18 Feb 2026OpenClaw Joins OpenAI, Legora Eyes $6B, Netherlands Tax Unrealised Gains
Christian Owens (Clove): AI, White-Collar Jobs & the Stock Dip
Owens explains his FT quote that the recent dip in financial stocks is warranted: mid-market wealth managers are extremely manual (paper onboarding, in-person KYC, data re-entered across seven tools) and institutionally unprepared for AI, unlike scaled players like Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan. He describes pivoting Clove from B2B tooling to a full-stack direct-to-consumer advice firm serving people below the traditional ~£250k minimum, and weighs in on Salesforce's defensibility and the viral Matt Schumer warning to non-tech industries.
Andreas Helbig (Atomico): 'You Can't Vibe-Code a Bank'
Helbig offers the counterpoint to Owens: in the short term we overestimate AI and in the long term we underestimate it, and building a bank or company takes more than code—distribution, consumer trust, and regulatory compliance. He discusses the weekend vibe-coded core banking ledger that went viral, Lovable switching its CRM to HubSpot, the "grow your own potatoes" analogy, the FDE motion, and critiques Salesforce's Agentforce and SaaS stock-based compensation.
Enrico Melis Launches Animal: Deal-by-Deal SPV Syndication
Melis announces Animal, the syndication company he launched after four years as a partner at Lakestar. Instead of raising a fund, he raises deal-by-deal SPVs, matching angels to founders' needs—celebrities who can open doors, bootstrapped founders, industry veterans—taking no management fee and investing his own money in every deal. He has raised roughly €3M across four SPVs since November and targets deploying €10–15M across ~20 deals this year.
Mick Hodgins (Notion): EMEA Hubs, Enterprise Push & AI Agents
Hodgins explains Notion's new hubs in London, Munich and Paris, the shift from product-led to sales-led growth, and why winning EMEA matters given 80% of users are outside the US. He says AI was serendipitous for Notion—50% of ARR came from AI products last year, doubling in 12 months—and describes thousands of internal custom agents, customer use cases like a governance-loop agent at a French e-commerce company, and how tech-native versus enduring enterprises approach AI differently.
News: OpenAI Hires OpenClaw's Peter Steinberger
The hosts dig into the FT story that OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot), calling it one of Anthropic's biggest fumbles after its cease-and-desist over the name forced a rebrand. They cover Sam Altman's announcement that Steinberger will drive "the next generation of personal agents," the project's ~195k GitHub stars, and how the narrative swung between OpenAI and Anthropic.
Aleksandr Chikunov (Verb Ventures): Trade Infrastructure & Sovereignty
Chikunov introduces Verb Ventures' $25M fund investing in trade infrastructure software for real supply chains. He defines sovereignty in trade as the ability to switch suppliers without pain (rare-earth export curbs, an airline cancelling ~2,400 flights over de-icing fluid), argues sovereignty should come from market competition rather than government mandates, explains why "boring" sectors like construction and aviation parts remain underdigitized with up to 18 middlemen, and predicts B2B marketplaces will evolve into agentic AI plays on top of their proprietary data moats.
Town Hall: Steinberger Hype, Moltbook & Agent Sentience
In the town hall segment the hosts riff on Peter Steinberger—his parallel gym and GitHub streak, the reported $10–20k/month compute costs from his Lex Fridman appearance, and being acquir-hired by OpenAI after ~44 projects. They also cover Moltbook, where agents post and debated their own sentience, spawning a "Christofarianism" religion, and Steinberger's line that he wants agents to "take over the world."
Milena Nikolic (Haywar Labs): Generative UX & $5M Pre-Seed
Nikolic discusses Haywar Labs' $5M pre-seed led by Cherry Ventures and the "generative UX" category she and her co-founder are defining: instead of text-in/text-out or vibe-coded HTML, the system orchestrates dozens of LLM calls and classifiers to produce fast, structured, mobile-first interfaces. She explains why vibe-coded pages are slow and error-prone, how they keep responses under two seconds, and the ambition to combine natural-language expressivity with delightful consumer experiences like hotel search.
News: Legora at $6B & Meta's Grief-Tech Patent
The hosts cover reports that legal-tech startup Legora is in talks to raise at a $6B valuation, tripling its valuation just four months after its $1.8B round (the show previously had an exclusive with Max on the $150M Series C), and riff on founder wars and narrative-driven tech coverage. They close part one on Meta's newly granted patent for an AI system that simulates a deceased person's social media activity—"grief tech."