Why this longevity startup raised in Japan, not Silicon Valley | TWiST Tokyo | E2315

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Sentry https://sentry.io/twist Agree https://agree.com Northwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Today's show: French ex-martial artist Bilal Kharouni is building his longevity startup from Okinawa, one of the world's "blue zones." (These are regions with the most people living long, healthy lives.) In this TWiST taping from Founder University in Tokyo, Jason investigates why a $200K raise in Japan can out-build a $2M raise in San Francisco, and why the best moat for biological AI isn't the model; it's the data no one else has. Plus a tactical and practical discussion of product market fit, why Ekei killed a growing side business to maintain focus, Japan's fast-track for regenerative medicine, and hitting the upper limits for consumer longevity gadgets. Plus a live Q&A with Founder U attendees. Guest Bilal Kharouni on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bilal-kharouni/ Ekei Labs: https://www.ekeilabs.com/ Relevant Links Okinawa Institute of Science and Tech (OIST): ****https://www.oist.jp/ Life Biosciences: https://www.lifebiosciences.com/ NewLimit: https://www.newlimit.com/ Centivax: https://www.centivax.com/ Medical Daily: "First Human Trial to Reverse Aging Gets FDA Clearance": https://www.medicaldaily.com/first-human-trial-reverse-aging-just-got-fda-clearance-what-epigenetic-reprogramming-actually-476076 Tim Friede snake venom article from Science: https://www.science.org/content/article/he-injected-himself-venom-decades-can-his-antibodies-help-snakebite-victims Micro1: https://www.micro1.ai/ Whoop: https://www.whoop.com/ Station F Paris startup campus: https://stationf.co/ Japan Times: "PM Takaichi sleeps only 2-4 hours a night": https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/11/14/japan/politics/takaichi-sleep-overwork/ FDLI: "Japan's Regenerative Medicine Regulatory Pathways": https://www.fdli.org/2019/02/global-focus-japans-regenerative-medicine-regulatory-pathways-encouraging-innovation-and-patient-access/ FDA: "Right to Try": https://www.fda.gov/patients/learn-about-expanded-access-and-other-treatment-options/right-try STAT News: "Are Blue Zones Real?": https://www.statnews.com/2026/05/04/are-blue-zones-real-new-scrutiny-longevity-hot-spots/ Timestamps: 0:00 Founder University is back in Japan! 4:05 What Ekei Labs does 5:13 Why Japan is a longevity hub 8:52 The AI biological moat 10:05 Sentry - Your team should be focused on shipping features — not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST 15:58 Right to try and the ethics of experimental therapies 22:30 Agree.com - Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract-to-cash stack. Go to https://agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life! 24:49 Japan's fast-track regenerative medicine law 26:03 Raising in Japan vs. the US 31:32 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 https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 40:44 Why Ekei killed a profitable service to focus 47:11 Have Blue Zones been debunked? 48:56 How socialization may extend lifespan 51:07 Founder Q&A: Booked vs. forecast revenue 55:42 Amazon's "bar raiser" framework 1:03:31 Social robots and loneliness 1:04:29 Jason on health and hustle culture 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 Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Alright everybody, I am back in Japan for Founder University Japan, which is our second cohort, and I'm here with a live audience, which you're gonna hear roar and clapping right now. And then I'm gonna teach you guys how to round out the clap. This is very important. You're gonna clap like crazy, like you won the lottery, but then I'm gonna go, and as it comes down, boom, nice and sharp, you stop. Okay, we'll try it one more time. I'm here with a live studio audience in Tokyo. Could be better, let's try one more time. I'm live with the studio audience here in Tokyo. Perfect. Now we've got it.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. Agree.com, stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract to cash stack. Go to agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life. And Sentry, your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code twist.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  What we like to do when I'm in Japan is meet some founders working on interesting things, who are a little further ahead than the Founder University cohort. What is Founder University? Founder University is a pre-accelerator. It comes before Techstars, Y Combinator, or the Launch Accelerator. Many of our companies have gone on to A16 Speedrun, Techstars, etc., Y Combinator of course, and our program, Launch Accelerator. We've run the Founder University program on three continents now. Here in Japan, we do it in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh twice a year, with our friends at Sanabel, the PIF, and we do it, of course, in America internationally. What is Founder University?

• 2:06Speaker 00

  As a pre-accelerator, we help teams work on product-market fit, raising their first round of capital. We have thousands of people apply a year for a couple of hundred spots. The program is 12 weeks long. We ask everybody to work really hard for those 12 weeks, to try to make amazing progress on their products, on their team, and in working with their customers. A startup in its most basic form is those three things. A team that develops a product that delights a customer base. And if you get that flywheel going, everything is really easy. Now, of course, most startups fail, but if you, in the course of your career, decide to do two, three, four startups, you're gonna hit success.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  And so, we love, as a firm, the Launch Fund, which I run, and we're now on our fourth fund, we love to work with early-stage founders. We've been so lucky to hit, you know, just some world-changing startups, of course Uber, Robinhood, Com, Thumbtack, Athena, ZipLine, Vasspace, so many great companies, and a lot of new AI companies that have suddenly become worth hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, like Abacus or Micro1. Those are recent ones that you'll be hearing about in the future. Because we're here live with a bunch of founders in the room, about 40 of them, we're going to talk about some topics today in terms of company building with our guest, and we're also gonna hear about his startup.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  So, our guest today is Bilal Kharouni.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Tony, yes.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Kharouni. Now, you have a French accent, not a Japanese one. Your company is Ekei Labs, that's spelt E-K-E-I labs.com. You can go visit it, you're a longevity startup.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  And everybody's talking about longevity. We'll talk about company building, everything from product-market fit to operating a company here in Japan, hiring people in Japan, cap tables, and all of those great things. But I wanna start with your business and what you're doing. So, Ekei Labs, what is the mission, and how are you going after this very important space, which is longevity? I'm sure it is by design that you're here in Japan, where we have some of the longest lifespans, and we have a massively aging population. So tell us just a bit about Ekei Labs.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So to start with Ekei Labs, we generate high-resolution and low-cost epigenetic data for drug development. Today, we're getting paid for discovery on aging, as well as for manufacturing quality control in cell therapy. Our mission is really to build an infrastructure for data generation to help advancing longevity research.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  So, there's a bunch of people

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  who are doing longevity research. Who are those people? Pharmaceutical companies, startups, big companies, small companies? Tell us a little bit about your customers, your partners.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  So we work with one of the largest life science conglomerates here in Japan, and we also work with early-stage biotech startups, and startups that are quite advanced and already manufacturing their own cell therapies. And you are mentioning one of the many reasons for longevity companies to be here in Japan, but one of them, on top of the aging society, is the reproductive medicine space. Some of the best innovations have been created here in Japan. We can cite the Nobel Prize, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, who created a new way to generate stem cells, to make it very simple. And we are very lucky to be working with some of the startups that were born from these movements, and are extremely innovative here in Japan.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Now, tell us a little bit about the product. You've been working on it for three or four years now, and it's in-market, you have paying customers.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  So what is this product exactly? And why don't they build it themselves, I guess, is always the question? So tell us a little bit about the innovation in terms of the product you're building, and you can get a little technical, and I'll help translate it, since I am not an investor in biotech companies.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yep. Great. So to make it quite simple on what our service is, is we generate epigenetic data that don't exist yet, for whoever wants to get a decision from it. So what is epigenetic?

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Epigenetic.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Epigenetic, yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  So we do not look at all of the DNA code, we look at a layer above it, that silence or express genes. Now, this signal is very important, because it changes with aging, it changes with therapeutic responses, and we have our own methods to read the methylation, which is a subset of epigenetics. Epigenetics, methylation is some chemical tags that go on the DNA, that switch certain genes on and off. And we have a way to read these signals in a way that is incredibly high-resolution at an incredibly low cost.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  So it's a tool that lets you look at this layer above the DNA

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  and understand how I'm aging. When do you start tracking somebody, and is it a blood test that is done, I'm assuming?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  So we're sample agnostic, we work with different sample types, and usually, we work with our clients, they have access to a large cohort, and they want either to do fundamental research on aging, so understanding how those patterns in methylation change when aging, and also how they change with some therapeutic response.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Got it. So if I was in this cohort, being studied

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  by a drug company

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  you run tests on me as the patient

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  and they typically have dozens of people in these trials?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  So we're lucky enough to work with very large cohorts, with hundreds, and sometimes thousands of participants. And yeah, so basically, this is, when I was telling that we're getting paid on discovery on aging, this is our project. And also, another area for which we're getting paid, and for which we have a lot of traction and interest, is also for one bottleneck in cell therapy manufacturing, which is to answer three questions. Is my batch potent? Is my batch what I think it is? And is it identical to the next one? Is this really consistent? So we also run tests on different stem cell batches for the manufacturing quality control.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  What is the impact of these drugs today? And with AI now, I am assuming, accelerating the ability to make these new drugs and these new therapies, tell us a little bit about the state of the art today, and where you think that'll be in five to 10 years?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Today, it's quite exciting. We've had our first AI-designed drug that's reached Phase 3 in the regulatory layer. And so what we do is we generate data that's never been generated before, using our technology, and then we use it to create new models for clients. The reason we are generating, and we are in the data generation business, is because in AI for biology, the mode is in data generation. If you use public data, it's not going, it wasn't built for your phenotype, it was not built for the indication you model targets, and unfortunately, you cannot really model your way out from a data set that isn't there.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  So we start from the start with the data generation, then we use relatively simple AI models, like elastic regression, to offer models either for drug discovery, but also for other aspects of the drug development, like patient specification, making sure that your clinical trials is going to enroll the right patients, or for the manufacturing QC. So today, it's really exciting, we have our first drug that's been designed by AI that's going above the regulatory rank, and my prediction is that

• 9:45Speaker 02

  The next frontier for AI modeling will be virtual cell organism. So currently, data is being generated to try to find those models and to have a next alpha fold breakthrough. And once we will have those virtual cell models, the new drug that will hit the markets will be absolutely groundbreaking.

• 10:05Speaker 00

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• 10:50Speaker 00

  likely. Try SEER and Sentry for free. If you're a This Week in Startups listener at sentry.io/twist, use the code TWIST for $240 in Sentry credits. Make sure you use that code, make sure you use that URL, sentry.io/twist, so they know your Uncle J Cal sent you. Yeah, and so today, is it mostly when people do longevity? Is it supplements? Is it anti-aging yet? Is it making my telomeres not get as short and maybe trying to reverse aging? What are, because I hear from my friends, they like to do off-menu items, things that you can't do in America.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  So they go down to Mexico, Costa Rica, South Korea, and they do stem cells. And they, I guess, have blood plasma taken out, it's spun, and there's some blood plasma treatments. So there's this idea of tourism based on longevity. I'm 55 now, I know it's hard to believe, but people my age are getting really into this, peptides, blood transfusions, and stem cells, are the ones I hear most about. Tell us a little bit about who is going to benefit from this and how.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  So true, so in terms of longevity treatments, you have a really large umbrella, from therapeutics to lifestyle-based interventions. And right now, there's not really a consensus of what would actually work for the patients. And that's why with AK Labs, we want also to build an infrastructure that can actually measure aging, to really being able to have a clinical validation of those treatments. And actually, it's quite exciting that in 2026, we've had the first clinical trial for a drug that might actually reverse aging. It's life bio science from Dr. David St. Clair that you might be aware of, as well

• 12:45Speaker 02

  as New Limit that was funded by Brian Armstrong Pharmacy of Conbase. They've had great data and they should have the first clinical trial, we hope, by next year. So I think that we're slowly moving from off-menu items to actually, actual drugs that went through the FDA programs, now targeting clinical indications that are not aging. But I hope that one day aging might be recognized by the FDA, either clinical indication, that we will have actual therapeutics, that we will be reviewed with the same scrutiny and with the same rigor for aging.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  For the individuals I know who are going to Panama, going to South Korea and doing these stem cells, are they wasting their money? Is it legit? Or is it just like a fad, this stem cell research in your mind? Would you, if you were my friend, and maybe we're friends after this, over time, would you advise me to follow them and do some of these things? Or would you tell me it's a waste of money? And if I had the money to waste, would you tell me, if it makes you feel good, do it, but it's probably not going to do anything? Be honest with me about stem cells and some of these things.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  So it's quite similar. Stem cells can be, and cell therapies in general, can be absolutely amazing, but it really depends on what is the clinical indication that you're going for. If it's for general aging, I do believe that some treatments might be really beneficial for aging. But I'm not a medical doctor and also doing things off-menu and with your own will, without like a framework and someone following you, I think, can be dangerous. And unfortunately, we have, you know, there are some bad stories of people having issues following those treatments, and it's something that we need to be aware of, that is not sometimes.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  The efficacy is not there?

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Efficacy is not here, and also the safety needs to be really looked at.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was a little concerned when I had friends going to Panama or going to Mexico and doing this, but they had nothing to lose, was kind of the situation. They were sick, where they had some indications. And then other ones are doing it because maybe they have a knee that had meniscus surgery or a torn ACL. And I have heard that some folks, Kobe Bryant has gone, rest in peace, but Kobe Bryant went when he tore his Achilles or shoulder, or whatever it was. And a lot of MB players went to clinics in Germany, I believe, to do this blood plasma kind of stuff. And I know you're not a doctor, it may not be your specialty, but there is some efficacy there?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  100%. So that's where I was, where I was drawing the line, is if it's not following a clinical indication and just for general wellness and aging, at the moment, I am not sure of the scientific consensus, but if you look at a clinical indication, I 100% believe that can be part of medical journey, that's tremendous value. And the other thing, when you're mentioning your friends that had nothing to lose, I'm also a huge believer in the right to try. Some states in the US are really pushing for this right, that for patients that unfortunately don't have another solution to have access to care that's sometimes.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Right to try, it's pretty explanatory in the name. You have the right to try a drug. It's your choice as a human on planet Earth to take that risk. But explain legally the framework as best you can for us as laypeople. You know, if a state decides to do this, what's the practical implication of it? We heard that there's somebody high-profile, who's 80 years old in the United States, who has some issues, taking Retitratide, this new, you know, GLP. And people were speculating it was the President of the United States. You've heard this speculation. We have no way of knowing if it's President Trump or not, but Retitratide is not there yet.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  People are taking it already from compounding pharmacies, someone who's not me, has experience with it and said it's pretty amazing. There are many people I know in the States who are taking Retitratide very quietly. So maybe you could talk about what is exactly the right to try and why you believe in it? And you believe in it also for young people who maybe aren't sick but want to try peptides, want to try Retitratide before it's approved, et cetera.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  So the legal framework of the right to try is very complex, but it would be the right for, if you have, for example, an intral disease, you have the right to try a therapy, like a cell therapy, a gene therapy, that haven't been approved yet, but you take the risk knowingly that might save your life. And you have politicians in the US, more and more, who are having a movement to put that in law and give access to care that could save life, to patients that would not have access to this care in the current situation. So I think that's absolutely a great thing. And now for the right to try for younger, healthy people, I think that's a very interesting ethical questions for doctors.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Me personally, I mean, I'm an entrepreneur and I have like a sense of risk. For me personally, I would like to try like certain, certain therapies that are not on the market, that are not maybe scientifically approved, but that would be my, 100% my choice and the risk that we're ready to take. But I can definitely understand that the ethical choice for doctors to inject a drug to a patient that is healthy can be also hard to take for the doctor.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  But you believe, as an entrepreneur and maybe as somebody who is freedom-loving, I think, and you were previously a martial artist who got injured, you say, hey, maybe there's a personal freedom here that should be allowed, if the person goes in knowingly and they've, you know, signed off on it, that they want to take the risk. And there have been trials, I don't know if they're called challenge trials, where people could during COVID, say, I am okay with taking the risk of giving me COVID in advance, giving me a therapy, because I want to try to help the world. I'm willing to take a payment for that, or I'm willing to do it for the good of society.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Now, in America, this would be foreboding, but in other countries, my understanding is if somebody wanted to say, yes, inject me with COVID and inject me with the cure, I want to do it for the good of society. This, to me, seems like a beautiful thing for somebody to do. Now, I would be concerned if it was a poor person who was doing it just for the money, because that would seem like, oh, we're using a power imbalance, an economic imbalance there. So I have deep concerns about that ethically. But if somebody who, you know, was not destitute financially and they went through multiple screenings with a psychologist, with a counselor, and they said, no, during the height of COVID, I would like to take the risk of getting COVID, I don't, I think I'm a low-risk, healthy individual.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  What do you think about that category of, like, actually, somebody joining something in that brave way, like being, it's almost like being an astronaut or something, and, you know, you're willing to risk going to the moon?

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Very interesting. I've never heard of this particular case, of people getting sick to advance medical research.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  For me, still like the ethical question of getting someone sick, even if it can advance the research, is maybe like a border that I would not cross.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  But.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  Ethically, it's a really fascinating one, right? Like, it's very challenging.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and for me, I think it's a border that we would cross. But and also, I would question the motivation of the person who will be ready to get sick. So would it be truly, I mean, if the, as I mentioned, if it's like space exploration is really to advance human health, that would be amazing motivation. But I would definitely also think about what would be the motivation. Do you know anyone in your personal circles that were ready to?

• 20:49Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't know anybody who would do that, but I could imagine if they were given compensation, if it was irreversible. So, hey, if you do die from this, your family would get a million dollars or $10 million if you were going to get sick and there was some ongoing long-term COVID, let's say, if you believe in long COVID, you would get free healthcare for life because of it. You know, as a society, we have people do many brave things. We have people who go to war. We have people who are firefighters who run into burning buildings. My brother was one of them, and he's run into many burning buildings. Is there a difference between the bravery of an astronaut, the bravery of a firefighter, the bravery of a soldier, and the bravery of somebody who wanted to be part of advanced

• 21:34Speaker 00

  medicine to try to push the human spirit and the human and reduce human suffering? To me, you know, I've thought about it, and I think, you know, I have nothing but respect for those people who choose to take those risks for the betterment of society. But I would be lying if I didn't think it is ethically and morally challenging and has to be really well thought out and considered, which I think is what you're saying as well.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's what I'm thinking. I think the ethical, because I was thinking about the firefighter example, which is great. But for example, we do not burn the skin of firefighters to then study how to do skin

• 22:16Speaker 02

  healing. So that's why I would draw the line is that if we actually inoculate patients, LCP people with a disease to advance science, we do still deteriorate their health, which I think is a line that personally I would not cross.

• 22:30Speaker 00

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• 23:12Speaker 00

  99.64% of all invoices on the entire platform are paid within just 10 days. So if you want to stop chasing invoices, go right now to Agree.com. And if you tell them Jason sent you, you're going to get 50% off for life. You want to talk about a crazy example. There's a guy who, and we'll put a link to it in our show notes, who collected venomous snakes and injected himself with the snake venom to build up a tolerance for it. Over time, after building it up, his blood plasma was able to create, I don't know what they call the antidotes for poisons like this and toxins, but he moved that science forward.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Now, he had done it on his own so that he would slowly build up a tolerance to this so he could handle his own snakes. But this person has given more to the advancement. More people have survived venomous snake attacks because of this individual. He saved thousands of lives, I believe. So very interesting frontier we're on now, huh?

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a really great example, yes.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Tell me about the regulatory, which modern societies have a very progressive, thoughtful way of advancing the science, given the risks? The United States, I think, is the most conservative with the FDA or extremely conservative in the top 20% of conservative?

• 24:40Speaker 02

  It is fairly conservative, but you have more and more intention from the FDA to fast-track cell therapy and gene therapy. So that is still very early, and also I am not a legal specialist, especially of the US healthcare system.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  But other countries like South Korea, Japan?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Japan is very advanced. So in 2012, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for discovery on pre-pretentance stem cells. In 2013, if I'm not wrong, the Regenerative Medicine Law Act was enacted, and that's really fast-track cell therapies and gene therapies in Japan. So in Japan, we have access to numerous therapies that you do not have access to in the US. And you have the really high-quality medical care in Japan. So I think that's an extremely interesting, unique situation, and that's also one of the reasons we are here with EK Labs.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk to you about company building here on This Week in Startups.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Great job. That was awesome. All right, we're here, we're in Tokyo for Founder University, our second cohort of Founder University in Tokyo. We've got an incredible guest. Bilal is here from EK Labs. You can go find out more at E K E I L A B S dot com. Let's talk about building a company. Why did you choose to place your company here in Tokyo? And I understand Okinawa.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so here in Tokyo and Japan is, of course, as you're mentioning, super age society, great legal framework to fast-track regenerative medicine, as well as great scientists. And we work on aging, we want to build an infrastructure to really accelerate aging research. So in terms of like macro environment, it makes a lot of sense. And why Okinawa? So funny enough, it's one of the blue zone where the life expectancy is really high, but it is not the reason we're there. The reason we are there is because of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. That's, I don't know if you're familiar with.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  It's ours, yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  It's pretty unique. So it depends directly from the Prime Minister's office. By status, the language is in English. 50% Japanese people, 50% foreign people, only from PhD graduates. And it's really a center of excellence for fundamental research. Great science, great environment, great talents. And we have located all of our R and D in Okinawa. So we have our own lab bench. So when we receive samples from our clients directly in our lab in Okinawa. And now we have actually a great bridge from graduated academics from OIST to come and work directly for us, with us.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  So it's a very great situation in which we do the business development, fundraising here in Tokyo and all of the science in Okinawa.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Tell us a little bit about, we get the talent base, right? So that's great. You have a great customer base. You've got a great framework for regulations here. Those are all, I guess, wind in your sails as opposed to headwinds if you were in other places. Let's talk about raising money in Japan versus the United States or other places. Now, you were born in Paris, you spent time in Thailand, now you're in Japan. So I just got back from Paris. Incredible. I forgot how amazing Paris is. And then you get to Tokyo, and you're like, wow, these are two of the great societies. You've got to live in both, yeah?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty lucky. So when was the last time you went to France and to Paris?

• 28:21Speaker 00

  I probably, well, I was there, like I said, for two weeks just recently. And then before that, it was about 10 years before that.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  It has changed.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Quite a lot, especially for the startup space.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're really cooking with oil. There's a lot of great startup energy. And I think they're becoming a little bit more flexible in terms of hiring people, firing people. There were some laws that made it very difficult to hire folks or to take risks in hiring folks because you couldn't, if you were to start a division and it was a very speculative vision, you hired 10 people for it, you can't just shut that division down. That's why a lot of founders who are taking high-risk startups maybe have a little bit of a challenge there, yeah?

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And it changed a lot, like being regulatory space, but also the amount of international founders and talents coming to Paris. I actually grew up 10 minutes from Station F.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  And Station F is this beautiful old train station, I believe, or warehouse that's been converted into a WeWork, a coworking facility.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Exactly. And the whole neighborhood is completely different from the time I grew up. So it's definitely interesting to come back when I can.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  And you have a great startup community here that's emerging lots of talent. That's why we're here. We're watching so many young folks and people who would have normally worked at a big company for life decide, hey, I'm going to try a startup, and their parents are supporting them. I was talking with a journalist today, he's Gen X as well, and I asked him for his three kids. He had some kids who were 17 and 20 years old. And I said, would you be happy? If your kids took the risk of doing a company, he said, oh, I'd be thrilled. Now, he works for essentially the New York Times of Japan. So he's, you know, a business reporter. I said, would your parents, as a Gen Xer, you know, he's got Gen Z kids.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Would your parents as a Gen Xer be happy if you started a company or would they be scared? He said, oh, scared. They wouldn't have wanted to. So we have this great moment where we have so many great founders here and they're taking risks and they're thinking globally. So that's one of the nice things about how the startup communities have grown. Let's talk really granularly about the investment community here. You have a number of great VCs, you have corporate VCs, and they also have grants. So you funded this company with a million dollars in seed funding and some, and some grants. Yeah?

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Exactly. So we raised capital from Japanese VCs as well as with from great Japanese angels. So not Japanese angels and as well as Europeans who have lived in Japan and led huge companies in Japan for decades. So we have very strong investors. And what is quite unique and what your audience, especially in the US, might be quite surprised that we also had numerous startup loans. So actually, regional banks are risk takers and they do give loans to biotech startups.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Which is incredible. There are banks that have been given money by the government and allowed to take the risk of backing startups. So you've had a loan, I'm assuming a low interest loan over a long period of time? Tell us about that. Okay, so you've identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in. So you're all set to launch your new company, right? Not so fast. If you want investors and potential customers to take your new business seriously, you need to consider forming a Delaware C corp. And that's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. They're going to give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email, and of course, a phone number.

• 32:00Speaker 00

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• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So we've had different, different startup loans. And as you mentioned, low interest over a long period of time. And more importantly, you have official institutions that are guarantors, which mean that they also take, take the risk of granting the loan. And so you mentioned there's a lot of great VCs in Japan, but the early stage funding is still sometimes slow and with small checks. And for us, it's being able to leverage what we raise in equity to have more than what we raise, right? So we have one and then we're going to have another one from the, from the banks.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  So for every dollar you raise, you can get a bank dollar? And then if you fight hard, you might be able to get some grant money because you're in this, this technology. Most angel investors here, what's their check size and the range?

• 33:16Speaker 02

  I've really heard of everything, anything, you know, from a couple of thousands of dollars to a few like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Okay, so you could have a 5K, 10K check, a 25K check, even 100 or 200K check. So that's lower than America and at lower valuations. But you raise less money per round because the cost of running a business here is significantly less than San Francisco, yeah?

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Exactly. So you raise less, sorry, that was a question?

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so yeah, you raise less, absolutely, because definitely less expensive than running a startup in San Francisco. And also, in our case, is we know that we can take the risk of raising less because we can add other source of non-dilutive funding, right?

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Incredible.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  So we can keep a clean cap table and have more than what we raised for. And actually, that's quite interesting because more and more US biotech VCs come to Japan and they're quite amazed at what a Japanese startup that's raised 200K, they were able to accomplish, right? As you look at the data, that was only made with this amount of resources. So I think something that we can be really proud in Japan is how much we can achieve with sometimes really small resources.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Well, and this will be an arbitrage opportunity. American VCs raise large funds, but they can take, make a couple of bets here at a lower valuation. The valuations in the United States have become disconnected from reality again. We had that happen previously in 2019, 2020, before COVID. They got disconnected during the SaaS period where they were giving people incredible valuations. So looking internationally, you can find great teams that accomplish a lot on a small dollar amount. Then you have to look at, well, can they exit for a large amount of money? So you're incorporated as a Japanese company or a Delaware company?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  So we are incorporated as a Japanese company. And we are talking more and more with US VCs and we might.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Flip.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Flip, yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the flip would then allow them, if you were a Texas company, Delaware company, even Nevada, those are the three ones that seem to be pretty popular right now in the United States, you'd be able to raise from those VCs. So you, as a founder, can also do this arbitrage. You can raise from people who are less cost sensitive. You can run the company here and then when it's time for an exit or an IPO, you can become an American company, yeah? And I don't think the Japanese government has too much of a problem with that. They want to have more people here. I think they prefer you to be a Japanese company for now, but on an exit, if you went public, that'd be incredible for the Japanese society. And you can go public here on the Japanese stock market as well. Have you become educated with that?

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Yes, actually, the regulation have changed a lot to do an IPO. The Japanese Series B for a very long time used to be the IPO.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Incredible, with as little as five or 10 million in revenue.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. So the Tokyo Stock Exchange actually stopped that and now.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Do you know why they stopped doing that? Is it, was it because there were too many failures or?

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there was too many like zombie companies on the stock markets. And also, I think that they want to encourage merger and acquisition as exits. And I think that will be really healthy, right? Because we're mentioning that the checks signed by the angels are pretty low is because also we don't have a lot of founders that's exited for a lot of cash and then that can really recirculate the money with angel investments. So now it's a lot of restructuring, I think, being made with Japanese VCs and Japanese LPs because the question is if the startups cannot do an exit by IPO, I don't like the Series B timing, where do they get the growth funding and how do they exit? So that's definitely an interesting time in, in Japan for this.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Mergers and acquisitions would always be the second option for an exit for an American company. We had four years where it wasn't allowed. We had a woman named Lena Khan running, you know, for the Biden administration, the rules around M and A and they blocked them. And so people gave up on M and A. President Trump joined, became president for a second term, 47th president of the United States, and he has been very pro M and A. In fact, inserting themselves into it and advising people and asking for certain ones to be approved and other ones not to be approved. There are some problems there, I guess, in terms of fairness and maybe being too involved and not impartial enough. But net, net, we're starting to see a lot more M and A. And that's good for the ecosystem because it recirculates cash.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Talk a little bit about equity and employee equity and cap tables. We've got a lot of founders in the room. And in America, we have, especially in San Francisco, I would say a cutthroat environment for equity. We have founders who will basically decide, hey, I'm going to do four years at Google. My four years are up. I'm not happy with this equity grant. I think Google's fully, you know, I think their valuation is fully realized or it's going to grow more modestly now, which is what happens when companies mature. I'm going to go to Meta. They go to Meta and then they go, oh yeah, I've been here for three years. I've vested most of my equity, but Uber and Airbnb and Coinbase are giving me a better deal and those are higher growth.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Then, oh, I'm going to now, the top thing to do is try to get SpaceX, Anthropic. And OpenAI shares or many other AI companies. The expectation here, there isn't as much of a cutthroat environment. Employees don't even, in some cases, understand. And you might be the first person to give them equity.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Do they believe you that it has the potential to have value? Or do they just think, uh, this is just like, um, a lottery ticket? And, uh, they don't take it as seriously. I say, American, you know, rank and file management developers, technical staff, where they look at and go, oh yeah, these are going to be worth something. I'm going to buy a house with this money.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Very interesting. I think it really depends, um, on the employees. We've had some who wants to fight, uh, to have more stock options and to have more equity in the company. Some, um, less, but we try to really make them understand that our success is shared with all the company. That's very important for us. But more and more, um, I think Japanese employees look at equity in the company. So there's been a lot of talks in the news about, um, how the stock options regulations got eased in Japan. So now definitely, um, it is more, uh, accepted and understood by.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Were there some technical issues around taxation and, uh, the awarding of them?

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm not really, uh, familiar with the topic because that's, uh, happened just before we really started issuing a lot of stock options. But from what I've heard, yeah, it was, um, on top of the taxation, it was also quite hard to grasp, uh, the previous framework. And now it's really simplified, um, to, uh, yeah, to just give, um.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  How much do you focus on product market fit? And refining it and improving it at your startup? And how do you know? And how did you know previously that you were getting product market fit? What were the early signs of product market fit that led you to make good decisions? Maybe what were the sign? Maybe when you were less focused on product market fit, did you make some mistakes and buildings you didn't need to? Just explore and let's open up that topic.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  So it's quite interesting. So we have this epigenetic services, right? So now we focus really on drug development, but we also used to offer the services to longevity clinics. Uh, that want to measure aging for their, for their patients. And we actually had quite some growth, um, with the clinics, a lot of prospect, lots of meetings. But we decided to completely terminate this business. And the reason why it was because it felt like a distraction from what will really make the value of the company explode, which is the race for data generation. So we really just focus on improving our methods to have even higher resolution in, um, in epigenetic. And the idea is to being able to generate data that nobody else can.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  And from this data derive assets that will give us an advantage. That could be new diagnostic, that could be new therapeutic assets. And that's, I think, what will be the vision of product market fit is when we'll be able to really derive our own IP, our own IPs from the platform that we're building.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  So you had short-term, quick revenue, some early success, but you looked at it and said, hey, that's not going to be an outlier success.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  And it's not going to accrue significant value to the equity holders, to the corporation. And so let's go for the long value creation. And that's trading short-term greed and opportunity for long-term greed and opportunity. Yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  We really believe in the clinical importance of biomarkers of aging in clinics. We didn't exit the market for that. But what we believe is that we can, if we keep improving our methods to generate data, um, at a higher resolution, lower costs, we might be able to come to clinics with an even cheaper and better product. So we really want to focus on, uh, on the R and D. We want to focus on the data generation and then derive even better services, uh, when we have the platform built.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  This is a tension a lot of founders feel early. There is a certain amount of runway in the bank. You've got 18 months, 12 months, and you can pick up some quick revenue. You say, ooh, it extends the runway, but it's not building a long-term business that could be a billion-dollar outcome.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  And angels might be like, whoa, I don't want my investment to go to zero. So an angel investor on your cap table might say, oh yeah, go for that quick revenue because they've seen too many companies flame out. A VC might tell you, don't try to make money, just try to build that value. We'll give you 36 months of runway. We want you to go for the long game. And then, of course, you have a board of directors and now you get caught. Maybe you have an angel on the board, maybe, you know, you have some people who are nervous from corporates. Maybe you have people who are VCs who they just want the power law.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  They would rather nine out of 10 companies go to zero and one go to a billion than have, you know, five of them have $100 million exits. Cause just on a math basis, 500 million versus a billion or $2 billion outcome, they're going to push you for that. So have you experienced that tension yet here in year three or four?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Um, no, actually. And I think that one of the reason why is, uh, in our cap table, so we have angel investors, but they're all, um, first well-versed in biotech. And second of all, this is not the first, the first check, the sign. So they know, um, how it plays. But also what is important even, uh, before having the approval from your board of directors, you also need to have a consensus inside the company, right? You need to talk with all of the team and just decide this is the company we want to build. This is the risk we want to take and this is, these are the changes we want to have on the world.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Uh, I want to go back to one topic I didn't hit on when we were talking about your company, which is biological age.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  I have a whoop.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  I did blood tests with superpower and function health and all these things. And the, one of them gives me like, oh, you're not sleeping at the same pattern. So you're a little bit older and then my blood tests are excellent. Oh, you're a little younger. These are just two different modalities. One is the blood test, one is like sleeping patterns and stress. How am I as a consumer of these products to understand the concept of biological age? And how can I actually take action based on that? Because my whoop's just saying, go to bed and wake up at the same time every day and you can game your score. But I don't like to go to bed and wake up at the same time. I like to go to a concert or a Knicks game and stay out late and then sleep in. Sometimes I get up really early and, and want to do a workout.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  I, I don't want to live by that strict of the, uh, and, and try to game that metric. Um, and I don't want to take a ton of supplements and try to make my vitamin D go up just so my blood test can say it. I, I'm having a hard time making sense of this. What is biological age and what's the best way to tell it?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  It's basically, what is your age? Uh, sorry, it's basically you look at the biomarker and it's looking at your benchmark to a cohort that has a similar age. So you, we can look, uh, for example, at the methylation of your DNA and estimate that you have methylation patterns that is some one of someone who is like 45 years old. Or we can look at another marker and estimate that your biological age is 55 years old. So it's really finding a biomarker and then just looking at your benchmark. Um, and what you were mentioning with the whoop and how to, um, try to game the, the system, I think is very important because at some points, uh, that's why actually I'm making a start for my Uring.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Is because it looks like you're trying to optimize for biomarkers that can be disconnected from your actual health, from really how you feel. And, um, so for consumers, I would say that the value is really, uh, for the trends. That's actually encourage as a population level, people maybe to sleep better, to eat better. But if we look at the medical age and biomarkers of aging for drug development, then you can find some value, right? Because you can actually have a marker, um, that is objective, that is not perfect, but that can really help, uh, designing your clinical trials protocol that can help you help, uh, for your drug discovery.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  Amazing. Uh, finally, blue zones.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  Okinawa is one of them. There were some in Italy. I understand there's been some now research and people went into the blue zones. And in some cases, people were lying about their age. You heard this story?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Uh, because maybe they got some benefits of saying they were a little bit older in some towns. So some of that research has been reversed, but the Japanese people are known for living longer on average. And they're in some cases, living in cities for, to a long age. Do you, has there been enough research now to understand the truth about these blue zones? And Okinawa obviously is one that is legitimate, I believe. And maybe the ones in Italy were the ones that weren't. Um, so tell me a little bit about the controversy there.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  So the papers that was released for the controversy was basically, um,

• 47:44Speaker 02

  It made observation that most of the blue zones were the poorest areas of those countries. And so it's not very intuitive to think that the poorest areas of some countries of where the lifespan are the highest. So they went, did some field trip and they realized that some people, for example, that were estimated to be one hundred, one hundred and eight years were just dead and people were collecting the pension as a family, for example. That'd be exciting. Okinawa and in most of the blue zones, there are some strong links is sociability.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  Sociability.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Sociability.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Why would that make somebody live longer? They're happier, they have lower stress.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  What is the theory there that socialization correlates with longevity?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I think it's first, if you have someone who knocks at your door every day to see that you're in good health, you have someone to actually care for you and therefore you tend to live higher and having healthier behavior. And also I think that mentally, having someone to look, to look at and to have a regular

• 48:50Speaker 02

  routine with some people that you appreciate and you to feel the support is actually extremely important to be in good health. And unfortunately, I know some people who've had this really strong supportive networks for years. And when the supportive network disappears, they can actually

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Decline.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Decline extremely fast. So this socialization is extremely important. And I've seen it first hand in Okinawa with some solid, solid energy networks that last for a really long time with people that have been peers for decades. It's really, really cool to see. And as well as diets can make definitely a difference, especially in Italy, the Mediterranean diet is Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I saw a study last week, again, this is a very early study. And I like to find these research stories as they happen. It said the chances of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's were dramatically lower in people who are bilingual or lower in people who are bilingual and who knew a second language and dramatically lower in people who are able to speak four languages or more.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  And I thought, wow, that's fascinating. There's something about the plasticity of the mind that if you speak multiple languages, your mind is healthier, which then makes sense. It's almost like it's working out and because it has, and this is, I don't know if you've heard this study, that's just in the last year or so.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  I really, yeah. It will be interesting to see if blue zones also zones where you have more dialects and therefore

• 50:25Speaker 00

  More brain health.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  More brain health, yeah.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Cause that is one of the big diseases, right? You have heart, you have

• 50:33Speaker 00

  and brains and lungs, like there's like some specific ones that tend to

• 50:38Speaker 02

  The force of man of

• 50:39Speaker 00

  The force of the dead. Yeah. And I think these are some of the big ones. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion. Let's give a big round of applause to our guest.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  And we'll do a couple of questions from our founders here. If you have a crisp, great question, we're gonna, we have a microphone here. We'd like you to come up to. A great question would be amazing, either about his company or just about running a company. And so it could use three great questions.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for the talk. Yeah. My question is, when you decided to cut one of your services, as you mentioned with the clinics, did you base it on data of the earned or the, what they all earned and the booked amount? Or did you also play into the forecasted one if you're gonna be closing this certain project?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Well, actually, if we were looking at the numbers and if we're looking at the books, we would have kept the business because it was revenues and everything and growing. It was more of a strategic question, like where do we want to grow the company? And where do we really want to focus 100% in terms of development? And we made the difficult choice of cutting a service that was actually generating cash regularly and predictably to really being able to focus on the R and D and trying to cut distractions for the time being.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  All right. Great question. And that really is what it's about. You have only so many cycles as a founder and a founding team. And focus is so important. Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  And especially today, because, so we do work with AI, we generate data for AI models. But we are not like an AI first company. And today it feels like every week where you don't grow exponentially is a week that you might waste forever. I don't know if that makes sense.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  There's a cost of not growing fast and being ambitious today that is, I think, higher than ever. And we really want to grow the company as much as we can in a difficult industry where we are, we have to follow the pace of experiments and the lab. And we really just want to give us all the force to grow as much as we can and working on the most difficult topic, because this is where we will really create value.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's inherent in the Japanese culture. I believe the term is kaizen, continuous improvement. Yes? Yeah, I'm getting nods. Okay. I pronounced it correctly. Yeah, kaizen. And this is one of the reasons why when I bring investors or angels or venture capitalists and founders and I take them to Japan for the first time and they see everybody really caring about what they do, they don't realize that the person who has been working on coffee or pasta or, you know, their tailor or they work in the subway, they've been trying to be a little bit better every week for many years. My favorite audio guy, every time he just tries to make the audio 10% better, right?

• 53:33Speaker 00

  And that spirit is so important and founders have it inherently, but most people don't. And they, they don't understand that compounding improvement, just like compounding interest is one of the most powerful forces in the world. And to your wasted weeks, this is so critical. Because it's not just, if you waste 10 weeks a year, if you've could have gotten your startup to be 3% more efficient that week and then 3%, I mean, it compounds and it compounds. And instead of having, you know, that kind of improvement, you'll just have

• 54:07Speaker 02

  This is what we hope. And I know I think we'll be, we are like in one of the most exciting times to build a startup. And I don't think that we can afford to not try to go.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Bush, yeah. You really want to try to accelerate it. And are you, let's take another question. If somebody has one, go ahead and go to the microphone. And while we're waiting for somebody to go to the microphone with a great question, don't be bashful here. I know you have questions. If this was America, they would be pushing each other over to get to the microphone, to plug their company and embed a plug for their company into the question. But one question for you, I think, you know, when you look at this improvement, how are you using AI to run the company?

• 54:54Speaker 00

  And how do you decide to hire the next person or maybe solve those problems with AI?

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Great question. So as an organization, we are still like AI 1.0, I would say. We don't use agents, for example. So

• 55:10Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. No agents.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  We are still

• 55:12Speaker 00

  No cron jobs? No agents, no cron jobs. Okay.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Exactly. So we still like have a lot of like lab work that is quite manual. But for AI, yeah, unfortunately, like we do

• 55:27Speaker 02

  hire, for example, like junior people and in terms that have learned, they have a background in machine learning, for example, and that we know they can actually use AI to basically can to accelerate their work.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is a term at Amazon, Jeff Bezos and the team over there had called a bar raiser.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  So you have a group in your company and you say, oh, we want to add somebody who's really good at PR, social media and just doing corporate communications. Okay, what do we all know about those topics? And everybody puts it on the table in a document, what they know. And then you hire somebody who has a much higher knowledge base than anybody on the team. So when they come in, the bar has been raised. Now we know somebody who really knows how to write a blog post, do a video, do, write a tweet, go on LinkedIn and tell us how to promote there. And then everybody in the organization, the bar's been raised. Why hire somebody? And sometimes people out of fear of hiring somebody better than themselves.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  We'll be like, oh, I don't want to hire somebody better than me, then the boss is gonna like them better. And maybe my job's at risk or they'll take work away from me. But they got everybody to agree, let's try to hire bar raisers. Let's try to hire the people who can drive the company, you know, higher.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Especially at the beginning, at the start of your company, right? Because you need those people who really going to bring something that the team doesn't have. So it's really essential to have, to have bar raisers. And also what is quite great, we have a great example in our engineering team, people who have really solid senior level with the help of AI, they multiplied the quality of their work and became, you know, world class level engineer. So it's a very exciting time.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  Let's take another question from our amazing Founder University founders.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  Thank you very much for the session. I have a question. I wanted to know, how do you know the best time to exit? Are there some factors you look at? Are there signs to let you know this is the right time? This is the right

• 57:31Speaker 00

  To sell your company?

• 57:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Great.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  So for us, we have envisioned like three times we could be acquired. And it's really thinking

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Okay, if we get acquired now, can we prove the company at a much higher valuation in the next couple of years and the next three years? Or is it better to just sell the asset now and let someone else take the hand? So we're trying to build a company that will grow into a platform. A platform is basically we have the engine to generate IP and to generate different assets. And the question for us to exit would be, okay, if company A wants to acquire for assets, do we sell them? Or do we just want to keep pushing to develop even better assets and more assets to have this component effect and take the risk of not selling now? So that would be for me the idea that I would have about the exit.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  It would be really about can we keep generating more IPs and more assets?

• 58:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I would say, when I talk to founders about this and they ask me for my counsel, if the founder is not having fun and they don't want to come to the office every day, it's like going to work is drudgery as opposed to inspiring. If you don't want to get to the office as soon as possible, start working and you can't sleep at night because you're just so engaged, then maybe it's time to sell. If you're not, or let somebody else run it who is more engaged than you. The second is you get an unreasonable offer. So your company was valued in the last round at 20 million and somebody offers you 200 million. It's life-changing money for you or your family, then you might have an obligation to take it because it might not come along that often, right? So the unreasonable offer is the second reason.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  The third reason is if you're very mission-driven and you say, hey, my mission is I want to help people live longer and they come to you and they want to acquire your company and they are the most credible company doing that and they're going to make you the president of the organization to report directly into the CEO, you might say, you know what?

• 59:43Speaker 00

  That's going to take five years out of our mission. We're going to have unlimited funding, we have unlimited resources and they have unlimited go-to-market. I'd like to do that. And sometimes maybe your business is troubled. So in the case of YouTube, they were under a crazy lawsuit that was going to end the company that no VCs would fund. So they had no choice, right? It was the, that was their fourth option. And what you're trying to also factor in is if it's another five years from now and this company goes 100X, will I have regretted it? And do I want to run this business for the rest of my life? You have to ask yourself, do I want to run this forever? And if you do, then you have to say, wow, I will get unreasonable offers. I will get offers that will accelerate the mission.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  I'm going to turn them down because I want to independently pursue the mission so greatly that I'm going to stick with it. So this is a great question. Never tell investors, though, that you want to sell and make quick money because you have to understand from their perspective, you need to look at their portfolio management. Maybe their firm is a $200 million firm that's going to invest in 30 companies. They expect 25 to go to zero, three to return two or three times their money and they're looking for one or two to be outliers. If they have one that's an outlier and returns 30X, 40X, 50X, maybe they have a 2X fund. If they have two do that, maybe they have a 3, 4, 5X fund and they're in the elite

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  venture capital space when they get to three times, four times, five times. And there's of course outlier success. So you have to understand their motivation. If they invested at your company at 20 million, they've got a $200 million fund and they own 10% of your company. Okay, they own 2 million in equity in your company. If your company gets to 10 billion and they're diluted 50%, now they own 5%. They get $500 million. They're a 2.5X company. That's if they invested just in your company and you become a $10 billion company. Think about how hard venture capital is. That's how hard it is. That's why so many people are quitting venture capital and do one or two funds and just quit. So you need to understand what pressure they're under. Great question.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  Great companies are bought, not sold. If a great company has got many offers, you can run an auction and what they call a process. A process typically involves a bank or is founder-led with the CFO. They make a list of targets. They say, hey, we've gotten two offers. We want to do our diligence with our board and the board has gone out and selected you as one of the people we're going to talk to. We have 12 people we're talking to. Would you like to review our company and where we're at? Would you like to meet our management? Of those 12 targets, six say yes. And then you've got two offers and of those six, another three offers come in. Now you have five offers. Now you say, okay, we'd like everybody to put their bid in. Then we're going to go to the final two bids and then we're going to do one more bake-off and you explain that bidding process.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  And so, yeah, Ruloff told me that at Sequoia when he, yeah, and he said, great companies are bought, not sold. If you're in the selling process and trying to convince people, it's going to go for a low price. If you have multiple offers, it's going to go for a high price. And you'll just know because people will want to hang out with you. All of a sudden, the founder of another company will call you. Like Steve Jobs called famously the founder Drew of Dropbox and said, hey, I would love to hear what you're up to. He's not calling because he needs more friends. Steve Jobs had enough friends and if he wanted more friends, he could just pick a celebrity or some artist or the most interesting person in the world and be friends with them. If Steve Jobs wants to be with you, it's for that reason. So you know when it's happening. Great job. Okay, let's take another question. Now we're talking.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Now, now the dam has broken. Now we're talking. Okay.

• 1:03:24Speaker 05

  Question, but Japan is the land of the robots and there's a lot of human-robot interaction research here on aging and the use of social robots. So, you know, my question is if loneliness has a measurable biological impact through stress, inflammation, cognitive decline, do you think that perhaps a sufficiently capable social robot could measurably improve biomarkers of aging?

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Ah, that's a great question.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  If the robot can actually create a link with a person and have a feeling of care, I would assume so. And I don't know if you've seen like the dog robots that were recently and there were like some studies that actually show that there was an affectionate link being created. So I would love to believe that there will be a value for it, yeah?

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Right, and that, now we're talking. He has a robot company working on, now we've got, now we got in the spirit. He's got a robotic company that's working on the software to create companions. Well done. Great question. All right, let's take another question. Now we're talking. Now you guys are acting like Americans.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Okay, would you like to promote your company in the form of a question? Go.

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  I'm doing something about A to A, Asian to Asian. My question's something different.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:04:38Speaker 06

  I'm curious about your opinion on working culture. Today, Silicon Valley has a very hustle culture such as, you know, 996 or 009, 007. And do you think it is bad for longevity? Or I mean, or sometimes startups should do that kind of, you know, resolution?

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  That's a good question. Yeah, the intensity of 996, which is a Chinese thing, not a Japanese thing, is it?

• 1:05:08Speaker 06

  I think so. But Japan also has similar tradition, I guess, especially in, you know, traditional company in Japan.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you work late nights, yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's extremely important, extremely interesting. And actually today I read an article about Prime Minister Takeuchi, who was saying that he was sleeping between 0 to 3 hours a night for her job. And I personally think that is not sustainable. So of course in a startup, we have marathon, we have crush and the 996 is just inevitable. We work on difficult things and we work on things that also really passionate us, right? We have a team that would have the choice to either work in some of the best universities in the world or some huge biotech startups and they take the choice of building something with us. So usually they have this motivation to just work long hours and multiple days.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  That being said, at the company at AK Labs, we really value work-life balance and we really value personal time and we think that in the long run, you need to allow some kind of rest. And we've seen some companies that were actually taking the biblical age of their employees to find out if they were like overworked or not. So if they aging was increasing a bit too fast, that's maybe a sign that they might be closer to a burnout. Yeah.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  But definitely, I don't know if you have an opinion on the work of 996?

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  You know, at my firm, I say to folks, try and keep up with me. I work 60 hours a week, 70 hours some weeks, but I try to enjoy life and I think having a sustainable culture is good. Now, sometimes we have intense moments, like we're kicking off a program. Other times, things are a little bit slower. Venture tends to be slower over the holidays because no deals get done between December 15th and January 10th, maybe. So you have this nice respite. And in the summer, other VC firms, essentially the VCs go on vacation for weeks and they will be lightly active, but they do a lot of travel and they try to enjoy it. For startups, I think you should work extremely hard and try to beat your competition. But you do need to understand that if you work hard, you have to play hard.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  And then I don't have a problem with founders who put three or four hard years in, fail and then decide to take a year off and kind of explore and recharge their batteries. And then they come back and I watch them do it again and I'm like super proud of them. It's an extreme pursuit. Being a Navy SEAL is an extreme pursuit. Nobody would look at an Olympian or a Navy SEAL or LeBron James and say, oh my God, that person is like sacrificing like their life. Like, don't they, wouldn't they enjoy eating like more pizza? It's like, well, no, they're an Olympian. They're trying to set a record, you know, for the, you know, and break a four-minute mile. Like, of course, they're not going to eat pizza and ice cream every day.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  They're sacrificing pizza and ice cream to break a world's record. Now, if you watch a lot of athletes, the first five years after they retire from the NBA, you're like, well, they're definitely eating well. You know, the body changes completely. But, or some of them are just addicted to it and they just stay in shape. But I do think you need to make a very personal choice. And then superimposed on that choice is if you have a partner. If you get married and you have kids, now you have a different responsibility. So I've seen many people go into their older years, 40-year-old founders, 50-year-old founders with families. And what they do is they're ruthless about their time at work. So they get up at 5:00 or 6:00 AM, they do two hours of work, they have breakfast with their kids or drive them to school.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  They put in like a really intense seven hours, then they have dinner with their families, they watch a movie or do whatever their family's going to do. And then they get back on their emails at 10 o'clock, they pound out another hour. That's me. Like I am ruthless about my time. I do not waste time on phone calls. Like, I literally have an enterprise person selling me enterprise software who's like, "I just, let's do a quick 20-minute phone call." I said, "I'm not a phone person. Just give me your best fucking price." Sorry. I'm in Japan, sorry. "Just give me your best frickin' price, and I'll tell you yes or no." And they're like, "Yeah, but I want to walk you some products, and we're really competing with this company." I was like, "I..." I just literally said to them, "I don't care. I just want the best price, and I'll make a quick decision. If you want to share anything with me, make a

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  loom. Like, make me a recorded video of the three new features and send it to me, and make it short, and I'll play it on 2X speed. I'm busy. I got three daughters waiting to go have dinner with me in Tokyo. I have to give them some time, too." Right? Yeah. So, I think this is like, um, the philosophy I take. So, different times in your... When I was young, I was at the office seven days a week. I made my career. I just said, "I am going to out-hustle everybody." Anytime a competitor started, when I had the magazine business, another competitor started a weekly email newsletter, and they beat my cadence of once a month, and I went crazy, and I told my team, "We're doing a daily email newsletter." Because they kept scooping us. Then we did a daily, and then somebody else said, "Oh,

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  this other monthly newsletter, uh, is doing a conference, and they had like 200 people show up." I said, "What?" And I said, "We have to do a conference, and we need to have 2,000 people there." And I got 2,000 people to come and pay $1,000 each. And I just said, "Anybody who creates a competing product, we have to do it better, and we have to crush them and make them feel like they cannot compete." That's crazy. And I'm still crazy like that, but what I do is, I do it in a more thoughtful way and more strategically. And now, I say, "I'm not going to do some projects. I'm just going to be strategic." So Founder University is very strategic for me. We, we know we can get to founders before the other programs, so I just sat and I meditated, "How, namaste, how do we get to founders first?"

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  And I just came up with a more efficient idea. So, efficiency can beat hours, but efficiency and hours can beat everything. So, just be ruthless about efficiency, and then with hours, you have to follow your energy. Like, this sleeping zero to three hours a night is dumb. Yeah. Because you'll make more mistakes, and then that will work against you. I believe you should get seven hours of sleep, even if you're like a crazy young person. There's no reason not to. Just stop watching TV. Like, who cares about TV and movies, whatever? Like, just pick one show a year that you love. Go see like, whatever number of movies. Also, you have to be healthy. Like, this is so critical. The founders who were unhealthy, and I was unhealthy, I was 40 pounds heavier. When I was unhealthy, I didn't think as crisply

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  as I do now. When I lost the weight, I was like, my thinking, my energy just totally changed. So, alright. We'll save some questions for next time. Uh, let's give it up, uh, for Kiall, and his company, of course, is Ekei Labs. E-K-E-I-Labs.com. You're hiring, I assume? Yeah. And so, if you want to live an amazing life in Okinawa or in Tokyo, uh, go to his website. I'm sure there's a jobs board. Absolutely. And you can go check out all the amazing jobs, and we'll see you next time on This Week in Startups. Good job, everybody. Okay.