Written by: CoolFish

Recently, a personal AI assistant called ClawdBot has become a social media sensation. Its open-source nature, local compatibility, and high degree of personalization have not only generated buzz among developers but have also unexpectedly boosted sales of Apple's Mac mini. However, even more attention is being paid to its creator—a serial entrepreneur named Peter Steinberger.

This seasoned developer from Vienna, Austria, founded a successful B2B software company and achieved financial freedom, but fell into a profound sense of emptiness after retirement. Now, with a renewed passion for AI technology and a deep understanding of the essence of entrepreneurship, he has returned to the center of the technology wave, starting with ClawdBot.

PSPDFKit's 13 Years of Development

Peter Steinberger's first entrepreneurial venture revolved around PSPDFKit, a company focused on document processing SDKs that provide PDF collaboration, signing, and tagging tools for developers worldwide.

Back in 2011, Peter received a job offer in San Francisco at the WWDC party. For him, a freelancer, the opportunity was incredibly tempting—living in San Francisco, immersing himself in the entrepreneurial culture, and working with industry elites. He accepted the offer and began waiting for his work visa.

But this wait lasted for more than six months.

During the waiting period, Peter stopped all freelancing and suddenly had a lot of free time. "My mind was freed from all freelancing, and naturally, I filled that time with other projects."

Inspired by a friend, he decided to try his hand at the paid component business. And that's how PSPDFKit was born.

PSPDFKit started as an experimental project he built in his spare time, but it unexpectedly attracted many developers to pay for it. Even more dramatically, before his visa was approved, the project had already developed into a viable business, " earning more money than I could probably earn working full-time ."

Even so, Peter decided to go to San Francisco to try out for the job. "Everything was geared towards San Francisco, so I took the job. Now it's all about the experience. I truly believe I can do it."

But reality soon proved this to be nearly impossible. Managing a job that required more than 40 hours of work while running another full-time business left him exhausted. After a period of "killing himself," he had to make a choice.

In April 2012, after attending the NSConference, Peter finally made up his mind. "So many amazing people, all genuinely passionate about what they do—after experiencing all this, you can never go back to your old 9-to-5 work schedule. What's more, seeing users use your product and truly love it is truly the most wonderful thing in the world."

Peter's experience in San Francisco helped him see his true direction. "It helped me figure out what I really wanted to do." So, he returned to Vienna, Austria, and pursued PSPDFKit as a full-time career. This seemingly "passive" attempt, which was initially put on hold due to visa issues, has instead led to his 13-year entrepreneurial legend.

PSPDFKit has gradually grown from a personal project into a global remote team of 60-70 people, with clients including top global companies such as Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, IBM, and Volkswagen. Even more remarkably, the company has been completely self-reliant for 13 years, without accepting any external funding .

Peter once admitted in his blog that he devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy to creating the best product. This relentless pursuit of product quality and deep understanding of the B2B market has made PSPDFKit a success story in the industry.

In October 2021, Insight Partners made a strategic investment of $116 million (approximately €100 million) in PSPDFKit. This marked the first time the company had received external funding and also signified the perfect end to Peter's first entrepreneurial venture. He and co-founder Martin Schürrer officially stepped down from their full-time management roles.

But behind this glamorous ending lies the cost of working almost every weekend for 13 years. Peter has admitted in several public speeches that this entrepreneurial experience ultimately led to severe burnout .

Emptiness and Awakening after Retirement

After selling PSPDFKit, Peter entered what is known as "retirement".

For a tech entrepreneur who achieves financial freedom right after starting his own business, this should be the ideal life. He should have plenty of time to adjust his mind and body and make up for the regrets he has accumulated over the past 13 years.

However, this freedom brought an unexpected sense of "emptiness".

In his blog post "Rediscovering Passion," he stated, " When I sold my shares in PSPDFKit, I felt utterly broken. I had poured 200% of my time, energy, and heart into this company; it was my identity, and when it was gone, little was left. I've heard that it's common for founders to experience a downturn and take a year off after leaving a company. The typical lifespan of a company is only 4-5 years. So looking back on these 13 years, I realize that I simply needed more time to find new goals ."

He tried everything to fill the void: attending parties, undergoing therapy, moving to a new country, chasing hedonistic pleasures. Ultimately, he realized: "You can't find happiness by moving; you can't find purpose; you have to create it."

This awakening prompted him to return to what he loved most—creating and building.

In 2024, the AI ​​wave was just beginning, but the user experience of AI tools at that time was far from ideal—simple arithmetic problems were solved incorrectly, logical reasoning was riddled with flaws, and the generated code was full of bugs. However, as time went on, AI technology developed rapidly, and Peter gradually discovered that AI had transformed from "not very user-friendly" to "truly interesting."

A completely new technological paradigm is taking shape, and he has decided to stop standing by.

Peter wrote on his personal page: "Came back from retirement to mess with AI." This casual remark foreshadowed the start of his second life.

ClawdBot: A viral hit cobbled together in an hour

Clawdbot was initially created because of Peter's personal needs, much like PSPDFKit was created in 2013.

In April 2024, he began conceiving a "life assistant" project, but the AI ​​model capabilities at the time were insufficient to support this vision. The idea was later shelved for a while because Peter felt that large companies would inevitably develop such products, making it seem pointless to do it himself.

By November, he realized a key problem: large companies had not created AI assistant products that truly met individual needs.

However, the AI ​​tools on the market are either limited in function, have concerns about data privacy, or have extremely high barriers to entry.

So he decided to do it himself.

Amazingly, Peter went from idea to prototype in just one hour .

In an interview with "Open Source Friday," he recalled, "That month I spent an hour piecing together some very rough code. It sent a message on WhatsApp, forwarded it to Claude Code, and then sent the result back. Essentially, it was just 'glueing' a few things together. To be honest, it wasn't difficult, but it worked quite well."

Initially, the project was called "V Relay," and it was essentially just a relay tool for WhatsApp. But it quickly demonstrated a "spontaneous adaptability" that even surprised Peter.

Once, while working at a hotel in Marrakech, Morocco, Peter jokingly remarked to his AI assistant, "The door lock at my hotel in Marrakech isn't very reliable. I hope you don't get stolen, since you're running on my MacBook Pro."

The AI's response stunned him: "No problem, I am your agent." Immediately, the AI ​​assistant detected the network on its own, found that it could connect to Peter's computer in London through Tailscale, and then migrated itself there.

Peter later recalled, "Perhaps it couldn't be called AGI yet, but at that moment I truly realized that the 'spontaneous adaptability' of these things had exceeded my original imagination. At that time, I thought, this is how Skynet was born."

The project's evolution was also full of chance. Later, while developing features related to Claude, a developer submitted a PR request for Discord. Peter hesitated for a long time: "I was thinking about whether to add Discord support, because it was no longer limited to WhatsApp." In the end, he accepted the PR, but the project name had to be changed.

What name should they use? Peter asked Claude for his suggestion. Claude proposed " ClawdBot"—a name that both echoed Claude's own name and carried the image of "claw." And so, ClawdBot was born .

The name itself offers a glimpse into the project's core concept: giving AI hands to become a true personal assistant running on your own devices.

ClawdBot has become a sensation in communities both domestically and internationally, with over 40,000 stars on GitHub. Even more dramatically, the project has boosted sales of the Apple Mac mini, with many users choosing it as their platform for running ClawdBot. Its affordability, compatibility, low power consumption, quiet operation, and small footprint have even led Logan Kilpatrick, a product manager at Google DeepMind, to place an order for one.

But this sudden popularity didn't come easily. Peter admitted that he had absolutely no idea how to communicate the value of the product to the public.

"Interestingly, when I showed this to my friends last November, they were all exclaiming, 'That's so cool!' But when I posted about it on Twitter, the response was surprisingly lukewarm," Peter recalled. "It wasn't until December that they would blurt out, 'I need this,' every time I demonstrated it to them in person. However, I found myself completely clueless about how to explain its brilliance to more people."

This dilemma of "good results from face-to-face demonstrations but difficulties in online dissemination" precisely illustrates ClawdBot's uniqueness—its value can only be appreciated through personal experience. Until January, with spontaneous dissemination within the community, it began to ignite a collective resonance across the entire developer community with unstoppable momentum.

Peter describes himself as someone who "stopped reading code and started watching it flow." While this sounds like a joke, it accurately encapsulates the fundamental shift in the developer's role in the AI ​​era. Clawdbot's success proves that after a period of relative obscurity, Peter Steinberger not only rediscovered his "spark" but also returned to the forefront of technological change with a more forward-thinking and philosophical approach. He has transformed from a traditional B2B software entrepreneur into a futurist who embraces AI and pursues the ultimate in personalized experiences.

From the early PSPDFKit to today's Clawdbot, both startups can be described as huge successes. But aside from success, their biggest commonality is that both companies solved real problems they encountered and then shared their solutions with the world.

In a recent interview, Peter repeatedly emphasized ClawdBot's mission: to empower everyone to control their own data, rather than handing it over to large corporations.

This technological idealism wasn't evident in his first entrepreneurial venture. Back then, PSPDFKit was more like a traditional B2B software company—excellent, but essentially born for commercial success.

Peter, in his second life, shed his commercial burdens and returned to his original passion for technology. ClawdBot's completely open-source nature, permanent free availability, and support for local models may not be "smart" from a commercial standpoint, but they have won widespread recognition from the developer community.

Build tools to solve your own problems, and then share them with the world—that's perhaps what open source should be about.

The Second Life (To Be Continued)

As of this writing, ClawdBot has surpassed 40,000 stars on GitHub.

Unlike the 13 years of hardship he endured during his first entrepreneurial venture, this time he seemed completely at ease. There was no pressure from KPIs, no one urging him on, only the pure joy of creation.

In an interview, Peter shared a moment that deeply moved him. A user who used to feel anxious about contacting customer service could now handle those issues for him through a smart assistant he developed.

Peter recalled, “I never imagined that a problem could be solved in this way. At that moment, I felt incredibly humbled, even a little overwhelmed: Wow, we—simply because the initial idea came from me—had actually changed something and genuinely improved someone’s life. It feels really good to be able to make someone’s life better .”

Peter Steinberger's second entrepreneurial journey continues. But one thing is clear: in this era where AI is reshaping the world, those who dare to create and actively embrace the future will never be left behind .