NanoClaw Creator Lands Docker Deal After Six Weeks

It has been an absolutely crazy six weeks

for the creator of NanoClaw by Gavriel Cohen.

He created this tool basically in 48 hours on his couch

and it has now led six weeks later

to going completely viral and creating

and having a deal with Docker.

So today on the podcast I wanna break down his story,

how he built this product, what it does.

It's basically an open source version of OpenClaw,

which is the viral tool used to create AI agents

that everyone is talking about and using.

I wanna break down the story of this company

because I think it is a phenomenal meteoric rise

of a really incredible tool

that a lot of people have fallen in love with.

So let's get into the podcast.

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All right, let's talk about this crazy week

that they're having over at NanoClaw the last six weeks.

Basically in early January, Cohen went and dropped a post

on hacker news where he introduced NanoClaw.

This is a really small open source alternative

to OpenClaw and he built this basically

in I think 48 hours straight.

He said he sat down and just cranked this thing out.

And eventually this thing snowballed quite big

but it was originally just started as a small side project.

A few weeks later, after he made a post,

Andrew Carpathy, of course, the famous AI researcher

was saying, this thing's pretty cool.

It went super viral when he did that.

He posted on X and this basically put it

in front of thousands of developers.

And from all the attention that that got,

it got more than 22,000 GitHub stars.

It had 4,600 forks and dozens and dungeons

of contributions and collaborations on new features

that people wanted to add to it.

And that's a cool thing with open sources.

You put it out there.

If people find it useful,

you're gonna get a ton of help building it up

and making it a really useful, great product.

I think that's when things started to get really serious

after that kind of initial wave.

So last week Cohen actually shut down the AI marketing startup

that he launched with his brother, Lazar.

And he is focusing exclusively on NanoClaw.

So he had something else going,

realized this thing had so much momentum.

He shut that down.

Right now, both of them are building company

around the project called NanoCo.

And this is usually how these open source projects go, right?

Because technically open source means

they're giving the code away.

Anyone can use it for free or kind of with a license.

I mean, there's different ways you can do open source.

But you know, you really are trying to give this way

for other people to use.

But you typically will create a company around it

where you host it on your own server

and usually have an API and people don't want to kind of

run it on their own hardware.

They can still get access to it through you.

So on Friday after, I guess they hit another milestone

and Cohen announced that Docker, who is of course

the company behind all of the container technology.

It's used by millions of developers around the world,

just partnered with NanoClaw.

And they're going to integrate Docker sandboxes directly

into their platform.

And for a project, I think that began, you know,

this is basically a weekend experiment six weeks ago.

This is moving very fast.

One thing that I do think is interesting here

is kind of the idea of NanoClaw how it came out.

There was a real world problem that they were trying

to solve.

Cohen and both, I think him and his brother

have been running an AI native marketing agency.

They use AI agents to do a lot of different tasks, right?

Like they used to think like market research,

blog writing, you know, GDM analysis.

They were doing all of that.

And the model was working well, but they already,

and they already had like a bunch of big customers.

They were on track to reach a million dollars

in annual recurring revenue.

And he said, I'm a big believer in AI native service companies.

They can operate with the margins of software companies

while still delivering service.

But there was like a big thing they said they were missing.

So the agents that Cohen built could, you know,

go, they can make any sort of tasks that you ask them to.

And by the way, like I listen to a ton of podcasts

and this is kind of the trend everyone's seen right now

is these kind of creating these agents

to do a lot of things in a lot of different industries.

But marketing is a huge one that I hear people just,

you know, spinning up tons of these agents.

And they're giving them like,

do all my LinkedIn outreach and customize it to the user

and go do a bunch of custom research on them

and make it really personalized

and look at all this kind of,

these different data points go to all these different websites.

So these things can be quite powerful.

But the problem is that they could not schedule work in advance

or they can't really connect super easily

to messaging platforms like WhatsApp to get assignments.

So when Cohen discovered OpenClaw,

he was like, oh my gosh,

this is kind of like the golden ticket for that.

He said there was an aha moment

and then it basically connected all of the workflows

that he'd already built.

So he was already doing a lot of this stuff.

He got OpenClaw and is like sweet OpenClaw

like can now like kind of manage it all.

And I think for a while,

OpenClaw was working perfectly for him.

And then he realized like there was a big piece missing

to even that.

So while he was kind of looking at some

of the performance issues,

he realized that OpenClaw's agents had downloaded

all of his WhatsApp messages

and then stored them locally as plain unencrypted text,

which right, I mean,

these are WhatsApp is famous for being encrypted

and now you got them all as unencrypted texts,

you know, just stored on your device.

And so I think not just,

you know, his work messages,

it had authorized that he like told it.

It got you know,

it had authorization to access.

Apparently it actually went and downloaded

his entire messaging history.

So I hope his like personal conversations

like everything it downloaded it.

And I think at that point,

he was basically realizing that it pretty much confirmed

that a lot of different developers were already sane, right?

This OpenClaw architecture could expose a lot

of sensitive data.

You know, I've,

and I've also heard like all sorts of things

that go wrong with this

where people stick it on their personal computer

and it like went and deleted all their family photos

for the last 10 years

and they're like,

couldn't figure out how to restore them.

So, you know,

there is definitely some risks with that.

And so I think the security angle there,

he realized was a serious problem.

And so when he was kind of looking at their code base,

he realized that it was an issue that was across,

you know hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

There was countless dependencies.

At one point he said he even saw a small open source

PDF editing tool

that he had personally written months before.

It was buried somewhere in the project.

So like OpenClaw was using some of his stuff,

which was hilarious.

He said at that moment,

he basically realized that no single developer

could realistically audit the entire stack.

Like this was just so,

there was just so much going on.

So he decided he wanted to build something simpler.

He took what was 800,000 lines of code

and he brought it down to 500

and was really just trying to create an absolutely minimal

and secure alternative to OpenClaw.

And so that's what he built with NanoClaw.

I mean, that is insane.

800,000 lines of code down to 500.

It was a super stripped down framework.

It was written, you know, very, very concise.

And so instead of relying on this kind of massive dependency tree,

it used containerized environments

that would isolate AI agents

and then strictly control what data they could access.

Originally, he just built it for his own startup, right?

Because I mean, he's doing like a million dollars

in annual recurring revenue on his company

and he's like, okay, sweet, we can build this for us.

He did decide to share it, which I think was, you know,

a huge kudos to him who's just trying to help people out.

Maybe he thought, oh, it was just 500 lines of code.

Like what's the big deal?

It went viral overnight

and I think a couple of weeks after he posted it to hacker news,

he got his phone was ringing

and it was a friend calling to tell him

that Andre Carpathi had retweeted it,

which is, you know, huge.

And then I think within hours,

the project really exploded in developer community.

So lots of people were retweeting about it.

Programmers were posting like YouTube breakdowns.

There's a bunch of articles that were started to appear

all, you know, a whole bunch of people

started to talk about it.

And I think there's funny, it's funny

because there was a domain squatter

that went and grabbed nanoclaw.dev

before he could actually go and get it.

And so I think there was a lot of momentum

that was really kind of just like building up inside of it,

especially from engineers inside of Docker.

So Oleg Sledgev is a developer at Docker.

He, I think he originally reached out after he saw

it kind of going viral on X or whatever.

And he's, you know, I think Cohen was really receptive

to this right off the bat.

He's like, look, this isn't just my personal agent

running on a Mac mini.

It's like a whole community using it.

So he's like, okay, maybe I should start making

some partnerships on this.

So now they are going about turning this into

an actual company.

It's called NanoCode.

I mean, they're obviously in the process

of trying to figure out how to make money.

In order to do that, they said that nanoclaw

is gonna stay free.

It's gonna stay open source.

So anyone that is currently in the developers

or currently kind of helping this project take off,

they'll still get access to it.

And they're just gonna be funding the development

of the next phase of this through a friends and family round.

They're gonna kind of figure out

what the long-term business model is.

I think one of the most likely directions

is basically building like a commercial platform

around the open source core.

But then they're gonna offer kind of an enterprise service,

you know, security hardening,

forward deployed engineers who can help companies

design and manage their AI agent systems.

Now, that whole market is a little bit crowded

if I'm being honest, but I think right now

there's like tens of thousands of developers

that are playing with NanoClaw.

And because they have some of these growing partnerships,

right, companies like Docker,

I think that they are gonna be able to turn this

into something a lot bigger.

And I think that, you know, if the last six weeks

are any indication, the NanoClaw story is just getting started.

Like this is obviously a company that's growing very fast.

And we're seeing a lot of exciting progress here.

So I'm super stoked to follow along

and a huge congratulations to everyone at the NanoClaw team.

I mean, particularly to Gabrielle Cohen,

great work on this product

and excited to follow in the future.

Guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.

If this was an interesting story

following the rise of this new AI company,

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