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From a 30-Person Discord Meetup to a Global Tour

tl;dr if you have haven’t heard of this OpenClaw thing, don’t worry its not too late. The Personal AI revolution is just getting started. I hosted the first-ever ClawCon in SF; it was a massive, unexpected success. We’re taking the show on the road with events planned in major cities worldwide. Want to host or sponsor the next one?

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It’s been over 2 weeks now since I hosted the 1st ClawCon in SF and I thought I would take a moment to write down the experience since it was a bit of a whirlwind.

At the beginning of 2026 I started hosting Claude Code events in SF. They were small show-and-tell gatherings where people building things with Claude Code got together and share what they’re working on or how they get work done.

I began planning the next one but decided it was gonna be a ClawdBot event because i started spending more time with it than with Claude Code. So I hopped into the Clawdbot community discord to see if anyone else wanted to join, when I noticed people were talking about doing a meetup in SF and I offered to host.

Peter Steinberger , the creator of OpenClaw (fka Moltbot fka Clawdbot) said he would make the trek to SF, he was living in Vienna at the time and said the first week of February would be best for him so I picked Wednesday Feb 4, shout out to my buddy Nick Gray, who loves a good Wednesday meetup.

How 30 RSVPs Became 1,300

When I posted in the discord there were about 30 people who RSVP’d so I secured a venue for 80 ppl thinking that once we posted on X we would get a few more people to sign up

We hadn’t really posted to X but already had 80 RSVPs. We needed a bigger venue and I asked people to hold off promoting the event until we could secure a space. Francesco & Tommy, my co-organizer, who were members at Frontier Tower were able to secure a spot that could fit 200 ppl.

You always need merch
Dave Morin texted me that we needed merch and that he was working with AI to design something in time. We still weren’t sure if we could get anything made 6 days before the event.

The next day he tweeted out his request to the universe and luckily Isaac from merch.com saw it and came through.

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During this short period of time Clawdbot renamed to Moltbot (because Anthropic’s lawyers sent a kind cease and desist email saying its name was too close to their Claude product.) And just around that time our event hit 700 RSVPs!! With still just a few days before the event, Tommy went to work securing another entire floor in the Frontier building.

2 days later Moltbot changed its name again this time to OpenClaw because its way better sounding, now we had 900 RSVPs the morning of the event. (As of this writing there are over 1,326 who signed up for the SF chapter of ClawCon)

Event Day

On my way to the venue I sent out one final email blast to the folks with the details about the event and I mentioned that people should get there early because I didnt want 900 ppl to show up at the same time. I did not think through what would happen next.

People started showing up 20 minutes after I sent out that email! By 5 PM there was a line down Market Street. Volunteers who came early to help set up got stuck in the lobby. The event wasn’t supposed to start for another two hours. It was wild to have had a packed house before the official start time. So the people who showed up on time at 6pm for the official start time had to head up to the overflow floor.

Tommy and I had been coordinating over discord daily leading up to the event and had never actually met before that day he posted this photo to the discord with the caption: “would you believe me if i told you this was my first time meeting @msg? feels like I’ve known the guy a lifetime.”

The Event

I opened up thanking folks for coming and gave a huge shout out to our sponsors who made the night possible

and then shared some of my slides of where I thought we were in timelines of our humanity.

Peter gave the “State of the Claw” in it he mentioned how he paid out of pocket for the first security hire for the project; how Google;s Virus Total was integrated into ClawHub for virus scanning for free; how he met with Anthropic; he plans to team up with one of the large AI labs to continue developing the project and no matter what happens OpenClaw remains MIT open source forever. “This is too precious to let one company eat it up.” (Less than 2 weeks later he announced he was joining OpenAI and wrote athoughtful post about why.)

The Demos:

Playpen / UFP (Natalie & Arjun et al) — We had robots controlled via lobster chat. They demoed ClawBot controlling fighting robots in coordination with autonomous robot battle league.
Cua (Francesco) — Multiplayer computer-use agents in Docker. They deferred their Hacker News launch to announce at ClawCon instead.
Clawdinator (Josh one the maintainers flew in from Rotterdam) and showcased the self-deploying, self-modifying maintainer bots. “Everyone says don’t make AI self-replicating. So we made it self-replicating.”
Lobster (Vignesh another maintainer flew in from Seattle) — YAML workflows for OpenClaw. “Bash for OpenClaw.” Vignesh had been stuck in line an hour earlier and got pulled to the front to present.
Bee Computer: showed off their OpenClaw skill that lets you pull data and query your recording
OpenClaw Trace (Eugene) — Recursive self-improvement using 20M tokens of traces. The bot writes research papers about its own bugs then fixes them.
Vincent (Chris Cassano) — Decentralized keys for agents
Cline (Tony) — Announced a $1M open source grants program for open source AI tools.

Then Theo and Peter chatted it up. Theo called out Mac Mini owners: “You spent $700 on a Mac you didn’t need but won’t donate $5/month to the project.” Peter’s closing line: “The future is gonna be fucking weird.”

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You can watch the full chaotic 2 hour livestream surprisingly over 30,000 people have watched it already

if you dont want to watch it you can login to X, Alex Volkov had his bot watch the stream and create a thread of it.

Event photos were captured from that night were posted over here

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My highlights of the event

It was so great to see so many people come out and connect in a non corporate event way and exude excitement around OpenClaw and Personal AI as a whole. People were so excited that they even tattooed the ClawCon logo on their laptops with the laser engraver I borrowed from my friend Chris.

Dave asking Susan Kare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare to design the logo design and the CEO of Merch.com Ikey ended up personally flying up from LA the day of the event to drop off the Lobster hats and a couple of the hoodies so we would have sick merch for the event.

It was great seeing people I hadn’t seen in years

What Other People Said

Seth: “CLAWCON. Haven’t felt this kind of energy in SF since… um… when?”

Dave Morin: “This was as close to 2000s energy as anything I have seen in San Francisco. Good to see people excited about personal software again.”

Localghost: “Nobody was really there for work, just hanging out and talking about their bots.”

Yuri Budman: “the real SF Super Bowl — over 1000+ people piling into a space to learn, build, and share open source projects.”

Vignesh: “It was like a concert. I haven’t seen this much excitement first hand.”

Scobleizer: “Was watching the stream. Awesome. So awesome.”

Jacalulu: “What an awesome event! Had such a great time.”

Jeff Weinstein: “the speed, veracity, and smell of a san francisco didn’t-exist-last-week-but-is-the-thing-this-week meetup is breathtaking.”

Brad Gessler: “Crabs and robots. Not pictured: lots of people looking at TUIs doing the work of software engineers of yesteryear and the smell of crab in a hot, humid, crowded space.”

What’s Next

The event was such a success that the next day people were asking to host it in their city. One of the sponsors even offered to have me host their events. I was flattered but politely declined.

Instead I tweeted out “What city should we host the next ClawCon in?”

And lots of responses came in and a number of people raised their hands to help host in their city so Tommy and I partnered up to take the show on the road and turn ClawCon into a real thing.

As of this writing we have announced ClawCon events in the following cities and in just a week we already have more RSVPs than we know where to put them:

(Because you read this far I will share a little secret: Madrid, Toronto, and Los Angeles will be announced soon but the dates are still TBD)

Peter busted opened the door to personal AI with OpenClaw and we want to help foster community and education with ClawCon. We see it as a place to gather and connect and figure out the future together. Besides for hosting events we plan to set up the ClawCon Community Fund to put resources back into the ecosystem: open source grants, workshops, and seed funding for local chapters worldwide.

If you or your company want to be involved — sponsoring, hosting a chapter, whatever — reach out. DM @msg