OpenClaw Founder's Self-Account: Creating a Prototype in One Hour, Getting Deeper and Evolving into Today's Project

Gate News reports that on March 20, according to 1M AI News, Peter Steinberger, the founder of the open-source AI agent framework OpenClaw, spoke about the origins of the project at an event hosted by Sequoia Capital. He recalled that in May last year, he had the idea of enabling AI to receive remote commands and perform tasks even when he’s not at his computer. However, he dismissed the idea at the time, thinking, “Big companies will definitely do this, why hasn’t anyone done it yet?” Several months later, in November, the same scenario occurred again—he was away from his computer but urgently wanted to send a command. The frustration became overwhelming: “Why haven’t I started this yet? It’s not that hard.” He traced this impulse back to his mindset when he first entered the industry: “Isn’t this what every founder thinks before starting a company? We start a company precisely because we don’t know how hard it is. We only realize the difficulty once we’re deep in it.” This time, he didn’t wait. He built a prototype on the spot, completed it within an hour, but it had limited functionality. He continued to invest, delving deeper and getting more entangled, until this “rabbit hole” evolved into today’s OpenClaw.