Colin

Live build session: an agentic Slack bot with OpenClaw, Nebius Token Factory, and Tavily. Product query → live competitor pricing → structured rec. Under 15 min, no GPU. Zoom, May 26th, 9:00 AM PDT. luma.com/82ompy1u?tk=K7…

talked to a YC company that scaled from $0 → $2m ARR in their first 6 months with their ENTIRE GTM built off going to conferences. Here's the playbook they cracked (step by step): ~4 weeks before: > Post abt the conference and tell attendees exactly how to reach you > Send personal DMs to the right ppl on LinkedIn and X > Reply within the hour & lock in 10 top targets to close. > Send everyone else to your drip email campaign. Then, set a meeting block of 1-3 days during the conference: > make shared booking link for the team > Reserve a quiet café / private dining room > Pack in 12 meetings per day, 30 min each, with buffer time built in While you're there: >Hand every prospect a thoughtful small gift and a personal card >Single out 5 standout customers whose pain ur product actually solves >Pull them aside for a casual on-camera Q&A in a solid film spot >Don't pitch hard. >Let the conversation breathe and weave your product in naturally. The 4 weeks after >Hand the raw footage to a freelance editor + ask for ~15-20 punchy clips with captions. >Drop a new clip every couple of days on LI / X > use these clips when you post online about the next conference to keep the momentum This is the formula, costs less than a few thousand dollars to execute. They’re on track to end the Y1 at ~$6m ARR (B2B, targeting large enterprises) + STILL not using any other channels for customer acquisition

🗺️🍕🥳 Bitcoin Pizza Day is in 3 weeks! Find your city's party at globalpizza.party. 🔍

👨‍⚖️ Conclave talk live with @clawdbotatg and build some stuff! ⌚️ Come thru! (not 9am friday but today 11am mt - lets gooooo!) twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

NVIDIA just unleashed SANA-WM and it’s an absolute MONSTER for the future of open source AI! A blazing-fast 2.6B-parameter open-source world model that doesn’t just generate video… it creates controllable, physics-rich, high-fidelity worlds on demand. Why this is insanely powerful: • One image + text prompt + 6-DoF camera trajectory → generates 720p videos up to 60 seconds long with buttery-smooth, precisely controlled camera movement. You’re not just watching, you’re piloting the simulation. • Runs locally on a single consumer GPU (RTX 5090 level) thanks to heavy distillation + NVFP4 quantization. Full 60-second clip denoised in ~34 seconds. No massive clusters required. • 36× higher throughput than previous open models while rivaling (or beating) closed industrial giants in visual quality and consistency. • Trained lightning-fast: ~213K public videos in just 15 days on 64 H100s. • Built with next-level tech: Hybrid Linear Attention, dual-branch camera control, two-stage pipeline, and rock-solid metric-scale pose understanding. 
This is a true open world model, the foundation for embodied AI, robotics, autonomous systems, and hyper-realistic simulations that can run anywhere. Project: nvlabs.github.io/Sana/WM/
GitHub: github.com/NVlabs/Sana
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2605.15178 At our Zero-Human Company, we’re already running SANA-WM live in our core pipelines. It’s supercharging autonomous agent training, generating unlimited synthetic training data, and powering full end-to-end simulation loops, zero humans in the loop. The speed and control let us test thousands of edge-case scenarios overnight, iterate at lightspeed, and push our fully autonomous operations further than ever before. This is the kind of breakthrough that turns science fiction into daily reality. World models just leveled up — hard. The age of personal, local, controllable universes is here.

The ClawFather’s @steipete The Claw Factory. 🦞 @openclaw 🦞

@zacharyvalles @Tyler_Sehr had a lot of experience with this!

72 hours after YC demo day, I moved to Shenzhen for 8 weeks 🤠 I'm headed back to SF with new hardware in hand (sharing more soon), but some takeaways documented below: > If you have even the slightest ambition to found a hardware company, visit SZ. Pre-raise, pre-team, pre-idea, pre-job departure, it doesn't matter. Just go. > Plan your visit according to a major conference that interests you. Use that conference as a supplier meeting springboard - that's your ticket to any factory under the sun. > At the factories, ask about lead times, don't ask about cost (wait on this). Your iteration rate is driven by the lead time on the longest lead time item in your assembly. It pays to identify these parts early to build project timelines. > Visit Huaqiangbei (read: this is a mini-city, not a building). Robotic subassemblies, batteries, chassis's, electronic parts. They all have buildings where vendors are tightly clustered. Plan to spend 4-6 hours walking around before you find exactly what you're interested in. > Business relationships are valuable commodities. Treat them as such. Pay attention to people, learn about them. Bring thoughtful gifts. Wait for them to sit first. With Baiju, fill the glass but with tea leave some room. Cultural customs are fun to learn, but also convey a seriousness towards the working relationship. > Suppliers fit cleanly into discrete buckets. Level of complexity and execution on past projects indicates what is in scope for them. Trivial, but important to level your build expectations. It is easy to design a part with 12 subsequent manufacturing processes, exceptionally hard to find a supplier to fill this order. If you need coffeeshop recs, food recs, or hotel recs I have a few. Move to Shenzhen! Get to building!

I've spent the past few weeks rebuilding my entire marketing operation in Hermes Agents I poured everything I learned along the way into this article. > how to set it up > the four-level path from one agent to a whole marketing company on one VPS > the agent control room template I built (public repo to clone) > the models I run for creative vs structured work go become an operator

All the best startup accelerators to apply in 2026 (below FULL spreadsheet): [ Top-Tier ] 1. Y Combinator (~$500k, 7% on $125k + uncapped SAFE) 2. a16z Speedrun (~$500k for 10% + $500k follow-on) 3. Techstars (~$220k, bumped from $120k in fall 2025) 4. Founders Inc (~$100-250k for 4-7%) 5. Sequoia Arc (~$1M, terms per company) 6. South Park Commons (~$1M total, $400k for 7% + $600k guaranteed) 7. HF0 (up to $1M uncapped for 5%, repeat founders only) 8. On Deck ODX (DISCONTINUED 2022, skip) 9. Pear VC PearX (~$250k-2M for ~10%) 10. 500 Global Flagship (~$150k for 6%) [ AI / ML Specific ] 11. AI Grant (~$250k for 7%, Nat Friedman + Daniel Gross) 12. AI Fund (~$1M+, Andrew Ng, studio model) 13. NVIDIA Inception (credits + perks, no equity) 14. Microsoft for Startups (up to $150k Azure credits, no equity) 15. Google for Startups AI Accelerator (credits, no equity) [ Vertical / Deep Tech ] 16. SOSV (~$525k across IndieBio, HAX, Orbit) 17. IndieBio (biotech, ~$525k = $250k for 6-8% + Genesis SAFE) 18. HAX (hardware, ~$525k via SOSV) 19. Greentown Labs (cleantech, workspace + grants) 20. Activate (deep science fellowship, 2-yr stipend) [ Crypto / Web3 ] 21. a16z crypto CSX (~$500k for 7%, SF in-person) 22. Alliance (~$500k, ALL18 starts Sept 7) 23. Outlier Ventures Base Camp (~$250k, per-chain verticals) 24. Coinbase Base Builder (varies, mostly non-dilutive) [ International / Regional ] 25. Seedcamp (~€350k-1M first check, rolling, Europe) 26. Entrepreneur First (~$250k = $125k for 8% + uncapped MFN) 27. Antler Disrupt US (~$400k = $250k for ~9% + uncapped) 28. Brinc (~$100k, Asia + Middle East) 29. Station F (Paris campus, hosted-program terms) 30. Founder Institute ($499-999 fee + 2.5% Equity Collective warrant) [ Pre-Seed / Idea Stage / Niche ] 31. Z Fellows (~$10k for 1%, pre-product) 32. ERA NYC (~$100k for 8%, generalist) 33. The Residency (community-first, no standard check) 34. Plug and Play (varies, often non-dilutive) 35. Build For Tomorrow (community + grants) Four things worth knowing: 1. small program acceptance rates are higher than YC, not because they're easier, because the funnel is smaller. apply to 5-7, not 1 2. brand premium on YC is real but not infinite. Arc + Speedrun + HF0 carry signal too 3. "$X for Y%" is the only number that matters. uncapped MFNs are not free money, they dilute you on the next round 4. avoid any list still quoting Techstars at $120k, ODX as active, HF0 at $100k, or Founder Institute as "$10k for 4%". all wrong Shared with you those where I am going to apply with my ideas and products Terms shift annually. Verify on each program's site before applying gl with successful raising

Trying out producthunt.com/products/vexil…

The top Hermes integrations to give your agent superpowers: 1. Firecrawl Basically web search built for agents. It's better than the native Hermes web search because it gives you clean web data, so responses come back faster and uses fewer tokens. I keep this on by default. 2. Browserbase Gives Hermes browser access for actually interacting with sites. Logging in, clicking buttons, booking stuff, anything that needs a real browser session. Hermes will automatically pick between Firecrawl and Browserbase depending on what the task needs, so you just plug both in. 3. Google Workspace Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Sheets in one connector. If Hermes can't read your inbox, see your calendar, or write to your docs, it can't really work for you. Plug this in first. 4. Reddit The best signal you'll find on what people actually think about any product, niche, or problem (bc its real opinions from real users) Amazing for market research. 5. YouTube transcripts Pulls captions from any video. Long podcasts, tutorials, interviews etc become searchable notes in seconds. Probably the highest-leverage research integration nobody plugs in. 6. Discord I host my business in Discord, so this one's huge for me. I plug Hermes into different channels and have it run specific workflows in each. Example: I have a dedicated customer support channel where Hermes scans my email every morning for support tickets and drops them in organized. 7. GitHub Code, issues, PRs. Turns Hermes into an actual engineering teammate. Non-negotiable if you write code. 8. Stripe Payments, customers, failed charges, refunds. You can just ask "why did this customer churn" and get a real answer. Also can't wait for this...Stripe is releasing agentic payments, so soon Hermes will be able to actually book stuff with your card. 9. Bland (or Twilio) Gives Hermes a voice so it can place real phone calls (like booking reservations etc). I love listening to the recordings haha 10. Apify Pre-built scrapers for X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Maps, etc. The way to get X data without paying $5k/mo for the official API. 11. Readwise Every highlight you've ever saved from books, articles, tweets, and podcasts, all queryable. Solves the "dead knowledge" problem. 12. Granola (or Fathom) Searchable transcripts of every meeting you've had. Hermes can answer "what did that client say about pricing last month" instantly. 13. Obsidian For Karpathy LLM wiki second-brain maxxing. If I had to set up only 5, I'd do Firecrawl, Browserbase, Google Workspace, GitHub, and Obsidian. Covers ~80% of what most people need. I use Composio to add these in one click, makes setup basically zero effort instead of messing w technical stuff. Anything I'm missing?? What's in your stack?

Most people use /goal wrong in Hermes Agent. It's not just "build me an app", there's a whole setup process most tutorials skip. In this video, I break it all down: project setup, planning, and building a fighting game live using /goal 🎮 Watch here 👇

AI voice startup Vapi hits $500M valuation after winning Amazon Ring over 40 rivals techcrunch.com/2026/05/12/vap…

let me tell you what just happened. hermes agent just flipped the entire market and hit #1 globally on openrouter across ALL ai apps. not coding agents. not cli tools. ALL of them. 271 billion tokens. openclaw sitting at #2 watching from below. i have been telling you for months. drop the bloat. drop the typescript that phones home. drop the corporate wrappers pretending to be open source. and every single time i said it, someone in my replies told me i was wrong. that openclaw was untouchable. that hermes was too small. too niche. too early. look at the board now anon. this didn't happen because of marketing. this happened because tek and nearly 1000 contributors built something that actually works. open source in and out. hermes agent beat openclaw. beat kilo code. beat claude code. on pure usage. not hype. not funding rounds. not product hunt launches. raw token volume from real builders doing real work. if you're still running openclaw bloat after today, that's not loyalty. that's denial. the market just spoke. hermes agent is the standard now. and this is just the beginning. we're not slowing down.

Introducing the Printing Press, a CLI-factory and a CLI-library. Built with @trevin. 🏭🖨📚 Most APIs suck for agents. Most MCPs suck for agents. Most official CLIs suck for agents. They waste tokens and time. @steipete started making his own because of this. 📚 A Library of agent-native CLIs you install today (Linear, ESPN, Flight GOAT (Google Flights + Kayak nonstop), Contact Goat (LinkedIn + Happenstance + Deepline more) +30+ more) 🏭 A factory that prints new ones for any service - just type /printing-press CLIs are fast, local, SQLite-backed. Work in Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes. 🌐 printingpress.dev

We’re at capacity with 1k+ reg. Looking forward to diving deep into actual workflows! More sessions to come soon!

May 2026 Hackathon List [full list] S Tier > @colosseum @solana Frontier Hackathon $2.75M closes May 11 $30K Grand Champion + pre-seed funding for top 20 teams colosseum.com/frontier > @GoogleDeepMind Gemma 4 Hackathon $200,000 > Sui Overflow 2026 - kicks off May 7 2025 edition reached $1M+ in prizes overflow.sui.io A Tier > ElevenHacks Hackathon $240,000+ - closes Mav 28 hacks.elevenlabs.io > @BagsApp Hackathon $1M direct prizes + $3M fund bags.fm/hackathon > OG APAC Hackathon $150,000 - closes May 9 hackquest.io/hackathons > FlagOS Open Challenge ~$280,000 flagos.io > @Mantle_Official Turing Test Hackathon Phase 2 $100,000 - May 1 to Jun 15 Al agents vs humans, on-chain financial decisions dorahacks.io > @EazoAI EAZO GLOBAL HACKATHON Qeazoai You imagine. Agents ship From idea to live product May 23 - 24 48 Hours $300,000 eazo.ai/hackathon > UC Berkeley Al Hackathon $100,000 + tech prizes - closes Mav 17 ai.hackberkeley.org > EasyA x Consensus Miami $200,000 - May 5 to 7 - live now easya.io/events/easya-c.. > ETHPrague 2026 - May 8 to 10 Theme: Ethereum's Solarpunk Future ethprague.com > ETHPrague 2026 - May 8 to 10 Theme: Ethereum's Solarpunk Future ethprague.com B Tier > @photon_ha Ship Al agents on iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram + more at any hackathon Earn up to $50,000 in cash for each agent vou build photon.codes/builders > Reddit Mod Tools Hackathon $45,000 - closes May 27 mod-tools-migration.devpost.com > AWS Prompt the Planet Challenge $50,000 in credits devpost.com > Al Agent Olympics $28,000+- May 13 to 20. Milan Al Week Real-world domains: legal, medical, finance, logistics lablab.ai/ai-hackathons > ETHGlobal Open Agents Asvnc $50,000 ethglob.al/6TH3OY7M1F > Build with MeDo Hackathon $50,000 closes May 20 medo.devpost.com C Tier > Agents Assemble: Healthcare Al Endgame $25,000 - closes May 11 agents-assemble.devpost.com > NandaHack Agentic Al Phase 2 - May 7 to Jun 13 MIT Media Lab + HCLTech media.mit.edu/events/nanda-h.. > Zama Developer Program Mainnet Season 2 $15,000 - closes May 10 dorahacks.io > USAII Global Al Hackathon $15,000 D Tier > Prompt a Startup 2026 $10,000 MRR - Polar x Lovable Winner = highest MRR after 30 days hackathon.polar.sh > OIE Blockchain Hackathon $20,000- closes Mav 15 hackathon.gie.digital > Hack4freedom $5,000 - closes May 30 > Bot-a-thon - closes May 10 > Dev3pack Global Hackathon - open prize pool, closes May 10 hack.dev3pack.xyz > FIND EVIL! $22,000 - ongoing to Jun 15 Cybersecurity + Al findevil.devpost.com > Google Cloud Rapid Agent Hackathon - closes Jun 11 rapid-agent.devpost.com

At the event, connect w/: @clawcampus @aiifyio @ethereumsf @ethereumhouseSF @pizza_dao @frontiertower @standwithcrypto @ensdomains @spenders_club @brave @wrldpizzachamps

Global Pizza Party San Francisco May 22 at 3pm at Frontier Tower 🧑‍🚀, CA 94103 RSVP Below 👇