Last November, Peter Steinberger was annoyed that there was no good way to talk to his coding agents from his phone, so he built one himself. A few months later, OpenClaw had exploded into one of the biggest open source AI projects in the world, with nearly 3,000 contributors and a peak of 4.7 million weekly downloads.
At Startup School 2026, Peter tells the story of what happened when OpenClaw took off, what he got wrong as it grew, and how he eventually stopped using the product he had built for himself.
He shares why the best products often start with something that annoys you, why focus matters more as building gets easier, and why, in his words, “fun is velocity.”
Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/peter-steinberger-what-happens-when
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
Chapters:
00:00 — Intro
01:16 — How OpenClaw Started
05:10 — Finding Product-Market Fit
07:01 — The Night OpenClaw Went Viral
09:50 — When the Project Exploded
11:05 — When the Attention Almost Broke Him
12:00 — Did You Sell Out?
14:17 — Your Name Can’t Be Forked
15:03 — What OpenClaw Got Wrong
20:40 — Hype Is Like the Weather
21:37 — When It Stopped Being Fun
25:30 — Fun Is Velocity
26:40 — What’s Next for OpenClaw
28:57 — Three Lessons From Building OpenClaw
30:08 — Q&A
