Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:10:13 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:10:13] S0: Great ROI. [00:10:14] S1: Yeah. And I had this sort of experience, two-sided experience. On one side, very unhappy that my calendar got deleted. On the other side of it was this, and you'll appreciate this as a product person, was that really ugly and apparent feeling of product market fit, which is it just hit me with enough joy and enough utility when it wasn't deleting my calendar that I knew something was there. And my advice to people, as they think about AI tools that seemingly come out three times a day, is you really have to pull the thread on these tools, and you have to spend enough time with them to see not where they are today, but where they are in a week, and where they are in a month and where they are in two weeks. And I had this experience with Claude- Cowork as well. It first came out. I was like, "Who is this for? I don't understand it." I could have walked away from that and written it off wholesale. And instead I came back to it week after week, tried it over and over and over again, and eventually found an unlock. And I would say OpenClaw, more than almost anything that I've worked with, and I would not have expected myself to say this in January, it has changed my life. I am breathless. I am a breathless OpenClaw bro now. And I think that what I hope I bring to this conversation is, and I have the receipts, I can tell you how it works. I can tell you exactly what it does for me. I can tell you exactly what it doesn't, and I can tell you why I went on my phone and bought four Mac Minis.
00:11:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:11:50] S0: Okay. This is incredible. We're going to get into a bunch of just how to actually do it, some of the unlocks that allowed you to be this successful with it. Give people a few examples of what this actually does for you in your life that is actually useful because you actually continue to use it. It's like a part of your life now. [00:12:05] S1: I first started with it the same way I recommend almost everybody start with it, which is every professional deserves an EA, and every family deserves a family manager. And so it started off as a general purpose, professional, sort of executive assistant, scheduling, email, personal project management, sort of that chief of staff, generalist helper. And then this is where it truly has product market fit, which is, complex schedules across a family and all the things it takes to run my household. We talked about this. I have three kids. They're in two different schools, plus a baby. We've got three basketball leagues going on right now, plus soccer, plus I'm in ballet. My husband and I have different work commitments, different social commitments. We have a house that we're trying to keep standing. We have bodies we're trying to keep healthy. All of those things I need some help with. And so the initial unlock for me were those, kind of, personal assistant use cases, both in my professional life and then just in my home life. [00:13:16] S0: By the way, you said ballet. I think it's important for people to know you're like, you're taking ballet. This is another thing [inaudible 00:13:23].
00:13:16 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:13:16] S0: By the way, you said ballet. I think it's important for people to know you're like, you're taking ballet. This is another thing [inaudible 00:13:23]. [00:13:22] S1: I do. I have carved off a single non-coding hobby I recommend to everybody, where my phone goes away for two hours on the weekend, and I do ballet. [00:13:33] S0: Incredible. Another podcast to explore there. Okay. Something that might be on people's minds is there's all of these other kind of OpenClaw-ish products launching now. Claude clearly is trying to, instead of acquiring OpenClaw, they're just like, "We will build it." And so they're just slowly launching all of the features. There's Manus has a thing. Perplexity has a thing. What's your take on just, is it worth still working with OpenClaw and setting that up versus trying these other things?
00:13:57 · Claire Vo
[00:13:57] S1: Again, it's going to be my job to look at all of these. And so I think they all have their strengths and their weaknesses. And I come with a lot of honesty on this topic when I think about models. Everybody's like, "Is there one perfect model?" No, there's not one perfect model. There's a great model for a use case. Is there one perfect agent experience? No, but everybody's going to take a run at it. What I think is interesting about OpenClaw, in particular, is one, it's open source, which means you can actually with, pretty little effort, understand what's happening behind the scenes, which is different from a hosted solution or a closed source solution. So you can go to the docs and read exactly how it works. You can go into the code, open up DeepWiki and ask how does it schedule tasks? What's the security? And I think that's important, maybe not as an end user, but if we speak to the product audience of your podcast, so many of us are going to be starting to build Agentic experiences and Agentic products. And this is sort of a platonic ideal example of what are good fundamentals of an agent experience that feels really easy to onboard on is self-learning, self-improving. And so I saw a benefit, not just because I feel like the product experience is better, but because it's open source, it's been much more decomposable in my own mind and has upleveled my thinking about AI in general and product building, and then it has helped me kind of think about new use cases that I wouldn't have thought of before that an agent could solve.
00:15:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[00:15:35] S0: My feeling is... because I've tried a few of these things, it's just you learn so much more doing it this way, like doing the OpenClaw thing versus just press a couple buttons and you have this AI agent, and it's also just feels just more fun using it versus other products. [00:15:51] S1: It's fun. I think I talked about high school, and I used to build my own computer in high school. I used to go to Fry's and buy a motherboard. [00:16:01] S0: Fry's. [00:16:01] S1: Yeah, throw back. Yeah. You know how old somebody is if they know where to look for Fry's? [00:16:05] S0: Are they not around anymore? Is Fry's not around? [00:16:06] S1: I think there might be like one lone Fry's in California standing. I've looked at this a couple times, but I would go to Fry's, and I would buy a motherboard, and I would buy a graphics chip, and I would get one of those really cool cases that had the window and the lights in it, and the fans because I was a very serious gamer. And in that process, it didn't make the computer better than what I could have bought off the shelf. It probably didn't make it cheaper, but I learned so much, and it really felt like it was mine. And these agents, I don't feel like I'm using Claude with AU or an AW. I don't feel like I'm using Claude. I feel like I'm using Polly. I feel like I'm using Finn. I feel like I'm using these things that I built, and that sense of crafting your personal agent experience, as opposed to giving your tasks to a general purpose agent, I think just changes the user agent interaction in a very interesting way.
00:16:06 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:16:06] S1: I think there might be like one lone Fry's in California standing. I've looked at this a couple times, but I would go to Fry's, and I would buy a motherboard, and I would buy a graphics chip, and I would get one of those really cool cases that had the window and the lights in it, and the fans because I was a very serious gamer. And in that process, it didn't make the computer better than what I could have bought off the shelf. It probably didn't make it cheaper, but I learned so much, and it really felt like it was mine. And these agents, I don't feel like I'm using Claude with AU or an AW. I don't feel like I'm using Claude. I feel like I'm using Polly. I feel like I'm using Finn. I feel like I'm using these things that I built, and that sense of crafting your personal agent experience, as opposed to giving your tasks to a general purpose agent, I think just changes the user agent interaction in a very interesting way. [00:17:06] S0: Okay. So let's get people to actually get over the hump and actually install this thing. So many listeners are listening to this. They're like, "Yeah, this is cool. I'm going to do it someday." So few people actually do this. Let's make it very easy. First question is just, do you need a Mac Mini? Where do you recommend running this thing, installing this thing?