This Week in Startups - Why You’ll Choose an AI Doctor (feat. Fred Almeida and Max Weiss) | E2239
Episode Date: January 24, 2026This Week In Startups is made possible by:Sentry.io - sentry.io/twistHubspot - clickhubspot.com/twist2Northwest Registered Agent - https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twistToday’s show:One day soon..., you might consult an AI general practitioner about your health, and then the computer will recommend human specialists to take up your case.On TWiST Tokyo, Jason chats with Fred Almeida — founder and CEO of American Medical Intelligence Inc. — and Maxwell Weiss, a partner at Pacific Bays Capital.Together, they discuss the future of medicine, and the opportunities for individuals to take greater control over their health and preventative care strategies.PLUS a look at how Japan has stayed at the forefront of technology despite NOT being a manufacturing hub, why so many Americans are willing to take a pay cut to move to Japan for work, and the concept of “genten shugi,” and how it prevents some Japanese people from communicating with English speakers, despite understanding the language.THEN we hear pitches from some of our favorite Founder University x Japan companies, and Fred, Jason, and Max pick their favorites!Timestamps:(00:00) Introducing today’s big guests: founder Fred Almeida and investor Max Weiss!(5:43) Why Fred thinks one day soon, an AI will be your general practitioner(8:26) The power of getting self-directed medical diagnostics(13:27) Max says Japan has moved into Decade 2 in its venture capital journey(14:37) Sentry - New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST(16:05) Max and Jason had wagyu barbecue the other night(17:10) Japan doesn’t OFFICIALLY have a standing army…(21:37) Why the line between talking startups and politics is blurring(23:05) Hubspot - Check out the guide “Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering: From Basic to Expert in 7 Days.” Download it for free at clickhubspot.com/twist2.(24:59) Japan doesn’t make a lot of things, but it produces the underlying tech behind a lot of things(25:52) Understanding Genten Shugi: Why some in Japan still have an “English allergy”(29:42) Why some Americans will take a pay cut to come work in Japan(33:28) Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist(34:10) PITCH #1: Cascade(36:10) PITCH #2: Altsource Global(38:10) PITCH #3: GoalMochi(40:25) Jason, Max, and Fred give feedback on our first three pitches(42:45) Would GoalMochi ever consider adding personas for added expertise, like say a nutritionist?(44:30) How does Cascade plan to compete against the massive ad networks of companies like Google and Meta?(46:05) PITCH #4: RandomChat(48:10) PITCH #5: Eir(50:05) More feedback for our final two pitches of the day(52:44) Fred wants to know how Eir’s product will integrate with other systems(54:19) Why Gigi made herself available to chat in her app(57:50) Why Jason thinks RandomChat should add anonymous personasSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(14:37) Sentry - New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST(23:05) Hubspot - Check out the guide “Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering: From Basic to Expert in 7 Days.” Download it for free at clickhubspot.com/twist2.(33:28) Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Is part of your thesis about healthcare that AI will have a profound impact on people doing self-directed care?
Yeah, entirely.
I actually think that the future of where this is going to go is that the AI will become your doctor in a few more years.
Your primary care doctor.
It'll be your primary care doctor.
And then you'll just go to diagnostic tool sets, which is part of the roll-up.
We actually are buying clinics to do diagnostics.
But at a higher level, if you think about it, it's almost really changing how a diagnostic
clinic will ever work?
Explain in layman's terms
what diagnostic clinic means.
What are the top five things they do?
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Welcome back to this week in startups.
I'm your host, Jason Kalakhanis.
I am just wrapping up an amazing week here in Tokyo where we launched Founder University.
Founder University is a pre-accelerator.
You would go to Founder University in year zero of your startup.
You got two or three co-founders.
You've built a project.
maybe you incorporate it. Maybe you haven't even bothered incorporating yet. You're in year zero.
That's what founded universities for. It's a 12-week program. We do it in Tokyo. We do it in Saudi Arabia,
in Riyadh, and we do it in America. We have thousands of people apply and dozens of people we
accept, and we spend time with you working on your startup. So while I'm here, I've been recording
some episodes of this week in startups twist, as we refer to it in town. And I've been learning a lot
about the ecosystem in here in Tokyo, and as well discussing with a bunch of venture capitalist,
angel investors, and founders how they look at the market. Japan, still third or fourth, most
important economy in the world. And something changed in Japan for the last 20, 30 years.
Young people wanted the safety of a job at a big company, and they might work there for 40 years.
Now, the preference of young people in Japan has flipped over the last five years or so.
They want to start companies.
And they've got quite a legacy and a tradition of innovation in the technology space.
So I'm spending time here because I think it's going to be one of the great startup markets of the next 20 or 30 years.
With me today, I've got two investors and founders.
Max Weiss is venture capitalists.
We had dinner last night.
His firm is Pacific Bay's capital.
He focuses on aerospace, defense, space, energy,
and basically making Japan more resilient,
almost Japanese dynamism to use the term we use in America.
Yeah, I think so.
Anything related to economic security, really.
And we believe that we need to partner with the U.S.
to make those kinds of things happen.
So Japan focused, but also a strong economic security,
sort of partnership type of focus too. Yeah, and this is a very interesting time to be doing that,
as I said, or observed from the feedback I got this week. Young people are looking at entrepreneurship
in a different way, and the relationship with Japan and America is in a little bit of a crossroads.
We're going to get into some of that geopolitics as well and the global dynamics. Fred Almadegh is also
with us. He's an entrepreneur and investor. Deep focused on AI and autonomous systems. You're the CEO of
American Medical, which is a roll-up. You're... Yeah.
It's a mix.
It's actually two parts of a platform.
Explain.
Yeah, so we felt actually that there's a shift in the way that medicine is being
provided to a lot of people, both in the U.S., in Japan,
and it's clear that we're not getting enough doctors coming out of the schools,
especially doctors that have a more general approach to how medicine could be done.
Everything's really specialized, especially in the U.S.
And so we felt that the patient side needed their own version of an AI medicine,
medical doctor, but we also needed to balance that out with the doctors themselves.
So we actually started with a number of hospitals, and we're already working with doctors
to basically figure out how do doctors want to talk to patients through an AI platform.
Got it.
And this is underdevelopment, launched?
It's under development, still pretty new.
All right, great.
So I think that gives us two really interesting jump-off points.
And you heard my sort of preamble here about Japan.
You're based in Japan?
Tokyo.
Why?
Oh, this is, I mean, you've been here many times.
This is a lovely country.
I actually think, to be honest, like, some of my first startups were here in Tokyo,
and I built one of the first robotics companies here, self-driving car company here in 2016.
That was way before anyone really understood what it was going to mean.
And it just feels right to build AI and technology like robots here.
Yeah.
And it just does.
And it is part of your thesis about healthcare that
AI will have a profound impact on people doing self-directed care.
Yeah, entirely.
I actually think that the future of where this is going to go is that the AI will become your doctor in a few more years.
Your primary care doctor.
It'll be your primary care doctor.
And then you'll just go to diagnostic tool sets, which is part of the roll-up.
We actually are buying clinics to do diagnostics.
But at a higher level, if you think about it, it's almost really changing how a diagnostic clinic will ever work.
Explain in layman's terms what diagnostic clinic means.
What are the top five things they do?
So you'll actually find if you go to a doctor,
a lot of doctors don't want to call for tests
because, A, it's really kind of painful for them.
They have to fill out forms.
They have to deal with a lot of issues with that.
Insurance issues?
Insurance, pre-authorization in the U.S.
In Japan, there's, like, limits to those.
So it's cumbersome, so they don't send you for tests?
Yes, and then so it ends up, you end up spending more time
doing basic testing with the doctor just looking at your ear, for example, if you have an
E&T, and if you have like an infection.
And then it may take four or five visits before they actually realize after they do a
diagnostic, like a cat scan or MRI, that you have an infection in your, you know, tonsils
instead of your ear.
And then so the, we believe that if you actually fix diagnostics, it's not perfect
diagnostics, right?
You do get positive, you know, you get negative, positive.
positives and positive negatives, right?
So ultimately what we want to solve is,
can we use AI inside the clinics to make it much better?
But at a higher level, as if you do a roll-up across clinics,
you can actually see how people are generally feeling, right?
And you can actually extrapolate trends and movements across it.
So in a way, like, it's the way you would do
like a differential geometry of like a stock market.
You can see the flow of how people are moving.
And then you can then make predictions.
on it. So to translate that, I have some pain in my ear or, you know, maybe it's in my throat. I'm not
sure I've got a collection of symptoms. I type into an AI, these are my symptoms. It does a really good
job. Yeah, it'll have to do differential analysis on you. Yeah, and it does an amazing job today.
In fact, a lot of the studies that are coming out today say it's exceeding, matching and exceeding
doctors, correct? Yes, we already are actually, yeah. So that's today. Who knows what happens
in a couple years. It'll clearly be better. Then the second piece is, okay, there's this weird thing
where the system is so convoluted that a doctor might not want to send you to just get the test
that would confirm this. But if you take out the doctor visit, which is how they make their money,
which they're incentivized to say, no, come to the office, come to the office. And that waste tons of
money and time. Why not just ask the AI, hey, here are the symptoms. It says, you need to go get a swab in
your throat or a blood test, whatever it happens to be, and then we will know. So that's more
efficient. So you're actually flipping it and saying, just go right to the test. There's a benefit of,
if you can go to the test early enough, we can catch disease at a level where you can treat it
with very easy, like an easier way to treating it. So if I find cancer at stage one, it's very fast,
right? You can literally not have cancer by just doing a special test. And, you, you can, you can literally
not have cancer by just doing a special test. And on top of that, most people don't realize that
the reason you're feeling bad is often you just don't have enough nutrients. And if you do,
for example, a genetic methylation test, we can actually see what you're missing.
That's fascinating. And then you just get it. And then, so you don't even have to go to the
doctors at that point. So this is extremely disruptive. There's a group of people. I'm wondering
if you've been inspired by the tip of the spear, biohackers, body hackers,
self-directed folks who are using their whoop, their aura, their eight sleep, we're investors in that last one,
and then they're going to function health or whoop is doing labs, and this is the United States at least,
and then superpower is another lab one, I did that one, and they're proactively getting their blood work,
using a concierge or AI to sort of analyze it. And then for me, like the primary care doctor seems like
the worst modality, why not just get your blood debt work done fully twice a year and be ahead of the
curve? Yeah, no. And in fact, if you actually think about it, it's actually even cheaper, even in the United States,
to proactively get your diagnostics done. And then because we're trying to change the way diagnostics are done, too.
So like if you can imagine 500 clinics across the United States all using AI to make, let's say you're getting a very
simple blood test, the doctor calls for like certain markers. But we can do the whole thing for.
you know and then we can get that you know somewhat paid for by the government
because they want the data the metadata your data the metadata and now we can actually
then look at your all your markers yeah and maybe we see something and we can
immediately tell the doctor what we see so he gets a differential
diagnostic from us saying hey we found this and then right now because of the
way the laws work you have to go see a doctor to get a prescription but that's
going to change so this is all incentives the incentives are broken the system is
backwards. And we could, there is a better way and the incentives need to change. Yeah,
but also insurance needs to change. And insurance needs to change. What a more delightful experience
for the doctor to say, hey, here are your hundred patients as a primary care doctor. Here's their
dashboard. We have done their blood work twice a year. We've done these other tests. Here's
their complaints and what happened. Now when you meet with them, you're starting with this,
you're starting, you know, with 80% of the work done.
you can actually do better work.
You can move up the stack and do higher level, more rewarding work.
So what we've found when talking to doctors,
we've talked to a lot of doctors in the U.S. and in Japan,
and a lot of very young talented doctors want to quit.
Why?
They hate being a doctor because most of their day is doing paperwork
or talking on the phone with an insurance rep.
To the point where sometimes doctors are in surgery
and they get called out of the surgery
to argue with the insurance company because they don't want to pay for the surgery.
That's insane.
While they're in the surgery.
That type of stuff drives them mad.
And considering we have such a small group of doctors in Japan and in the U.S.,
you can't drive them insane.
We have to treat them like Formula One drivers from my point of view.
Yeah.
Right?
And so if we can create a system that automatically creates all the paperwork they need,
removes the government side of it, removes the insurance side of it,
all you have to do is just confirm that diagnosis that you had.
And then the system that we're creating for patients ensures the patient follows through
with what you want them to do.
Got it.
Right?
We remind you to take your pills.
Which pill will?
This one, take this one now.
Right?
So it's not to the point where, like, we're not yet creating like this perfect medical doctor
that's going to sit in your pocket, but that will come out.
So, Max, let's move over to your business.
Why did you pick?
You know, Fred picked a really hard one, health care.
Lots of regulations, lots of incumbents, lots of regulations, insurance, just so much friction.
You also picked an area with a lot of friction, going to space, atoms and bits.
The bits are easy, the atoms are hard, aerospace and defense, energy, and in a very volatile world,
I assume the volatility and the vol creates the opportunity, but tell me why you picked the verticals
you're investing.
For us, it's more of kind of looking at what.
what Japan has to offer and going backwards from there.
So I think this was talked about a little bit earlier at some point.
I believe we're in the middle decade two in venture in Japan.
The first decade was defined by consumer and software as a service,
as I'm sure it was in lots of other parts of the world.
But then you had this whole dynamic there.
Now we're in a situation where maybe according to some people,
This is decade one, depending on how you look at it.
So the amount of financing, the amount of support, all this stuff is slowly getting to a global scale.
So maybe you can call it decade one depending on how you look at it.
But basically, I think a lot of stuff changed.
And now you're looking at folks who used to work at multinational corporations.
And that's really where a lot of the technical talent lies and where I think Japan's sort of hidden strength lies.
And those guys, what they're doing is materials and semiconductors.
And that's why we focus on the areas that those could be applied to.
All right.
When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk specifically about defense here in Japan.
And Japan has an army or doesn't have an army when we get back on this week's startups.
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All right, we're back here in Tokyo, wrapping up my first week of Founder University,
did Angel University as well.
My guest today, Max Weiss, from,
Pacific Bayes Capital and Fred Almadee, who is with American Medical doing a roll-up and using AI to
really reinvent healthcare.
Max, you and I had some conversations last night over some outstanding.
Wagyu and...
That was outstanding.
Crazy.
We went to this amazing Wagyu place, and I said, you can't put Wagyu on a barbecue.
It'll light on fire.
I've cooked Wagyu many times.
And he said, oh, this grill is a very hot grill.
And the grill then has water running through the tubes where you would lay the meat on top of so that it doesn't light on fire.
Yeah, that was kind of a novel thing that I hadn't seen before either, but it went really well with the meat.
You don't overcook it.
Yeah, it was great.
Yeah, and then you decided, you found out I was paying, and you did the caviar and the truffle supplement.
Yeah, just stuffed myself silly.
It was crazy.
It was fantastic.
I mean, if we had that dinner with the exchange rate and with just importing, well, I'll go just.
the United States, it would have been three times as much. I got the bell and I thought it was
the wrong tables bill. I was like, this can't be right. This has got to be double and it was not.
And we had just such a spectacular mayor and a spectacular conversation that eventually got to
the relationship between America and Japan. This is a longstanding, you know, and in our
lifetimes, absolutely fantastic relationship. But part of that is the United States provides the defensive
capabilities in the military for Japan. But Japan also
has fighter jets and military equipment and they know how to use those so Japan doesn't have a
standing army not officially not officially yeah but they do but does have individuals who
know how to operate military equipment exactly yes see I have a high tolerance for
ambiguity I understand exactly what's happening here so but the relationship
between the two countries of late
America seems super focused on our hemisphere, the Western.
China has a certain concept of their relationship here in this region.
You have Korea, Japan, Singapore, and then Australia, New Zealand,
forming some type of alliance or group.
But how do the Japanese people look at the relationship with America?
Here we're on Twist, so you give permission to be candid.
What do you think of our changing stance in the world order?
And then how do you, how does the average person in Japan
think about their protection and their safety
when North Korea is shooting rockets over the island?
I think that's a good question.
I'll preface this by saying,
I don't think a lot of ordinary Japanese citizens are political
like they tend to be back in the U.S.
That said, you can kind of see these general trends.
So, for example, over the past couple of years,
I think we're seeing a shift to the right with a new sort of prime minister.
And you've had these sort of changes to how Japan interprets the self-defense force that it has,
which is what it's officially called,
although by any practical means you look at it and say this could be a military with a snap of a finger, right?
So that people don't like to talk about politics.
It's not the blood sport that it is in the United States.
But the leadership here is acutely aware of, hey, the United States and their loyalty to NATO has been questioned.
Maybe we'll even pull out of it.
Maybe we don't need to be involved.
So there is a sense like, hey, we might need to go it alone.
Potentially.
I think that's a little bit less a part of the discourse right now.
there's this growing sort of reluctance to towards immigration, for instance, and things like that.
So it could be a matter of time before the conversation does turn into things like that.
So this is something we're talking about and we're aware of, and you're aware of because of your investment.
Yes.
Thesis, but maybe not the populace yet.
Yeah.
I would say that there is a change in that I think Japan does think it's going to have to do it alone.
And I'm not entirely.
Japan being the people of Japan or the government or the government.
because I think, you know, they're looking at what's happening in Europe.
They're looking at how America is dealing with these, you know,
the stresses of what's happening with Russia and Ukraine
and what's happening in Venezuela, now Greenland.
And so they're looking at that and they're wondering, you know,
maybe we should invest more heavily into our defense.
Now, they're not being an offensive.
I don't think Japan's going to go take over countries and anything like that.
But there is a push.
You can see one is they're deciding not to import, you know,
low-skilled workers.
What they really want to do now is actually invest heavily into AI robotics
and start building probably something more like Lucky Palmer is doing.
Yeah, my power.
Here.
Yeah, he's great.
Friend of the pal.
Yeah.
So really what I would love to see in Japan is really a lot of new lucky palmer's, right?
Yeah.
Palmer Lucky.
Yeah, well, Palmer Lucky, sorry.
He's also lucky.
Yeah.
We're good.
That might have been one of the things you were hinting at.
And it's not that we're explicitly invested.
investing in defense tech in Japan.
I think that's more of what we look at in the US.
There are a lot of sort of technologies, for example,
semiconductors and chips that could be used in satellites
and other things like that.
And those can be found here,
but I think they're less likely to call it defense tech
than they are.
Since we kind of dovetailed into immigration,
another, and it's, I don't bring these topics up
because I want to talk about politics here on the street in startups.
It's because startups are driving politics,
and it's hard to tell sometimes which is downstream of the other.
Is politics downstream of the technological innovation,
or is politics driving technological innovation?
It's kind of like these things are in orbit, and there's gravitational pulls.
Japan has traditionally been a very close society, and you can come here,
but you're not going to become a citizen, but with population decline,
and the need to take care of older people
and to fill jobs.
Immigration is one solution.
But what we're scared of in America,
job displacement,
robotaxies and Waymo's taking all these jobs.
China also very nervous about losing all those driving jobs.
That is an opportunity here.
It's looked at differently.
There are so many people who are driving taxis
who are 70 years old.
Yeah, actually just today.
It was 80.
Who's 80?
Driving a taxi.
Yeah, I was like, I love those guys.
Strap those in.
No, I mean, these guys know exactly where they're going.
Automation's never really been a dirty word here like it's been in other countries, yeah.
Fascinating that it's looked at us in actual opportunity.
And I think Waymo is driving some cars around and Weber has made a couple of announcements.
Weimos here and a few others.
I think Zoom might be here.
Zooks.
Zooks.
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When you're looking at those companies, tell me about Japanese startup culture and the Japanese
capacity to build these type of companies.
Because there's a big tradition here of doing it.
And do you have enough factory workers to do it, or is it going to be kind of, as I was
talking on the program, about Uniclo?
You know, maybe people were making clothes here on the island previously, but now, hey,
we're designing it, we're sourcing the fabrics, we're building the brand, we're building
the technology for checkout, all that other stuff.
but we will build it in another country.
So what's the Japanese capabilities right now when it comes to defense tech, deep tech, et cetera?
You brought up Uniclo, which is interesting because I think this is somewhat of a well-known story,
but they were laughed out of the room because they described themselves as a technology company,
even though obviously they may close, but look where they are now.
And I think that's what you'll see in a lot of cases here.
The technology exists, and it's great.
and top of the line, and semiconductors, for instance.
A lot of the tools and materials that are needed to create semiconductors
that TSM then produces can only find in Japan,
and in some categories it's a 90% monopoly.
So we're confident in the technology part of it.
What's missing is the sort of company building part of it.
So I'm part of a fund, I'm part of several funds,
but one of the funds, it takes university research,
and then does more of a sort of startup builder.
approach. And I think that's one thing that we need over here. I know that JETRO you're working with
to bring capital, which is fantastic, I think. And the next step beyond that, I think, is to then
bring in foreign sources of revenue. There's customers. Customers. There's a phenomenon in Japan
called English allergy. This is a term that a lot of people use here. So I think folks in the
audience might be familiar with that. What it is is, it's not just,
an inability to speak English or to do English sales.
It's just an allergic reaction.
They feel physically disgusted by the idea and can't bring themselves to put themselves
in front of an English speaker, right?
It's not because people can't speak it, although we're in the bottom 10% globally in
proficiency, but it's just this fear of failure.
To embarrass yourself by not speaking it well?
Or not to be able to get the...
It's risk aversion to embarrass yourself,
to not be able to convey what you want properly.
So there's this whole philosophy called Genten Shugi, Japanese,
which means you're judged not by your accomplishments,
by what you've screwed up.
And this is how people in some traditional Japanese companies
get decided whether you get a promotion or not
or whether you advance the company, right?
So it's a deeply ingrained concept.
Your mistakes define you.
Exactly, yes.
The opposite of America.
The opposite.
You've screwed up so many times.
What are you doing next?
It's one of the things you have to address, I think,
as you bring Founders University here.
It's like how can you break out of that?
And the key way is really just to have them fail faster.
So they get it out of them.
Like do something fast.
It fails great.
You're the next one.
So they have to feel like there's less risk of failure.
Yeah.
And one of the interesting things,
about immigration today here is you have a lot of founders and investors who've been
successful in the United States who look at, and you're both Americans.
Born in America?
Yeah.
Oh, Canada.
Yeah, yeah.
But I'm mostly American.
He likes to pretend he's much.
I love American more.
No problem.
No problem.
Well, we're going to make it the 51st state.
It depends on...
I hope so.
Well, Venezuela, Greenland, and Canada, it's going to be one, two, and three, 51, second, or
third.
We're not sure how we're going to do it yet.
I hope at PM is watching.
But, you know, it's great.
It's going to be great.
great contribution to the American experiment when we started heading states.
What we're seeing, though, like, for example, with a semiconductor company and a few others,
is a lot of Americans and Europeans want to come live in Japan.
Well, that was where I was going with it, is this could change because Japan is open to high-skilled entrepreneurial and investors coming here.
They're very interested in that.
They may not be interested in not maybe.
people immigrating at lower skill levels or from cultures that may not integrate as well.
Yeah, they've had some problems with that.
Yeah. But there is really very little stress to come work in Japan if you do have skills,
especially if you have a master's degree or better. That was very different 20 years ago.
Yeah, back then, you know, it was harder to come in here.
Because they thought it was competition for jobs or?
They didn't really know. I actually think it was just so new to them. I was, I came here as a student and I was like the only,
foreigner in the city I was in and people would follow you. Oh really? Oh yeah. I remember
that kids would follow you around like I'd be walking down the street to go to school
and you'd have like 20 kids behind me. Yeah it's really weird. I had that actually
happened in Shenzhen over maybe 20 years ago. Right yeah I went to an amusement park
that was only for people from China and just literally 20 kids surrounded me and were
touching me and touching my hair and wanting to take pictures with me with film cameras.
They had never seen a white guy before from America.
But we're seeing more hybrid teams.
Like for example, my CTO and chief research officer are both Japanese, but my chief medical
is American.
So, you know, it works really well.
I don't know.
There's, I think mixing teams like that may actually be a very powerful tool.
It's good for the culture.
It's good for broading the skills.
set. Yeah. So the Japanese team would benefit from the audacity, aggressiveness,
bluntness of the Americans and the Americans might learn a little humility,
hardworking, discipline. In discipline, by working with a Japanese team. Yeah, and not
just that you can pay them less over here too. But we come up to an idea that we
shouldn't be paying less actually. Well, but not as much as America. America's
gone crazy. Well, let's just discuss it. What is a Japanese developer, let's say some
somebody who's been a developer for five or 10 years, what would their compensation be here?
Broad Shrokes. Working at a big company.
Amazon, maybe like a mobile developer, 7 million yen, which is about, what, 45,000K?
What?
Yeah.
That's a third.
By the way, I want to clarify something real quick.
I'm not advocating for paying people way less than their market value.
What I'm saying is you can bring in highly talented folks from abroad, but pay them closer to what the average salary is in Japan,
while paying them more while raising the overall sort of salary level here.
But you're getting folks with very specialized skill sets from the U.S.
that are willing to move here despite the pay cut.
Right, well, they would be coming for the pay cut, but getting the lifestyle gains.
Yeah, exactly.
And then you could increase the salary of the Japanese executive
and give them the opportunity to work with the Americans.
So this could be win-win-win.
The company has a,
has overall a lower average salary than in Silicon Valley, which is absurd,
because the cost of living is absurd.
And then you get this great cross-cultural, functional team that gets to benefit from each other.
And the salaries can go up and the quality of life can go up.
Living in San Francisco in fear and in danger is, you know,
I was talking to some Americans who were here for the first time,
and they were like, I left my laptop out.
And I'm like, yeah, it'll be there next week.
You could literally leave your laptop in Starbucks at 8 a.m. and come back at 4 p.m.
It'll still be in the same seat.
I've lost my wallet, my bags, everything here.
Every time it comes back.
Never had it disappear.
In America, literally they've done like reality TV type shows where they'll put a laptop with a cable on it.
The funny is it in Starbucks.
And literally within five minutes, somebody's yanking and falling on their face.
It took three seconds in France and it was gone.
So, listen, I could talk to you guys all day long.
It's absolutely fantastic to meet you.
And we have five of the founders who came to Founder University.
These were the ones that distinguished themselves out of the 30.
And I was wondering if you would hear their pitch.
Now, this is year zero.
And then give them, hey, this is what I think of your idea or what was solid in your thinking.
And then maybe a challenging question.
One of each.
Would you guys be willing to do that?
Absolutely.
Of course.
And you'll be candid.
Yep.
Very candid.
Well, here in Japan, this is one of the things I've been working on.
with the founders is we're going to be brutally candid.
So just pretend it's like a Korean soap opera or, you know, just forgive us for being American,
but we want to be incredibly blunt.
We're going to tell you the design is a four of ten needs to be an eight of ten.
Or the business model is challenged for this reason.
Okay.
Five extremely candid pitches live from Tokyo when we get back.
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Hello everyone. I'm Katz, Japanese founder CEO of Cascades.
Cascade provides a digital ad optimization platform for the performance magazine.
Here is our real customer, though.
He is a brand manager at Cosmetic Company.
He runs digital marketing as acclacral channels,
many campaigns at the same time.
The problem is, digital marketing never sleep.
So he has to check the error data,
and if not, he weighs the budget and miss the growth.
Here's demo, so he can only connect Google AdO account
in one click,
and he can check the data through the a lot of, you know,
optimization from our AI.
So he can check the keyword to adapt,
and one click directly reflect to each other platform.
And also we have the marketing AI agent here.
So he can ask what type of campaign need
for the DETZ for instance.
So our AI instantly responds to the response.
And this is not just sexy UI, US.
We can save real time.
So we reduce the marketing operation monthly hours,
from 40 hours to the one hours.
So we can reduce the cost efficiency.
Not only the efficiency, we can increase the performance.
So in the D2C test, we can reduce CPC cost per click by 33%
and increase the cost, the number of clicks, 49%.
Our business model is very straightforward, very cheap compared with the traditional agency,
and also we are doing the SOS model here.
And here at Team, some executive founder,
who sold AIM generation startup,
for 1.5 million US dollars in two years.
And two smart engineers are building Cascade with me.
All members have worked before together at the exit company
so we can seep and first productions.
And we are raising the 1 million US dollars
to boost our production development and the LOI
combining into the paid customers.
Thank you so much.
Hi, I'm Maya, founder of Allsource Global.
We provide risk analysis, risk-intuitive,
Risk intelligence for procurement team providing the intelligence to choose the right supplier for the team.
Meet Sam. He's a director of procurement at US Electronics Company.
His job is to make sure his critical components do not disrupt the production or hurt the business.
When Sam logs into the platform, he sees all his component scored for risks.
and he sees why it's risky and alternative solutions are listed over here.
Before ArtsSOS, he spent weeks searching for suppliers and validating their reliability.
With this platform, he can identify the risks and find alternatives in minutes.
Our core revenue is annual SaaS subscriptions.
Optionally, we also provide supplier discovery services, but this is not for long term.
So X-axis shows multi-diverse, multi-country diversification, and Y axis shows the transparency
and risk mitigation.
Also sits top right, showing real-time and actionable solutions.
We are ready to onboard pilot customers and testing for real world.
Our bottoms-up approach allows us to scale from pilot to full-book,
platform serving for global manufacturers. I'm the founder. I spent nearly 20 years designing,
manufacturing, and supply chain in global companies. I'm providing this outsource to give
procurement team smarter, faster supply chain visibility. Thank you.
Hi, I am Matt, builder and founder of Goal Mochi, bite-sized momentum for goal achievement.
Meet Aya, an SEO specialist just starting a career.
pivot. She struggles to maintain focus so she can complete her goals. Now meet Goal Mochi. Ia comes across
Goalmochi and emails Story at Goalmochi.com with her goal. She wants to start a generative advertising
consultancy. Life with Goal Mochi. It's 7.30 a.m. and a personalized daily goal summary arrives.
It has fresh research, an action plan for the day, and context from Ayah's to-do list and
notion pages. Now, Iya knows what to focus on.
on this morning.
2.30 p.m.
Aya tells Goalmochi, give me a story
about today's prospective client meeting.
She gets a narrative story about her at the meeting,
and it's infused with context about Aya and relevant research.
Aya visualizes herself acing the meeting.
She's ready.
Aya's life with Goalmochi.
She has clear visualized goals she can act on,
new ideas and insights, and momentum for her goal.
Goal Mochi has over 260 organic
signups after our MCP server was published on Anthropics GitHub.
We've even received unprompted user emails saying they love it.
Go-Mochi competes with chat GPT and their pulse feature,
strides, goal tracking app, and productivity tools.
Yet none of them are 100% goal-focused,
proactive first, and don't have a clunky UI.
We see 812,000 obtainable goal-focused productivity users out there,
and getting them could bring us up to 80,
million dollars in AR within a few years.
Gold Mochi is a freemium product soon with a subscription, and we want to target 100 daily active
users by Q1 of this year and 10XRI agentic abilities and productivity tool suite in Q2.
Gold Mochi will be increasingly capable.
I'm Matt.
I'm an AI-first technical founder, and with your support, I will hire an ops and marketing bar
razor.
I believe goals don't fail us because, I believe goals don't fail because we lack plans.
They fail because we lose momentum when plans are all we have.
Gold Mochi solves this in a creative way.
Thank you.
All right, Max, Fred, we saw three great startups.
Kaz from Cascade doing AI tools that should save you 97% of the time when you're running your ad campaigns.
We saw Maya from Alt Source Global doing supplier discovery.
And then we saw Matt from Go Mochi doing an AI life coach.
Let's start, I guess, Fred.
Which one was the most interesting to you as an investor?
Through the investor lens.
Which one, not just personal that you want to use,
not what you think would become the most successful in the world,
but if you had to put $25,000 or $10,000 to one of these companies,
which one would you think will get the best return?
I personally liked the out source global.
Why?
I think it's actually a problem,
it's kind of a large problem to actually find the good suppliers.
I've worked in robotics and, you know, just to find, like, the right motor is impossible.
Okay.
And I think, you know, your friend Elon, in the end, just basically decided to make his own motors, right?
So, I mean, that's really...
You didn't want to be, yeah, a slave to the supply chain.
You can find anything, actually.
Max, which one was your favorite as an investor, putting your investor hat on?
Yeah, I agree with Fred.
Number two is the most regionally relevant one, I think, for what Japan is strong in.
And I could see this potentially becoming a global service, perhaps.
Okay.
Well, source was your favorite as well.
I had a hard time with this because I liked all three.
But from an investment perspective, I go for the weird one that I think has outlier potential.
And I thought the weirdest one was Matt's, Golmochi, this AI life coach.
And I thought, well, this is just a commodity.
I know people are doing life coaching inside of chat GPT.
But I thought, well, the device of getting it every day, if you were to put a human in the loop
and have a human writing some prompts.
I think you could delight and surprise users with a coach that really did become addicting.
And there's many things you can wrap around a coach.
I got many questions about it.
So, okay, that's from an investment perspective of what we think.
The pitches were all solid.
So then let's move to the next step, which is asking a question about the business itself to each of the company.
So Fred, pick a company and ask a question.
I guess I'll start up with gold mochi, because I actually thought of an idea while you're...
Okay.
So, for example, I know a very famous kind of nutritionist in L.A.
You might know him, actually.
But, and I was thinking, you know, people pay him thousands of dollars just to sit down and really talk about food and just working through that.
And I was like, is Matt thinking of bringing in, like, significant experts into the...
And making them your coach?
Yeah.
So they become your life coach.
That's because not go-mochi.
You can make a persona based on them.
It's a gold mochi persona based of like an expert and it's trained on the microphone.
Matt, you can answer that.
Goal-Mucci actually has memory.
So it can definitely play that role.
It can take on a persona.
And also I see Goal-Mochi as being on the right side of model development because as they get better,
it's just going to get more capable and take on that persona and help much better over time.
Okay, well done.
Max, do you have a question for somebody other than Matt?
But it can be Matt if you want.
Maya.
So I was curious what you were doing before, since it looks like you have some sort of background in manufacturing, I'm guessing.
My background is material engineering.
I started as a design engineer, basically modeling for a body in white, and I worked with many suppliers.
And then I also work for a robotics company because Japan has a really large robotics company to work for.
and I actually did AI integration as well.
So to make it short, I transferred to commodity management, global supply management, after getting MBA,
and I realized there's a lot of problems that I couldn't unsee.
So I wanted to solve a big problem.
Okay, well done.
I'll ask Kaz from Cascade a quick question.
Hey, the two biggest ad networks are Meta and Google's,
and they both have very large, significant leads in AI,
and they're obviously putting AI into every single product line.
What will you be able to do with your AI tool
that they won't have natively in their ad platforms?
Thank you. That's a good question.
So we believe Google has, of course, in the gradient optimization too,
and the matter has also as well.
However,
you know,
Google cannot basically optimize meta ad, right?
And the meta also cannot optimize Google ad, right?
So from, you know,
company perspective,
they direct to do the optimization,
add optimization across all channels
to grow their business.
This is a great answer.
Right.
So.
The one I expected, you know,
a savvy founder would say,
I'll just give you one little bit of coaching
on top of it,
which is there are also,
emerging platforms like TikTok, Amazon's platform, Uber's platform, Instacart, and Snapchat.
There are many other platforms so we can take whatever's working on meta and Google's platforms
and then help you discover new platforms and master those, which most people are not taking
advantage of the other long tail of ad networks, including Reddit and other ones.
So great answer.
Great job to our first three pitches.
We're going to take two more pitches and give two more sets of feedback.
and then I'm going to ask you to rank your top two.
My name is Gigi, random chat, the zero-star social network.
When I say zero, what do I mean?
I mean number of friends.
In Japan, one third of them identify themselves as no friends.
And more than half of them say they have no close friends.
In the US, the same trend.
So this is our solution.
You just join without any setting,
and you can start to chat with people.
Then you can join also group chatting.
Also, finally, you can become streamer
or listen to others streaming
and then super like it.
Actually, 11% of our active users
become live audio streamer.
On our platform is a place
where everyone can start from zero.
All you need is I want to chat with someone.
You don't have need to prepare photos.
You don't have to prepare your profile.
And I asked, how it's working?
people said, 67% of them said loneliness resolved by my platform.
And why is not solved by current social network?
Because Snapchat for close friend, Instagram for top 10% content, TikTok for 1% talent.
They all need friends or talents.
How about 30% of people?
And we already have attractions to answer these needs.
We have 4 million downloads now, 200k monthly active users,
and each user spend 70 minutes per day on our app.
And we have three revenue streams now,
in-app purchase for micro-transaction and ads,
and also subscription to remove ads.
After 0 to 1, next, we will build their identity on our platform.
They already have rent on our platform.
So next, they want identity.
So let's why AI can have.
where AI can help us because we only have two people now,
or engineer.
So now we are using AI to create visual identity for our users.
That's all. Thank you.
Hi, I'm Eugene, founder of Air Inc.
AirTest is AI-powered QA for the era of Vibe coding.
The problem.
Meet Matt, co-founder of No Reply,
one of your companies actually.
He's scared about introducing bugs during a significant refactor.
He provides a URL, and within seconds, our agents,
are analyzing his site. Within minutes, we get right to the test. He has a full suite of automated
tests covering his application. The competitors are providing AI tools, but they put them in
desktop apps. Ours is Bowser-based, all in the cloud, and time to value is minutes versus ours.
Traction, we've got one paid customer and Wadbin Market Pilot. Zico, it's a local company. They're
pretty awesome. Roadmap, we will expand into agentic bug fixes, U.X gap analysis to tell the
UX health of your site and security surface mapping to provide the same. Verticals,
scrappy SaaS, always on QA.
Scaleups transforms QA engineers into velocity accelerators.
Direct to consumer e-commerce, they pay for manual testing offshore.
Spring to onshore in-house, cheaper, better quality.
Pricing is seat-based primarily for solo founders 500 a month.
Scale up 1K per month.
Onboarding fee is a hypothesis I have, which is time to value will allow for us to charge
5 to 10K up front to get them results they've been trying to get to for quarters.
Market size, top tier is existing companies with 10 employees and up, $42 billion.
Bottom is my speculative, which is basically 75 million startups.
0.05 get funded, applied with that pricing seat.
So it's some, I would say, an explosive area that might be much more than $30 billion.
Team is AI-focused, machine learning, and Tosh CEO.
She's the builder of our team.
I'm raising runway for the next 24 months.
Keep the team small until we get to 20 to 30KMR.
and then we know how the mechanics of the business work.
We can apply capital, scale it appropriately.
The ask, I want everybody here, if you can,
to send me one of your portfolio companies.
I will analyze it, generate tests for it,
provide you some results.
Explosive velocity with automated proof.
That's what air test provides.
Thank you.
We saw two great companies in our second group.
Gigi from random chat.
Nobody's got friends.
You can't fill out a profile.
You've got no talent.
Interesting idea.
We're going to get your friends.
Love it.
And then Eugene from AirTest, AI, Q&A, quality testing, seems like a huge winner, seems like a great strategy.
Of the two, which one, if you had a gun to your head, and we don't have any guns here in Japan, but in America, everybody's got two.
So if I took my two guns and I put it to the side of your heads, which one would you put 25K of your own money into?
I feel like I would, what I know now, I'd go for the AI-powered Q&A, but I feel like there's something I'm missing with the other.
company too and I'm really curious with random chat going into that yeah got it so
you're intrigued by random chat but your gut says hey the safe bet is the testing
how about you Fred I have a lot of questions for EIR I mean I I'm wondering about it
because you know Facebook just bought Manus and or did they I don't even show you
it went through right yeah yeah so they bought it and then you have now you have
free code it was an open source okay so you have questions about competition
yeah competition obviously
important area but which one would you pick if you had to put the 25 can I I
like the random chat so you would yeah great for me this is a really difficult
one yeah because this one we're only choosing between two the safe bet is
obviously the quality testing like low risk because you know it's gonna make
money but it's gonna cap out maybe or not who knows but a super impressive
founder in Eugene and then and equally if not more impressive founder
and Gigi, who I was absolutely riveted by your pitch.
Gigi, you understand something.
Every founder has a secret.
Every founder understands something.
Your command during that presentation was the strongest of all five we saw.
You understand, and the confidence you radiated in telling us why they should exist
in the world had me captured.
And so I would take the bigger risk and go with random chat.
And I have a new name for you.
That being said, I'd probably just give you each 12-5.
I'll tell you, I'm not going to tell you the name now.
I'll tell you secretly, just the two of us so nobody gets the domain name.
Okay.
So a question.
I think Fred you wanted to ask Eugene about competition.
Go ahead.
So most people don't know this, but there's been a bit of a controversy with Anthropic
over the last couple of days because they changed the requirements for using cloud code
on your system. So up until now you could basically, you know, use cluck code in different kind of solutions like inside of your IDE or whatnot.
But now they're basically saying you have to stay inside of the ecosystem. You cannot use it with cursor.
You can't use it with Google's development tool that it's really is.
It was called.
Antigravity, that's it. The trend now seems to be that most of the closed source providers are going to move to ecosystem protections, right?
So if you're basing, I mean, I guess the real question is,
how would you get this to work if, for example,
your customer is based on Accenture or like,
Okay, great.
So I would say primarily the main value is that it's
behaving and testing the application as if it were a user.
So the system can't actually tell whether it's a user
or if it's our AI, right?
So a platform is separate.
The other kind of strategic importance,
I feel, is separation of concerns.
As you know, quality is, in this case,
quality assurance system like this is kind of like a doctor
in a way, right?
And it needs to have separation from the building of the thing.
So if you put all the context inside the built system,
it creates some really odd results
where it tells itself it works correctly,
but there's no actual external monitor to validate that.
That's my main angle.
Cloud QA that provides that monitor at scale separate
from the core systems that use to develop them.
Great. Max, you have a question for one of the two?
So I feel like with media,
social companies, you know, rising tide floats all boats and I saw at the end they have four million downloads.
So I apologize if you've already covered this I might have been missing something.
But I'd be curious to kind of understand the problem solution in the context of where is all the sort of movement happening right now in the space that you operate?
And, you know, where's sort of the magic that you provide that allows you to grow to where you are now?
Basically, we are mostly organic.
That's how big the needs is, seriously.
So I personally do SEO, and ASO myself,
absorb a CEO, sort of.
So if you are in Japan, you type Japanese,
I'm confident you can find me
if you want to chat with someone,
in Japan, not in the US.
I need Jason's new name to do that in the English.
Actually, not just me.
There are many services there,
because the needs is growing,
and nobody cares.
of them because all people here
has so many friends.
How many friends do you have?
Too many. Too many.
Like you get at least 20 name
card today, I guess.
So, but that's the truth.
And that's, that's why
democracy doesn't work now.
You know, maybe it's too big, but
it's because a lot of people, they have no friends.
People say you are average of five
friends, right? But they don't have five
friends. So
people with agenda
get into their kind of brand
Basically. So that's how, but some of them, they try to find a way to find their friend. And the
fattest way is to search, talk to someone online. And that's where I catch the needs.
My question is more along the lines of, so for example, you mentioned a few social platforms,
but one way to find friends is on Bumble, for example. It's not necessarily just for romance.
Then you also have Clubhouse. That's a good way to meet new people.
So I'm curious about just sort of with these options,
clearly there's some sort of trend in which a lot of Japanese people
are gravitating towards some form of media or meeting people.
They're almost hacking existing systems to solve the problem.
Do you think?
Because Clubhouse isn't meant for making new friends.
It's meant for conversations around topics.
But that's interesting that you say in Japan,
people are using it to make friends.
Well, as much as people still use it, I think.
Yeah.
That's a really interesting.
case study. So recording
Clubhouse and also, I think
Naval, a famous,
actually he did air chat.
Yeah. And it's
kind of similar, I think, and also Bumble.
All of them kind of
encourage you to bring your real identity
to the platform. Yes.
Use your name, use your photo.
And again, the 30%
just, they don't want their real identity
in it. They want a new start, I
suppose. Or they just
want something quick. I think this is
is the magic of what you've done.
You have realized there is a cold start problem.
Yes.
And you've realized, let's just take all the friction out.
If you're lonely, talking to someone makes you less lonely.
So why don't we let you talk with someone, which is what chat roulette was.
So you're more like chat roulette.
But chat roulette wasn't explicit.
It was more for entertainment, not for friendship.
And then I like your idea of the big reveal.
We invested in a company many years ago, Cool Whisper, that was a geography-based one.
So you would start chatting with people who were in your neighborhood.
And these anonymous chats do have some issues.
You have to be careful about maybe going after young kids, etc.
So you're going to have a lot of issues you're going to have to deal with.
But if you're thoughtful about it, I think that you have the start of something that could be magical,
which is, okay, you start with no persona, then you do a persona.
Yes.
Then you can reveal your real self.
Yes.
when you want. And both people can choose to reveal themselves, and that could only be for paid accounts.
Yes.
So if you want to reveal, you have to be a subscriber, and then what you can say is you will verify
their identity. So you have to have a verified identity with your driver's license, services
you can use for that. I don't know how it works in Japan, but in the U.S., there are plenty of
ways to do that, or relatively understand this is who this person is. You verified their phone number,
you verified their email, you verified their driver's license, all different ways,
card. You'd at least know something about the person to avoid some problems. I think it could be
magical. It's weird. It's interesting. And I think you're the right person to do it. Let's give all
five companies a big round of applause. And now I ask you to pick your one and two. Your one and two.
We'll start with your two and then go to your one. We'll go two, two, two, one, one. I have my
one picked. I have my two picked. I loved all five. These are five companies that I think are all
investable. All five deserve angel investing to get to the next stage. All five are very frugal, I think.
They're not going to need a lot of money to get to their first paying customers and to get to some
level of product market fit. They have varying degrees of it. They're obviously in different stages here.
But I am really enamored by all five. It's going to be very hard for me. In fact, I just changed my
votes. Change my number two vote. Okay. Fred, you're looking up. So you have your number two ready.
just your number two and why? I think my number two is probably EIR. Okay, yeah.
And I, I do see where they sit in the whole software development lifecycle, but I still have
tons of questions, but I do like it. Okay, that's your number two. Max, who's your number two?
My number two would, I think it's the same company, the AI powered Q&A. So air testing was your number two.
I considered that for my number two. I considered All Source Global is my number two, and I considered
Cascade is my number two, but I picked for my number two, Matt and Go Mochi.
And the reason I picked it was I think that there is a way to do this that has a tremendous
impact on a set of people's lives and that it has massive upside.
I think it has the lowest chance of succeeding of the five.
But I think if it does succeed, it could have a profound impact.
In other words, the execution is going to be extremely hard for you, Matt.
It would have been much easier for me to pick either Cascade or Alt Source Global and certainly
Air, which was on my other number two possibility, because all of those are going to be quicker
and easier to $1 million in revenue, which means I did pick.
I'll go number one first.
We'll do this like a baseball auction.
My number one is random chat and Gigi, and I already stated why I liked it.
I found the founder had presence, passion, and a secret, and a knowledge that could unlock something also very profound.
And now it's not lost on me.
They picked the two consumer apps, which are the least investable.
But having done Robin Hood and Uber and Com and seeing the outcomes of how large consumer things can get, I sometimes lean towards them and not safety.
Now, Max, you're number one.
Sure.
So just caveating this, agreeing with the...
You didn't change your vote, did you, based on mine.
Okay.
But clearly everyone's good enough to be on this stage with Jason.
So, again, you know, great job.
Everybody, my number one would be, sorry, Maya, I think it was.
Yeah, alt-source global.
Yes, alt-source global.
And I just put a lot of emphasis and weight on, does this company
have to be from Japan. Then from Japan does this have a chance of becoming a global company.
Oh, I like your framing. Yeah, great job, Max. Fred, who's your number one?
I actually like the outsource as well. And from my point of view, the reason why I liked it was
that even in my space, in medical world health care, it's actually very hard to find the right
suppliers for doctors. In fact, if you ever go to a doctor-run clinic, their back office is a
complete mess. It is a mess. And so they don't, they're not very good business doctors, right?
So it's a mess in the back. They don't know where to buy things. They don't know. They pay too
much. They order too much. They know all that stuff. And then the other side of it is for patients,
they don't know where to go. So one of the other things we're thinking about is like, if you're
you know, you want to, you want to get a CAT scan, where do I go to a CAT scan that's near me?
If you don't know, it's actually quite hard. You're on Google. You're trying to find something.
You don't really understand. You don't know if it's too expensive or not expensive.
So I thought there's a lot of ways that this risk management could work for processing supply chain is actually really quite interesting.
All right.
There you have it.
Another amazing episode of Twist is in the can.
See you next time.
Bye bye-bye.
