Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"

**Peter Steinberger** (0:00)
Y Combinator Startup Podcast Y Combinator Startup Podcast Y Combinator Startup Podcast Y Combinator Startup Podcast Six months ago, I was the future. These days, the pulse, I got mocked by an anime girl. You know, I get questions like this almost every day. Usually, I ignore it. Or I give the media answer. Today, you get some real ones. It's going to be five questions, 40 minutes. And I know what you might all came for. You came for loops, graphs, making codecs go brrr. This is free on my Twitter.
This will help you to survive the roller coaster that might be coming for you. You know, yesterday, Boris told you to let the model cook. I'm the guy who found out what happened when tens of thousands of people let it cook at the same time. Let's start with the question everyone asks first. How is OpenClaw only eight months old? You know, it might be eight months in human time, but in AI times, it's more like four years. And my source of inspiration is usually being annoyed. So on a rainy day in November, I was juggling some agents, but I was also hungry. So I want to make sure that my tokens are put to good use, while I read the kitchen. And there was still no good way to just send a prompt from my phone to my computer. So some agent could check up how my agent is actually doing. Remember early 2025? And you guys, this is my first silent discourse. It's a very new experience. So give me some hands if you actually listen to me. Yes. Amazing.
You know, early 2025, oh my God, we're talking the old Opus 3, Gemini 2.5, OpenEye had O3, which was the most impressive one, but also really slow and expensive at times. And I got a dopamine hit when my agent did something right. I'm sure you remember this time. And these days, if they get something wrong, I usually question myself, you know? Did I design the loop wrong? Did I not give my agent everything they need to verify their work? Do I have an error in my thinking?
Am I asking for impossible things? So I came back from the kitchen, and my coding agent stopped because of something silly.
And I was annoyed. So I spun up a new terminal session. I rambled my idea in, and I let the model cook. It built me a WhatsApp relay. And in an hour later, I could send messages from my Mac to WhatsApp and back. And that in itself felt magical. But really, it shouldn't have. It's like, we all did this for months already, right? We opened the terminal and you type something in and you get a reply. But the magic is how it felt. It wasn't a terminal. It wrote concise answers.
It was proactive. Like sometimes it would just like check on me during the day. I made it so the complexity would melt away. You don't have to think about which model, which context size, or when you start a new session. And I prompted the weights to a little bit outside the default distribution.
Make it feel more like a friend. And I was using it.
I had so many moments where I felt like this is the future. This is AGI.
And you know what? Nobody cared.
Back then, I already had a good following on Twitter. I know it's called X now. I'll always call it Twitter. People were not getting it. I would keep trying to make them understand how magical this felt to me.
But week after week, I failed.
And you notice a pattern? It annoyed me. So I would create group chats with friends, and I added them, WhatsApp Relay, and I would show them. I would let them talk to it. And every time, I got a strong emotional reaction. Some people were amazed. Some people were scared or freaked out even. But each time, there was a strong emotion. And the best part, there were quite a few people that really wanted it. And like, especially to my non-technical friends, I told them, no, this is not yet for you. And they got mad. So if that's not an indicator to have product market fit, I don't know what is. So I spent another month tweaking the details, thinking, what could I do to explain the world?
You know, and then the audacity, someone sent me a pull request to my WhatsApp Relay to add Discord support. You know, like what parts of the name are you not getting? I let the PR sit for a while and I was thinking and I was thinking, and then eventually I was like, what the hell? And out of VAR Relay became Claudius, as I'm good with names, and there's no more than one message channel. And so you understand how early this was. I didn't even had Compaction built in yet. So at some point, it would just like stop. And just in time for Discord, I added a very hacky version of Compaction, so Mario could make a good one in Pi.