If you are following LMAI you’re going to love this story.
There’s this developer, Peter Steinberger. Not a loud Twitter AI guy. Not a VC-backed wunderkind. Just a serious builder. Years ago, he bootstrapped a developer tools company called PSPDFKit. Solid business. Real customers. Quiet success.
Then recently, he ships this open-source project called OpenClaw. And it’s not just another chatbot wrapper. It’s an AI agent that actually does stuff. Runs locally. Touches your apps. Executes tasks. Less “ask me a question,” more “tell me what to handle.”
Developers freak out — in a good way.
The repo starts moving fast. Stars stack up. People fork it. Talk about it. Build on top of it. Because it feels like a glimpse of what’s next.
Not just better prompts. Autonomous software altogether.
And then — boom — he actually gets invited to join OpenAI. Sam Altman announces this on his X profile.
That’s the crazy part.
He didn’t raise $50 million. He didn’t run a massive launch campaign. He just built something useful and shipped it in public. And the market pulled him in. Now he got offered a position + some equity in the fastest developing company in the world.
That’s what’s interesting to me. And from side of OpenAI, this was a very smart move to pull in the best talent into their own system and let them do what they do best – develop.
We keep thinking the next big opportunity is hidden in some stealth startup or behind a pitch deck. But more and more, it’s just sitting on GitHub.
You build something real. People use it. The right people notice.
OpenClaw isn’t the main story. The story is that one well-built project can completely change your life trajectory. That’s the new leverage.
Build in public. Ship fast. Let the internet compound it.
And if you happen to be early to a massive shift the upside isn’t incremental.
It’s career-defining.
