From skeptic to true believer: How OpenClaw changed my life | Claire Vo

With OpenClaw, you started off as one of the leading skeptics.

My first install, I truly spent eight hours getting OpenClaw up and running. In return for those eight hours, I got my personal family calendar deleted.

Now you're a true believer.

I am a breathless OpenClaw bro. It has changed my life. It just hit me with enough joy and e- enough utility when it wasn't deleting my calendar, that I knew something was there. I'm now running, like, eight different agents on OpenClaw. You really have to pull the thread on these tools, and you have to spend enough time with them to see not where they are today, but where they are in a week and where they are in a month.

It feels like a big unlock for you with OpenClaw was realizing you shouldn't just have one.

Where people stumble with OpenClaw is they think they can throw any task at a single agent and get great results, and then they get really frustrated. I won't sugarcoat it. It's a pain to set up. It is not hands-off, but the value is so high, I am willing to go through the pain.

Give people examples of what this actually does for you in your life.

Boy, did I start creating agents. So now we have Paulie, Finn, Max, Howie, Kelly, Holly. Sam is my salesperson. What Sam does has real economic value. Last year, before the beginning of the year, I was paying somebody 10 hours a week to do this.

Today my guest is Claire Vo, the incredible host of our sister podcast, How I AI. She's also a longtime engineer, a three-time chief product officer, and founder of her own AI startup. This is our first-ever crossover episode. We may do more. I asked Claire to come on the podcast because she has become an absolute power user of OpenClaw, which is especially surprising because she was one of the biggest skeptics when it first came out. I don't wanna give too much away, but she has got nine OpenClaws running across three computers, and maybe most importantly, unlike a lot of people online talking about OpenClaw, it has really, truly changed her life across her family's life, her home life, and her work life. Claire is very pragmatic and practical. It takes a lot to get her excited. She's told me that OpenClaw is the most mind-blowing and important AI experience she has had since ChatGPT, which for Claire, who tries out every new AI product, says a lot. I love the timing on this episode because we are now past the absolute peak hype cycle around OpenClaw, when everyone was posting basic how-to videos and theorizing about what OpenClaw could do for them. Now we can get into the reality of what it's actually good at and how to make it work for you in your life. By the end of this episode, you're gonna understand a bunch of ways that it can be useful in your own life, how to install it, how to avoid the security challenges that people run into, how to overcome some of the biggest hurdles that people have. I personally learned a ton from this conversation, and I'm now revisiting my own OpenClaw, which I lovingly named Claudia. If you've been wondering, "What the heck is OpenClaw? Should I still spend time on this? Should I use this versus all these other tools that are launching that are inspired by OpenClaw?" This episode is for you. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's Newsletter subscribers. With that, let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs, including me. I switched to Mercury from Chase over a year ago, and it is such a profoundly better experience. It's like an actual product person built a bank versus a banking person building a product. It is fast. It's elegant. It is super easy to set wires, to track my spending, to set up triggers to move money around when accounts get low. We moved all of our invoicing to Mercury, and it is such a smoother experience than anything else we've tried. It's also really easy to grant people on your team just the right amount of access to help take work off your plate. It's free to get started, no in-person visits, no minimum balances. The product also flexes to all sizes of company, from startups to large enterprises. Just visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column A Members FDIC. This episode is brought to you by Omni. Many product teams today are in the process of debating how to ship AI analytics. The hard part is obvious. Having an LLM guess at SQL in production is a huge mess and just a bad idea. Omni takes a different approach. They have a semantic layer built in so that when you embed their analytics, the AI actually knows your business definitions, not just your raw tables. You can test queries, validate the reasoning, and lock down permissions before anything hits production. If you want AI analytics in your product without building the whole stack from scratch, check out omni.co/lenny for a free three-week trial. Companies like Perplexity, DBT, and BuzzFeed use Omni to ship analytics their customers can trust. That's O-M-N-I.C-O/lenny. [gentle music] Claire, thank you so much for being here, and welcome back to the podcast.