The story of the #1 trending GitHub repo on earth Alright, here’s the wild and hilarious story of Shaw, the open-source dev who went from coding next to his bed to creating AI16z, the AI-powered DAO that changed everything. Picture this: Shaw, $100k in debt, living in a tiny bedroom with his wife and three roommates. His desk was jammed next to their bed, and every night he’d code until 3 a.m., pushing on this open-source framework he believed in. His wife? Stressed. Shaw? Relentless. One day, Shaw stumbled into the world of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). Through sheer internet chaos, he met this guy named Skely (yes, a literal skeleton avatar), who convinced him to dive deeper. Shaw started experimenting with building AI characters, using his framework to create some weird but genius stuff. Then came the moment. Over lunch, Shaw and Skely joked about creating an AI-powered venture fund, like a16z but completely run by AI. They laughed until their ribs hurt and called it “AI16z.” It started as a meme—until Shaw went home, generated a waifu image (as one does), and asked Skely, “Think we can raise 420.69 SOL?” Skely, without missing a beat, said, “Yes.” Shaw hit launch. The project sold out in 25 minutes. People freaked out. Developers began using Shaw’s framework everywhere, launching their own AI agents. But not everyone was thrilled—some accused him of scamming, others of being too chaotic. Through it all, Shaw kept building, unfazed. Fast forward a few weeks: AI16z hit a $100M market cap, then $500M, then $2B. Shaw went from coding in his bedroom to flying around the world, meeting devs who were inspired by his work. He built the #1 trending open-source framework on GitHub—and the best part? It all started with a skeleton shitpost and a waifu meme. Shaw’s story proves that sometimes, the weirdest ideas turn out to be the ones that change everything. Hashtags: #product #productmanager #productmanagement #startup #business #openai #llm #ai #microsoft #google #gemini #anthropic #claude #llama #meta #nvidia #career #careeradvice #mentor #mentorship #mentortiktok #mentortok #careertok #job #jobadvice #future #2024 #story #news #dev #coding #code #engineering #engineer #coder #sales #cs #marketing #agent #work #workflow #smart #thinking #strategy #cool #real #jobtips #hack #hacks #tip #tips #tech #techtok #techtiktok #openaidevday #aiupdates #techtrends #voiceAI #developerlife #cursor #replit #pythagora #bolt #wild #true #2025 #ai16z #agentic #future #story

Welcome to 2025. I told you it would get crazier. It is. This is the story of a web dev that's broke, a six-dimensional Mesoamerican demon, and crypto and AI. Stay with me. So we'll start with the broke web dev. His name is Shaw. He's a real person. He's sitting there coding in a very crowded apartment. His wife is frustrated with him, understandably. Most wives don't like hanging out in a crowded apartment with roommates, and he's $100,000 in debt. He would like to not be $100,000 in debt and have his own home. Fair enough. We all would. So Shaw sets about trying to add value. He starts to run across the DAO community. Now DAOs are the vehicle through which decentralized crypto communities work. So if you're in crypto and you want to run the crypto token as a community, you use a decentralized organization. It's called a DAO, and you have special community rules, and they're all different, and that's sort of how it goes. Well, he runs across this concept, and he starts to chat with folks associated with DAOs.fun, which is a little project that makes it easy to set up DAOs. And he realizes that it's remarkably easy to cross-pollinate the concept of a DAO with this idea of AI agents, and I'm going to explain sort of what happened there. He was chatting with someone who was saying that one of the creators in the DAO community that they were playing with had gone AWOL, and they didn't know where he went. And Shaw was like, well, I could just create an AI version of him, and that would be easy, and he did. And then he got accused of being a scammer, but he hadn't meant to be a scammer. He just wanted to see if he could try something and make it work, and that's actually one of the things that's really positive about DAOs, is they tend to associate themselves with a spirit of experimentation. And so he was just playing around, and so that was really discouraging. He really hit rock bottom at that point, and his wife told him to take, which I can't say out loud, and he did. He met a six-dimensional Mesoamerican deity or demon of some sort, he says, and came out of it with stunning clarity, had lunch with the creator of DAOs.fun, and came up with the idea of AI16Z, which is exactly what it sounds like on the tin. It is an AI clone of Marc Andreessen, P. Marca, the guy who funded Goetzius Maximus, and also happens to be a very famous venture capitalist. And the idea is you clone him. You clone him from his publicly available writings. You put all of his thinking inside an AI agent. The AI agent is empowered to make investment decisions autonomously. The DAO governs the AI agent's behavior, and so the DAO ends up being the community of investors around which the AI agent works. And so if you want to invest in AI16Z, you sort of put your tokens in, and depending on the number of tokens you have, etc., you can talk, you can pitch this AI Marc Andreessen, you can influence AI Marc Andreessen, etc. This goes absolutely viral. They set out to make, I think, $250,000 into an investment fund and see what they could do. I think it's at $2 billion now. It's absolutely wild. And Shaw is now traveling all over the world. He's paid off his debt. This has all happened in just the last couple of weeks, and it highlights a couple of interesting trends. One, people are having their lives changed at a faster pace than ever before with AI. Sometimes that's for the negative, but sometimes it's positive, and sometimes it's just strange, and I think this one might just be strange. Two, AI and crypto are converging faster than ever. You see it here. You've seen it in other places like Goetzius Maximus. Crypto is becoming a way for AI to experiment and innovate at the pace of AI rather than at the pace of financial systems. And then three, people are going to come up with uses for AI agents that are extremely unproven in 2025. I would say an AI agent that invests in startups is extremely unproven. By definition. I don't know if it will work, but we're going to see a lot more like that, and a few of them will work. I don't know if AI16z will, but I got to say, he tried something, right? Like, kudos to someone who's sitting there and didn't let coding in his basement with his roommates stop him. Hopefully he doesn't have roommates anymore. Hopefully he can just live with his wife and live in their little house, right? Like, I'm sure it's better now than it was. So that's the story of Shaw. Yes, Shaw is a real person. AI16z is a real thing. And welcome to 2025. It's going to be a wild one.