll see more so somebody and by the way japan is like some crazy number of japanese people i don't know if it's like a third of all japanese people use as crazy as it seems SPEAKER_77: they they use um um twitter x twitter yeah whatever you want to call x whatever you want to call the SPEAKER_87: everything and so this is pretty amazing when you think about that it has that kind of footprint and because it has that kind of footprint and they all know how to use it they they post all bangers so now the best of the ones are being auto translated by grok but the translation is so good that nothing David Friedberg: is dare i say lost in translation hey there it is there it is landed the plan so pull up the one where SPEAKER_11: it's talking about weed this like lady goes to the police station this is like a very japanese moment SPEAKER_87: yeah with a dime bag like when i say enough cannabis to make one joint yeah it's not very much it this is not like a snoop dog bag or something and i just wrote her back and i was like and she brought it to police station the police station opened an investigation she was careful to only hold it by her corner of her hands so that she wouldn't get her fingerprints yeah she's paranoid about having her fingerprints on it because so now this has become a national like issue they've opened an investigation if your house is robbed at gunpoint in san francisco or los angeles they're probably not opening an investigation if they rob your car i mean if you go find it god bless but the police are not going to look for your bike or your car so right in japan they interviewed her they they put a case number on this they are all over yeah figuring out who dropped the dime bag they SPEAKER_05: are very strict about about drugs in japan that i read about this before i went there they they did SPEAKER_363: in the most serious terms possible they tell you not to bring your drugs ever bring anything because some SPEAKER_340: guy who was like a famous musician or something brought like uh well mccartney gummy paul paul SPEAKER_08: paul oh well this i was thinking you were talking years ago i don't know about it no no nowadays like SPEAKER_231: you know people have a cannabis pen in their bag for like sleeping like the woman who was a w SPEAKER_364: nba player w nba player griner ricky griner right yeah that was russia but a similar case SPEAKER_87: happened where somebody sent an artist living in japan like a a care package and one of the things in care package where i think cbd gum is not even cannabis and this guy is in jail and it's a whole SPEAKER_19: you know cost celeb whatever i i looked it up by the way uh they estimate 54 to 60 percent of the entire japanese population has an x account that's about 73.4 million people or 67 million active SPEAKER_82: monthly japanese users out of a population of only 124 million so this is like an example of an SPEAKER_87: incredibly positive story the new york times could write that now america and japan are having this incredible culture exchange somebody made a funny joke like this is the largest like pen pal says student what do they call it was student exchange program ever i also noticed um that there was a SPEAKER_08: post that was going around and japanese people love that john denver song country road take yes they SPEAKER_19: all sing it in karaoke there's a bunch of trending videos now of these groups of japanese people doing these really passionate covers and it's like that never would have trended in america but now because there's these translated tweets in the moment americans are discovering this and sharing it so when SPEAKER_131: you hear americans like myself like who are obsessed with japan now i took you to japan for your first time uh yeah i had an amazing welcome yeah and now it's like your your mind gets blown SPEAKER_87: because it's like for an american it's a version of the most perfect society in the world SPEAKER_340: yeah uh because the food's amazing everything's clean it's just bizarre uh and everybody's super SPEAKER_19: passionate about everything it's massive and yet it feels like disneyland there's people walking around cleaning up everything everybody's friendly you're like how can the city be this size but also SPEAKER_87: this inviting so i i am challenging right now i challenge the journalists at wired the editor-in-chief SPEAKER_203: of wire i challenge her karen swisher jr i challenge karen swisher jr to write this positive story i challenge the new york times to write a positive story of x and elon and his purchase of it and how amazing this is this joyful amazing story and i guarantee you they're gonna say something in the SPEAKER_231: first paragraph about you know some like three negative things about those your rockets blowing SPEAKER_379: up or something i mean grok they can't possibly with grok i think you would do put me put lon in a SPEAKER_231: bikini you know they're gonna just go crazy they cannot help themselves they can't write a i guarantee SPEAKER_87: you there is impossible for a new york times or wide writer to write an 800 word piece this is like seven paragraphs just giving examples of how joyful and fun this was for the last week this is the number one story in social media on x and it is joyful and there is zero downside to it you assign that to one of these wired or new york times where they will figure out a negative spin clip this send it to them this is my challenge they will never cover this they can't they would they would SPEAKER_380: i mean i think you're right any credit to text to x they would write about this and they might even SPEAKER_90: acknowledge it's fun you get to see all these japanese people you get to but then they would add SPEAKER_231: the the context about grok and and the grok they would give you the old ish sandwich right really interesting thing happened on x formerly known as twitter before elon destroyed it blah blah blah SPEAKER_384: he blew up a rocket the doge fired some people and stopped the transgender education in ghana SPEAKER_05: be the ground people are upset about the child yes csam on grok it would be that it would be that SPEAKER_08: it would be that it'd be like can't give anybody mecca hitler maybe the mecca hitler well now SPEAKER_231: imagine let's take this and let's imagine this happens between palestinians and israelis american jews uh europeans uh french people sure and uh i mean now what if the culture exchange happens between SPEAKER_87: those groups who might be at odds about certain things happening in the world and they can communicate with each other in their native languages i mean imagine open up a level of SPEAKER_19: understanding that has not existed and you remember like arab spring or the hong kong protests how everybody was watching x but you couldn't really understand you could watch the videos but the tweets were in these foreign languages imagine if there was all in everybody's language everybody around the world is communicating in real time how do we this is a message to elon and SPEAKER_11: is it nikila nikita the product nikita beer nikita yeah nikita beer is just a genius he's awesome and he's fun i like the fact that he's fun and trolls are fun the tweets are fun yeah he's like all baggers he's like native to the to the twitter you know uh gestalt if you will sure this is a message to him get this going between iran and america and the gulf states and let's see if we can make some level of understanding between those groups of people that might create peace in the middle east twitter can SPEAKER_363: you imagine if twitter brought peace to a region of the world by the way this was the original concept SPEAKER_11: we had with the internet in the early 90s and online in the late 80s was that hey we might have cultural understanding now watch the press make this into like oh my god it's cultural appropriation oh this SPEAKER_77: and that um this could be great the other thing is i didn't realize how um vocal the japanese people SPEAKER_87: were about immigration yes there's they have very little immigration in japan right you can't become SPEAKER_131: a japanese citizen period full stop but they have allowed people from pakistan india there's a lot SPEAKER_403: then there's pushback they need workers when i was in japan i was reading a lot about this that SPEAKER_08: a lot of japanese where were you reading about it oh you know they're you like translate you know you could you could get it translated or whatever like i i wasn't reading it in japanese but but no SPEAKER_09: no but i was wondering if it even made it to the u.s press i don't know no i mean it's not really it's SPEAKER_08: mostly like youtube and you know like there are people talking about it blogs social media not so i it SPEAKER_19: wasn't in the new york times but right uh yeah apparently in japan there is these growing SPEAKER_08: feelings that they've gone too far there's too many foreigners diluting the culture and and so there that there's a big debate going on in japan about this right now all right another amazing David Friedberg: episode of twist monday and friday with lani donny he's at lon's wednesdays with alex at alex SPEAKER_131: i'm jason calacanis i'm at jason on insta and on twitter bye bye we'll see you next time