NanoClaw Creator Lands Docker Deal After Six Weeks

**Jaeden Schafer** (0:00)
It has been an absolutely crazy six weeks for the creator of NanoClaw by Gavriel Cohen. He created this tool basically in 48 hours on his couch, and it has now led six weeks later to going completely viral and creating and having a deal with Docker. So today on the podcast, I want to break down his story, how he built this product, what it does. It's basically an open source version of OpenClaw, which is, you know, the viral tool used to create AI agents that everyone is talking about and using. I want to break down the story of this company because I think it is a phenomenal, meteoric rise of a really incredible tool that a lot of people have fallen in love with. So let's get into the podcast. Before we do, I wanted to mention, if you want to build and create your own AI tools and agents, I'd love for you to check out my platform, which is aibox.ai. It's $8.99 and you get access to over 40 of the top AI models all in one place. We just did a massive update that finished yesterday where all of the models speak quicker. So you can get access to all of those models, chat with them all super quick, snappy, lightning fast inside of our playground. Currently on the platform, we have all the best models from Anthropic, Coheer, DeepSeat, Google, Meta, Mistral, OpenAI, Perplexity, XAI. For image generation, we have Ideogram, XAI, Black Forest Labs, OpenAI. And for audio, we have 11 labs at OpenAI. So tons of cool models. Go check it out. It's $8.99 a month to get started. And you get 20% off if you get an annual plan. And of course, there's tons of cool tools that you can use on our marketplaces. So go check it out. Link's in the description. All right, let's talk about this crazy week that they're having over at NanoClaw the last six weeks. Basically, in early January, Cohen went and dropped a post on Hacker News where he introduced NanoClaw. This is a really small open source alternative to OpenClaw. And he built this basically in, you know, I think 48 hours straight. He said he sat down and just cranked this thing out. Eventually, you know, this thing snowballed quite big, but it was originally just started as a small side project. A few weeks later, after he made, you know, a post, Andrew Carpathy, of course, the famous AI researcher, was saying, you know, like, hey, this thing's pretty cool. It went super viral when he did that. He posted on X. And this basically put it in front of thousands of developers. And from all the attention that that got, it got more than 22,000 GitHub stars. It had 4,600 forks and dozens and dungeons of contributions and collaborations on like new features that people wanted to add to it. And that's the cool thing with open source is you put it out there. If people find it useful, you're going to get a ton of help building it up and making it a really useful, great product. I think that's when things started to get really serious after that kind of initial wave. So last week, Cohen actually shut down the AI marketing startup that he launched with his brother Lazar. And he is focusing exclusively on NanoClaw. So he had something else going, realized this thing had so much momentum, he shut that down. Right now, both of them are building a company around the project called NanoCo. And this is usually how these open-source projects go, right? Because technically open-source means they're giving the code away. Anyone can use it for free or kind of with a license. I mean, there's different ways you can do open-source. But you really are trying to give this away for other people to use. But you typically will create a company around it where you host it on your own server and usually have an API. And if people don't want to kind of run it on their own hardware, they can still get access to it through you. So on Friday after, I guess, they hit another milestone. Cohen announced that Docker, who is, of course, the company behind all of the container technology, it's used by millions of developers around the world, just partnered with NanoClaw and they're going to integrate Docker sandboxes directly into their platform. And for a project, I think, that began, you know, this is basically a weekend experiment six weeks ago. This is moving very fast. One thing that I do think is interesting here is kind of the idea of NanoClaw, how it came out. There was a real world problem that they were trying to solve.