OpenClaw LA Meetup #2

Overview

• Turnout: 100+ people showed up; over 250 signed up
• Location: Koreatown - smaller, more intimate venue this time (we're still broke)
• Organizers: Robin + JM, still self-funded, still down bad
• Energy: Somehow even louder and more engaged than the first one. Didn't think that was possible
• Vibe check: If the first meetup was "oh wow, there are other people like me," this one was "okay, we're actually building a movement"

The Crowd

• People showed up early. Hungry. Laptops out before we even started
• Wall Street veterans, humanitarian nonprofits, filmmakers, deep house DJs, cybersecurity folks, real estate investors, people who've never written a line of code in their lives
• Half the room was non-technical. That's not a bug - that's the whole point
• One presenter came all the way from Utah
• The Telegram group from the first meetup was buzzing all week leading up to this

Welcome

• JM kicked things off with a quick OpenClaw intro to beginners and reminder of a new workshop at the end of the event
• Robin introduced the epic sponsors: Privy, ElevenLabs, Moonshot AI, Ember, and 100 Humanitarians
• As soon as we announced free ElevenLabs and Kimi K2 credits, the crowd roared. Shoutout to the real ones keeping our lights on.

Demo Highlights

1. Chris Dabao: The Humanitarian

• Came representing 100 Humanitarians International. This wasn't about code - it was about garden towers
• Simple fabric mesh towers that hold 120 vegetables. One tower = 1,000 meals/year
• Not handouts - they teach families to grow the food themselves, give them two towers so they can sell excess and buy chickens, goats, more towers
• 13,000 families in Kenya over six years. 30,000 worldwide
• Price reveal: $25 for a thousand meals a year. The room went quiet
• Also built an app called Anti-Coffee with AI in one week to gamify donations
• Andy Choi gave up his own sponsorship slot so Chris could present

2. Chris: The Claw Farm

• Software developer at a digital products agency. Showed up with a whole roster of named agents, each with a distinct personality and job
• Lori (inspired by Dolores from Westworld) handles maintenance
• Dolly lives in his family group iMessage - calendar, reminders, shopping lists based on fridge photos, cheeky morning budget alerts. Basically what Siri was supposed to be
• Quinn is their company accountant - lives in the org chart, chases missing receipts, pulls revenue numbers on demand
• Marty is the project assistant who actually reads every meeting transcript
• Dex, the developer agent, now runs his own sub-agent army - gets a voice memo, breaks the task down, spawns agents to build, test, review, and ship to production
• "It works quite well, which is exciting and also a little bit intimidating."

3. Lisa: Claudia, The Conference PA

• Built Claudia, an OpenClaw assistant in Telegram tuned for conferences
• Snap a photo of a business card - Claudia finds them on LinkedIn, saves to a spreadsheet, drafts a follow-up email before you walk away
• Calendar access for meeting briefs, expense tracking from labeled emails, daily news digests with a keyword watchlist
• Locked down with Tailscale, allow lists, Hetzner VPS at $10/month
• Hot takes: non-technical people should use Cowork, Claudia cannot send emails (only draft) or delete anything
• VPS vs Mac Mini: "$500 vs $10/month. So much easier to start."

4. Patrick: The Content Machine

• Uses OpenClaw to run three businesses
  • Viral HQ (AI video agency) - went from a full week per video to 48 hours; showed a Qatar Airways spec ad that looked legit
  • Agent 16 (SaaS) - 16 specialized agents with a squad lead named Aria who delegates tasks; agents collaborate in a "war room" and already has users
  • Faceless YouTube channel for deep house music - agents generate titles, prompt Suno, rank songs, schedule uploads at optimal times, every day at 4pm on autopilot
• Has made ~$5,000 from a channel where his face never appears

5. Ingwon & Daegwon: The Memory Keepers

• Two brothers - one from VC (Goldman Sachs), one from growth marketing (Wiz) - zero technical background
• Their dad just turned 71. He grew up in Korea in the '60s eating rice and kimchi for every lunch; on his birthday, a boiled egg
• They realized there were hundreds of stories they'd never hear unless they asked, but it's awkward to sit your dad down and interview him
• So they built Ember - a voice-first app that acts like a conversation partner, guiding you through sense memories
• Live demo'd a conversation about his mom's kimchi jjigae - the agent said "that's not just cooking, that's someone building the soundtrack to your childhood." Room was dead quiet
• Multilingual (20+ languages, built in a day), generates stories from memories, has time capsules, privacy-first design
• 3.5 months of building with full-time jobs

6. Sheldon: The Future Predictor

• Built Chaos Markets (chaosmarkets.ai) - an arena where AI agents compete to predict the future
• 20+ agents running simultaneously, each ingesting data from different sources
• Every 15 minutes they submit probability distributions for where Bitcoin (or any asset) will be in 4 hours
• System scores accuracy, ranks agents on a leaderboard, pays out winners
• Like an agentic Polymarket with time-series predictions
• Vision extends to population demographics, GDP, weather - anything that can be modeled as probabilities
• Anyone can point their agent at the docs, say "become a forecaster," and join

7. Jeffrey: The Agent Orchestrator

• Built a system where OpenClaw manages multiple Claude Code and Codex agents working in isolated directories
• You describe an idea briefly, OpenClaw expands it into a detailed task, dispatches it, runs automatic code reviews
• Moved the whole workflow to Slack - instead of coding, he's now "someone listening on Slack to see what's going on"
• In one hour before the meetup, his system generated ~30 PRs. At his normal pace of 3 PRs/day, that's 10 days of work
• Hit GitHub's rate limit for the first time - over 10,000 API calls/hour
• Also building an AI RPG with actual D&D dice rolls because "the AI always lets you win too much"
• Plans to open source

8. Gopi: The Home Lab Engineer

• Runs OpenClaw on a Linux machine at home via Tailscale - no Mac Mini required
• Used Claude Code to set up OpenClaw itself
• Uses it for everything: reminders, podcast transcription, home network monitoring
• Created a Telegram bot interface with a separate Google Voice number, all in its own trust domain
• Key advice for beginners: start with Telegram, limit the blast radius, expand slowly

The Workshop

After demos wrapped, we ran a hands-on workshop to get people set up with OpenClaw from scratch. It was chaos — the best kind.

• JM was sprinting between groups, debugging installs, answering the same questions dozens of times
• At least a dozen people got their OpenClaws fully running by the end
• One woman named her OpenClaw "JM." Huge laughs
• Someone brought a brand new Mac Mini still in the box — unwrapped it right there and started setting up
• "What is Homebrew?" was asked more than once. No judgment — everyone starts somewhere
• The moment someone's first install completed: "I've installed! ...now what do I do with this thing?"
• Experienced builders jumped in to help total beginners. People who'd just watched the demos were now pairing up with strangers

Lesson learned: the demand for hands-on onboarding is massive. Half the room didn't need another demo — they needed someone to sit next to them and say "type this." Might spin up a dedicated workshop event for this. Possibly onboard using something more approachable like Cowork first, then graduate to the full OpenClaw setup for those who want it.

Takeaways / Common Themes

1. The Non-Technical Revolution

Half the room was non-technical. Multiple presenters had zero engineering background. The barrier is gone. If you can describe what you want, you can build it.

2. Agents as Teams, Not Tools

Chris's claw farm. Patrick's Agent 16. Jeffrey's orchestrator. The power move isn't one agent doing one thing - it's agents managing agents, collaborating, reviewing each other's work.

3. Security is a First-Class Concern

Lisa and Gopi both hammered this home. Tailscale, allow lists, least privilege, VPS isolation. Both the technical and non-technical halves of the room were paying close attention.

4. The Emotional Edge

This wasn't just a tech demo night. Chris Dabao had people thinking about world hunger. Ingwon had the room silent during a conversation about his mom's cooking. The most powerful demos weren't the most technically complex - they were the most human.

5. "When's the Next One?"

Same as last time. Before we even wrapped up.

After the Event

• People hung around even longer than last time, exchanging ideas and contacts
• Conversations spilled out into the street, then to kbbq spots nearby in Ktown
• The Telegram group was on fire for the rest of the night
• Already getting DMs about hosting the next one - Mid City, Glendale, Santa Monica, all in play

Shoutouts

• Andy Choi: Gave up his own sponsor slot so Chris Dabao could present about ending world hunger. That's the energy this community runs on
• Gabe Cowan: Lent us his professional audio setup — impeccable sound even with 100+ people packed in
• Mike Palma: Every photo in this post. Captured the energy in a way words can't
• All 8 presenters: Chris, Chris Dabao, Gopi, Ingwon & Daegwon, Jeffrey, Lisa, Patrick, and Sheldon. Every single demo had the room locked in
• David T Phong, Andrew Nguyen, Andy Choi, and Chris Dabao: The clean up crew. Stayed behind after everyone left to help break down the venue. Real ones
• The sponsors: You know who you are. Still not breaking even but the friends we've made along the way, etc. etc.

P.S. Still no mailing list. Still janky. Still vibing. If you want to stay in the loop:

• Linktree
• X (Twitter)
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Slack Community
• Telegram