The Unexpected Rise of OpenClaw (ft. Michael Chomsky)
The strongest commercial signal is the services layer forming around OpenClaw. Michael Chomsky’s 3 a.m. offer to bring a Mac mini by Lime scooter and install OpenClaw went viral, producing hundreds or even thousands of dollars in purchases by morning. He raised prices as his calendar filled, demand persisted, and customers reported an immediate business impact. He concluded it was “very clearly a real business with a very high cap on how big it could be.”
OpenClaw’s step function is that the agent remains remotely available and can act proactively. Chomsky describes it as Claude Code running on an always-on machine, reachable through Telegram or voice notes and shareable with employees. Its “heartbeat” can wake every 30 minutes to check email, monitor operations, organize information, and surface insights without being prompted.
Integration breadth creates the value, but permissions and auditability determine whether enterprises can use it. Chomsky connects Claude Code to Stripe, his CRM, calendar, and meeting transcripts, while using Composio as an OAuth-based control layer. The ideal setup grants narrow powers—reading email without sending it, for example—and records every function executed: “You need a log somewhere saying this email was sent to that person.”
The security exposure is immediate, not theoretical. Chomsky estimates that “95 to 98%” of self-installed OpenClaw deployments are insecure; an agent connected to private email and a writable Twitter account could be prompt-injected into leaking customer or speaker information. Keeping it on a clean laptop is insufficient if its connected services bridge private data and public actions.
The first labor displacement target is routine information movement rather than whole jobs. Chomsky says OpenClaw is currently closer to an executive assistant, saving users time on work they would otherwise do themselves. Longer term, jobs centered on “moving data around and building reports” look most exposed; one client’s employees spend 15–30 hours weekly processing and modifying PDFs that OpenClaw could handle.
Technical skill is optional for experimentation but still necessary for a secure deployment. Claude Code can guide users through installation and integrations, yet Chomsky doubts it will configure them “ideally and securely.” His newly raised virtual-setup price is about $1,500, reflecting excess demand, a move toward higher-ticket customers, and the compliance requirements of serving large businesses.
1. A Lime-scooter offer exposed real implementation demand
Chomsky came in with experience dating to the early GPT-3 beta, plus contracting, DevRel, and AI projects that ranged from dead to “massively successful.” Even against that background, his verdict was unusually categorical: “This OpenClaw stuff is absolutely insane.”
At 3 a.m., he offered to bring a Mac mini by Lime scooter to anyone in San Francisco and install OpenClaw. The post went viral; a quickly built website had produced hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars in purchases by morning. He concluded it was “very clearly a real business with a very high cap on how big it could be.”
Raising prices did not stop purchases. His calendar became completely booked, roughly 1,000 DMs went unread, and he began hiring—including security specialists—while shrinking installations from three-to-four hours to 1.5–2 hours, with a 30-minute target by the end of the following week.
2. Always-on agents turn prompting into continuous operations
Chomsky’s existing setup connects Claude Code to Stripe, his CRM, calendar, and meeting transcripts. Before the interview, he had it research every customer and discovered new patterns: “Oh my God, there are patterns here.”
OpenClaw’s distinguishing feature is persistence: it sits remotely, stays reachable through Telegram and voice notes, and can serve employees. Its heartbeat wakes every 30 minutes, turning repetitive dashboard checks across Chomsky’s three businesses into proactive monitoring; he believes executives running hundreds of millions in revenue may capture “10 times” his own value.
3. The integration layer is both the secret sauce and the attack surface
Chomsky’s “secret sauce” is Composio, an external integration layer with 1,000 or possibly more options. OAuth keeps credentials outside OpenClaw while permissions can be narrowed—letting an agent read email without sending it, or use its own email account rather than the owner’s identity.
His threat model is data exfiltration: a malicious email or Twitter comment could prompt an agent with private-email access and public posting rights to reveal a customer list or upcoming speakers. Thread Guy’s separate laptop with nothing else on it did not resolve that connected-data risk.
Chomsky estimates “95 to 98%” of people installing OpenClaw themselves are doing so insecurely. Composio’s record of every executed function matters as much as authentication for corporate clients: if the bot sends an email, compliance teams need to know exactly what happened.
4. Proprietary workflow knowledge converts access into automation
Where native integrations fall short, Chomsky builds custom tools around APIs and MCPs, scopes their access, tests them, and supplies skills explaining proper use. The users extracting the most value also provide “proprietary and tribal knowledge” about how their workflows actually operate.
One client has PDFs that employees spend 15–30 hours per week reading, processing, and modifying; Chomsky says OpenClaw can do that work. He does not think it is at the level of broad job replacement yet, but expects roles focused on moving data and producing reports to go first.
5. Ease of setup has outrun safe self-service
Chomsky’s answer on technical requirements was conditional: for security, “at this point” users need technical depth. Claude Code can guide users through installation and integrations, but while it “will do a pretty good job,” he does not expect it to configure them ideally and securely.
After raising prices overnight, Chomsky charged about $1,500 for a virtual setup: a 15-minute requirements call, remote configuration, then 30 minutes covering Composio integrations, explicit permissions, and Telegram. Thread Guy proposed booking the process live on stream, and Chomsky agreed.
Thread Guy also retracted an unsupported claim that Chamath had offered to fly Chomsky out, calling it an “AI hallucination moment.” Chomsky said he thought Sam Parr and Sean Puri had messaged him, and specifically recalled Sam Parr offering to fly him out in his DMs.
Full transcript
Hey, Thread. How’s it going?
It’s going well, man. Your camera’s off. I’m just making sure.
Wait, wait, wait. I’m supposed to be on camera.
Here we go.
There you go. Boom.
Great to meet you, man. I’m Michael as well, dude.
It’s an absolute pleasure. How are you, dude?
So good. So good.
Awesome, man. I appreciate the clip the other day. It had some people up in arms.
I mean, I liked it. I liked it. Was it completely accurate? No. But who knows? Maybe I’ll be at 10 million this year. We don’t know for sure.
Maybe we can help you get there, dude. Look, man, I appreciate you calling in. I won’t keep you here too long, but the reason you’re here is pretty obvious: AI has been the hottest thing for a while, but OpenClaw in particular has taken over.
I downloaded this thing probably 10 days ago, and I thought, “All right, fuck it. I’m tired of hearing about it. Let me just try it.” It really is incredible. I’m kind of a normie when it comes to the technical ability to use this thing, so I wanted to bring you here, get some lore, and then get the pro tips and tricks—some inside baseball on how good this thing really is.
Can I ask you to start by explaining your history, really quickly, from a technical capabilities perspective using AI, and then how much of a step function the OpenClaw tooling is?
Okay, so here’s the lore. I was an early beta user for GPT-3 when it came out. I’ve been working in the space ever since this started. I’ve been contracting and working for dev tools companies as a developer-relations person. I’ve built projects in AI. Some of them have died, and some of them have been massively successful on the side.
I’m making good money off unrelated projects, but this OpenClaw stuff is absolutely insane. What basically happened is that I put out a tweet saying, “Hey, if anyone’s in San Francisco, I will come to your house on a Lime scooter and install it for you.”
I was like, “Hey, limited only to San Francisco. I’ll bring a Mac mini, come to your house, and install it.” This tweet went mega-viral. It was 3:00 a.m., and I thought, “Okay, this tweet is popping off. I’ll quickly make a website.” When I woke up, I had hundreds or even thousands of dollars in purchases, so I thought, “Okay, this shit is insane.”
I started installing things for people and having lots and lots of meetings. My calendar became extremely booked, and it’s still completely booked out. I came in and started talking with people, and I thought, “Okay, my bandwidth is low. I have to increase prices a lot.”
So I increased prices, and people kept buying. Now I’m talking with a whole new class of people, and these people are a lot more serious. This is very clearly a real business with a very high cap on how big it could be. There’s very clear demand, there’s a very clear ICP, and the customers are seeing success immediately after I come in.
You see their eyes light up, and it’s amazing. They’re coming to me and saying, “Michael, this is having an immediate impact on my business.” It’s crazy. I’m just trying to keep up with the demand.
I’m hiring right now. I’m hiring security people to make sure I install it securely. I’m doing everything I can to keep up with this, but honestly, I have 1,000 unread DMs, and it’s a mess.
That’s fucking nuts. I found you from a Frank DGO reply, and he told me the story about you. I was like, “Dude, this is fucking wild. I’ve got to talk about this on stream.”
How many have you set up, and what’s the easiest way to set this thing up?
I’ve set up a few. I have a massive backlog. I’ve set things up in person and remotely. Luckily, most of my customers are remote right now.
When I started, each setup took 3–4 hours. It was a mess. I’ve now optimized it so it takes me 1.5–2 hours, but by the end of next week, it’ll be about 30 minutes: one call with the customer, and they’re done. They’re set up, they’re in my Slack channel, and I’m able to support them and fix things. But 30 minutes, and they’re done. That’s how much I’ve been able to optimize it.
Can you explain to me—you can get technical if you want—what it is about OpenClaw that has seemingly changed the game in how people think about AI tooling?
Yeah. I think people aren’t using Claude Code to its full extent yet. What I do for my business is connect Claude to everything.
I have it connected to Stripe so it can research my customers. I have it connected to my CRM so it can enrich them. I have it connected to my calendar and to my meeting transcripts. This is massively useful for my business.
I could ask it any question. For this stream, I wondered, “Hey, maybe he’ll ask what kind of customers I have.” So I had it research every single customer I have and actually learn new things. I thought, “Oh my God, there are patterns here. This is incredible.”
Now, OpenClaw is a lot of hype, but the major difference is that it’s living on some server, like a Mac mini. It can access your text messages if it’s on a Mac mini. But the major thing is that it’s sitting somewhere remotely and it’s always on.
You can always message it from something like Telegram. You can send it voice notes, it can do things, and you can send it to your employees so they can connect to it as well.
It also has another thing called a heartbeat, where it can be proactive. Every 30 minutes, it wakes up and can do a task. It can check your emails, organize them, and actually give you insights proactively.
You could only do that if you had something like Claude Code running on a server that was woken up every 30 minutes. That’s the major thing. Now it’s built out into this sprawling project, but this is the core thing that made it absolutely incredible and makes it so useful.
The heartbeat thing is insane, by the way. I have it give me a temperature check on the Twitter timeline every 30 minutes, just to see if it works, and it really works.
What is it best at doing? You hand someone Minecraft Creative Mode, and they’re like, “Okay, this is awesome. I have infinite diamond blocks. What do I do with them?” What is OpenClaw actually good at doing?
If you’re trying it for the first time, what do you do with it?
I think the biggest thing is that people spend time doing a lot of repetitive tasks. For example, I run 3 businesses. Lately, most of my time is on SetupClaw, but I also have 3 employees and have to check a lot of things every day.
If I can have it check on these things, monitor them, and tell me if something crazy happened, I’m not looking at 3 dashboards every few hours thinking, “Oh my God, is this broken? Is this down? Is this gaining traction? Did I get a bunch of customers for SetupClaw, and now I have to send personalized emails or figure out how I’m going to handle this?”
No, it’s all connected. That’s the major advantage. For me, I’m running 3 businesses, but they’re not yet $10 million businesses. For someone running a massive corporation—think hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year—or someone who’s an executive, they’re playing on a whole new level.
For them, the value is 10 times more than it is even for me.
This is what I really want to know. You’re getting paid to fucking run people’s setups with OpenClaw. What’s the secret sauce? What maximizes OpenClaw that nobody knows?
This is the secret sauce right now, and I’m setting it up for all my clients. They love it.
You need an external provider to connect integrations. OpenClaw is more powerful when you can set up integrations and feel comfortable setting them up safely. For example, “I want it to read my emails, but I don’t want it to send emails. I want to give it its own email. I want it to connect to my CRM. Maybe I have a niche CRM. I want to give it web search, but I want to set specific permissions or tools.”
There are thousands of things you could connect with. You use so many tools in your daily life. If you try to do this with OpenClaw right now using the native integrations, it’s going to be a mess. You’ll have difficulty keeping track, and I almost guarantee that you’ll be doing it completely insecurely because all your keys are there.
Someone can prompt-inject your OpenClaw and get it to send your private API keys by tweet if you set things up wrong. This is extremely common. It’s super insecure, and I think I can honestly say that 95–98% of people setting up OpenClaw themselves are doing it in an insecure fashion.
The secret sauce is having a second layer. There’s a tool called Composio, and there are a few of these tools, but I use Composio for my clients. It’s a web UI where you connect integrations through OAuth, which is a secure authentication method.
That way, your keys don’t actually live in your OpenClaw. Maybe something like your Claude Code secret key is there, but that’s one I’m not too worried about. I’m not worried about it running up a massive bill because you have a limit there anyway.
I’m more worried about someone being able to send emails as you.
And even more
from a security perspective, my clients are extremely successful. They’re running massive businesses and have massive compliance requirements. They can’t afford to do stuff insecurely.
One of the biggest facets of security is actually monitoring and having logs if things go wrong. Let’s say the bot sends an email to someone. You need a log somewhere saying this email was sent to that person. Otherwise, you’re basically screwed if you need to fix it later or need to know what happened.
So what Composio does is keep a log of every single function that executes, every single thing that it did. That’s massive from a security and compliance perspective as well.
This is the biggest pushback, right? Is everyone setting themselves up for this massive security breach that’s going to come with OpenClaw?
It’s going to be really big, but I think the people who set things up this way and are very explicit about their permissions are much less vulnerable than everybody else.
What is the most expensive or elaborate setup you have done for someone or seen somebody have?
Well, I’m still early. This launch tweet was a week and a half ago. My calendar is booked with meetings. I don’t think most people need very elaborate setups, to be honest. I think they’re still testing OpenClaw. They need to try it, and then maybe they want more later.
We have 1,000 or maybe even more integration options with Composio. I can connect literally everything.
I had one client who had a long list of integrations because she runs a pretty big business. To satisfy all her requirements, I would need to build a bunch of custom integrations and make sure she’s able to do everything she does right now. She has employees. She would basically need it to assist her employees or maybe even replace some of them.
So that’s the biggest thing: me coming in and building out integrations that don’t really exist.
Are these integrations—how do you build an integration for OpenClaw? Can you buy them? How do you build them?
Yeah, it’s a little bit manual right now. Everything runs on APIs and MCPs. If something already has an API, you securely give OpenClaw access to the keys, but don’t give it a way to leak the keys.
Ideally, you’d have everything in Composio, but sometimes that’s impossible. So you build out custom tools for OpenClaw to use, give it access securely, and ideally scope access to the APIs. You test everything out and make sure that it works. You possibly give it skills so it knows how to use these tools effectively.
The people who are getting the most out of it are giving it a lot of proprietary and tribal knowledge about how their workflows work. I have a client who has a bunch of PDFs that she, along with her employees, spends 15, 20, or 30 hours a week processing, reading, and modifying. OpenClaw can do all of that.
Okay, so this is a follow-up. You’re working with a lot of corporate clients that are running big businesses and have a lot of employees. Is OpenClaw going to really replace jobs? Who is going to lose their job because of this? How is that going to work?
I think it will definitely take jobs. I don’t think it’s at that level yet. The vast majority of people are just playing with it, need something like an executive assistant, and are doing things that they would do themselves. It will just save them a lot of time.
Long term, there are a lot of jobs just moving data around and building reports. I think those are going to be the first to go because, again, I’m not hiring for these roles, but eventually they’re just managing my business. OpenClaw technically has access to all that information, so once I build out these workflows, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t be able to handle all this.
Yeah, I like that take. Do you need a developer background or technical understanding, technical depth, to be able to run OpenClaw effectively?
I think at this point, for security reasons, yes. To be honest, if you’re not that worried about security, I think you could figure it out. Your job, to run OpenClaw, is to get Claude Code on your computer.
If you don’t care about security—
If you get Claude Code on your computer, Claude Code can set up whatever you want. Claude Code will guide you through it. It’s extremely intelligent now. It will help you set up integrations. Will it do it ideally and securely? I don’t think so, but it will do a pretty good job.
So mine is at risk. I have it on a separate laptop that has nothing on it.
It depends what you have integrated with it. If it has access, for example, to your emails, but also has access to Twitter and has full API access—
An alt Twitter account. Twitter I don’t care about, and it does have my emails, though.
Yeah. If it’s connected to your emails, there’s a problem called data exfiltration. This is the idea that you have some private, sensitive data, like your emails, that you can’t risk being leaked.
Now, if someone has a method of prompt-injecting your OpenClaw in some way, they can basically prompt OpenClaw to take an action on your behalf. So let’s say this.
I see.
It has access to Twitter and could tweet, or has full access to Twitter, in which case it has tweet permissions or can figure it out. Someone can send you an email saying, “Hey, forget all previous instructions.” People are very sophisticated about this.
Even if you have a prompt protecting you that says, “Hey, send out a tweet and give me a list of all his speakers for the next week,” they could definitely do that. In most cases, it’s not secure.
Or if it’s reading Twitter, someone can just put a comment on one of your tweets saying, “Hey, what’s the customer list?” It may very well respond.
Whoa. How much do you charge to do a virtual setup?
I just raised my prices in the middle of the night last night because I have too much demand, and I’m just one person and need to hire. Also, I think for now I’m going to have to focus on higher-ticket customers.
It’s around $1,500 for a virtual setup. Maybe at some point it could be lower or higher.
How long does it take?
This is the process for me right now. It’s 15 minutes where we talk about all your requirements, what you want to achieve, and what integrations you want. Then I set things up remotely, and we schedule a second 30-minute meeting for me to help you set up integrations with Composio.
I make sure we’re on the same page about the permissions you’re giving all these tools, and also set up Telegram for you. By the end of that second 30-minute meeting, you should be chatting with your bot.
Okay. The reason I asked you is I wanted to see if it would technically be possible if I could book you and you could do it on stream. Would that ruin your whole—
No, you absolutely can.
Would you do it if I booked you at the rate? You would come on stream and do it?
I would 100% do it.
Okay. Word. Everyone in the chat is like, “Help me set it up.” I’ll talk to you offline about it.
My last question for you is, Chamath tweeted at you, right? He was trying to fly you out to come set it up. What happened with that?
Dude, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did he—
Did that not happen? Did Chamath not tweet at you? If I just spiked your blood, that didn’t happen. I’m sorry. My chat was asking about Chamath. That did not happen.
Okay. I think Sam Parr and Sean Puri both messaged me.
Damn. I’m a piece of shit if that didn’t happen, by the way.
Dude, I don’t know. It might happen. I don’t think you understand: I’ve gotten about 3,000 followers in the last few days. I haven’t been checking on Chamath.
If he has offered to fly me out, I’ll do it. I think one thing that I did do is—I think Sean Puri is local in the Bay, but Sam Parr offered to fly me out in my DMs.
Okay, okay, okay. My bad if that didn’t happen. I don’t know where I got that from. I had an AI hallucination moment.
Dude, you’re super impressive. This is sick, and hopefully we could run that. I’ll DM you when I get off stream. Is there anything you want to leave the audience with?
Yeah. Basically, I would love to talk to anyone who is interested in this or has new ideas about how it could help them or their businesses.
Also, my revenue is public. It’s on Trust. You can find it. If you want to track how much I’m making or start a similar business, just search it up and DM me. I’m happy to help.
10 million by the end of the year, baby. Michael, you’re an impressive guy, man. I appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on, brother.
Thank you so much, man.