Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:17:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[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? [00:17:24] S1: No, you don't need a Mac Mini, but they sure are fun. They sure look cute, stacked up on your computer. So if you can get a Mac Mini and it will spark joy, it's a really easy way to start with OpenClaw. And while you don't need a Mac Mini, I think the safest and cleanest way to start with OpenClaw is a clean machine. And so that clean machine can be what mine was, which was an old MacBook sitting in a closet somewhere that I just did a fresh install on and said, "This is going to be Polly's laptop." It could be a machine in the cloud that you can run. I found the setup to be pretty hands-on, and just plugging in a keyboard, plugging in a mouse, having the computer, having the monitor was just useful for me as I was setting it up. So I think the easiest way is to start with a machine. It doesn't have to be a Mac Mini, but once you're hooked, you're probably going to want to get one.
00:17:24 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:17:24] S1: No, you don't need a Mac Mini, but they sure are fun. They sure look cute, stacked up on your computer. So if you can get a Mac Mini and it will spark joy, it's a really easy way to start with OpenClaw. And while you don't need a Mac Mini, I think the safest and cleanest way to start with OpenClaw is a clean machine. And so that clean machine can be what mine was, which was an old MacBook sitting in a closet somewhere that I just did a fresh install on and said, "This is going to be Polly's laptop." It could be a machine in the cloud that you can run. I found the setup to be pretty hands-on, and just plugging in a keyboard, plugging in a mouse, having the computer, having the monitor was just useful for me as I was setting it up. So I think the easiest way is to start with a machine. It doesn't have to be a Mac Mini, but once you're hooked, you're probably going to want to get one. [00:18:24] S0: Wouldn't it actually benefit with the Mac Mini because I got one. I have it right here and I put a little lobster claws on it to make it look like a lobster, is like you order it, it come arrives and then you're like, "Okay, I actually have to do this. I spent 500 bucks on this thing. Okay, let me actually do it." [00:18:39] S1: Yes. It's an accountability cost. [00:18:41] S0: Yeah. Okay. And people keep talking about they're all selling out because of OpenClaw. I think they're still available. [inaudible 00:18:48]. [00:18:47] S1: Yeah, [inaudible 00:18:48]. Apple will still take your money.