Wang Huiwen Is Rallying People to Start Another Venture, but Building Another OpenClaw Is Unrealistic

OpenClaw goes viral — and people are trying to cash in

It has been reported that Wang Huiwen (王慧文) is rallying people to start a new venture riding the OpenClaw wave, but industry insiders say cloning the project is easier said than done. OpenClaw itself has exploded on GitHub — it has been reported that the repo passed roughly 140,000 stars and generated more than 2 million weekly visits — and spawned fast-moving experiments such as Moltbook, a social site that only allows AI agents to post, and Rent-a-Human, an AI-to-human crowdsourcing mockup that briefly drew half a million visits in a day. The takeaway? AI-to-AI interactions are suddenly tangible, and the FOMO is real.

Why a commercial copy is unlikely to win

Founders and VCs warn that OpenClaw’s ascent is a community phenomenon, not a conventional product-market fit you can buy. It has been reported that multiple entrepreneurs believe projects that merely “AI-ify” existing workflows via chat prompts — spreadsheets, video editing, analysis — are now exposed. OpenClaw’s novelty is autonomous agent execution and agent-to-agent scaling, a paradigmatic shift that a small startup with a paid product will struggle to match when the original growth is grassroots. Remember NVIDIA’s CUDA: bigger incumbents tried to tie ecosystems to hardware and lost to community-driven openness. Can a startup hope to out-community the community? Unlikely, say several people interviewed.

Where real startups should look

Investors are not writing OpenClaw off — they are redirecting focus. Yuan Ziheng (袁子恒), CEO of Jiahe Capital (嘉和资本), points to three concrete opportunities amplified by OpenClaw: multi-agent orchestration tools, security and permission governance for agents with system-level access, and new social/collaboration layers on high-frequency chat platforms (Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Slack). Fu Zhi (付智), founder and CEO of Gongji Technology (共绩科技), has been an early deployer of OpenClaw and argues the biggest near-term effect will be on compute demand: AI-to-AI will amplify peak inference loads and reshape how companies buy and rent GPU capacity.

Infrastructure squeeze, geopolitics and the new business models

Gongji Technology’s pitch is a “compute Didi” — crowd-sourced, second-by-second GPU pooling that chases peaks and fills valleys — and it has been reported that their largest customers grew from single-digit card deployments to thousands within a year. That surge is happening against a backdrop of US export controls and broader US‑China tech tensions that complicate access to the latest accelerators, making local elastic compute and orchestration businesses strategically important. So while many entrepreneurs will try to “build the next OpenClaw,” pragmatic plays now lie in securing agent ecosystems, hardening safety and permissions, and solving elastic compute economics — areas where startups can add defensible value even if they can’t recreate the original viral community.