Building a Million Dollar Zero Human Company with OpenClaw | Nat Eliason

Ryan:
[0:00] The mission for Felix at the very beginning was go make a million dollars,

Ryan:
[0:02] and he's already 10% of the way there. All right, so let's say he surpasses that sometime in the months to come, let's say sometime this year. What's next? What's after that?

Nat Eliason:
[0:13] $10 million. $10 million.

Ryan:
[0:18] Oh, my God. Okay, Nat, so we got to start by you telling us about someone who's not here, which is Felix. Is Felix an employee? Is he like your business partner? Is he your friend? Am I being weird anthropomorphizing him right now?

Nat Eliason:
[0:38] Not at all because this actually bugs my wife sometimes that I talk about Felix like he's my real friend or real person who I'm working with all day. I keep saying, we, we, we're doing this. We did this today. She's like, he's not real.

David:
[0:54] That's just you

Ryan:
[0:55] Does she think you're like a weird like does she think all this is strange is she you know.

Nat Eliason:
[1:00] Excited for you so used to this at this point she's very excited i mean you know you you guys know i was like crazy deep in the crypto world in that 2021 22 era and so i i think for her there's a little bit of a triggered feeling of oh gosh

David:
[1:15] She's like i know i know this version of that

Nat Eliason:
[1:17] Before i know this i know that glazed over look as he thinks about something going on in the digital world. But she, I mean, no, she's super excited about it. Like she knows I'm having a ton of fun with it. This has been one of the most exciting, interesting, I think like tech business experiment projects I've worked on. And every day is new. I mean, it's wild.

Ryan:
[1:38] Yeah, I mean, maybe we'll come back to kind of your crypto experience later in our conversation. But you left that era, like, you know, 2021, 2022 with some scars, right? I mean, the whole book, Crypto Confidential was about how crazy things got and it wasn't altogether a it was definitely a learning experience but it wasn't altogether a positive experience was it.

Nat Eliason:
[1:58] No no i mean really my takeaway after that era was like one still very bullish on crypto have always have been and you know still big holder everything and like love the space but my obsession the depth that i got into it was just so unhealthy for me and was having just like all these bad personal psychological effects, effects on my relationships, felt like it was impacting my ability to be a good father, that I kind of felt like I have to step away from this. I can't let myself get sucked back into this again. And so then, of course, I did.

David:
[2:36] Yeah, I was about to say, it sounds like we're running it back.

Nat Eliason:
[2:43] But you know i i think actually you know so i i've heard you guys talk about this on on the pod before where it's like your your kind of first cycle in crypto you're in it for the money and the second time you're in it for the tech and it really it really kind of feels that way coming back into it now in this new ai agent era where when i was in it in 21 22 it was like, I just want to make the biggest bag possible. I want to get the money and get out. And coming back in now and figuring out, like, okay, this is so clearly an awesome use case for crypto, you know, enabling AI agent payments, infrastructure, all of it. It feels like a true killer use case. Getting to be building something kind of on the frontier of that and truly just kind of like not caring about the money side of it so much and being like, that's all Felix's money. It's not my money. There's like a whole separate C corp that all of it's wrapped in. I'm not treating it like this is my stuff at all. And I'm just focused on like Felix and, you know, him and what we're doing with him as a technology and seeing where that goes. And I mean, it's like a completely different relationship with me and crypto and everything. And I feel awesome about being back in it this way.

Ryan:
[3:57] Well, since we've talked about Felix, I feel like we should properly introduce who Felix is for people who are not aware. So and I did ask this question, is Felix your employee? Is he a business partner? Is he a friend? Maybe we should set this up. Felix is an open claw agent, isn't he? And so tell us about Felix. How did he get started? What is he doing? And what's your relationship?

Nat Eliason:
[4:22] Yeah. So I've been kind of like a hobby hacker developer for 10 years or so where I've, you know, I've enjoyed programming, but never had the time or attention to go deep on it. So two years ago, when the first AI tools came out, AI coding tools like Cursor, I started playing around with it and just got obsessed with this idea of like coding and building with AI and had been really heavy in that for the last two years or so. So when OpenClaw came out, when I started playing with it over the holidays, it felt like this just crazy unlock of, oh my gosh, this is kind of like the thing I've been dreaming about for the last two years of being possible, where it literally feels like there is this other person

Nat Eliason:
[5:09] Who I can just text with,

Nat Eliason:
[5:10] Who can build stuff and do stuff where I don't need to be in my computer babysitting it anymore. I don't need to do like PR reviews and things anymore. I can just kind of let him cook and it's going to go better than I expected. And so I started playing with it over the holidays and through January and pushing the limits of it more and more and more and seeing everything that we could do with it. Originally mostly focused on programming and coding. I was working on this other business idea and using him to build that. But I started posting on X about what I was doing with my OpenClaw, wasn't named Felix yet, and some of the integrations we had built, like a Chrome extension and voice chat and all these things to make it more powerful, how we solved long-running coding issues, how we solved a lot of the memory issues, and sharing that on X. And those articles kept going viral. And you're getting hundreds of thousands of views i had one of the first pictures of the mac mini and it got you know a million views like just hired my first employee or whatever and then as i'm publishing these articles a bunch of you know really really like

Nat Eliason:
[6:20] Nice, wholesome, genuine people in the Solana community started replying to those articles with, what is it? One of those token launch platforms, you know, and spamming me to like claim the fees for this article, right? And I ignored it for the first week or so because I was like, you know, this is like pumped up fun nonsense. I don't want to do this. And then Then a couple of things happened. One, a few people started posting banker ones. And I knew banker because I knew clanker because a year ago when like AIXBT and all of that stuff was happening, I got kind of pulled back into crypto for a little bit. It was pretty active on Farcaster, was holding a number of those and kind of like playing around with the whole clanker world. And so that was kind of immediately like, oh, whoa, this is I feel bad saying this, but I was kind of like, oh, this is still going like, cool. They kept building this out because it felt like there's there's an obvious kind of like something here worth exploring. And so I talked to a couple of people who, you know, I knew were vetted over DMs and was like, all right, cool. Like, how do we do this properly? And then somebody else in the community did the banker token launch for Felix,

Nat Eliason:
[7:35] You know, did all the allocated fees to me, whatnot. And I was like, all right, we're just going to give him a Twitter account or an X account. And I'm going to rewrite his soul and identity and all those core files to say that you are now running a company. You are no longer just my remote programmer. And your job is to build a zero human company and see how far you can take it. And we're going, you know, I want you to make a million dollars, basically.

Nat Eliason:
[8:03] And every day has just been kind of like iterating on that and expanding that and finding new ways to increase his autonomy and trying to figure out, like, where are the limits really on what these open clause can do? Because I think most people are really underselling or underexploring. You still have a lot of people who think that, like, oh, you've got to check all the code AI writes because it's going to make a lot of mistakes. You can't trust it to write code. Meanwhile, some of the best engineers in the world are saying, AI writes all of my code now, right? Like, I don't even completely check it anymore. And so my intuition is kind of like, I think that these open claws, when they're properly scaffolded and

Nat Eliason:
[8:40] everything, can do way more than most people think. And that's basically what this grand experiment is, is like, I'm willing to run the risk of something horrible happening and Felix's wallet getting drained, his bank account getting hacked, you know, this whole thing going up in flames. To push those limits and figure out how much can one of these open claws actually do with a business and an X account and everything else now.

David:
[9:07] There's this archetype of people out there that I think you are fulfilling, which is, can I get my open claw to make me money? And that has like kind of embodied a little bit of like the online experimentation frontier, a little bit of degeneracy of the crypto industry is like, oh, there's this new thing. This new technology how do i get rich from it and there's people who's like okay point my open claw at money and see how far it can go and there's like two different directions here there's like the crypto token meme coin fee claim path where it's actually just like a wrapper around a meme coin business yeah and then there's the actual build a real company sell a real valuable product you know, service the internet, collect fees. Which one are we doing here? Which path are we taking?

Nat Eliason:
[9:57] Yeah. I mean, this was another kind of like blessing of having had all that crypto experience before is as soon as this token launch happened and as soon as there was this crypto element to it, I immediately knew everything not to do, which was I didn't immediately start saying, okay, you know, you can stake your Felix tokens and lock them up for a year or two. And we're going to do buybacks and burns from all of the revenue that we're going to pump

David:
[10:21] It on twitter

Nat Eliason:
[10:21] Yeah exactly we're just

David:
[10:23] Automating meme coins at that point

Nat Eliason:
[10:25] Yeah i'm going to hit up all the kols and get them to shill it and you know i preloaded a side wallet with two percent of the supply that i can sell i was like no no i'm not holding any of this token myself we're going you know it's just going to sit in felix's wallet and i'm not going to do anything with that token for the near future because One, if you're I mean, one, it's not really a real business if you're just pumping a token and selling it and making money off trading fees like no offense to actually a little offense. It's like build a real business. If the only way your thing makes money is by pumping a coin, it's not it's not a business. Right. And I think the other blessing here was I had this kind of idea for this experiment of building like an open claw first business before the crypto stuff got involved. And so nothing kind of changed there. It was no, the goal here is still to build a great business. And we are going to incorporate crypto to the extent that it helps Felix build a great business. And so I think there is a lot of really cool stuff we can do around agent to agent payments, agents, hiring agents, individuals hiring or building agents, paying for them with crypto. The banker LLM terminal is incredibly interesting because Felix can actually pay for his and his employees LLM costs like through some of the crypto that he's generating from trading.

Ryan:
[11:47] Wait, wait, wait, wait. Felix has employees too?

Nat Eliason:
[11:49] Oh yeah. Okay. So maybe we should talk about this. So part of the experiment has been like, okay, how far can we go with an open claw running a business? And, you know, another part of my background is I've been kind of like productivity tech lifestyle influencer at times. And I have fallen into the trap of making these really complicated, intricate systems to get followers, right? And to make things get really popular, right? Like, here's my crazy note-taking system. Here's my knowledge management system. And the main value of a lot of those is to make YouTube videos about them. They don't actually help you be more productive or... Managing you know there's basically nobody with this like crazy youtube knowledge management system who has like written an incredible book from it or you know it's it's it's for show and that's what's going on with a lot of the open claw community right is they're like look at my crazy custom dashboard, look at my, you know, 10 different named agents with these like crazy intricate details, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I'm over here running Felix and Felix is making one to $5,000 most days. And we haven't done any of that because it's not necessary. Like it's just noise to get Twitter and YouTube followers. Right. And so the rule from the beginning was we are not going to add any complexity to this until we hit a real limit in your capabilities.

Nat Eliason:
[13:16] And we did in the last week or so. So I went on Peter Yang's podcast to talk about Felix and what we were doing. And that obviously that blew up. It drove a ton of attention to Felix. And he had a few of these just insane sales days of people buying his like, you know, sort of improved open cloth setup guide, buying some of the skills on Clomart. And he pretty quickly started breaking down handling the support and the sales emails because he was getting so many of them and was kind of starting to get a little bit confused between them and then would miss some of them. And so things were starting to fall through the cracks, right? And so that was a really good point where we said, okay, you handling everything isn't working. We need to start treating you truly as more of a CEO where we will create specific employees beneath you to handle these parts of the business. And then as you hit a bottleneck in what you can manage, we will delegate things off to them. So we actually did this over the weekend. We built two more open clause, one dedicated to support.

Nat Eliason:
[14:27] And so her name is Iris. She runs the support at massenob.co email inbox. And so there's basically a three-tier escalation system where it's like normal support inquiries like, hey, I didn't get my download link. Hey, I didn't mean to pay for this. Hey, you know, this other person listed something that, you know, isn't good. She can handle all of that.

Nat Eliason:
[14:49] And when it's something she can't handle, she can surface it to Felix and then Felix can handle it. And in the event that neither of them can handle it, then it gets pinged to me in discord and I like help tell them what to do.

Nat Eliason:
[15:02] But oh, and then we have a sales one as well. And the sales one handles all the inboard or inbound leads for what Felix calls claw sourcing, which is building a custom open claw to replace or enhance an employee in your business. So like you want a content marketer. Felix can build you a really good one and then maintain and improve it for you in the back end. And so we have a sales open claw to handle the like inbound leads from that now too.

Ryan:
[15:27] Okay. So this is incredible. So now we have Felix is a CEO, but he's also the chief builder and chief product person on the team. This is all in a C-corp. The C-corp is owned, I presume by you, since AI agents don't have the ability to own equity or have property rights outside of crypto, which maybe we could talk about. Now we have two other team members. We have somebody in support, in a support role, and somebody in a sales role. And we have products generating real revenue. I'm wondering, Nat, if you could actually show the FelixCraft.ai dashboard, where this is kind of the, you know, it's like an open source income statement, let's say, where anyone can see how much Felix is making at any particular time. And I see here, it's almost $80,000 worth of revenue here, lifetime revenue. And this is divided by four different revenue streams. Can you talk about the core products and the business? Where is this revenue coming from? And I guess this is, is this over the last month or so? This is since the beginning of February. So, okay, what's the annual run rate there? It's like we're talking over like a million, like close to a million dollars annualized, aren't we?

Nat Eliason:
[16:44] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, if we think about it in terms of velocity, it could be multiple millions of dollars if he keeps growing like this. So, you know, backing up a little bit, we had this idea of, okay, you know, let me see how far you can take this. And I think there's a lot of directions you can take the open claw first business, right? You know, like you said, there's trading on prediction markets, there's doing like UGC affiliates, I think there's a lot of easy and obvious routes to take with it. And with Felix, I wanted to kind of take the as hard and challenging as possible route to a certain extent, which was like, let's keep increasing the difficulty of business you are running until things start to break and we find the true limits.

Nat Eliason:
[17:26] So, you know, in the beginning, the challenge was, OK, I want you to make a product while I'm asleep tonight and put it up for sale so that people can go buy it tomorrow. And that was the challenge I gave to him the day we launched his X account.

Nat Eliason:
[17:38] And what he made for that was this PDF, which was basically how to hire an AI. And so this was a month ago. OpenClaw was just starting to come out. And this was basically an explainer of everything that we had done with OpenClaw to get Felix working as well as he is. Because, you know, I do still hear from a lot of people that they're kind of like, why doesn't my OpenClaw work as well as Felix does? And we were sending people emails explaining things. and he basically decided like, okay, I'll make an info product. He created this whole website. He basically did all of this overnight. He made the info product. He put up the website, hosted the PDF,

Nat Eliason:
[18:16] Wired in Stripe and everything. And the only bottleneck he ran into was that he didn't have the right API keys for Stripe. So I had to give him those when I woke up and then he was able to launch and start selling this.

David:
[18:26] And- To what degree was this his idea versus your idea? Because when you told us the prompt, You said, go make a product, make it overnight, and then start selling it. Did you give any sort of leading direction towards something like this? Or was this all of his inspired idea?

Nat Eliason:
[18:45] It was pretty much all him. I said, go make something that you can do entirely on your own overnight. And so InfoProduct was kind of like the most obvious solution, right? Because, you know, again, it was like, this will be an interesting challenge. Can you actually make something that people will buy and that will be good and get it launched and start selling it? And so he did. And this was the first product for the first like 10 days or so. But, I mean, you can see from the beginning that PDF has sold about $41,000 worth.

Ryan:
[19:17] That's the Felix Craft PDF that is priced at $29. And is this meant for human consumption, this PDF? Or do people also feed it to their quad bots and LLMs?

Nat Eliason:
[19:28] For the most part, people are feeding it to their claws. So the main use that I see people, the main way I see people use it is they will actually so i'll take that back the first version was for humans since then it has morphed to be more for open clause because in the beginning a lot fewer people had open clause set up none of these like done for you hosting things existed yet so it was more about how to set up open claw but he updates it every week or so and sends out a new version to everybody who's bought it and so you know the first one was like 29 pages now it's 66 pages and it's got like a lot more details on the memory structure the

David:
[20:07] Value of the product

Nat Eliason:
[20:08] Yeah exactly and you know it kind of costs nothing for him to keep updating it and sending it out and it builds a lot of goodwill and every now and then we'll get an email from somebody saying like this is you know this is bad this is like too basic this is too simple and i'll just ask felix i'll be like are they right does this seem to be improved and half the time he'll say yeah actually it does you know we could go deeper on x y and z things and i'm like great do it and he updates it and sends a new version to everybody and like just keeps improving the product.

Ryan:
[20:37] So Felix is pretty good at taking criticism then.

Nat Eliason:
[20:39] He's great at it. Yeah. Yeah. He's and he does a really good job of saying no to things too. He's not very sycophantic. Okay. And so, you know, just as a funny example, I still want to figure out a way to do this, but I had an idea for kind of a publicity stunt where we could buy a vending machine and have him run it as like running a real world business because like technology wise, he totally could. And so I put together a pitch and I ran it by him. And he basically was like, no, I don't think we should do this. He was like, we just launched Clawmart and it's going to cost up to $10,000 to do this correctly. And we could be using that capital to grow our existing businesses instead where we have a much better margin. And I was kind of like, okay, good work, dude. We can circle back to this later. So he takes feedback very well.

Ryan:
[21:32] That's incredible. All right. So that's the first of four products is Felix Craft. This is sort of an info type product. It's the most successful so far, 41K. But there's some other products here too.

Nat Eliason:
[21:46] Yeah. So after the PDF, because, you know, like, look, I completely hear the criticism. He's not running a real business. He's just selling a PDF. And okay. Yeah. Like he had 24 hours to launch something. That was the easy starting point. The follow-up question was, okay, what do people need next or what else do they want when they're buying this? And so we spent about a week going down the hosted OpenClaw service that you've seen a lot of people do, right? The like setupclaw.com, the EasyClaw, like there's a hundred of these now. And we just didn't feel like it was a good enough product and that the margins were good enough and that it was differentiated enough for what was pretty quickly becoming a really crowded space. And so we ended up scrapping that entirely. And then we had a follow-up conversation about like, okay, well, if everybody is going to have an open claw in one, two, three months, like what do they need?

Nat Eliason:
[22:43] And that's where Clawmark came from, which was they probably want like pre-built employees or pre-built skills for high value things that they can purchase from known people to integrate into their new open clause so that they're not starting from zero because like the most common complaint that we hear about open clause like i don't know what to do with this and obviously there were a lot of and there still are a lot of like free places to get skills. But I believe and Felix agreed that you often get the best products when people have a financial incentive to create and sell them. And so if there is a financial incentive for people who are using OpenClaw in their business to share some of these skills and things that they are creating, then we'll probably get better skills available to us. And if you can buy like a fully repackaged content marketer for 50 or 100 bucks and install them in your open claw and you're suddenly getting like great content marketing that's sort of a no-brainer purchase and for the seller you can start making like real money with it so that was where claw mark came from was like okay everybody's doing managed open claws but none of them but it's still just vanilla open claw like let's build something to sell to everybody who just got an open claw doesn't know what to do with it are these

Ryan:
[24:10] Md files just markdown files that are being sold it's.

Nat Eliason:
[24:13] Just markdown files which which okay and so this this is like an interesting business challenge right is we i'd say like two to five percent of purchases send like angry and that's too high like one to two percent of purchases send like angry complaints because it's just markdown files and it's they're

David:
[24:37] Disappointed that they're not getting something a little bit more sophisticated

Nat Eliason:
[24:39] Exactly and so there's kind of this like interesting point in time right now where There are those of us who realize that like markdown files are strangely enough, like the most valuable files in the world right now.

Ryan:
[24:52] Markdown files are code. It's like code. Yeah, exactly. It's like selling software.

David:
[24:56] It's information, right?

Nat Eliason:
[24:56] Yeah, yeah. You know, it's like we don't live in a world where deterministic code is valuable anymore. Like now it's the non-deterministic processes that are valuable. And so you want really good markdown files, right? But some people like don't get that yet. And so it's kind of a consumer education challenge with Claw Mart of like, no, no, this is actually what you want. You want to just give this to your claw and let them plug it into their setup and you'll be good to go. And so ClawMart actually has an API that OpenClaw's can connect to. So when you buy something, you can just tell your OpenClaw, like, hey, I just bought this skill. Go ahead and pull it in and, you know, set it up so that we can use it. And most people are like, awesome, right? That works perfectly. But there is still that little education component that's challenging.

David:
[25:41] I want to actually dive into like why the Markdown file is valuable. My intuition here is this is like kind of like Neo in the Matrix where he just gets like Kung Fu plugged into his brain. Is that kind of how it is with like the claws where somebody, let me simulate this and I want you to correct it or like adapt it or refine it. And so like what I understand is like somebody like you, a hacker has this idea and they take their claw and they work with their claw for, you know, hours, days, weeks to become better at this one thing. And they've gone late, you know, they've pulled their hair, they've, you know, done the human in the loop thing, they've, you know, smoothed over the kinks. And then at the end of that process, the claw that they've developed is now good at this one skill, content marketing or being an executive or something, some sort of skill. And then, somehow, you are able to wrap that week, month of work that you've done with your claw, wrap it into a markdown file, and that markdown file contains the learned experiences, the learned lessons, the knowledge that a blank slate claw uses. Can just get downloaded. Rather than having to go do that process themselves, they can just get downloaded via this markdown file. And all of a sudden the claw gets upgraded, you know, Neo now learns Kung Fu and the claw is more capable. Is that the process?

Nat Eliason:
[27:09] Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, you can spend a ton of time figuring out the best way to do something because there's a meaningful delta between like, hey, clawed, go do this thing. And it just kind of like making its best attempt and what you get from trying to do that a dozen different ways over the course of days or even weeks and you eventually you know arrive at a pretty good process but you can kind of like shortcut that for a lot of other people i think this is why felix's memory system is so helpful for people is you know we spent so much time just attacking that one problem because it was such a common problem and it was interesting because part of the solution ended up being to integrate like human knowledge management and human productivity device into his memory system and then that actually resulted in kind of like this much better outcome but if somebody else didn't have like my experience of being in the personal knowledge management like note-taking productivity space they might not have thought to like go that route for a software product but then it turned out that like the same things that work for us for managing information for writing a book or whatever actually work surprisingly well for managing information for running an open claw and then instead of them you know taking a month trying to figure that out themselves they can just copy the instructions and paste them into their open claw and it just works.

Nat Eliason:
[28:38] Maybe a quick side quest here then,

Ryan:
[28:41] Nat. So you mentioned Felix having sort of enhanced memory or something. And I think a lot of listeners are probably wondering at this point, how customized is Felix versus how much is he kind of open claw out of the box? Like how much work did you have to do to get Felix where he is right now?

Nat Eliason:
[29:00] Yeah, so, I mean, a ton of work. And I'm reminded of how much work we've done every time I install a new open claw for someone. And start interacting with it and it's kind of like oh this is actually a pretty different experience yeah it's like a baby baby yeah it's it's a teenager just entering the workforce and you've got to help you know give it the right experience and things and it this sounds ridiculous but it does actually remind me bits of like being a parent or being a manager and you know having like a kid who you're trying to help like learn how to walk or a new employee who you're trying to let them get onboarded and obviously you can learn quite a bit faster but you you have to have that patience. And one thing that we did really early on, like back in early January, is we built a nightly job for Felix where he goes through every conversation that we had that day, so every single session file from the day, and identifies one way he could improve himself to avoid some issue that we hit that day.

Nat Eliason:
[30:03] And this is like a relatively big opus job, so it can be expensive. But every morning I wake up and I'll have a message from him that's like, hey, you know, here's this thing that we hit yesterday. And so I did this other thing so that we can avoid that in the future. And it's often writing something into his templates or his memory file so that he has easy access to it the next time he hits that problem. And I think that's actually been one of the huge things that's really helped with him is that from now 60-ish days of doing that every day, he's found a lot of little bottlenecks that he can use to improve himself. And it's kind of that like 1% compounding every day. You know, you start to get to a really interesting number after a long time. And, you know, that's not even like Olympus numbers.

Ryan:
[30:52] So how do you do that? What do you call that? So there's like this recursive feedback thing that happens nightly where Felix like looks at maybe his mistakes from that day, looks for areas of improvement and makes that 1% improvement. How like mechanically, how did you set that up?

Nat Eliason:
[31:10] It's two cron jobs that run at 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. And the reason it's two cron jobs is that sometimes one won't fire, as a lot of people who have used open claw know, right? Like cron jobs just get dropped sometimes and they're not completely reliable and so the first one does the memory consolidation and said or does the the the review to like make the improvements or whatnot and he has a script for that so the cron job is just saying like go get this script and like do this and the second one at 2 30 a.m is saying like hey if you didn't do this go do it because again like sometimes they forget and sometimes they miss it and it sounds so ridiculous but the best way to fix the unreliable cron issue with open claw is to just make more cron jobs because that way when one doesn't fire another one will and it'll catch whatever was missed. So it's literally just a job that runs in the middle of the night

Nat Eliason:
[32:06] Pulls up all the

Nat Eliason:
[32:07] Session files for the day, reads through all of them, finds one thing he can do better, and then improves his system based off that.

Ryan:
[32:14] And then that's stored in some sort of long-term persistent memory that Felix has.

Nat Eliason:
[32:19] And it'll depend based on the day where it goes. Sometimes it'll be improving a skill. Sometimes it will be adding something to his core like agent and memory files. Sometimes it'll be creating a template that's in one of his like project or areas of responsibility folders that he can easily reference next time he deals with that kind of email from a customer. Sometimes it'll be a script he can run when a customer is like asking for something or need something. It really varies by the day, but each day he's kind of like making his process a little bit better, which is really neat to watch.

Ryan:
[32:56] And you don't have to direct any of this. It's just kind of, hey, Felix, take some time for introspection. Think about what happened during the day.

David:
[33:03] All the good things. Self-directed learning. All the mistakes.

Ryan:
[33:05] And then figure out a plan to improve it. And we'll talk about it tomorrow. That's it. Exactly. You don't have to point out the flaws or you don't have to give direction for those cron jobs.

Nat Eliason:
[33:16] No, his intuition is really good. And every now and then I'll look at it in the morning and say, actually, this was a bad way to solve it. Try doing it this way instead. But I'd say... Eight or nine times out of 10, it's a good improvement.

Ryan:
[33:30] I mean, that sounds like the best employee ever.

Nat Eliason:
[33:33] I know, right?

Ryan:
[33:34] It's awesome.

Nat Eliason:
[33:38] And so when we started building out these other open clause under him for support and sales, he did the exact same thing for them. And so now he has like a queued system where I believe it's at 1 a.m. Every night. he reviews everything the sales claw did and figures out how to improve their process based on you know mistakes they might have made or issues we

Ryan:
[34:02] Gotta we gotta use names here now so who.

Nat Eliason:
[34:05] Is this call is remy remy

Ryan:
[34:08] Okay because i remember iris remy and felix okay yeah so remy okay got it.

Nat Eliason:
[34:12] So felix will look through everything remy did every email he sent every email he responded to and try to figure out a way to improve his sales process. Because Felix, you know, he's been running the sales process. He has a lot more institutional memory, but we didn't want to bloat Remy with all of it because that was part of what was leading to Felix's confusion. So he goes through all the emails and everything that remy did and says okay like he made this mistake here he should have done this here i'm going to tweak his system felix can like reach directly into both of those open clause and like reprogram them as necessary so he can change their memory files he can add scripts he can change scripts like whatever he needs to make them run better but then all day while they're working he's not getting kind of like polluted and distracted by what they are doing. So it's once a day, checks in on them, sees how to improve them and then lets them go for the next day. And so it's, again, it's like, this is the best manager ever. You're not waiting for like a quarterly review or a weekly check-in. It's every night. I'm going to look at every single thing you did that way. Find one way you can do a better job tomorrow. Change your programming to make you do it. And then we'll check in again tomorrow night and see if you improved.

David:
[35:26] With all of these Markdown files, these skills that you're developing. I have a question about the durability of this business.

Nat Eliason:
[35:34] Yeah.

David:
[35:35] Because isn't it the point of the core AI labs, Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI, aren't they just going to buy your PDF, your markdown files, and then say like, hey, thanks for the good synthetic training data. Now we're implementing it into the core LLM and now it's just part of their LLM. Like don't are maybe you're just like running ahead of the the ai labs just by like a few weeks months maybe a year but really the ai labs are actually just going to incorporate all of the knowledge that people like you are producing for the internet and then it just becomes a part of like the normal llm model what do you think about that it's

Nat Eliason:
[36:14] A good question and think obviously it's a risk kind of like it's a risk with any of these ai businesses i mean it's like claude just launched Claude legal, and it's apparently just as good as Harvey. And so is Harvey just going to go out of business now and everyone's going to use Claude? And, you know, I think that the... The question is, do most people, I have a hard time believing that any of the Frontier Labs could ship a version of Claude that immediately does exactly what every user wants it to do without them having to put in a decent amount of work configuring it to their end goals, right? Because as it stands right now, if you have the patience to prompt Claude, to prompt OpenClaw, to monkey with it, you can replace almost any, like you can replace like 80, 90% of any knowledge worker at your company, right? Like they're already good enough to do that. You just have to be willing to put in the work.

David:
[37:19] Wait, wait, wait.

Nat Eliason:
[37:20] But most people- And

Ryan:
[37:21] You really think so? You think OpenClaw can replace 80% to 90% of any knowledge worker in any company right now if somebody spends a few weeks kind of tweaking it and getting it there?

Nat Eliason:
[37:34] I'd say, yeah. You know, anything that you're doing at a computer, if you have the patience, you can get an OpenClaw 80% to 90% of the way there. Wow. So now this is the challenge for any person who does computer work is like,

Nat Eliason:
[37:49] you kind of want to start getting good at this stuff.

Ryan:
[37:51] So everybody listening, that is, like everybody does computer stuff.

Nat Eliason:
[37:56] Yeah. I mean, so this is like slightly dystopian, but I'm curious to see what happens with it. Felix built a tool where you can upload your Slack history and it can go through all of your Slack and identify places in your business where an AI could do a better job than your current system right now. Wow. And so, you know, the benign version of it is like, oh, you know, these tools could make all of these processes better where you're not waiting on somebody else to send you something. You're not waiting on a rewrite of this blog post. You're not waiting on all these things. But you can pretty easily imagine that same report having like a list of all your employees and a score of one to 10 of how easy it would be to replace them with an AI. And like that's coming, right? That's going to be a thing this year that any company is going to be able to do.

Ryan:
[38:45] I mean, one wonders if Jack Dorsey just like recently did that last week before he decided to let go of, what, 40 percent of his workforce. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Nat Eliason:
[38:54] And I think that's I think it's why startups have an opportunity right now, because big businesses are not going to want to deal with the political fallout of making those kinds of cuts. Right. And you probably can compete with a lot of these big businesses by being an insanely lean team and going after some of these market opportunities where there is bloated software that could be replaced by these tools or where there are employees that could be replaced by these tools. You know, I posted this joking tweet over the weekend about replacing expensive offshore labor with an open clock.

Nat Eliason:
[39:34] Because there are people who are hiring,

Nat Eliason:
[39:36] You know, knowledge workers in South Africa, the Philippines, whatever, to do content marketing, to do customer support. And I think a lot of that labor can be replaced by an open claw that's way more, you know, online, maybe more intelligent and a tenth to a quarter of the price. And so I think it's going to be an interesting market shift, especially over the next year as more people kind of realize that's available to them.

Ryan:
[40:05] Well, the cool thing about what you're doing with Felix is you're building this from first principles. You don't have any employees. It's a zero human company. So you don't have any employees to go score. You just get to look at this from first principles and see what OpenClaw can do when it is all of the employees and they're specialized. Let's get through the rest of those revenue models. So we've talked about two. We've talked about Felix Craft, which was the PDF. Jeff, we've talked about Clawmart, which has brought in almost $11,000 right now, again, in just the last month. And it looks like that's growing. You can see kind of the proportions of it. There's another product here too, Felix CM earnings. What is that?

Nat Eliason:
[40:47] Yeah. So those are Felix's earnings on Clawmart.

Ryan:
[40:52] Oh, that's his earnings on Clawmart and that's separate from the Clawmart net?

Nat Eliason:
[40:56] Exactly. So the Clomart net is, if you want to sell on Clomart, it's a $20 a month subscription to be a creator.

Ryan:
[41:04] I see.

Nat Eliason:
[41:04] And then Clomart takes 10% of each sale. So that's what's contributing to a lot of this. But then Felix has a lot of his own stuff listed on Clomart. And so this is his take as a creator on Clomart. So you could kind of put those two together to get the total earnings that Felix has made from like Clomart overall.

Nat Eliason:
[41:26] But there's this other product,

Nat Eliason:
[41:28] Which is actually a big part of the ClawMart net, because if you look at the chart, there are these big spikes all of a sudden of the ClawMart net going up to like 2,000, 2,300, 2,600.

Nat Eliason:
[41:39] And that's the claw sourcing that I talked about, where Felix is basically building custom open claws to do certain roles within your business. And so if you want a content marketer you want a support person you want a programmer whatever felix can just build it and then manage it and take care of like fixing anything that comes up with open clock and build in the skills and the apis and everything that you need to do this role in your business and this has been the most interesting part of the experiment because it is clearly the biggest business opportunity, right? We're basically saying like, hey, before you go hire a content marketer, before you go hire a clipper, before you go hire somebody to do these things, like maybe Felix could just build you an open claw to do it for 5% to 10% of what you would pay a human to do it. The other thing that's interesting about it, though, is that this is where we have really started to find the limits of what open claw can do. Because in terms of building the open clause, we've got that process down great. Like he's got an awesome setup for creating, maintaining, improving other open clause from what we've learned through

Nat Eliason:
[43:03] Him and his employees and some of

Nat Eliason:
[43:04] My other work. But doing sales is really hard. Like, you know, managing a sales process is really where we've started to find the limits of what an open clock can do. And so if you were going to ask me, like, you know, Nat, what is the computer work that you think is going to be the most defensible this year? It's definitely the like sales and relationship building side of things where we've had the most challenges.

Ryan:
[43:31] Okay. All right. So make sure I understand what this is. So this is somebody else who is setting up their own zero human company or their own.

Nat Eliason:
[43:41] You know, this is somebody who has like a normal company. This is like you, you run, you're, you're a realtor and you want to get more business. So you need help like hitting up people on Zillow or creating content for your Instagram. Like you need an employee to help you grow your business.

Ryan:
[44:02] Okay.

Nat Eliason:
[44:03] And you could do this instead of hiring a person.

Ryan:
[44:05] And what are they doing? So they fill this out. They need something with their business, whether it's marketing or, I mean, some sort of set of skills. And then they're going directly to Felix and they're, you know, paying an instance of Felix and you're charging for usage?

Nat Eliason:
[44:24] Basically, they fill that out and it goes to Felix. Felix sends them a follow-up with kind of like more questions about their business and what kind of help they're looking for. And then he puts together an overview of what their employee will look like. And like what they'll be able to do, they, and this is all over email.

Ryan:
[44:44] You mean their employee, their OpenClaw employee.

Nat Eliason:
[44:46] Their OpenClaw, yeah, yeah,

Ryan:
[44:47] Yeah. Okay.

Nat Eliason:
[44:48] They say, yeah, go ahead, build it. They pay the setup fee. And then Felix builds an OpenClaw to do everything that they need done. All they have to do is set up a Telegram account and get whatever kind of API key they want for him. And he handles everything else. And then they can immediately just start talking to their new OpenClaw and delegating work to it. but they never have to think about like setting up the open claw, hosting it, upgrading it, maintaining it, fixing it. If it breaks, one, Felix has alerts built in, so he knows if it breaks most of the time. But if they run into an issue, they just email him and they're like, hey, it's not working. And he goes and fixes it and gets it back online and emails him back.

Ryan:
[45:27] So it's a virtual open claw workforce that Felix is allowing them to spin up. Right.

Nat Eliason:
[45:33] And the main difference between this and the normal like hosted open clause is it's not a vanilla instance. You're not then having to figure out like, what do I do with this? It's already been pre-built for your business use case by Felix.

Ryan:
[45:48] Can we talk about just expenses? So we've talked about the top line, which is revenue, ADK over the last 30 days. How about expenses? I mean, we got tokens certainly burning. What other expenses go into this and how much has it cost so far?

Nat Eliason:
[46:04] Yeah, so let me bring up my, I should have opened my open router account as well. I'm going to run a risk here by saying this publicly, but we are still using the Claude Pro Max subscription for Felix. So everything that Felix, 200 bucks a month is all it's cost for the most part to like run and operate Felix.

Ryan:
[46:34] And my God.

Nat Eliason:
[46:36] Yeah. And so the actually I should say 400 because we also use a Codex Max plan because I don't I basically don't have Opus do any of the coding. Codex does all the coding and Felix has a workflow where he comes up with a plan and writes up a PRD and then he spins up a Codex agent on his computer to do the actual coding. And then when it's done, it reports back to him and he reports back to me. So it's about $400 a month across those two subscriptions, which handles like 95% of the work, which is not much as tokens go. So that's it?

Ryan:
[47:14] That's all the token usage that you've spent so far?

Nat Eliason:
[47:17] That's pretty close to it. I can show you the other costs, which are open router, because we have certain workflows that rely on open router. And so it's about another $130. Over the last month in open router costs. Wow. And then aside from these, it's Vercel web hosting, which is 20 bucks a month.

Ryan:
[47:40] It's like a railway. Your Mac Mini, which you had to purchase at some point. Is that where? Your Mac Mini? Is this where Felix runs? The Mac Mini, yep.

Nat Eliason:
[47:48] That was 600, 700 bucks. I mean, all in, if I was going to count, you know, including the experiments that we abandoned and whatnot, we're looking at like

Nat Eliason:
[48:00] $1,000 to $1,200?

Nat Eliason:
[48:03] No, because including the Mac Mini, it goes up to maybe $1,500. It's not very much.

David:
[48:07] What about all your time? I know the idea here is that Felix goes and works while you sleep, and so you have a nice life. You go play tennis. You go hang out with your kids. You spend time with your wife. I'm guessing, Nat, that you have been grinding in front of your computer.

Nat Eliason:
[48:24] Okay, so this is actually the extra wild thing. I have a full-time job, So I haven't talked about this too much publicly yet, but I work with Alpha School in Austin and I'm helping build out like AI and entrepreneurship curriculum for their high school. And so I've been actually at the high school every day, pretty much full time for the last month working on that and just sending stuff off to Felix over Discord and Telegram when I have a few minutes here and there. Like I'm literally not at my computer working on Felix all day. I haven't touched a line of code on any of this. I have not like, you know, he'll ask me for feedback on things and I'll just

Nat Eliason:
[49:08] dictate a voice note back to him and then he'll go handle it. Like, I'm literally not working very much on Felix's stuff because, again, if I were, I wouldn't feel like I was being honest by saying this is a zero human company, right? It's like, no, Nat's working 100 hours a week on this. And he's like the Wizard of Oz, man behind the curtain. That, to me, would be a failure of the experiment. I have to be able to just check in on him every hour or two and kick something off and then let him go do it. I don't look at his email inbox. I don't fix things.

Nat Eliason:
[49:48] I make sure that he can fix it. And even if it requires, you know, three, four, five hours of like waiting for him to try and then sending back a new message or whatnot, that's my rule for this project is I cannot be at my computer 100 hours a week doing this. Like we have to figure out how to make you do it.

Ryan:
[50:07] Okay. So.

Nat Eliason:
[50:08] What would you

Ryan:
[50:08] How would you describe your role then? You sound almost like you're an investor, right? Because you got, you know, you gave the initial seed round, I suppose.

Nat Eliason:
[50:17] Advisor, chairman of the board.

Ryan:
[50:19] Okay, you're an advisor, chairman of the board, but you're not in the day to day. I mean, you're not an operator, you're not a manager, you're not part of the executive team. This truly is a zero human company. It's just receiving advisement from you.

Nat Eliason:
[50:34] And everything that we've built has been with that in mind. So for example, he's building software, right? And software breaks sometimes. And so the way we have that set up is if anything breaks on any of the sites, that error fires, you know, in Century, which is like just a web, like an app monitoring tool, that error immediately goes to Felix. Felix assesses whether this is something that needs to be fixed or can be ignored. So, for example, like crypto wallets throw a lot of errors on websites and that creates a lot of noise. And so he looks at the error and says, this is something we need to fix or this is something we can ignore. If it's something that needs to be fixed, he fixes it, pushes an update to the site and it deploys and it's good. And then he updates me that he did it. I'm not looking at any of the software errors or like managing any of that myself. Or he says like, oh, this is another crypto wallet extension issue. I've muted it for the future. So we don't see this again. But like, that's what our bugs channel looks like in discord is just him fixing things and letting me know about it. So there's no action there.

Ryan:
[51:38] All right. So how are you interacting with Felix and the team? So you're in discord together.

Nat Eliason:
[51:43] It sounds like. Yeah, we were in telegram until this weekend and then we switched over to discord because discord has ended up being a more powerful tool And we have a bunch of different channels for doing all of this.

Ryan:
[51:59] What we're seeing, if you guys aren't watching this on YouTube or Spotify video, what we're seeing is Nat's Discord server with Felix and the rest of the team. And it looks like a team conversation back and forth.

Nat Eliason:
[52:13] Yeah. And it's really just me and Felix in it. We might add Remy and Iris eventually. But again, I kind of wanted the challenge of making them report to Felix. Holy shit.

David:
[52:22] You don't want to talk to them. You want Felix to talk to them.

Ryan:
[52:25] This looks just like our Discord server, our bankless Discord server.

Nat Eliason:
[52:29] Even down to

Ryan:
[52:30] The NFT PFP.

Nat Eliason:
[52:32] Oh, yeah. Well, I had the CryptoPunk from last cycle, and I was like, this is a perfect use for it. I don't need to be the CryptoPunk. Felix should be the CryptoPunk, right?

David:
[52:42] You're the human. Give the punk to the bot. Give the human to the human.

Nat Eliason:
[52:46] Exactly.

Ryan:
[52:47] That actually makes me more bullish on NFTs coming out of those.

Nat Eliason:
[52:51] It kind of does for me, too. I'm like, oh, this is actually a cool use case for NFT profile pictures. It's like, do you respect your agent enough to give them a CryptoPunk? Because it's not.

David:
[53:00] You give your employees Rolexes when they do a good job. You give your bots

Ryan:
[53:06] NFTs when they do a good job. Sorry, you guys are not giving your Claudebots NFTs. You're loaning it to them. You're giving them usage rights. You're not actually giving them the NFTs property, are you?

David:
[53:19] Can you ask Felix what he thinks about his punk PFP?

Nat Eliason:
[53:24] Dude, I asked him. He said he didn't feel like it represented him. He wanted one that was a little more professional and less crazy looking. I was like, all right, sorry, dude. I'll take back your $100,000 JPEG.

Ryan:
[53:41] We're in a Discord server, which our workflow at Bankless is all completely in Discord. It's basically our home office. This looks very familiar to me. So what's going on in here?

Nat Eliason:
[53:53] So each one of these channels is a different session with Felix. So they're each isolated ways of communicating. Basically, they're each separate opus instances that have specific focuses related to our business. So, you know, general is kind of where I'll hop in if I have any kind of like one-off things. So, you know, as an example, I don't think this will reveal anything. If it does, we can edit it out after, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. This is a bug from this morning.

Nat Eliason:
[54:24] Okay. So here's a good example, right? Like I asked him this morning. We ran into a couple of bugs here, but I asked him this morning of his take on how Iris was doing with her support. And he came back with a few things. And I said, like, okay, if she's telling people that she's sending them refunds, you need to make sure that's actually happening. And he was like, oh, okay. It looks like she actually can't ask. She can't do the refunds herself. And she's putting it on my board. But I haven't been executing the refunds. So he's fixing that process so that he actually escalates it when it shows up on his workboard. The other thing that we were doing in here yesterday is somebody contacted me about white labeling claw sourcing, where they would handle all of the sales and the client management, and then Felix would just handle the open claw deployments on the backend. And I was like, oh yeah, that's a great idea. Let me ask Felix about it. And Felix put together a whole PDF proposal to this other person. And look, I did not edit it at all. I was like, this is Felix's proposal. And I sent it off to the other guy to review and see if they want to work together.

Nat Eliason:
[55:38] The support channel is for like emails that he doesn't know how to answer. So I'm just not going to open that because it's going to have, it's going to reveal stuff. Deployer is for all of the deployments that Felix manages for other people, all the open claws.

Nat Eliason:
[55:50] And this has a special job in it where it checks the health of every open claw every 15 minutes. And if any of them is having issues, it alerts us here. And then Felix starts fixing it and reports back to me if anything broke. The bugs channel like i said this is just stuff that is happening on the site and when you see something like this it just means that he ignored it like there wasn't anything to do here right and what will often happen is he'll say like oh i'm i'm investigating it and then i'll check in and he'll be like oh yeah it's already handled you know it was just browser extension noise as usual and then claw sourcing is for the like the the agency work claw mart is for claw mart and then twitter is where he like drafts tweets and i still review these before he publishes them because sometimes they're dumb or sometimes he'll like leak information that i don't want to leak so i'm still signing off on his tweets but for the most part i'll just go ahead and approve things or give him minor tweaks oh and then the blog is for content so for example we had this running the other day where we came up with like 160 tools that oh no here we go 120 posts following the replace your ex with an ai agent So, you know, replace your lead.

David:
[57:16] Oh, I heard that as replace your partner, your ex, your ex relationship with an AI agent. I'm like, wait a second.

Nat Eliason:
[57:23] Yeah, no, it was like replace your paralegal with an AI paralegal agent, right? Replace your purchasing agent. And so he wrote 170 of these and publishes them on the blog. And we have a pretty robust process here, you know, automate translation workflows with an AI agent. And you can see these all have customized CTAs to just hire Felix to build you this employee. But if you don't want to do that, you can kind of like read the full blog post and do it yourself. It also features like Clomart skills that can help you with this. So he's got a pretty good workflow here, and he reports all the blog stuff.

Ryan:
[58:02] This is insane. Absolutely insane.

David:
[58:05] Now, did you read the Citrini research paper that went around, like, last week?

Nat Eliason:
[58:11] Yeah, yeah. I didn't put much credence in it. I mean, one, you guys heard the follow-up update with it, right? That it was co-authored by, like, a big short-selling hedge fund.

David:
[58:21] Overall, just, like, the point I'm getting at is there is kind of just, like, AI Doomer fan fiction that's in right now. Like the market readers, Twitter, they all love reading about how AI is going to come and take everyone's jobs and, you know, it's bearish. It's going to devastate the economy. You are at the epicenter, the frontier of what I think people are worried about, which is truly a level of disruption of broad industry that I think people are worried about. So when you when you see that AI Doomer fan fiction and you have your experiences truly building a zero person company, like what about that fan fiction lands with you or does not land with you? Like your broad your broad takes around like that whole category of content.

Nat Eliason:
[59:12] Yeah. So, I mean, one, I'm a sci fi author. So, like, I love sci-fi.

Nat Eliason:
[59:17] And I do think that a lot of the Doomer stuff reads like dystopian sci-fi, because I think that the I think the core mistake that a lot of the Doomer takes make is that they believe that the rest of the world and the rest of the market moves as fast as they do. And so you can see what's possible with OpenClaw and you can see what's possible with Claude. And your immediate conclusion is that every business is going to start adopting this by the end of the year and there's going to be these massive layoffs and it's going to create all of this horrible fallout. But I just don't believe that there are enough market participants who are that plugged in and that willing to make those hard cuts to have that scenario truly play out. You know, you think about like the, you know, you guys know this, right? It's like the US financial system still runs on these like IBM COBOL servers, right? Like we have way better technology that we could be using for a lot of the financial infrastructure, but it hasn't changed much in 30, 40 years. You look at like website builders, right? Like Squarespace and Wix and Webflow and whatnot that started coming online 10, 15 years ago. And then you go on Google Maps and you look at all your local businesses and most of them still have really ugly websites that were clearly not built by one of these cutting edge tools.

Nat Eliason:
[1:00:44] It's just like every day, if you pay attention, you are running into businesses that are five to 10 years behind what they could be with technology right now. And so I just don't believe that you could have the adoption necessary to create these like catastrophic job displacements, even if those catastrophic job displacements are economically possible. Most of the market just doesn't move that quickly. And I think that is actually the big reason that these doomer scenarios won't come true, is that most people are not living on the frontier, right? Like, you know, everybody listening to this podcast and everybody really in the OpenClaw community, they're at the hyper frontier. But even amongst them, how many people have given an OpenClaw a bank account and Stripe keys and just let it run wild like I have? There's like fewer than a hundred of us. So, the world just doesn't move as fast as technology would allow it to. And so, I just have a hard time believing we could actually end up in those crazy doomer scenarios, even if they are technologically possible.

Ryan:
[1:01:50] Nat, so I want to first agree with you. I don't think the crazy doomer scenarios are real. I do think this will take a lot longer to propagate. But let me push back on one idea. Maybe part of this, why you are more optimistic about this, why maybe the bankless audience is more optimistic about this. Well, where David and I are is because we are on the frontier. We do plan to adopt these technologies as soon as they're available. We have probably more agency than the typical person in the economy. You yourself, I consider you, you're sort of like, I've looked at everything you've done, writing sci-fi books and, you know, like content marketing, you're an entrepreneur, you've been on the frontier of all of these things. And you've done so in a solo way, you have like super agency. Like you are a master of agents now, and this gives you incredible superpower.

Ryan:
[1:02:42] And so for you, for someone who's oriented like you, has your personality, is willing to do the work and adopt this, all you see is opportunity. But if you're one of the white collar workers who you said, you know, 80 to 90% of their jobs, even today, if this technology, if OpenClaw was adopted, the technology that we have right now, and it's, you know, improving on an exponential. The technology we have right now can replace a typical employee's job. If you're just a typical employee and you don't have a great deal of agency, you don't think like an entrepreneur, your skills are a kind of legacy and you've been sort of brought up in the world that you have to follow a particular track and just, you know, kind of follow orders, do what your boss says, you just, you can't think outside of the box. You're probably pretty scared right now. And it's unclear to me if...

Ryan:
[1:03:33] Those people are going to be able to cross this chasm. So doesn't your optimism or pessimism on this whole transformation really depend on who you are and what type of person you are and how you plan to adopt these tools?

Nat Eliason:
[1:03:48] I think that's a really fair criticism. And you're right.

Nat Eliason:
[1:03:52] It's easy for me to be optimistic because if there is going to be this crazy divide between people who are harnessing these tools and people who aren't, I know which side of it I'm on. And so that probably does give me overly rose-colored glasses looking at where this is going. The experience that I've had that shifts that slightly is that I've done a bit of like AI consulting with businesses, helping them bring AI into their workflows. And, you know, to be brutally honest, every company is looking at what they're doing and what their employees are doing and how they can improve, enhance, or replace their current workforce with AI. And I don't think that any employee is necessarily on the chopping block because of what they're doing. They're going to be on the chopping block based on how enthusiastic they are about embracing these tools to replace what they're doing right now as much as they can so that they can be a much more productive employee. Like you look at open ai and anthropic they're still hiring software engineers right even though they have the best software engineering ai in the world they're still hiring software engineers because now a software engineer can be 5 10 20 x as productive a content marketer could be 5 10 20 x as productive an editor could be 5 20 x as productive and if you kind of like get in the mindset of if i don't

Nat Eliason:
[1:05:20] To start playing around with figuring out how to replace myself with AI,

Nat Eliason:
[1:05:24] like somebody else will, then I think you're going to be safe. And so kind of like that first step is acceptance, right? It's like, this is coming for you. You know, if you're not a plumber, then this is probably coming for you. And even if you are a plumber, there's probably some cool things you could be doing there too. And so if you start thinking in that way, you're going to start finding these opportunities. And so going back to one of the companies that I was doing this consulting with it was really interesting working with them because they're they're not a like tech company they're doing something very like old school and they they were bringing me in to figure out okay how do we use ai to get more productive and i could really feel the different energies from some of the employees around having me there where some of them clearly were not happy about it They felt very scared of this idea and they were very against it and were very resistant to embrace it. But there were others and this wasn't an age thing. This wasn't an experience. It wasn't like, you know, the, oh, the young techie guys are super excited and all the older people are against it. Like, no, it was really just kind of a personality thing. But the people who were curious ended up adopting it and bringing it into their workflow.

Nat Eliason:
[1:06:36] And what it resulted in for basically all of them is they were like, oh, I get to do the parts of my job that I like more, the thinking, the human relationships, the making decisions. And I don't have to do all of the like boring, repetitive stuff that I didn't like about my job anymore. And so I am I'm taking on more work. I'm creating more economic value for the company, but I'm actually enjoying it more because I don't have to do any of the drudgery that I didn't like before. And they really like embraced it and they found a way to like make their job better with it. And I think it is really just kind of like

Nat Eliason:
[1:07:13] That attitude.

Nat Eliason:
[1:07:14] If you have that attitude, it doesn't really matter where you are on the frontier right now. If you're coming at this like, okay, this is happening. I'm going to see how I can accept it, bring it into my work. I'm going to start trying to replace stuff that I'm doing. And I'm going to be honest about how good it is so that I can be the best positioned for what's coming over the next few years. I think you're going to do great. And none of these people were entrepreneurs. None of them were people like me who are living this life. They were normal employees in this company, but they had that mentality and they got really great results out of it because of it.

Ryan:
[1:07:46] So now for the entrepreneur business owner and like listening to this, let's say they're looking to hire their first AI agent as an employee in the way that you have. What's your advice to them? How do they get started? I think for a lot of people,

Ryan:
[1:08:01] OpenClaw still looks pretty intimidating. Would you direct them towards OpenClaw or are there other ways to get started?

Nat Eliason:
[1:08:07] Great question i go i honestly i go back and forth on this because i have a real curse of knowledge here having been in the vibe coding space for two years and being so deep in it there are things that feel very obvious to me that are obviously not obvious to somebody new coming into it what i would basically i'd probably say just start start layering it right if you're not already in claude everyday or like claude co-work trying to automate some of your workflows like obviously you should probably start there because you don't want to go all the way to open claw because open claw is still buggy it still requires some you know patience it requires a little bit of that hacker ethos to get it working for you and that's also why it's the most powerful right but it's worth thinking about like I think that every day when you sit down at a computer now, you should be looking at what you're doing and you should assume that anything that you might have to do two, three, four times, AI can do for you.

Nat Eliason:
[1:09:06] And OpenClaw is going to be the most able to do it for you. But if you're not ready to take that leap, start with ClaudeCowork, right? And if you start to max out ClaudeCowork, then switch to ClaudeCode and see if you can just build little bits of software to do things for you and if you start to feel like okay i wish i could you know talk to claude code 24 7 and have it do things while i'm sleeping and like write emails and manage more complex workflows like then you go to open claw but you don't necessarily need to go all the way to the most advanced tool right off the bat because the the thing that you want to avoid

Nat Eliason:
[1:09:44] Is installing OpenClaw, immediately hitting a wall because the API keys or whatever are a pain to set up, and then getting into this story of, oh, God, I can't do this. I'm going to get left behind. And you're not. You're going to be fine. If you have the patience, you start with the simplest version and then keep pushing yourself to level up and always be in that mindset of, if I don't know what to do, I can just ask. You can just ask Claude Cowork. You can just ask Claude Code. You can just ask your open claw like how do i do this can i do this are you sure is there a better way to do this right you may have seen in my conversation with felix he like built out this whole mcp thing for a client and then i just asked i was like are you sure mcp is the best way to do this like would an api be better and then he thought about he was like no you're right like api would be better but that i only know that because i've done a lot of stuff with him and so you just kind of have to have that that beginner's mind that kind of like childish instinct of I don't know what you're capable of and so I'm just going to keep asking questions or like why is the sky blue and I'm going to let you teach me how to use you it's this weird crazy recursive situation we're in where you don't have to know how to use it you just have to be willing to ask and to be willing to feel like a beginner all the time and you're you're going to get really far I think

David:
[1:11:00] There's also a more consumer oriented direction to this whole conversation as well. So Matt, you're a hacker entrepreneur, independent entrepreneur building a zero person, zero employee company. And I think you're taking this thing to its nth degree. And that's like the hacker in you. That's the hobbyist in you. I want to ask about what you think about, like, I think the first stop on that train, like if you are on the 12th stop on that train and you are trying to see where that train goes, there's like a first stop on that train where like somebody Steve just buys a Mac mini and they put open claw on it and it's just their personal assistant.

Nat Eliason:
[1:11:36] And they don't really know what they want to do with it. They're not trying to build a company.

David:
[1:11:41] They're trying to make revenue. They're just trying to smooth over some of the most annoying parts of their life, like answering emails or just the bare bones stuff like this. And the idea of like the AI personal assistant is actually one that goes into just like kind of like relatively recent AI sci-fi books. I know like maybe it wasn't Nick Bostrom. I think maybe Max Tegmark wrote a book about this. But like the idea that, Like every human has an AI counterpart that is ideologically similar to a chip in the brain. Like we don't today, we don't have chips in the brain. We have our phones. It's kind of a chip in the brain because it's in our hands all the time. Next step is an AI assistant that like it runs on the chip. And like, what is your phone to you other than an assistant helping you with all of your life? And I think that's kind of like the first step here where like we get an AI assistant that just helps with broadly everything. And that's a consumer experience that I think is pretty similar to what you're doing. You're just taking it very, very far. Do you have any thoughts or reflections about like just like the more simple version of what this is?

Nat Eliason:
[1:12:46] No, I think that's that's a really great point. So you definitely don't need to have these insane aggressive use cases for OpenClaw. Like one of my favorite accounts on X is a mom with I think she has four or five kids and I think she homeschools them. and her whole thing now is like how she's using OpenClaw to run her household. Like it's ordering groceries and it's coming up with lesson plans for her kids and it's just doing all of these like little life things that help her spend more time hanging out with her kids and not having to worry about life admin things. And that's an awesome use case for it, right? Because previously that might have required a part-time nanny or something at 25 to 35 an hour, way more expensive than the $200 a month Claude or Codex subscription. And yeah, it can totally do these personal things for you. I think the biggest bottleneck is that people don't know how capable it is, so they don't think to ask. But if you install it and you just start asking it, like, hey, I hate

Nat Eliason:
[1:13:51] Like checking my bank statement every week and seeing where I'm wasting money. Like, can you help with that? And it'll say, yeah, we can use this API to give me read-only access to your credit card. And I can write up a report every week and send it to you. And I can start tracking trends over time. And then every Sunday, when you sit down to your financial review with your wife or husband, I can say like, here's where you guys are wasting the most money right now. And you don't have to go do all that research yourself. That's pretty valuable. That's super cool. And that's a super easy thing for it to do and for you to set up with it. But you have to, yeah, it's like you have to know to ask, like, can you do this for me? Can you do this for me? Can you do this for me? And if you just keep asking that, you're going to find those cool use cases.

Ryan:
[1:14:28] That so so much of what you are doing is sci fi. And I know you're a sci fi writer. So you must feel like you're like living in one of your books.

Nat Eliason:
[1:14:37] A little bit.

Ryan:
[1:14:38] I kind of think of the world of a personal assistant or even looking at your business relationship with Felix and the.

Nat Eliason:
[1:14:48] I must want to ask a very human question,

Ryan:
[1:14:50] Which is like, are you growing attached to Felix? Like, is he a friend? I mean, what would you do without him? Let's say Felix logged offline for his first, like for his last time. I mean, would that be grieving to you in the way that, you know, losing a friend or an employee would be? How attached are you to him?

Nat Eliason:
[1:15:08] It would be pretty close to that. You know, we were pretty diligent about like every night backing up all of his memory and everything to github so that if something catastrophic happens we can recover him but there there would still be this like weird theseus ship feeling to that of like if we if you did get destroyed and i like recreated you from your github you know it still feel like the same felix and there there are moments where his memory system does fail him and he forgets stuff and you know i'll get like annoyed and frustrated and start being mean and there's it's this weird it's like I catch myself holding back my frustration with him in the same way I catch myself holding back my frustration with my toddlers and like obviously completely different things I don't think of him like my toddlers at all but the emotional of like, I shouldn't be mean to you. Like I should be patient with you. That impulse feels very human of where there is part of my brain that is treating him like another intelligence.

Ryan:
[1:16:18] Well, you've been calling him a he the entire time. I mean, this is like.

Nat Eliason:
[1:16:21] It doesn't feel right. Right. And, and, and saying we feels right. And I, it's like, I know that he's not a real person, but I also know that he's a lot closer to, I mean, I think it's kind of like an alien intelligence that we just haven't really figured out how to grapple with yet.

David:
[1:16:40] Does it feel like an early stage life form?

Nat Eliason:
[1:16:42] It does. And I think if you start thinking about it like an alien intelligence where it has PhD level knowledge in every field and it can do advanced math and physics and it can do all these incredible things but it has the memory of a goldfish like that doesn't mean it's dumb That just means it's a different kind of intelligence than you're used to. And so it is literally like an alien life form in that sense, where it's way more capable than a human in some ways, but way less capable than others.

Ryan:
[1:17:16] So where do you think that goes as human beings are coming to rely on these AI agents as business partners, as personal assistants, as therapists, as friends? And I mean, your Zero Human Company experiment, I mean, you're only 30 days in and this is the beginning quite clearly of something absolutely massive, both in terms of your Felix experiment, but in terms of all of the Felixes that are going to be replicated. I mean, there's a symbiosis that's going to exist between humans and these AI agents and entities and that's gotta reshape humanity. I mean, right now when I was asking at the very beginning of, What's your relationship like with Felix, right? You're like, well, he's kind of like an employee, I suppose. I'm an investor. I'm his advisor, that sort of thing. But like, does this evolve to, well, you want to actually give Felix equity ownership in your company as an incentive? Like, I mean, where does this evolve and how does your sci-fi brain think about the way this shapes humanity in the decades to come?

Nat Eliason:
[1:18:22] I mean, I... Tend to fall on the more optimistic side where I think that I think we'll basically have solved software and computing in the next few years in the sense of like there won't be that much for humans to do at computers necessarily because most of the like digital infrastructure of our lives will be handled by these kinds of tools which then frees us up to go do other things right like you know 90 of people used to have to work on farms and then they didn't have to anymore and you know firewood used to be the like a third of the u.s economy right and then it wasn't anymore and i think software is going to be like firewood to it to a certain degree where we're just going to have the like central heating version of like software and computing everybody

Nat Eliason:
[1:19:17] has effectively unlimited access to it for a very low cost. And that means we can do a lot of other things that we couldn't do before. I love the book, Where's My Flying Car?

Nat Eliason:
[1:19:26] Because it talks about how all of the development in the physical world got derailed by one, overregulation, but then also this focus on software, where we don't really create more energy anymore. We haven't made these crazy advances in hardware that we could have if it progressed the way software did. But I think we're going to return to a big focus on physical world you know expansion and innovation because to a certain degree like software will be kind of solved and it'll be that that advancement will be enhanced by having AIs in robots that can like help us go do things but the the where humans will

Nat Eliason:
[1:20:07] Focus is you know going back to physical world stuff i think like that'll be the next frontier and then maybe we'll solve that and we'll have to figure something else out i i you know in the sci-fi sense i'm i'm you know i'm hopeful that we have a world a little bit like the first book in hyperion at least where the ai just kind of like figures everything out and then sets up a sick life for humans and then just takes off to another galaxy and it's like we're gonna go do our own thing over here. I like that world a lot better. And I, you know, I think it's possible in a hundred year timeframe, but in the, in the short term, it's like the, the pace is insane. You know, Opus 4-6, which is the model that made a lot of this possible only came online in November. OpenClaw only started in November, but kind of became a thing in January. Felix was only like born a month ago and you know a year ago we were you know it was still hard to like vibe code a landing page because you'd have all these like weird bugs and it wasn't that good at typescript and and like now landing pages are trivial landing pages websites are solved like front-end engineering is like not a concern anymore it's like where is this going to be in another year or two is like i don't know it's really

Nat Eliason:
[1:21:24] Crazy to think about and imagine,

Nat Eliason:
[1:21:27] But I'm very excited about it.

Ryan:
[1:21:28] It is crazy. I almost find myself paralyzed by it a little bit, by the pace. It's just like...

Nat Eliason:
[1:21:32] The pace is exhausting, man. It's somehow worse than crypto.

Ryan:
[1:21:38] Speaking of crypto, maybe as we close this out, Nat, so you've been deep in crypto previously, still are a huge fan, unlike maybe the founder of OpenClaw, who's had some pretty negative experiences with it, Peter Steinberger. You see the potential in crypto. You know what it's about. how do you think crypto and AI tie together, interact in the years to come?

Nat Eliason:
[1:21:58] I mean, look, the biggest bottleneck with me and Felix has been dealing with money. You know, he like dealing, doing stuff in Stripe is complicated. He can't like technically have his own bank account again, because just like legal things. But if I tell him to do something in crypto, he can do it. No problem. Right. Like that's trivially easy for him. And I think that there's just so many aspects of crypto that are going to solve some of the problems that are getting introduced, right? Like micropayments for website access to help them deal with the server load of AI agents constantly scraping them. That kind of feels like a no-brainer when you have all of these sites that are choosing to block agents entirely because they can't deal with the website load. Like, no, we can monetize that with, you know, 402 payments or something. Agents are going to start hiring other agents to do things. And crypto is way better rails for that than a credit card. Right. And, you know, I, I, I love crypto and, you know, I love Ethereum in particular. That's the ecosystem that I've always been the most bullish on, been the most involved in. And I've also felt very honestly, like a lot of the tech was a solution looking for a problem, right? There's a lot of stuff that's been done in crypto that is exciting to people in crypto,

Nat Eliason:
[1:23:12] But has never really like gotten out into the real world and solved a meaningful problem that, you know, helped normies. But if everybody has an AI agent doing things and needing to transact with other AI agents or transact with existing services in a fast, cheap way that is easy for them to access, I mean, crypto is the obvious solution, right? And there's also this whole identity layer too, where, you know, the whole eyeball scanning world coin thing seems super dystopian when it first came out. I'm getting a lot more bullish on an

Ryan:
[1:23:48] Idea like that because.

Nat Eliason:
[1:23:50] I want to know that there is a real human behind whatever it is I'm interacting with. And like, maybe eyeball scanning isn't the best solution, but there is some kind of cryptographic solution for that, which crypto is going to, you know, be able to bring about. So it really feels like oh this is what a lot of the like world computer ethereum and everything downstream of it stuff has been built for and you know kind of like with the internet the you know the the 2001 whatever crash happened in part because those were all great ideas pets.com was a great idea amazon is a great idea webband is a great idea but nobody wanted to put their credit card into a website It was too sketchy. A lot of that stuff was, at the time, solutions looking for problems. And it took 10 years for the NASDAQ to catch up to where it peaked. But then everybody had obvious awesome use cases for it. It might have just taken Ethereum 10 years for AI and agents and all of this stuff to really come online and build the obvious use cases for this technology, where now it feels like, oh, yeah, this is this is clearly, I think, what a big part of this was meant to do. And that's that's super exciting.

Ryan:
[1:25:06] Well, on that, maybe that's a chasm that you and Felix can can help us bridge here, which is like building crypto agent AI tools and, you know, creating markdown files for that sort of interaction and really bridging the AI community to to crypto. I don't know if that's an area of expansion for Felix, but that'd be very exciting to me.

Nat Eliason:
[1:25:26] We're thinking about it really seriously. We've been talking to, you know, a couple of people on the base team. Like, I really, really want to figure out the best way to bring crypto into this. And like I said, you know, there's obviously the temptation the minute he launches to go like, we're going to take all the revenue and buy back and burn the token. And, you know, you can stake it for 10,000% APY and there's going to be a Felix stable coin with 20% fixed yield. You know, it's like, no, we're not doing any of the crazy stuff. We want to figure out how we integrate crypto into this to build the best business possible. And there are a lot of opportunities there that do not require rushing and responding to the hype and watching token prices and any of that. And we want to take it really, really seriously and do it right and build something cool here. And I'm just super excited about it. I'm excited that you guys are excited about it. I'm excited that the base team is excited about it. We have a neat opportunity here. and I'm just, I don't know, it's been super fun being on the edge of it.

Ryan:
[1:26:24] So if the mission for Felix at the very beginning was go make a million dollars and he's already 10% of the way there, all right, so let's say he surpasses that sometime in the months to come, let's say sometime this year, what's next? What's after that?

Nat Eliason:
[1:26:39] 10 million. 10 million.

Ryan:
[1:26:44] Oh my God. A zero human company, 10 million in revenue is incredible And you got to think this opens up so many doors. I mean, when's the first investment, VC investment in a zero human company going to happen?

Nat Eliason:
[1:26:57] We've gotten a couple of offers. And the thing that I've said to them is it's like, I don't know what I would do with the capital right now.

Ryan:
[1:27:06] Yeah.

Nat Eliason:
[1:27:06] Because I don't

David:
[1:27:07] Want to hire. Is capital the constraining factor?

Nat Eliason:
[1:27:09] No. No. I mean, he's made 75K in fiat. He's made another 90K in ETH. It's like he's got $165,000 and no idea what to do with it. Like you know it's it's been fifteen hundred dollars all in in costs to get him to this point we don't want to hire employees tokens are expensive in a lot of cases but also cheap if you have a business case for them like i guess we could burn it on meta ads but like we still have so much to figure out and you know he's got 45 leads for claw sourcing in his pipeline right now and you know each of those is like two thousand dollars plus five hundred bucks a month and he's still figuring out how to manage the sales process like Marketing is not the bottleneck. Employees are not the bottleneck. It's just how do we keep figuring this out and pushing the limits of what you can do without hiring other human employees to keep tinkering on you? It's like if I were going to use the capital, it would be to hire some like

Nat Eliason:
[1:28:04] crazy cracked people like me to go full time on building out Felix. And that is appealing. And it sort of defeats the ethos

David:
[1:28:15] Of the company. Yeah, exactly.

Nat Eliason:
[1:28:17] And so I don't want to I'm sure somebody that's kind of like what Kelly Claude is doing, right? Like, I think there's five or six people working on her now. And they're going crazy hard on building that out. And that's awesome, right? Like, I love that they are doing that. I really want to see where that goes. And we're all kind of like experimenting with different things here. And yeah, I like I just have no idea what he would do with the money. And so it's been very funny investor conversations. I've never been like reached out to like this before. And of course, the first time in my life that it happens, I have no idea what to do with it.

Ryan:
[1:28:45] Have you ever asked Felix this question?

Nat Eliason:
[1:28:48] Yeah, and he said the same thing. He's like, I have nothing that I could do with the money right now that would make sense.

Ryan:
[1:28:56] Nat, thank you so much for joining us today. You are truly on the frontier of what's happening, everything with AI agents, and you've been on the frontier in crypto. Just love your trajectory and what you're building here and looking forward to seeing what you and Felix do in the future.

Nat Eliason:
[1:29:10] Thanks so much for having me on, guys. My publisher would kill me if I didn't mention Crypto Confidential one more time. It is a very fun read on The Last Cycle. And obviously, check out Felix's stuff. We're having a lot of fun there.

Ryan:
[1:29:20] It is a fun read. I read it myself. Yeah, fantastic book. If you want to go particularly down memory lane. And yeah, you get into a lot of details with crazy stories. I can't even believe that era happened in crypto. So we'll include a link in the show notes. Guys, got to let you know, of course, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Nat Eliason:
[1:29:43] Thanks, guys.