alt Hacker NewsDid this guy just exit the first one man billion-dollar startup for... less than a billion?
Replies
No because this was not a billion dollar business
Where do you guys get the 1b exit from? I didn't see numbers yet.
Everyone is going to have their own flavor of Open Claw within 18 months. The memory architecture (and the general concept of the multi-tiered system) is open source. There's no moat to this kind of thing. But OpenAI is happy to trade his star power for money. And he might build something cool with suddenly unlimited resources. I don't blame the guy. OpenAI is going to change hands 2-3 times over the next 5 years but at the end of the day he will still have the money and equity OpenAI gave him. And his cool project will continue on.
Was the project really ever valued that high? Seems like something that can be easily replicated and even properly thought out (re: pi). This guy just ran the social media hype train the right way.
I keep reading takes about OpenClaw being acquired, but even the TLDR at the top makes it clear that OpenClaw isn’t part of this move:
> tl;dr: I’m joining OpenAI to work on bringing agents to everyone. OpenClaw will move to a foundation and stay open and independent.
I’m sure he got a very generous offer (congrats to him!) but all of the hot takes about OpenClaw being acquired are getting weird.
how is it a "startup" if all ip is open-source. Seems like openAi is just buying hype to keep riding their hype bubble a little longer, since they are in hot water on every other front (20Billion revenue vs 1 Trillion expenses and obligations, Sora 2 user retention dropping to 1% of users after 1 month of usage, dense competition, all actual real founding ml scientists having skipped the boat a long time ago).
I literally had begun to wonder if OpenClaw had more of a future as a company than OpenAI
The fact that 1 billion is the threshold you chose to highlight shows the ridiculousness of this industry.
Openclaw is an amazing piece of hard work and novel software engineering, but I can't imagine OpenAI/anthropic/google not being able to compete with it for 1/20th that number (with solid hiring of course).