Why You'll Choose an AI Doctor (feat. Fred Almeida and Max Weiss) | E2239

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Sentry.io - sentry.io/twist Hubspot - clickhubspot.com/twist2 Northwest Registered Agent - https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Today's show: One day soon, you might consult an AI general practitioner about your health, and then the computer will recommend human specialists to take up your case. On TWiST Tokyo, Jason chats with Fred Almeida — founder and CEO of American Medical Intelligence Inc. — and Maxwell Weiss, a partner at Pacific Bays Capital. Together, they discuss the future of medicine, and the opportunities for individuals to take greater control over their health and preventative care strategies. PLUS a look at how Japan has stayed at the forefront of technology despite NOT being a manufacturing hub, why so many Americans are willing to take a pay cut to move to Japan for work, and the concept of "genten shugi," and how it prevents some Japanese people from communicating with English speakers, despite understanding the language. THEN we hear pitches from some of our favorite Founder University x Japan companies, and Fred, Jason, and Max pick their favorites! Timestamps: (00:00) Introducing today's big guests: founder Fred Almeida and investor Max Weiss! (5:43) Why Fred thinks one day soon, an AI will be your general practitioner (8:26) The power of getting self-directed medical diagnostics (13:27) Max says Japan has moved into Decade 2 in its venture capital journey (14:37) Sentry - New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST (16:05) Max and Jason had wagyu barbecue the other night (17:10) Japan doesn't OFFICIALLY have a standing army… (21:37) Why the line between talking startups and politics is blurring (23:05) Hubspot - Check out the guide "Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering: From Basic to Expert in 7 Days." Download it for free at clickhubspot.com/twist2. (24:59) Japan doesn't make a lot of things, but it produces the underlying tech behind a lot of things (25:52) Understanding Genten Shugi: Why some in Japan still have an "English allergy" (29:42) Why some Americans will take a pay cut to come work in Japan (33:28) Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist (34:10) PITCH #1: Cascade(36:10) PITCH #2: Altsource Global(38:10) PITCH #3: GoalMochi(40:25) Jason, Max, and Fred give feedback on our first three pitches(42:45) Would GoalMochi ever consider adding personas for added expertise, like say a nutritionist?(44:30) How does Cascade plan to compete against the massive ad networks of companies like Google and Meta?(46:05) PITCH #4: RandomChat(48:10) PITCH #5: Eir(50:05) More feedback for our final two pitches of the day(52:44) Fred wants to know how Eir's product will integrate with other systems(54:19) Why Gigi made herself available to chat in her app(57:50) Why Jason thinks RandomChat should add anonymous personas Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (14:37) Sentry - New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST (23:05) Hubspot - Check out the guide "Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering: From Basic to Expert in 7 Days." Download it for free at clickhubspot.com/twist2. (33:28) Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Is part of your thesis about healthcare

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:03Jason Calacanis?

  that AI will have a profound impact on people doing self-directed care?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, entirely. I actually think that the future of where this is going to go is that the AI will become your doctor in a few more years.

• 0:16Jason Calacanis?

  Your primary care doctor.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  It'll be your primary care doctor, and then you'll just go to diagnostic toolsets, which is part of the roll-up. We actually are buying clinics to do diagnostics, but at a higher level, if you think about it, it's almost really changing how a diagnostic clinic will ever work.

• 0:32Jason Calacanis?

  Explain in layman's terms what diagnostic clinic means. What are the top five things they do?

• 0:38Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. HubSpot, check out the guide, Advanced Chat GPT Prompt Engineering from Basics to Expert in Seven Days. Download it for free at clickhubspot.com/twist2. Sentry, new users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST.

• 1:13Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. I am just wrapping up an amazing week here in Tokyo where we launched Founder University. Founder University is a pre-accelerator. You would go to Founder University in year zero of your startup. You've got two or three co-founders, you've built a project, maybe you incorporated, maybe you haven't even bothered incorporating yet. You're in year zero. That's what Founder University is for. It's a 12-week program. We do it in Tokyo. We do it in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh, and we do it in America. We have thousands of people apply and dozens of people we accept, and we spend time with you working on your startup. So while I'm here, I've been recording some episodes of This Week in Startups, TWIST, as we refer to it in town.

• 1:58Jason Calacanis?

  And I've been learning a lot about the ecosystem in here in Tokyo. And as well, discussing with a bunch of venture capitalists, angel investors, and founders, how they look at the market. Japan, still third or fourth most important economy in the world, and something changed in Japan for the last 20, 30 years. Young people wanted the safety of a job at a big company, and they might work there for 40 years. Now, the preference of young people in Japan has flipped over the last five years or so. They want to start companies and they've got quite a legacy and a tradition of innovation in the technology space. So I'm spending time here because I think it's going to be one of the great startup

• 2:41Jason Calacanis?

  markets of the next 20 or 30 years. With me today, I've got two investors and founders. Max Weiss is a venture capitalist. We had dinner last night. His firm is Pacific Bay's Capital. He focuses on aerospace, defense, space, energy, and basically making Japan more resilient, almost Japanese dynamism, to use the term we use in America.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. Anything related to economic security, really. And we believe that we need to partner with the US to make those kinds of things happen. So Japan-focused, but also a strong economic security sort of partnership type of focus, too.

• 3:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and this is a very interesting time to be doing that, as I said, or observed from the feedback I got this week. Young people are looking at entrepreneurship in a different way, and the relationship with Japan and America is in a little bit of a crossroads. We're going to get into some of that geopolitics as well and the global dynamics. Fred Almeidaé is also with us. He's an entrepreneur and investor, deep focused on AI and autonomous systems. You're the CEO of American Medical, which is a roll-up.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a mix. It's actually two parts of a platform.

• 3:54Jason Calacanis?

  Explain.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we felt actually that there's a shift in the way that medicine is being provided to a lot of people, both in the US and Japan. And it's clear that we're not getting enough doctors coming out of the schools, especially doctors that have a more general approach to how medicine can be done. Everything's really specialized, especially in the US. And so we felt that the patient side needed their own version of an AI medical doctor, but we also needed to balance that out with the doctors themselves. So we actually started with a number of hospitals, and we're already working with doctors to basically figure out how do doctors want to talk to patients. Through an AI platform.

• 4:35Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:35Jason Calacanis?

  And this is under development, launched?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  It's under development, still, still pretty new.

• 4:41Jason Calacanis?

  All right, great. So I think that gives us two really interesting jump off points. And you heard my sort of

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:46Jason Calacanis?

  preamble here about Japan. You're based in Japan?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Tokyo.

• 4:51Jason Calacanis?

  In Tokyo. Why?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Oh, this is, I mean, you've been here many times. This is a lovely country. I actually think, to be honest, like, I, some of my first startups were here in Tokyo. And I built one of the first robotics companies here, self-driving car company here in two thousand and sixteen. And that was way before anyone really understood what that, what it's gonna mean. And it was just, it just feels right to build AI and technology like robots here.

• 5:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And it just does.

• 5:17Jason Calacanis?

  And is part of your thesis about healthcare?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:20Jason Calacanis?

  That AI will have a profound impact on people doing self-directed care?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, entirely. I actually think that the future of where this is gonna go is that the, the AI will become your doctor in a few more years.

• 5:36Jason Calacanis?

  Your primary care doctor.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  It'll be your primary care doctor. And then you'll just go to diagnostic toolsets, which is part of the roll up. We actually are buying clinics to do diagnostics, but at a higher level, if you think about it, it's almost really changing how a diagnostic clinic will ever work.

• 5:51Jason Calacanis?

  Explain

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:52Jason Calacanis?

  in layman's terms what

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 5:54Jason Calacanis?

  diagnostic clinic means.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:55Jason Calacanis?

  What are the top five things they do?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  So you, you'll actually find if you go to a doctor, a lot of doctors don't wanna call for tests because A, it's really kind of painful for them. They have to fill out forms, they have to deal with a lot of issues with that. So those

• 6:08Jason Calacanis?

  Insurance issues?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Insurance, pre-authorization in the US. In Japan, there's like limits to this.

• 6:13Jason Calacanis?

  So it's cumbersome, so they don't send you for tests?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yes. And then so they, so what ends up, you end up spending more time doing like basic testing with the doctor, just looking at your ear, for example, if you have an ENT. And if you have like an, like an infection. And then it may take four or five visits before they actually realize after they do a diagnostic, like a CAT scan or MRI, that you have an infection in your, you know, tonsils instead of your ear.

• 6:40Jason Calacanis?

  Ah.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And then so the, we believe that if you actually fix diagnostics, there's, it's not perfect diagnostics, right? You do get positive, you know, you, you get negative positives and positive negatives, right? So Ultimately, what we want to solve is can we use AI inside the clinics to make it much better. But at a higher level, if you do a roll up across clinics, you can actually see how people are generally feeling. Right? And you can actually extrapolate trends and movements across it. So in a way, like it's the way you would do like a differential geometry of like a stock market. You can see the flow of how people are moving and then you can then make predictions on it.

• 7:21Jason Calacanis?

  So to translate that.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:23Jason Calacanis?

  I have some pain in my ear or, you know, maybe it's in my throat. I'm not sure. I've got a collection of symptoms. I type into an AI, these are my symptoms. It does a really good job.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll have to do differential analysis on you.

• 7:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and it does an amazing job today. In fact, a lot of the studies that are coming out today say it's exceeding, matching and exceeding doctors, correct?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yes, we already are, actually, yeah.

• 7:47Jason Calacanis?

  So that's today.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  That's today.

• 7:48Jason Calacanis?

  Who knows what happens in a couple of years. It'll clearly be better. Then the second piece is, okay, there's this weird thing where the system is so convoluted that a doctor might not want to send you to just get the test that would confirm this. But if you take out the doctor visit, which is how they make their money, which they're incentivized to say, no, come to the office, come to the office. And that wastes tons of money and time. Why not just ask the AI, hey, here are the symptoms. It says, you need to go get a swab in your throat or a blood test, whatever it happens to be. And then we will know. So that's more efficient. So you're actually flipping it and saying, just go right to the test.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  There's a benefit of if you can go to the test early enough, we can catch disease at a level where you can treat it with very easy, like an easier way to treating it. So if you, if I find cancer at stage one, it's very fast, right? It's, you can literally not have cancer by just doing a special test. And on top of that, most people don't realize that the reason you're feeling bad is often you just don't have enough nutrients. And if you do, for example, a genetic methylation test, we can actually see what you're missing.

• 8:59Jason Calacanis?

  That's fascinating.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  And then you just get it. And then, so you don't even have to go to the doctors at that point.

• 9:03Jason Calacanis?

  So, this is extremely disruptive. There is a group of people, I'm wondering if you've been inspired by the tip of the spear, biohackers, body hackers, self-directed folks who are using their Whoop, their Aura, their 8Sleep, we're investors in that last one, and then they're going to Function Health, or Whoop is doing labs, and this is the United States at least, and then Superpower is another lab one. I did that one, and they're proactively getting their blood work, using a concierge or AI to sort of analyze it. And then, for me, like, the primary care doctor seems like the worst modality. Why not just get your blood work done fully twice a year?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:46Jason Calacanis?

  And be ahead of the curve?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, and in fact, if you actually think about it, it's actually even cheaper, even in the United States, to proactively get your diagnostics done. And then, because, we're trying to change the way diagnostics are done too, so like, if you can imagine 500 clinics across the United States, all using AI to make, let's say you're getting a very simple blood test, the doctor calls for like, certain markers. But we can do the whole thing for you, you know, and then we can get that, you know, somewhat paid for by the government, because they want the data, the metadata, not your data, the metadata. And now we can actually then look at your, all your markers.

• 10:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  And maybe we see something, and we can immediately tell the doctor what we see. So he gets a differential diagnostic from us, saying, hey, we found this. And then, right now, because of the way the laws work, you have to go see a doctor to get a prescription, but that's gonna change.

• 10:35Jason Calacanis?

  So this is all incentives. The incentives are broken, the system is backwards.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  It's backwards.

• 10:40Jason Calacanis?

  And we could, there is a better way, and the incentives need to change.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but also insurance needs to change.

• 10:47Jason Calacanis?

  And insurance needs to change. What a more delightful experience for the doctor to say, hey, here are your 100 patients as a primary care doctor, here's their dashboard. We have done their blood work twice a year, we've done these other tests, here's their complaints and what happened. Now when you meet with them... You're starting with this, you're starting, you know, with eighty percent of the work done, you can actually do better work. You can move up the stack and do higher, more level, more rewarding work.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  So what we've found when talking to doctors, we've talked to a lot of doctors in the US and in Japan, and a lot of very young, talented doctors want to quit.

• 11:23Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  They hate being a doctor because most of their day is doing paperwork or talking on the phone with an insurance rep. To the point where like sometimes doctors are in surgery and they get called out of the surgery to argue with the insurance company because they don't want to pay for the surgery.

• 11:43Jason Calacanis?

  It's insane.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  While they're in the surgery. That type of stuff drives them mad. And considering we have such a small group of doctors in Japan and in the US, you can't drive them insane. We have to treat them like Formula One drivers, from my point of view.

• 11:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And so if we can create a system that automatically creates all the paperwork they need, removes the government side of it, removes the insurance side of it, all you have to do is just confirm that diagnosis that you had, and then the system that we're creating for patients ensures the patient follows through with what you want them to do.

• 12:17Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Right? Remind you to take your pills. Which pill will it be? This one, take this one now.

• 12:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Right? So it's not to the point where like, we're not yet creating like this perfect medical doctor that's going to sit in your pocket, but that will come out.

• 12:29Jason Calacanis?

  So Max, let's move over to your business. Why did you pick, you know, Fred picked a really hard one, healthcare? Lots of regulations, lots of incumbents, lots of regulations, insurance, just so much friction. You also picked an area with a lot of friction, going to space.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:46Jason Calacanis?

  Atoms and bits, you know, the bits are easy, the atoms are hard. Aerospace and defense, energy, and in a very volatile world, I assume the volatility and the vol creates the opportunity, but tell me why you picked the verticals you're investing in?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  For us, it's more of kind of looking at what Japan has to offer and going backwards from there. So I think this was, talked about a little bit earlier at some point, I believe. We're in the middle of decade two in venture in Japan. The first decade was defined by consumer and software as a service, as I'm sure it was in lots of other parts of the world. But then you had this whole dynamic there. Now we're in a situation where, you know, maybe according to some people, this is decade one, decade one, depending on how you look at it. So the amount of financing, the amount of support, all this stuff is slowly getting to a global scale. So maybe you can call it decade one, depending on how you look at it.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  But basically, I think a lot of stuff changed. And now you're looking at folks who used to work at multinational corporations. And that's really where a lot of the technical talent lies and where I think Japan's sort of hidden strength lies. And those guys, what they're doing is materials and semiconductors. And that's why we focus on the areas that those could be applied to.

• 14:08Jason Calacanis?

  All right, when we get back from this quick break, I want to talk specifically about defense here in Japan. And Japan has an army or doesn't have an army when we get back on this week's startups.

• 14:23Jason Calacanis?

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• 15:05Jason Calacanis?

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• 15:28Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we're back here in Tokyo, wrapping up my first week of Found University, did Angel University as well. My guest today, Max Weiss from Pacific Bays Capital, and Fred Almedé, who is with American Medical, doing a roll-up and using AI to really reinvent healthcare. Max, you and I had some conversations last night over some outstanding wagyu and...

• 15:49Speaker 03

  That was outstanding.

• 15:51Jason Calacanis?

  Crazy. We went to this amazing wagyu place, and I said, "You can't put wagyu on a barbecue, it'll light on fire." I've cooked wagyu many times. And he said, "Oh, this grill is a very hot grill, and the grill then has water running through the tubes where you would lay the meat on top of, so that it doesn't light on fire."

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was kind of a novel thing that I hadn't seen before either, but it went really well with the meat. You don't overcook it, and it was great.

• 16:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and then you decided, you found out I was paying, and you did the caviar and the truffle supplement.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, just stuffed myself silly.

• 16:26Jason Calacanis?

  It was crazy. It was fantastic. I mean, if we had that dinner, with the exchange rate, and with just importing wagyu to the United States, it would have been three times as much. I got the bill, and I thought it was the wrong tables bill. I was like, "This can't be right. This has got to be double," and it was not. And we had just such a spectacular mirror and a spectacular conversation, that eventually got to the relationship between America and Japan. This is a longstanding, you know, and in our lifetimes, absolutely fantastic relationship. But part of that is, the United States provides the defensive capabilities and the military for Japan. But Japan also has fighter jets and military

• 17:09Jason Calacanis?

  equipment, and they know how to use those. So Japan doesn't have a standing army.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Not officially.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Not officially, but they do.

• 17:19Jason Calacanis?

  But does have individuals who know how to operate military equipment.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Exactly, yes.

• 17:26Jason Calacanis?

  See, I have a high tolerance for ambiguity. I understand exactly what's happening here. So, but the relationship between the two countries of late, America seems super focused on our hemisphere, the Western.

• 17:41Jason Calacanis?

  China has a certain concept of their relationship here in this region.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:46Jason Calacanis?

  You have Korea, Japan, Singapore, and then Australia, New Zealand, forming some type of alliance or group. But how do the Japanese people look at the relationship with America? And it's here, we're on twist, so you can permission to be candid.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 18:03Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think of our changing stance in the world order? And then, how do you, how does the average person in Japan think about their protection and their safety when North Korea is shooting rockets over the island?

• 18:19Speaker 03

  I think that's a good question. I'll preface this by saying, I don't think a lot of ordinary Japanese citizens are political like they tend to be back in the US. That said, you can kind of see these general trends. So, for example, over the past couple of years, I think we're seeing a shift to the right with the new sort of prime minister. And you've had these sort of changes to how Japan interprets the self-defense force that it has, which is what it's officially called. Although, by any practical means, you look at it and say this could be a military with the snap of a finger, right?

• 19:01Jason Calacanis?

  So that people don't like to talk about politics. It's not the blood sport that it is in the United States. But the leadership here is acutely aware of, hey, the United States and their loyalty to NATO has been questioned. Maybe we'll even pull out of it. Maybe we don't need to be involved. So there is a sense like, hey, we might need to go it alone.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Potentially. I think, I think that's a little bit less a part of the discourse right now. There's this growing sort of reluctance to, towards immigration, for instance.

• 19:35Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Things like that. So it could be a matter of time before the conversation does turn into things like that.

• 19:40Jason Calacanis?

  So this is something we're talking about and we're aware of, and you're aware of because of your investment.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:46Jason Calacanis?

  Thesis, but maybe not the populace yet.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  I would say that there's, there is a change in that I think Japan does think it's gonna have to do it alone. And I not entirely.

• 19:57Jason Calacanis?

  Japan being the people of Japan or the government?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  No, the government, because I think, you know, they're looking at what's happening in Europe. They're looking at how America is dealing with these, you know, the stresses of what's happening with Russia and Ukraine and what's happening in Venezuela and now Greenland. And so they're looking at that and they're wondering, you know, maybe we should invest more heavily into our defense. Now, they're not being offensive. I don't think Japan's gonna go take over countries or anything like that. But I, there is a push. You can see one is they're deciding not to import, you know, low skilled workers. What they really wanna do now is actually invest heavily into AI robotics and start building probably something more like Lucky Palmer is doing.

• 20:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, my pal.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Here, yeah, yeah, he's great.

• 20:42Jason Calacanis?

  Friend of the pal.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like really what I would love to see in Japan is, is really a lot of newer, new Lucky Palmers, right?

• 20:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And building.

• 20:50Jason Calacanis?

  Palmer Lucky.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well Palmer Lucky, sorry. He's also Lucky.

• 20:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  I think that might have been one of the things you were hinting at. And it's not that we're explicitly investing in defense tech in Japan. I think that's more of, of what we look at in the US. There are a lot of, of sort of technologies, for example, semiconductors and chips that could be used in satellites and other.

• 21:12Jason Calacanis?

  Defense tech, sure.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  And those can be found here. Uh, but it's, I think they're less likely to call it defense tech than they are.

• 21:20Jason Calacanis?

  Since we kinda dovetailed into immigration, another, and it's, I don't bring these topics up because I want to talk about politics here on this meeting. Startups. It's because startups are driving politics and it's hard to tell sometimes which is downstream of the other. Is politics downstream of the technological innovation or is politics driving technological innovation? I, it's kind of like these things are in orbit and there's gravitational pulls. Japan has traditionally been a very closed society and you can come here, but you're, you're not gonna become a citizen. But with population decline and the need to take care of older people and to fill jobs, immigration's one solution.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:02Jason Calacanis?

  But what we're scared of in America, job displacement, robotaxis and Waymos taking all these jobs. China also very nervous about losing all those driving jobs, that. Is an opportunity here. It's looked at differently. You have so many people who are driving taxis who are 70 years old.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, just today. He was 80.

• 22:25Jason Calacanis?

  Who's 80, driving a taxi.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like.

• 22:27Jason Calacanis?

  I love those guys.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Strap those in.

• 22:29Jason Calacanis?

  No, I mean, these guys know exactly where they're going.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Automation's never really been a dirty word here, like it's been in other countries, yeah.

• 22:36Jason Calacanis?

  Fascinating that it's looked at as an actual opportunity. And I think Waymo is driving some cars around and Uber has made a couple of announcements.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Waymo's here and a few others. I think Zoom might be here.

• 22:46Jason Calacanis?

  Zooks?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Zooks, sorry, Zooks.

• 22:49Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, we all know ChatGPT is amazing when you just need to look something up quickly. But if you're not going really deep and getting strategic when you write your prompts, you're not getting the most out of this incredible tool. But I've got a free resource from our friends at HubSpot. It's called Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering: From Basic to Expert in Seven Days. HubSpot is giving you a complete system for structuring ChatGPT prompts using the ROSE's framework: role, objective, scenario, expected solution, and steps. Thinking about your prompts this way is a huge game changer. And it's taken me from just hoping I get the right output I'm looking for to knowing with confidence that I'm going to get the information I need organized the way I want it.

• 23:30Jason Calacanis?

  So level up the use of your AI and download the guide for free at clickhubspot.com/twist2. That's clickhubspot.com/twist and the number two. Or find the link in the description. And thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring this episode.

• 23:47Jason Calacanis?

  When you're looking at those companies, tell me about Japanese startup culture and the Japanese capacity to build these type of companies. Because there's a big tradition here of doing it.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:01Jason Calacanis?

  And do you have enough factory workers to do it? Or is it going to be kind of, as I was talking on the program about Uniqlo? You know, maybe people were. Making clothes here on the island.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:15Jason Calacanis?

  Previously, but now, hey, we're designing it. We're sourcing the fabrics. We're building the brand. We're building the technology for checkout, all that other stuff. But we will build it in another country.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:25Jason Calacanis?

  So what's the Japanese capabilities right now when it comes to defense tech, deep tech, etc.?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  You brought up Uniqlo, which is interesting because I think this is somewhat of a well-known story, but they were laughed out of the room because they described themselves as a technology company.

• 24:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Even though, obviously, they make clothes. But look where they are now. And I think that's what you'll see in a lot of cases here. The technology exists and it's great and top of the line. And semiconductors, for instance, a lot of the tools and materials that are needed to create semiconductors that TSMC then produces can only find in Japan. And in some categories, it's a 90% monopoly. So we're confident in the technology part of it. What's missing is the sort of company-building part of it. So I'm part of a fund, I'm part of several funds, but one of the funds, it takes university research and then does more of a sort of startup builder approach. And I think that's one thing that we need over here. I know that Jetro you're working with to bring capital.

• 25:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Which is fantastic, I think. And the next step beyond that, I think, is to then bring in foreign sources of revenue.

• 25:34Jason Calacanis?

  Customers.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Customers. There's a phenomenon in Japan called English allergy. This is a term that a lot of people use here, so I think folks in the audience might be familiar with that. What it is, is it's not just an inability to speak English or to do English sales. It's just an allergic reaction. They feel physically disgusted by the idea and can't bring themselves to.

• 26:01Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Put themselves in front of an English speaker, right? It's not because people can't speak it, although we're in the bottom 10% globally in proficiency.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Um, but it's just this, this fear of failure.

• 26:15Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, to embarrass yourself by not speaking it well? Or not to be able to get the.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  It's risk aversion to embarrass yourself, to not be able to convey what you want properly. So there's this whole philosophy called genten Shugi, uh, Japanese, which means you're judged not by your accomplishments, by, by what you've screwed up. And this is how people in some traditional Japanese companies get decided whether you, you get a promotion or not, or whether you advance in the company, right? And so it's this deeply ingrained.

• 26:45Jason Calacanis?

  Your mistakes define you.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Exactly, yes.

• 26:48Jason Calacanis?

  The opposite of America, where we're like.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Entirely opposite.

• 26:51Jason Calacanis?

  You've screwed up so many times, what are you doing next?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's one of, it's one of the things you have to address, I think, as you bring up Founders University here.

• 26:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  It's like, how, how can you break out of that? And, and the key, the key way is really just to have them fail faster, maybe, so they get it out of them. Right? Like, do something fast, it fails, great, you're the next one. Right? Like, so they have to feel like there's a less risk of failure.

• 27:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and one of the interesting things about immigration today here is you have a lot of founders and investors who've been successful in the United States who look at, and you're both Americans, born in America.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Canada.

• 27:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Canada, okay.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm mostly American.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  He likes to, he likes to pretend he's.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  I love America more.

• 27:34Jason Calacanis?

  No problem, no problem. Well, we're gonna make it the fifty-first state. It depends on.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  Well, Venezuela, Greenland and Canada, it's gonna be one, two and three, fifty-first, second or third. We're not sure how we're gonna do it yet.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  PM is watching.

• 27:45Jason Calacanis?

  Um, but, you know, it's, it's great. It would be, it's gonna be a great contribution to the American experiment when we start adding states.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  You know what we're seeing though, like for, like, for example, with a semiconductor company and a few others is, um, a lot of Americans and Europeans wanna come live in Japan.

• 28:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that was where I was going with it is, this could change because Japan is open.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  To high skilled.

• 28:08Jason Calacanis?

  High skilled entrepreneurial and investors coming here. They have, they, they're very interested in that.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:14Jason Calacanis?

  They may not be interested in not, um, maybe people immigrating at lower skill levels or from.

• 28:22Jason Calacanis?

  That may not integrate as well.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've had some problems with that. But there is really very little stress to come work in Japan if you do have skills, especially if you have a master's degree or better.

• 28:33Jason Calacanis?

  That was very different twenty years ago.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, back then, you know, it was harder to come in here.

• 28:38Jason Calacanis?

  Because they thought it was competition for jobs or?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  They didn't really know. I actually think it was just so new to them. I was, I came here as a student and I was like the only foreigner in, in, uh, in the city I was in. And people would follow you.

• 28:58Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I remember that. Kids would follow you around. Like, I'd be walking down the streets to go to school and you'd have like twenty kids behind me.

• 29:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  It was really weird.

• 29:05Jason Calacanis?

  First white guy there. I had that actually happen in, I had that happen in Shenzhen over maybe twenty years ago.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 29:11Jason Calacanis?

  I went to an amusement park that was only for people from China and just literally twenty kids surrounded me and were touching me and touching my hair and wanting to take pictures with me with

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I took so many pictures.

• 29:21Jason Calacanis?

  Film cameras. They had never seen a white guy before from America.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  But we're seeing more hybrid teams. Like, for example, my, my CTO and chief research officer are both Japanese, but my chief medical is American. So, you know, and it works really well. I don't know. There's, there's, I think mixing teams like that may actually be a very powerful.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  It's good for the culture. It's good for broadening the skill set.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:48Jason Calacanis?

  So, the Japanese team would benefit from the audacity, aggressiveness, bluntness of the Americans and the Americans might learn a little humility, hardworking.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Discipline.

• 30:02Jason Calacanis?

  And discipline by working with a, with a Japanese team, yeah?

• 30:05Speaker 03

  And not just that, you can pay them less over here, too.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  But we come up with the idea that we shouldn't be paying less, actually. But not as much as America. America's gone crazy.

• 30:13Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let's just discuss it. What is a Japanese developer, let's say, somebody who's been a developer for five or ten years, what would they, their compensation be here, brochures? Working at a big company?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Amazon, maybe like a mobile developer.

• 30:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Seven million yen, which is about, what, forty-five thousand K?

• 30:30Jason Calacanis?

  What? That's a third.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  By the way, I want to clarify something real quick. I'm not advocating for paying people way less than their market value. What I'm saying is, you can bring in highly talented folks from abroad, but pay them closer to what the average salary is in Japan while paying them more while raising the overall sort of salary level here. But you're getting folks with very specialized skillsets from the US that are willing to move here despite the pay cut.

• 31:00Jason Calacanis?

  Right, well, they would be coming for the pay cut but getting the lifestyle gains.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:04Jason Calacanis?

  And then you could increase the salary of the Japanese executive and give them the opportunity to work with the Americans. So this could be win-win-win. The company has overall a lower average salary than in Silicon Valley, which is absurd, because the cost of living is absurd. And then you get this great cross-cultural, functional team that gets to benefit from each other, and the salaries can go up and the quality of life can go up. Living in San Francisco in fear and in danger is, you know, I was talking to some Americans who were here for the first time, and they were like, "I left my laptop out." And I'm like, "Yeah, it'll be there next week." You could literally

• 31:46Jason Calacanis?

  leave your laptop in Starbucks at 8:00 a.m. and come back at 4:00 p.m. It'll still be in the same seat.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  I've lost my wallet, my bags, everything here. Every time it comes back. Never had it disappear.

• 31:57Jason Calacanis?

  In America, literally, they've done like, reality TV-type shows where they'll put a laptop with a cable on it.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  The funniest is France.

• 32:05Jason Calacanis?

  Put it in Starbucks, and literally, within five minutes, somebody's yanking it and falling on their face.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  It took us three seconds in France, and it was gone.

• 32:12Jason Calacanis?

  So, listen, I could talk to you guys all day long. It's absolutely fantastic to meet you. And we have five of the founders who came to Found University. These were the ones that distinguished themselves out of the 30. And I was wondering if you would hear their pitch. Now, this is year zero. And then give them, "Hey, this is what I think of your idea, or what was solid, you know, in your thinking." And then maybe a challenging question. One of each. Would you guys be willing to do that?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Of course, yeah.

• 32:39Jason Calacanis?

  And you'll be candid?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Yep, very candid.

• 32:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here in Japan, this is one of the things I've been working on with the founders is we're going to be brutally candid. So just pretend it's like a Korean soap opera, or, you know, just forgive us for being American, but we want to be incredibly blunt. We're going to tell you the design is a four of 10, needs to be an eight of 10, or the business model is challenged for this reason. Okay. Five extremely candid pitches live from Tokyo when we get back.

• 33:12Jason Calacanis?

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• 33:53Jason Calacanis?

  and ensure that you can focus on building your business, not administrative tasks and paperwork. So get more from your Delaware C corp with Northwest Registered Agent. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  How do we run? I'm Kat, Japanese founder and CEO of Cascades. Cascade provides a digital ad optimization platform for the performance marketing. Here is our real customer, Liu. He's a brand manager at a cosmetic company. He runs digital marketing as across the channels, many campaigns at the same time. The problem is, digital marketing never sleep. So he has to check the error later, and if not, he wastes budget and misses growth. Here's demo, so he can only connect Google account in one click. And he can check the data through the a lot of optimization from our AI.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  So he can check the keyword to adapt and one click directly reflect to the each other platform. And also, we have the marketing AI agent here. So he can ask what type of campaign need to for the Gen Z, for instance. So our AI instantly responds to the response. And this is not just sexy UI UX. We can save real time. So we reduce the marketing operation monthly hours from 40 hours to the one hours. So we can reduce the cost efficiency. Not only the efficiency, we can increase the performance. So in the D2C test, we can reduce CPC cost per click by 33% and increase the cost, the number of clicks 49%.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  Our business model is very straightforward, very cheap compared with the traditional agency. And also, we are doing the SaaS model here. And here, team, Sam is a good founder who sold AI image generation startup for 1.5 million US dollars in two years. And the two smart engineer are building Cascade with me. The all members have worked before together at the exit company. So we can ship and first productions. And we are raising the 1 million US dollars to boost our production development and ROI combining into the paid customers. Thank you so much.

• 36:14Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Maya, founder of Altsource Global. We provide risk analysis, risk intelligence for procurement team, providing the intelligence to choose the right supplier for the team. Meet Sam. He's a director of procurement at US electronics company. His job is to make sure his critical components do not disrupt the production or hurt the business. When Sam logs into the platform, he sees all his component scores for risks. And he sees why it's risky and alternative solutions are listed over here.

• 36:55Speaker 05

  Before Altsource, he spent weeks searching for suppliers and validating their reliabilities. With this platform,

• 37:05Speaker 05

  He can identify the risks and find alternatives in minutes. Our core revenue is annual SaaS subscriptions. optionally, we also provide supplier discovery services, but this is not for long term. So X-axis shows multi-country diversification and Y-axis shows the transparency and risk diversification, risk mitigation. Also sits top right showing real-time and actionable solutions. We are ready to onboard pilot customers and testing for real world.

• 37:44Speaker 05

  Our bottoms-up approach allows us to scale from pilot to full platform, serving for global manufacturers. I'm the founder. I spent nearly 20 years designing, manufacturing, and supply chain in global companies. I'm providing this also to give procurement team smarter, faster supply chain visibility. Thank you.

• 38:13Speaker 06

  Hi, I'm Matt, builder and founder of GOMOchi, Bite-Sized Momentum for Goal Achievement. Meet Aya, an SEO specialist just starting a career pivot. She struggles to maintain focus so she can complete her goals. Now meet GOMOchi. Aya comes across GOMOchi and emails [email protected] with her goal. She wants to start a generative advertising consultancy. Life with GOMOchi. It's 7:30 a.m. and a personalized daily goal summary arrives. It has fresh research, an action plan for the day, and context from Aya's to-do list and Notion pages. Now Aya knows what to focus on this morning. 2:30 p.m.

• 38:54Speaker 06

  Aya tells GOMOchi, "Give me a story about today's prospective client meeting." She gets a narrative story about her at the meeting, and it's infused with context about Aya and relevant research. Aya visualizes herself acing the meeting. She's ready. Aya's life with GOMOchi. She has clear visualized goals she can act on, new ideas and insights, and momentum for her goal.

• 39:19Speaker 06

  Gomochi has over 260 organic signups after our MCP server was published on Anthropic's GitHub. We've even received unprompted user emails saying they love it. Gomochi competes with ChatGPT and their Pulse feature, Stride's goal-tracking app, and productivity tools, yet none of them are 100% goal-focused, proactive first, and don't have a clunky UI.

• 39:43Speaker 06

  We see 812,000 obtainable, goal-focused productivity users out there, and getting them could bring us up to $80 million in ARR within a few years. Gomochi is a freemium product, soon with a subscription, and we want to target 100 daily active users by Q1 of this year, and 10x our agentic abilities and productivity tool suite in Q2. Gomochi will be increasingly capable. I'm Matt. I'm an AI-first, technical founder, and with your support, I will hire an ops and marketing bar raiser. I believe goals don't fail us, because I believe goals don't fail because we lack plans. They fail because we lose momentum when plans are all we have. Gomochi solves this in a creative way. Thank you.

• 40:30Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Max, Fred, we saw three great startups. Kaz from Cascade doing AI tools that should save you 97% of the time when you're running your ad campaigns. We saw Maya from Alt-Source Global doing supplier discovery. And then we saw Matt from Gomochi doing an AI life coach. Let's start, I guess, Fred. Which one was the most interesting to you as an investor? Through the investor lens, which one, not just personal that you want to use, not what you think would become the most successful in the world, but if you had to put $25,000 or $10,000 into one of these companies, which one would you think would get the best return?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  I personally liked the Alt-Source Global.

• 41:11Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  I think it's actually a problem, it's kind of a large problem to actually find good suppliers. And I've done, I've worked in robotics and... You know, just to find like the right motor is impossible.

• 41:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, your friend Elon, in the end, just basically decided to make his own motors.

• 41:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  So, I mean, that's really.

• 41:31Jason Calacanis?

  Didn't want to be, yeah, a slave to the supply chain.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  You couldn't find anything, actually.

• 41:35Jason Calacanis?

  Max, which one was your favorite as an investor, putting your investor hat on?

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree with Fred. Number two is the most regionally relevant one, I think, for what Japan is strong in. And I could see this potentially becoming a global service perhaps.

• 41:50Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well, Source was your favorite as well. I had a hard time with this because I liked all three. But from an investment perspective, I go for the weird one that I think has outlier potential. And I thought the weirdest one was Matt's Gomochi, this AI life coach. And I thought, well, this is just a commodity. You can, I know people are doing life coaching inside of ChatGPT. But I thought, well, the device of getting it every day, if you were to put a human in the loop and have a human writing some prompts, I think you could delight and surprise users with a coach that really did become addicting. And there's many things you can wrap around a coach. I got many questions about it, so, okay. That's our, from an investment perspective, what we think. The pitches were all solid.

• 42:33Jason Calacanis?

  So then let's move to the next step, which is asking a question about the business itself to each of the companies. So Fred, who, pick a company and ask a question.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  I guess I'll start off with Gomochi because I actually thought of an idea while you were pitching.

• 42:48Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  So, for example, I, I know a very famous kind of nutritionist in, in LA. You might know him, actually. But, and I was thinking, you know, people pay him thousands of dollars just to sit down and really talk about food and just working through that. And I was like, is Matt thinking of bringing in like significant experts into the?

• 43:10Jason Calacanis?

  Them your coach?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:12Jason Calacanis?

  So they become your life coach, not Gomochi. You can make a persona based on them.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  It's a Gomochi persona based of like an expert and then it's trained on their.

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  Matt, the microphone. Matt, you can answer that.

• 43:22Speaker 06

  Gomochi actually has memory, so it can definitely play that role. It can, it can take on a persona. And also I see Gomochi as being on the right side. Of model development because as they get better, it's just going to get more capable and take on that persona and help much better over time.

• 43:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well done. Max, do you have a question for somebody other than Matt? But it can be Matt if you want.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Maya, so I was curious what you were doing before, since it looks like you have some sort of background in manufacturing, I'm guessing.

• 43:50Speaker 05

  My background is a material engineering. I started as a design engineer, basically modeling for a body in white. And I worked with many suppliers. And then I also worked for robotics company and because Japan has a really a large robotics company to work for. And I actually did AI integration as well. But so to make it short, I transferred to a commodity management, global supply management. After getting MBA and I realized there's a lot of problem that I couldn't unsee. So I wanted to solve the big problem.

• 44:31Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well done. I'll ask Kaz from Cascade a quick question. Hey, the two biggest ad networks are Meta and Google's. And they both have very large, significant leads in AI and they're obviously putting AI into every, every single product line. What will you be able to do with your AI tool that they won't have natively in their ad platforms?

• 44:56Speaker 04

  Okay, thank you. That's a good question. So we believe, you know, Google has, of course, in the gradient optimization too. And Meta has also as well. However, you know, Google cannot basically optimize Meta as well, right? And Meta also cannot optimize Google as well, right? So the problem, you know, a company perspective, they would like to do the optimization, ad optimization across all channels to grow their business.

• 45:22Jason Calacanis?

  This is a great answer. It's the one I expected, you know, a savvy founder would say. I'll just give you one little bit of coaching on top of it, which is there are also emerging platforms like TikTok, Amazon's platform, Uber's platform, Instacart, Snapchat. There are many other platforms. So we can.

• 45:41Jason Calacanis?

  Take whatever is working on Meta and Google's platforms, and then help you discover new platforms and master those, which most people are not taking advantage of the other long tail of ad networks, including Reddit and other ones. So, great answer. Great job to our first three pitches. We're going to take two more pitches and give two more sets of feedback, and then I'm going to ask you to rank your top two.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  My name is Gigi. Random chat, the zero star social network. When I say zero, what do I mean? I mean number of friends. In Japan, one-third of them identify themselves as no friends. And more than half of them say they have no close friends. In the US, the same trend. So this is our solution. You just join without any setting, and you can start to chat with people. Then you can join also group chatting. Also, finally, you can do become streamer or listen to others streaming and then super like it. Actually, 11% of our active users become live audio streamer on our platform. It's a place where everyone can start from zero.

• 46:50Speaker 04

  All you need is I want to chat with someone. You don't have need to prepare photos. You don't have to prepare your profile. And I asked, how is it working? People said 67% of them said loneliness resolved by my platform.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  And why is not solved by current social network? Because Snapchat for close friend, Instagram for top 10% content, TikTok for 1% talent. They all need friends or talents. How about 30% of people?

• 47:26Speaker 04

  And we already have traction to answer these needs. We have 4 million downloads now, 200K monthly active users, and each user spends 70 minutes per day on our app. And we have three revenue streams now in app purchase for microtransaction and ads and also subscription to remove ads.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  After zero to one, next, we will build their identity on our platform. They already have friend on our platform. So next, they want identity. So that's why AI can help us, because we only have two people now. Or engineer. So now we are using AI to create visual identity for our users. That's all. Thank you.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Eugene, founder of Air Inc. Air Test is AI-powered QA for the era of vibe coding. The problem. Meet Matt, co-founder, founder of No Reply, one of your companies, actually. He's scared about introducing bugs during a significant refactor. He provides a URL and within seconds, our agents are analyzing his site. Within minutes, we get right to the tests. He has a full suite of automated tests covering his application. The competitors are providing AI tools, but they put them in desktop apps. Ours is browser-based, all in the cloud, and time to value is minutes versus hours. Traction, we've got one paid customer and one bin market pilot. Zyko, it's a local company. They're pretty awesome. Roadmap, we will expand into agentic bug fixes, UX gap analysis to tell the UX health of your site,

• 48:57Speaker 04

  and security surface mapping to provide the same. Vertical, scrappy SaaS, always on QA. Scale-ups transforms QA engineers into velocity accelerators. Direct-to-consumer e-commerce, they pay for manual testing offshore. Spring to onshore in-house, cheaper, better quality. Pricing is seat-based primarily for solo founders, 500 a month. Scale-up, 1K per month. Onboarding fee is a hypothesis I have, which is time to value will allow for us to charge 5 to 10K upfront to get them results they've been trying to get to for quarters. Market size, top tier is existing companies with 10 employees and up, 42 billion. Bottom is my speculative, which is basically 75 million startups, 0.05 get funded, applied with that pricing seat.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  So it's, I would say, an explosive area that might be much more than 30 billion. Team is AI-focused, machine learning, and Tosh, CEO, she's the builder of our team.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Raise, I'm raising runway for the next 24 months. Keep the team small until we get to 20 to 30K MRR. And then we know how the mechanics of the business work. We can apply capital, scale it appropriately.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  The ask, I want everybody here, if you can, to send me one of your Your portfolio companies, I will analyze it, generate tests for it, provide you some results. Explosive velocity with automated proof. That's what Airtest provides. Thank you.

• 50:17Jason Calacanis?

  We saw two great companies in our second group. Gigi from Random Chat. Nobody's got friends. You can't fill out a profile. You've got no talent. Interesting idea. We're going to get your friends. Love it. And then Eugene from Airtest. AI Q and A, quality testing, seems like a huge winner, seems like a great strategy. Of the two, which one, if you had a gun to your head, and we don't have any guns here in Japan, but in America, everybody's got two. So if I took my two guns and I put it to the side of your heads, which one would you put 25K of your own money into?

• 50:51Speaker 03

  I feel like I would, what I know now, I'd go for the AI-powered Q and A. But I feel like there's something I'm missing with the other company too, and I'm really curious.

• 51:00Jason Calacanis?

  With Random Chat?

• 51:01Speaker 03

  Going into that, yeah.

• 51:02Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So you're intrigued by Random Chat, but your gut says, hey, the safe bet is the testing. How about you, Fred?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  I have a lot of questions for EIR. I mean, I'm wondering about it because, you know, Facebook just bought Manus and, or did they? I don't even sure. It went through, right?

• 51:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they bought it. And then you have, now you have free code, with an open source.

• 51:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you have questions about competition.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, competition.

• 51:27Jason Calacanis?

  Obviously, important area, but which one would you pick if you had to put the 25K?

• 51:32Speaker 01

  To be honest, I like the Random Chat.

• 51:36Jason Calacanis?

  So you would?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. For me, this is a really difficult one.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:39Jason Calacanis?

  Because, listen, we're only choosing between two. The safe bet is obviously the quality testing, like, low risk, because you know it's going to make money, but it's going to cap out maybe, or not, who knows? But a super impressive founder in Eugene, and then, and equally, if not more impressive founder in Gigi.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:00Jason Calacanis?

  Who I was absolutely riveted by your pitch, Gigi. You understand something. Every founder has a secret. Every founder understands something. Your command during that presentation was the strongest of all five we saw. You understand, and the confidence you radiated in telling us why this should exist in the world. Had me captured. And so I would take the bigger risk and go with random chat. And I have a new name for you. That being said, I'd probably just give you each 12.5. I'll tell you, I'm not going to tell you the name now. I'll tell you secretly, just the two of us, so nobody gets the domain name. Okay. So, a question, I think Fred, you wanted to ask Eugene about competition. Go ahead.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  So, most people don't know this, but like, there's been a bit of a controversy with Anthropic over the last couple of days because they changed the requirements for using Claude Code on your system. So, up until now, you could basically, you know, use Claude Code in different kind of solutions, like inside of your IDE or whatnot. But now they're basically saying you have to stay inside of the ecosystem. You cannot use it with Cursor. You can't use it with Google's development tool that it just released. It's called Antigravity, that's it. The trend now seems to be that most of the closed source providers are going to move to ecosystem protections, right? So, if you're basing, I mean, I guess the real question is, like, how would you get

• 53:30Speaker 01

  this to work if, for example, your customer is based on Accenture or like?

• 53:34Speaker 04

  Okay, great. So, I would say primarily, the main value is that it's behaving and testing the application as if it were a user. So, the system can't actually tell whether it's a user or if it's our AI, right? So, a platform is separate. The other kind of strategic importance, I feel, is separation of concerns. As you know, quality is, like, in this case, quality assurance system like this is kind of like a doctor, in a way, right? And it needs to have separation from the building of the thing. So, if you put all the context inside the built system, it creates some really odd results where it tells itself it works correctly, but there's no actual external monitor to validate that. That's my main angle. Cloud QA that provides that monitor at scale, separate from the core systems they used to develop them.

• 54:17Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Max, you have a question for one of the two?

• 54:20Speaker 03

  So, I feel like with media, social companies, you know, a rising tide floats all boats. And I saw at the end, they have 4 million downloads. So, I apologize if you've already covered this, I might have been missing something. I'd be curious to kind of understand the problem-solution in the context of where is all the sort of movement happening right now in the space that you operate? And, you know, where's sort of the magic that you provide that allows you to grow to where you are now?

• 54:53Speaker 04

  Basically, we are mostly organic. That's how big the need is, seriously. So I personally do SEO and ASO myself, app store, SEO, sort of. So if you are in Japan, you type Japanese, I'm confident you can find me if you want to chat with someone in Japan, not in the US. I need Jason's new name to do that in the English. Actually, not just me, there are many services there because the need is growing and nobody cares of them because all people here have so many friends. How many friends do you have?

• 55:28Jason Calacanis?

  Too many.

• 55:28Speaker 04

  Too many, like you get at least 20 name cards today, I guess. But that's the truth and that's why democracy doesn't work now, you know? Maybe it's too big, but it's because a lot of people, they have no friends. People say you are average of five friends, right? But they don't have five friends. So people with agenda get into their kind of brand, basically. So that's how, but some of them, they try to find a way to find their friend and the fastest way is to search, talk to someone online. And that's where I catch the needs.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  My question is more along the lines of, so for example, you mentioned a few social platforms, but one way to find friends is on Bumble, for example. It's not necessarily just for romance. Then you also have Clubhouse, it's a good way to meet new people, right? So I'm curious about just sort of with these options, clearly there's some sort of trend in which a lot of Japanese people are gravitating towards some form of media or meeting people.

• 56:35Jason Calacanis?

  They're almost hacking existing systems to solve the problem, do you think? Like, because Clubhouse isn't meant for making new friends, it's meant for conversations around topics. But that's interesting that you say in Japan, people are using it to make friends.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Well, as much as people still use it, I think.

• 56:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's a really interesting case study.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  So regarding Clubhouse and also, I think. Naval, a famous, actually he did air chat.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  And it's kind of similar, I think, and also Bumble. All of them require, uh, kind of encourage you to bring your real identity to the platform.

• 57:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 57:10Speaker 04

  Use your name, use your photo, and again, the thirty percent just, just, they don't want their real identity in the, they want a new start, I, I, I suppose, or they just want something quick.

• 57:22Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is the magic of what you've done. You have realized there is a cold start problem.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 57:29Jason Calacanis?

  And you've realized, let's just take all the friction out. If you're lonely, talking to someone makes you less lonely.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:37Jason Calacanis?

  So why don't we let you talk with someone?

• 57:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:40Jason Calacanis?

  Which is what Chatroulette was. So you're more like Chatroulette. But Chatroulette wasn't explicit, it was more for entertainment, not for friendship. And then, I like your idea of the big reveal. We invested in a company many years ago called Whisper. That was a geography-based one, so you would start chatting with people who were in your neighborhood. And these anonymous chats do have some issues. Um, you have to be careful about, you know, maybe going after young kids, etc. So you're gonna have a lot of issues you're gonna have to deal with. But, if you're thoughtful about it, I think that you have the start of something that could be magical, which is, okay, you start with no persona, then you do a persona.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:18Jason Calacanis?

  Then you can reveal your real self.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:21Jason Calacanis?

  When you want. And both people can choose to reveal themselves, and that could only be for paid accounts.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 58:28Jason Calacanis?

  So if you want to reveal, you have to be a subscriber, and then what you can say is, you will verify their identity. So you have to have a verified identity with your driver's license, services you can use for that, I don't know how it works in Japan, but in the US, there are plenty of ways to do that. Or relatively understand, this is who this person is. You've verified their phone number, you've verified their email, you've verified their driver's license, all different ways, credit card, you'd at least know something about the person to avoid some problems. I think it could be magical. It's weird, it's interesting, and I think you're the right person to do it. Let's give all five companies a big round of applause. And now, I ask you to pick your one and two. Your one and two. We'll start with your two and then go to your one. We'll go 222, 111. I have my one picked.

• 59:12Jason Calacanis?

  I have my two picked. I loved all five. These are five companies that I think are all investable. All five deserve angel investing to get to the next stage. All five are very frugal, I think. They're not going to need a lot of money to get to their first paying customers and to get to some level of product market fit. They have varying degrees of it. They're obviously in different stages here. But I am really enamored by all five. It's going to be very hard for me. In fact, I just changed my votes. Changed my number two vote. Okay. Fred, you're looking up. So you have your number two ready? Just your number two? And why?

• 59:50Speaker 01

  I think my number two is probably EIR.

• 59:55Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  And I, because I do see where they sit in the whole software development lifecycle. But I still have tons of questions, but I do like it.

• 1:00:04Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. That's your number two.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:06Jason Calacanis?

  Max, who's your number two?

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  My number two would, I think it's the same company, the AI-powered Q and A.

• 1:00:12Jason Calacanis?

  So Air Testing was your number two. I considered that for my number two. I considered All Source Global is my number two, and I considered Cascade as my number two. But I picked for my number two, Matt and Gomochi. And the reason I picked it was, I think that there is a way to do this that has a tremendous impact on a set of people's lives and that it has massive upside. I think it has the lowest chance of succeeding of the five. But I think if it does succeed, it could have a profound impact. In other words, the execution is going to be extremely hard for you, Matt. It would have been much easier for me to pick either Cascade...

• 1:00:55Jason Calacanis?

  Or all source global and certainly air, which was on my other number two possibility. Because all of those are gonna make, gonna be quicker and easier to one million dollars in revenue. Which means I did pick, I'll do, I'll go number one first, we'll do this like a baseball auction. My number one is random chat and Gigi. And I already stated why I liked it. I found the founder had presence, passion, and a, and a secret, and a knowledge that could unlock something also very profound. And now, it's not lost on me that I picked the two consumer apps, which are the least investable. But having done Robinhood and Uber and Calm, and seeing the outcomes of how large consumer things can get, I sometimes lean towards them and not safety.

• 1:01:39Jason Calacanis?

  Now, Max, your number one?

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  Sure. So, uh, just caveatting this, agreeing with-

• 1:01:45Jason Calacanis?

  You didn't change your vote, did you, based on mine?

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  I did not.

• 1:01:48Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  But clearly, everyone's good enough to, to be on this stage with Jason. So, again, you know, great job, everybody. My number one would be, sorry, Maya, I think it was.

• 1:02:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, all source global.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  Yes, all source global. And I just put a lot of, of emphasis and, and weight on, does this company have to be from Japan? Then, from Japan, does this have a chance of becoming a global company?

• 1:02:17Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I like your framing.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  I've emphasized on that.

• 1:02:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, great job, Max. Fred, who's your number one?

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  I, I actually liked all source as well.

• 1:02:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  And from my point of view, the, the reason why I liked it was that, even in my space, my, in medical-

• 1:02:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  -world healthcare, it's actually very hard to, to find the right suppliers for doctors. In fact, if you ever go into a doctor-run clinic, their back office is a complete mess. It is a mess. And so they don't, they're not very good businessmen doctors, right? So it's a mess in the back. They don't know where to buy things, they don't know, they pay too much, they order too much, and all that stuff. And then the other side of it is, for patients, they don't know where to go. So one of the other things that we were thinking about is like, if you, you know, you wanna, you wanna get a CAT scan, where do I go to a CAT scan that's near me? If you don't know, it's, it's actually quite hard. You're on Google, you're trying to find something, you don't really understand, you don't know if it's too expensive or not expensive, right? So, I thought there's a lot of ways that this risk management-

• 1:03:11Jason Calacanis?

  Could work.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  -for, for processing, you know, the supply chain is actually really quite interesting.

• 1:03:16Jason Calacanis?

  All right. There you have it. Another amazing episode of Twist is in the can. See you next time. Bye-bye.