I feel like a lot of people miss out what this hire and his decision to join are really about. I (think) I can relate, because I once had a viral hit (with interviews, press, etc) that made me "silicon valley famous" for a while, and ended up with me joining a mega-company despite lots of speculation I'd build it into a startup.

The two sides:

* From his POV: He said he's not interested in doing "another company" after spending 13 years trying to build a startup. I imagine there's another aspect too, which is that OpenClaw is not in itself an inherently revenue-generating product, nor is it IP-defensible. This was my situation. My viral hit could (and soon was) replicated by many others. I had the advantage of being "the guy who invented that cool thing", but otherwise I would be starting from scratch. It was a mind-fuck having a huge hit on my hands from one day to the next, but with no obvious direction on how to capitalize on it.

* Then from the company's POV: despite hiring thousands and thousands of employees, only a tiny handful of them ever capture any "magic." You've got an army of product managers who have never actually built or conceived of a product people love, and engineers who usually propose ideas that are ok but probably not true gold. So now here we have a guy who did actually conjure up something magical that really resonated with people. Can he do it again? Unknown, but he's already proved himself in the ideas space more than most people, so it's worth a shot for the company.