This Week in Startups - Why this longevity startup raised in Japan, not Silicon Valley | TWiST Tokyo | E2315

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

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

All right, 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 going to hear roar and clapping right now. And then I'm going to teach you guys how to round out the clap. This is very important. You're going to clap like crazy, like you won the lottery. But then I'm going to 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. This weekend 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 Northwest Registeredagent.com slash 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 Century, your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to century.io slash twist and use the code twist. 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, Wycombinator, or the Launch Accelerator. Many of our companies have gone on to A16 Speed Run, TechStars, etc., Y Combinator, of course, and our program, Launch Accelerator. We 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 Senable, the PIF, and we do it, of course, in America internationally. What is Founder University? 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 going to hit success. 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, Robin Hood, Com, Thumbtack, Athena, Zipline, Vast Space, 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 Micro-1. Those are recent ones that you will 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 guests, and we're also going to hear about his startup. So our guest today is Bilal Karoni.

Tony, yes. Caroni. Now you have a French access, not a Japanese one. Your company is E-K-E-K-E-I-Labs. That's spelled E-K-E-I-Labs.com. You can go visit it. You're a longevity startup, 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, you know, cap tables, and all of those great things. But I want to start with your business and what you're doing. So, Iki 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 Eiki Labs. Yeah. So to start with AK 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.

So there's a bunch of people 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. So we work with one of the largest life science conglomerate 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 company to be here in Japan, but one of them on top of the aging society is the relative medicine space. Some

of the best innovation have been created here in Japan, we can cites the Nobel Prize, Dr. Shinna Yamanaaka, who created a new way to generate stem cells to make it very simple. And we were very lucky to be working with some of the startups that were born from these movements and are extremely innovative here in Japan.

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. 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 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 a investor in biotech companies. Great. So to make it quite simple on what our service is, is we generate epigenetic data that don't exist yet for whoever

want to get a decision from it. So what is epigenetic? Epigenetic, yeah. Yes. 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 method to read the methylation, which is a subset of epigenetics. Epigenetics is some chemical tags that go on the DNA that switch certain genes on and off. And we have a way to read this signal in a way that is incredibly high resolution at an incredible low cost. So it's a tool that lets you look at this layer above the DNA

and understand how I'm aging. When do you start tracking somebody and is it a blood test that is done, I'm assuming? So we're a sample agnostic. We've worked 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 ventilation change, when aging and also how they change with some therapeutic response. Got it. So if I was in this cohort being studied by a drug company, you run tests on me as the patient and they typically have dozens of people in these trials? 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 in 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. 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 ten years. Today it's quite exciting. We've had our first AI design drug that's reached phase three in the regulatory layer. And so what we do is we generate data that's never been done 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 your model targets and unfortunately you cannot really model your way out from a data set that isn't there. 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 like the discovery, but also for other aspects of the drug development, like patient certification, 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 a first drug that's been designed by AI that are going above the regulatory rank. And my prediction is that,

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. It's the worst nightmare of every founder. You've built a product. Everything's working great.

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agent uses all this data and context to identify the root cause of the problem and suggest a fix. It can even take a look at your code before it ships and warn you if any problems are likely. Try Sear and Sentry for free. If you're a this week in Startups listener at sentry.com. I.O. slash twist. Use the code for $240 in Century credits. Make sure you use that code. Make sure you use that URL. Century.com. So they know your Uncle JCal sent you. Yeah. And so today is it mostly when people do longevity? Is it supplement? 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. 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. 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 AKalabs, 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 26, we've had the first clinical trial for a drug that might actually reverse aging. It's live bioscience from Dr. David Sinclair that you might be a...

aware of, as well as New Limit that was funded by Brian Armstrong pharmacy of ConBays. 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-manue items to actually actual drugs that went through the FDA programs now targeting clinical indication 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.

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. So it's quite similar. Stem cells can be in cell therapies in general. It can be absolutely amazing,

but it really depends on what is the clinical indication that you're going for if it. 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-moneyu 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. It's something that we need to be aware of that is not sometimes.

The efficacy is not there? It doesn't... It's not here, and also the safety need to be really... Look at. 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 NBA players went to clinics in Germany, I believe, to do this blood plasma kind of stuff. And I know you're not a doctor and it may not be your specialty. But there is some efficacy there. 100%. So that's what I was during the line.

Yeah. Is if it's not following a clinic communication and just for general wellness and aging at the moment, I am not sure of the scientific consciousness, but if you look at a clinical education, I 100% believe that can be part of a 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's for patients that unfortunately don't have another solution to have access to care that sometimes is right to try.

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 lay people. 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 Reda Trutide, 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 Red of Trutide is not there yet. People are taking it already from compounding pharmacy. Someone who's not me has experienced with it and said it's pretty amazing. There are many people I know in the States who are taking Red of True Tide 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 red at trutide before it's approved etc 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 these cares 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. Me personally, I mean, I'm an entrepreneur and I have like a sense of risk. For me personally, I would like to try certain therapies that are not on the market, or not maybe scientifically approved, but that would be my, 100% my choice and the real that we're really 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. 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 person, 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. Now, in America, this would be foreboden. 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 imbalancer. So I have deep concerns about that ethically. But if somebody who was not destitute financially and they went through multiple screenings with the psychologist with the counselor and they said no i 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 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 very interesting i've never heard of this particular case of people getting sick to advanced medical research.

And for me, still, the ethical question of getting someone sick, even if you can advance the research, is maybe like a border that I would not cross. Yeah. But ethically, it's a really fascinating one, right? Like, it's very challenging. Yeah. And for me, I think it's a border that's really across,

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, yeah, if the, if, as you 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 cycles that were ready to? 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 health care 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 firefighter, the bravery of a and the bravery of somebody who wanted to be part of advanced 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. 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 healing. So why I would draw the line is that if we actually inoculate patients, LC people with disease, we have been science, we do still deteriorate the health, which I think is a line that personally I would not cross. Our show is filled with helpful and practical advice for founders,

but there's another reason to become a regular twist listener, amazing deals on essential products to help you run your company more effectively. So I'm super excited to announce our new deal withagree.com, the all-in-one contract to cash flow workflow workflow. Go right now to agree.com, sign up and tell them you're a J-Cal listener, and they'll give you 50% off for life. Agree is the number one fastest way to go from contract to cash. That means gathering e-signatures, invoicing, billing, payments, and revenue recovery.

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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. 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? Yeah. That's a really great example, yes. 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? It is fairly conservative, but you have more and more intention from the FDA to fast-track

cell therapy and gender therapy. So that is still very early, and also I am not a legal specialist. especially of the US healthcare system. But other countries, like South Korea, Japan? Japan is very advanced. So in 2012, Dr. Sina Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for discovery on pluripotent stem cells. In 2013, if I'm not wrong, the Reginative 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. I think that's an extremely interesting, a unique situation, and that's also one of the reasons we are here with Akalab.

When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk to you about company building here on this week in startups. 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 Eiki Labs, you can go find out more at E-K-E-I-L-A-B-S.com. Let's talk about building a company.

Why did you choose to place your company here in Tokyo and I understand Okinawa? Yeah, so here in Tokyo and Japan is, of course, as you mentioned, super-h society, great legal framework to fast-track relative 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 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 very 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. It tells us, yeah. It's pretty unique. So it depends directly from the prime minister 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 environments, great talents. And we have located all of our R&D in Okinawa. So we have our own lab bench. So when we receive the 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 from us with us. 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. 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 cells, 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? Yeah, pretty lucky. So when was the last time you went to France and to Paris? into Paris? 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. It has changed. Yes. Quite a lot, especially for the startup space. 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 division 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 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 and station F is this beautiful old train station I believe or warehouse that's being converted into a we work, a co-working facility. Yeah, 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. 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 the 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, would your parents as a Gen Xer be happy if you started a company or would they be scared? He said, oh, scary. They wouldn't have wanted to. So we have this great moment where we have so many great founders here, and they're taking risk 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 fund in this company with a million dollars in seed funding and some grants, yeah? 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. They do give loans to biotech startups. 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

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slash twist for more details, and the links are in the show notes. Yeah, exactly. So we've had different startup loans. And as you mentioned, low interest over a long period of time. And more importantly, you have official institutions that are grantals, which mean that they also take the risk of granting the loan.

And so you mentioned there's a lot of. 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 banks. 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 technology. Most angel investors here, what's their check size and the range? 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.

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? Exactly. So you raise less. Sorry, that shows you question. Yeah. 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-delittative funding, right? Incredible. So we can keep a clean cap table and have more than what we raise for. And actually that's quite interesting because more and more US biotech VC, come to Japan and they're quite amazed at what a Japanese startup that's raised 200K, they were able to accomplish, right? They 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. Well, and this will be an arbitrage opportunity. American VCs raise large funds, but they can 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 accomplished 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? So we are incorporated as a Japanese company. And we are talking more and more with US VCs and we might flip. Flip. Yeah. And the flip would then allow them,

if you were Texas company, Delaware company, even Nevada, those are the three ones that seem to be pretty popular right now in the United States. You would 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. 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 would 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?

Yes. Actually, the regulation has changed a lot to do an IPO. The Japanese Series B for a very long time used to be the IPO. Incredible, with as little as 5 or 10 million in revenue. Exactly. So the Tokyo Stock Exchange actually stopped that. And now... Do you know why they stopped doing that? Was it because there were too many failures or...

Yeah, so 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 exit. And I think that will be really healthy, right? Because we're mentioning that the checks signed by the Angels are pretty low, 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 investment. So now there's a lot of restructuration I think being made with Japanese VCs and Japanese LPs because the question is if the startups cannot do an exit by the IPO around like the CWB timing, where do they get the gross funding and how

do they exit? So that's definitely interesting time in Japan for this. 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 Con running for the Biden administration, the rules around M&A, and they block them. And so people gave up on MNA. President Trump joined, became president for a second term, 47 president of the United States. And he has been very pro-MNA. In fact, inserting himself 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&A. And that's good for the ecosystem because it recyc-circulates

cash. 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. Then, oh, I'm going to now, the top thing to do is try to get SpaceX, Anthropic, and Open AI 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. Do they believe you that it has the potential to have value, or do they just think this is just like a lottery ticket? and they don't take it as seriously. I say American 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. Very interesting. I think it really depends on the employees. We've had some who wants to fight to have more stock options and to have more equity in the company. Some 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 I think Japanese employees look at equity in the companies so there's been a lot of talks in the news about how the stock options regulations got eased in Japan so now

definitely it is more accepted and understood by whether there's some technical issues around taxation and the awarding of them yeah so I'm not really familiar with the topic because that happened just before we really started issuing a lot of the corruption. But from what I've heard, yeah, it was on top of the taxation, it was also quite hard to grasp the previous framework. And now it's really simplified to just give a. 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 science, 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. So it's quite interesting. So we have this epionetic services, right? So now we focus really on drug development, but we also use to offer the services to longevity clinics that want to measure aging for their patients. And we actually had quite some growth with the clinics, a lot of prospects,

like 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 a race for data generation. So we really just focus on improving our methods. We have even higher resolution in epigenetic. And the idea is to being able to generate data that nobody else can. 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 would be the vision of product market fits is when we'll be able to really derive our own IPs from the platform that we're building. 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.

And it's not going to accrue significant value to the equity holders to the corporation. More importantly, yeah. 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? We really believe in the clinical importance of by market 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 at a higher resolution, lower cost, we might be able to come to clinics

with an event cheaper and better product. So we really want to focus on the R&D. We really want to focus on the data generation and then derive even better services when we have the platform built. 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. 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 have some people who are nervous from corporates. Maybe you have people who are VCs who they just want the power law. They would rather nine out of ten companies go to zero and one go to a billion than have, you know, five of them have $100 million exits. Because just on a math basis, 500 million versus a billion or $2 billion outcome, they were going to push you for that. So have you experienced that tension yet here in year three or four? No, actually.

And I think that one of the reason why is in our capital, so we have angel investors, but they're all first well versed in biotech. and second of all, this is not the first check, the science, so they know how it plays. But also what is important, even 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 all the changes we want to have on the world. I want to go back to one topic I didn't hit on when we were talking about your company. which is biological age. I have a whoop. I did blood tests with superpower and function health and all these things.

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 whoops 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 they get up really early and want to do a workout. I don't want to live by that strict and try to game that metric. 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.

I'm having a hard time making sense of this. What is biological age and what's the best way to tell it? It's basically, what is your age? It's basically you look at the biomarker and it's looking how you benchmark to a cohort that has a similar age. So we can look, for example, at the methylation of your DNA and estimate that you have meditation patterns that is someone who is like 45 years old. 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 how you benchmark. And what you were mentioning with the whoop and how to try to game the system, the thing

is very important because at some points, that's why actually I'm making a stuff for my o'a ring is because it looks like you're trying to optimize for biomarkers that can be disconnected from your actual health, from how you feel. And so for consumers, I would say that the value is really for the trends. That's actually encouraged as a promotion 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 that is objective, that is not perfect, but that can really help designing your clinical trials protocol

that can help you help for your drug discovery. Amazing. Finally, blue zones. 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? Yeah. 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 to a long age. 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.

Tell me a little bit about the controversy there. So the papers that was released for the controversy was basically, it made an observation that most of the blue zones were the poorest, areas of those countries. And so it's not really intuitive to think that the poorest areas of some countries were the lifespan are the highest. So they went,

did some field trip and they realized that some people, for example, that we estimated to be 108 years were just dead and people were collecting the pension the family, for example. That being said in Okinawa and in most of the blue zones

there are some strong links. is sociability. Sociability. Why would that make somebody live longer? They're happier, they have lower stress. Yeah. What is the theory there that socialization correlates with longevity?

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 at and to have, regular routine with some people that you appreciate 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 disappear they can actually decline yeah very fast so this socialization is extremely important and I've seen it first end in Okinawa with some solidarity networks that last for a really long time with people that have been peers for decades. It's really beautiful to see. And as well as diets can make definitely different, especially in Italy, the Mediterranean diet. Yeah, it's pretty healthy. Yeah, 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. 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. A bridge, yeah. It would be interesting to see if blue zones also zones where you have more dialects and therefore... More brain health. Yeah. Because that is one of the big diseases, right? You have heart, you have...

Exactly. And brains and lungs, like there's like some specific ones that tend to... The foresourceman of the death. 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. And we'll do a couple of questions from our founders here. If you have a crisp, great question.

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. Well, thank you for the talk. 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 and the book? amount or did you also play into the forecasted one if you're going to be closing this certain project? Well, actually, if we were looking at the numbers and if we're looking at the books,

we would have probably kept the business because it was revenue generating and growing. It was more of 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 a difficult choice of cutting a service that was actually generating cash regularly. predictively to really being able to focus on the R&D and trying to cut distractions for the time being. 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. And especially today because, so we do work with AI and 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. It's just 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

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. Yeah. It's inherent in the Japanese culture, I believe the term is Kaisan, continuous improvement, yes? Yeah, I'm getting nods, okay. I pronounced it correctly, yeah, Kaizan.

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? And that spirit is so important. And founders have it inherently.

But most people don't. And 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 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, who, this is what we hope. And now I think 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 push. You really want to try to accelerate it. And let's take another question. If somebody has one, we had to go to the microphone. And while we're waiting for somebody to go to the microphone with a great question,

don't be bashrel here. I know you have questions. If this is America, they would be pushing each other over to get to the market. 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? And how do you decide to hire the next person or maybe solve those problems with AI? Great question.

So as an organization, we are still like AI 1.0, I would say. We don't use agents, for example. Oh, wow. No agents. We're still... No cron jobs? No agents, no cron jobs. Exactly.

So we still have a lot of lab work that is quite manual. But for AI, yeah. Unfortunately, like we do hire, for example, like junior people and in terms that have learned, that have a background in machine learning, for example, and that we know they can actually use AI as basic and to accelerate their work. Yeah, this is a term at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and the team over their hat called a bar razor. Yeah. 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 and 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, write a tweet, go on LinkedIn and tell us how to promote there. And then everybody in the organization, the bar has been raised.

Why hire somebody? And sometimes people out of fear of hiring somebody better than themselves, we'll be like, oh, I don't want to hire somebody better than me, then the boss is going to like them better or maybe my job's at risk or they'll take work away for 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, hire. Especially at the beginning at the start of your company, right? Because you need those people who are really going to bring something that the team doesn't have. So it's really essential 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. I demultiplied the quality of their work and became, you know, a work-class level, engineer. So it's a very exciting time. Let's take another question from our amazing Founder University founders. Hey, thank you very much for this 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 company. To sell your company? Yes. Great. So for us we have envisioned like three times we could be acquired and it's really thinking, okay, if we get acquired now, can we push the company at a much higher valuation in the next couple of years and in the next three years or is it better to just sell the asset now and let someone else take the hand? So we try 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 require 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 net selling now? So that would be for me the idea that I would have about the exit. it would be really about, can we keep generating more IPs and more assets? Yeah, and I would say when I talk to founders about this and they asked 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 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? That's going to take five years out of our mission. We're going to have unlimited funding. We'll 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? 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. 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 three, four, five-x fund, and they're in the elite 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 $200,000.

million dollar fund and they own 10% of your company. Okay, they own two 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 dollars. They're a two and a half X company. That's if they invest it 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. 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 bakeoff. And you explain that bidding process. And so, yeah, Ruloff told me that at Sequoia. 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 you wanted more friends, he could just pick a celebrity or some artist or the most interesting person in the world and be friends with him. 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. Now the dam has broken. Now we're talking. Okay. Question, but Japan is a line of the robots and there's a lot of human robot interaction research here around aging and the use of social robots. So my question is that 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? That's a great question. If the robots 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 with Sony. And there were like some study that actually showed that there was an affectionate link being created. So I would love to believe that there will be a value for it.

Right. And that now we're talking. He has a robot company working on. Now we've got, now we've got in the spirit. He's got a robot 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. Okay. Would you like to promote your company in the form of a question? Go. I'm doing something about eight to A Asian to Asian. Okay.

My question is something different. Okay. I'm curious about your opinion. on working culture. Today, Suikonbury has a very hustle culture, such as 996 or 0907. And it is bad for longevity. Or sometimes startups should do that kind of resolution.

That's a good question. Yeah, the intensity of 996, which is a Chinese thing, not a Japanese thing, is it? I think so. But Japan also has. has similar traditional, I guess, especially in, you know, traditional company in Japan. Yeah, you work late nights, yeah. Yes.

Okay. Yeah. No, it's extremely important, extremely interesting. And actually today, I read an article about the Prime Minister Takehouti, the worst thing that he was sleeping between zero to three hours a night for her job. And I better think that it's not sustainable. So, of course, in a startup, we have Marathon and 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 of 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. That being said, at the company at EK 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 of rest and we've seen some companies that were actually taking the medical 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 may be a sign that they might be closer to a burnout. But definitely, I know if you have an opinion on the work on 1906. 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,

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, and then I don't have a problem of 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. 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. 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, 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 or 6 a.m. They do two hours of work. They have breakfast with their kids or drive them to school. 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 list. 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 freaking 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 just literally said to them, I don't care. I just want the best price. And I'll make a lot of the best price. And I'll make a lot of them, a quick decision. If you want to share anything with me, make a 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 two X 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 the philosophy I take. So different times 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 it. 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, this other monthly newsletter 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 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, 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 a 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 a half a year, when I was unhealthy, I didn't think as crisply as I do now. When I lost the weight, I was like, my thinking, my energy just totally changed. So, all right, we'll save some questions for next time. Let's give it up for Kulal. And his company, of course,

which is Eiki 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, 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's startups.

Good job, everybody. Okay.