2 min read
06 ClawCon Madrid
The energy in the room told you more than the slides.
On a rainy Thursday evening in Madrid, ClawCon filled a lecture hall at IE University.
ClawCon Madrid: Langosta a la Madrileña 🦞.
Over 350 people signed up. The room held around 150. Standing room only.
I was there because of Joe Haslam - one of those people who quietly opens doors when you are still finding your feet in a city. When ClawCon sold out, he got me into the room anyway.
A month earlier, almost nobody was talking about OpenClaw . Peter Steinberger built it. It went viral. He joined OpenAI. Within weeks the project had six-figure stars on GitHub. The speed at which that happened tells you something about where AI adoption actually is - not where the conference slides say it is, but where teams are genuinely ready to change how they work.
What the Room Told You
Docplanner , WAME Sports , and Dappnode were demoing live integrations. ClawSight presented security tooling for the ecosystem. When governance tooling appears this early, it means adoption is real. Nobody builds guardrails for toys.
The other theme was data sovereignty. People want to run models on their own machines, manage their own data, and stop depending on third parties they do not trust. This, in many ways, is what resonates most about OpenClaw - not just what the agents can do, but that you own the environment they run in.
Connecting
ClawCon was not my first event in the city. Since arriving in Madrid I have been seeing a lot of energy - the kind that reminds me of the Berlin scene when I first arrived there in 2009.
In January, Joe invited me to speak to his MBA class at IE Business School about AI-assisted coding, scaling teams, startups, and operating trade-offs.
In February, I joined a panel at a Product People x Clarity AI event on AI-powered product discovery.
There is real energy here. Smart people, low enough cost to take risks, and a collective sense that something is forming.
I am glad to be here for it.
