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

28:16Yeah. Yeah. Pretty lucky. So when was the last time you went to France and to 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 vision, you hired 10 people for it, you can't just shut that division down.

28:57That'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 in regulatory space, but also the amount of international founders and talents coming to Paris. I actually grew up 10 minutes from Station F. Station F is this beautiful old train station, I believe, or warehouse that's been converted into a WeWork, 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.

29:34That's why we're here. We're watching so many young folks and people who would have normally worked at a big company for life decide, hey, I'm going to try a startup, and their parents are supporting them. I was talking with a journalist today. He's Gen X as well. And I asked him for his three kids. He had some kids who were 17 and 20 years old. And I said, would you be happy if your kids took the risk of doing a company? He said, oh, I'd be thrilled. Now, he works for essentially the New York Times of Japan. So he's a business reporter. I said, would your parents, as a Gen Xer, 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?

30:18He 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 risks and they're thinking globally. So that's one of the nice things about how the startup communities have grown. Let's talk really granularly about the investment community here. You have a number of great VCs, you have corporate VCs, and they also have grants. So you funded this company with a million dollars in seed funding and some grants, yeah? Exactly. So we raised capital from Japanese BCs as well as 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.

31:00So we have very strong investors. And what is quite unique and what your audience, especially in the US, might be quite surprised is that we also had numerous startup loans. So actually, regional banks are risk takers and 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.

31:38So you're all set to launch your new company, right? Not so fast. If you want investors and potential customers to take your new business seriously, you need to consider forming a Delaware C Corp. And that's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. They're going to give your new company a real identity. That means an address for your public filings, a domain, a custom website, a business email, and of course, a phone number. And that's going to take just 10 minutes and 10 clicks. They don't charge hidden fees. Customer service is available around the clock. They're not overwhelming your inbox with spam and they make it easy to cancel at any time so get all the advantages of a delaware c corp independent regardless of where in the u.s you're operating from visit northwest registered agent.com twist for more details and the links are in the show notes yeah exactly so we've had different um different startup loans and as you mentioned low interest over a long period of time and more importantly you have official institutions that are grantors which mean that they also test take the risk of granting the loan and so you mentioned there's a lot of great vcs in japan but the early stage funding is still sometimes slow and with small checks and for us it's being able to leverage what we raise in equity to have more than what we raise, right?

33:00So 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 from a couple of thousands of dollars to a few hundreds of thousands of dollars. Okay, so you could have a 5K, 10K check, a 25K check, even a 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.

33:41Yeah? Exactly. So you raise less. Sorry, that was your 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-deleteive funding right incredible so we can keep a clean cap table and have more than what we raised for and actually that's quite interesting because more and more US biotech VCs come to Japan and they're quite amazed at what a Japanese startup that's raised 200K, they were able to accomplish, right?

34:24Look 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 accomplish a lot on a small dollar amount.

35:04Then 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. Yeah. And the flip would then allow them, if you were a Texas company, Delaware company, even Nevada, those are the three ones that seem to be pretty popular right now in the United States, you 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.

35:40You 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. So actually, the regulations have changed a lot to do an IPO. The Japanese Series B for a very long time used to be the IPO.

36:12Incredible, 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? Yeah, I think there were too many zombie companies on the stock market. And also, I think that they want to encourage merger and acquisition as exits. And I think that would be really healthy, right? Because we're mentioning that the checks signed by the angels are pretty low is because also we don't have a lot of funders that's exited for a lot of cash and then that can really recirculate the money with angel investments.

36:50So 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 the series B timing, where do they get the gross funding and how do they exit? So that's definitely an 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 Kahn running for the Biden administration the rules around M &A, and they block them. And so people gave up on M &A. President Trump joined, became president for a second term, 47th president of the United States.

37:31And he has been very pro-M &A. In fact, inserting themselves into it and advising people and asking for certain ones to be approved and other ones not to be approved. There are some problems there, I guess, in terms of fairness and maybe being too involved and not impartial enough. But net-net, we're starting to see a lot more M &A. And that's good for the ecosystem because it 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.

38:08We 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 OpenAI shares or many other AI companies.

38:46The 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. Yeah. 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 as a American, you know, rank and file management, developers, technical staff where they look at and go, oh, yeah, these are going to be worth something. I'm going to buy a house with this money. Very interesting. I think it really depends on the employees. We've had some who want to fight to have more stock options and to have more equity in the company.

39:29Some less, but we try to really make them understand that our success is shared with all the companies. That's very important for us. But more and more, I think Japanese employees look at equity in their 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... Were there some technical issues around taxation and the awarding of them? Yeah. So I'm not really familiar with the topic because that's happened just before we really started issuing a lot of tax options. But from what I've heard, yeah, it was on top of the taxation.

40:11It 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 when you were less focused on product market fit, did you make some mistakes in buildings you didn't need to? So just explore and let's open up that topic. So it's quite interesting. So we have this epigenetic services, right?

40:48So 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, a lot 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 to have even higher resolution in a genetic 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 for advantage.

41:35That could be new diagnostic, that could be new therapeutic assets. And that's, I think, what will be the vision of product market fit is when we'll be able to really derive our own 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.

42:10We really believe in the clinical importance of buy markers of aging in clinics. We didn't exit the market for that. But what we believe is that 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 even 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.

42:49You 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.

43:24maybe you have people who are VCs who they just want the power law. They would rather nine out of 10 companies go to zero and one go to a billion than have five of them have$100 million exits. Because just on a math basis,$500 million versus a billion or$2 billion outcome, they're going to push you for that. So have you experienced that tension yet here in year three or four? No, actually. And I think that one of the reasons 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 sign, so they know how it plays.

44:04But 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 these are 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.

44:39So you're a little bit older and then my blood tests are excellent. Oh, you're a little younger. These are just two different modalities. One is the blood test. One is like sleeping patterns and stress. how am I as a consumer of these products to understand the concept of biological age? And how can I actually take action based on that? Because my whoop's just saying, go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, and you can game your score. But I don't like to go to bed and wake up at the same time. I like to go to a concert or a Knicks game and stay out late and then sleep in. Sometimes they get up really early and want to do a workout.

45:14I 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 it. 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? Sorry, 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 methylation patterns that is someone who is like 45 years old. Or we can look at another marker and estimate that your biological age is 55 years old.

45:56So 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, I think it's very important. because at some points, that's why actually I'm making a stop for my UR ring, is because it looks like you're trying to optimize for biomarkers that can be disconnected from your actual health, from really how you feel. And so for consumers, I would say that the value is really for the trends that's actually encouraged at a population level people maybe to sleep better, to eat better. But if we look at the medical age and biomarkers of aging for drug development, then you can find some value, right?

46:39Because 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. Yep. 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.

47:19And 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 were 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 or the highest. So they went, did some field trip, and they realized that some people, for example, that we estimated to be 180 years, we're just dead, and people were collecting the pension, the family, for example.

48:10That being said, in Okinawa, and in most of the blue zones, there's some strong links, is sociability. Sociability. Sociability. Why would that make somebody live longer? They're happier, they have lower stress. 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 a regular routine with some people that you appreciate and you to feel the support is actually extremely important to be in good health.

48:56And unfortunately, I know some people who've had this really strong supportive networks for years. And when the supportive network disappears, they can actually decline extremely fast. So this socialization is extremely important. And I've seen it firsthand in Okinawa with some solidarity networks that last for a really long time with people that have been peers for decades. And it's really, really full to see. and as well as diets can make definitely difference, especially in Italy, the Mediterranean diet is a - Yeah, it's pretty healthy. 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.

49:41It 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. I don't know if you've heard this study. That's just in the last year or so. I really, yeah. It would be interesting to see if blue zones, also zones where you have more dialects and therefore more brain health because that is one of the big diseases right you have heart you have and brains and lungs like there's like some specific ones that tend to the force of men of the death yeah and i think these are some of the big ones uh 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.

50:52If 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 I could use three great questions. 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 booked 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 revenues and everything and growing.

51:33It was more of a strategic question like where do we want to grow the company and where do we really want to focus 100 % in terms of development? have we made a difficult choice of cutting a service that was actually generating cash regularly and predictably 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. Yeah. Yeah. 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.

52:15And today it feels like every week where you don't grow expressionally 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 are we have to follow the pace of experiments and the lab and we really just want to give us all the force to grow as much as we can and working on the most difficult topic because this is where we will really create value. Yeah it's inherent in the Japanese culture I believe the term is kaizen continuous and continuous improvement yes yeah I'm getting nods okay I pronounced it correctly yeah kaizen and this is one of the reasons why when I bring investors or angels or venture capitalists and founders, and I take them to Japan for the first time, and they see everybody really caring about what they do, they don't realize that the person who has been working on coffee or pasta or their tailor or they work in the subway, they've been trying to be a little bit better every week for many years.

53:27My favorite audio guy every time he just tries to make the audio 10 % better. 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. 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 that kind of improvement, you'll just have, oof. This is what we hope.

54:08And now I think we are 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, whoosh, yeah. 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 bashful here. I know you have questions. If this was America, they would be pushing each other over to get to the microphone to plug their company and embed a plug for their company into the question. but one question for you, I think, 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?

55:01Great 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. No cron jobs? No agents, no cron jobs, okay. Exactly, so we still have a lot of lab work that is quite manual, but for AI, yeah, unfortunately, we do hire, for example, junior people and interns that have learned, that have a background in machine learning, for example, and that we know they can actually use AI as they can to accelerate their work, yeah. Yeah, this is a term at Amazon, Jeff Bezos and the team over there had called a bar raiser. 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.

56:00Okay, what do we all know about those topics? And everybody puts it on the table in a document, what they know. And then you hire somebody who has a much higher knowledge base than anybody on the team. So when they come in, the bar has been raised. Now we know somebody who really knows how to write a blog post, do a video, 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, will be like, oh, I don't want to hire somebody better than me.

56:34then the boss is going to like them better or maybe my job's at risk or they'll take work away from me. But they got everybody to agree, let's try to hire bar raisers. Let's try to hire the people who can drive the company higher. 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, they multiplied the quality of their work and became, you know, world-class levels of engineers.

57:11So it's a very exciting time. Let's take another question from our amazing Foundry University founders. Hey, thank you very much for the session. I have a question. I wanted to know, how do you know the best time to exit? Are there some factors you look at? Are there signs to let you know this is the right time, this is the right 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 the next three years?

57:54Or is it better to just sell the asset now and let someone else take the hand? So we have tried to build a company that will grow into a platform. A platform is basically we have the engine to generate IP and to generate different assets. And the question for us to exit would be, okay, if company A wants to acquire for assets, do we sell them or do we just want to keep pushing to develop even better assets and more assets who have this component effect and take the risk of not selling now? So that would be for me the idea that I would have about the exit. it would be really about can we keep generating more IPs and more assets.

58:36Yeah, and I would say when I talk to founders about this and they ask me for my counsel, if the founder is not having fun and they don't want to come to the office every day, it's like going to work is drudgery as opposed to inspiring. If you don't want to get to the office as soon as possible, start working, and you can't sleep at night because you're just so engaged, then maybe it's time to sell if you're not or let somebody else run it who is more engaged than you the second is you get an unreasonable offer so your company was valued in the last round at 20 million and somebody offers you 200 million it's life-changing money for you or your family then you might have an obligation to take it because it might not come along that often right so the unreasonable offer is the second reason 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.

59:45We'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 trouble so in the case of youtube they were under a crazy lawsuit that was going to end the company that no vcs would fund so they had no choice right it was the that was their fourth option and what you're trying to also factor in is if it's another five years from now and this company goes 100x will i have regretted it and do i want to run this business for the rest of my life you have to ask yourself do i want to run this forever and if you do, then you have to say, wow, I will get unreasonable offers.

1:00:23I 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.

1:01:03If they have two do that, maybe they have a 3, 4, 5x 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 million fund, and they own 10 % of your company. Okay, they own$2 million in equity in your company. If your company gets to$10 billion, and they're diluted at 50%, now they own 5%, they get $500 million. They're a 2.5x company. That's if they invested just in your company, and you become a$10 billion company.

1:01:40Think 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.

1:02:15We have 12 people we're talking to. Would you like to review our company and where we're at? Would you like to meet our management? Of those 12 targets, six say yes. And then you've got two offers. And of those six, another three offers come in. Now you have five offers. Now you say, okay, we'd like everybody to put their bid in. Then we're going to go to the final two bids. And then we're going to do one more bake-off. And you explain that bidding process. us. And so, yeah, Ruloff told me that at Sequoia when he, yeah, and he said, great companies are bought, not sold. If you're in the selling process and trying to convince people, it's going to go for a low price.

1:02:47If you have multiple offers, it's going to go for a high price. And you'll just know because people will want to hang out with you. All of a sudden, the founder of another company will call you. Like Steve Jobs called famously the founder, Drew, of Dropbox and said, hey, I would love to hear what you're up to. He's not calling because he needs more friends. Steve Jobs had enough friends. And if he wanted more friends, he could just pick a celebrity or some artist or the most interesting person in the world and be friends with him. If Steve Jobs wants to be with you, it's for that reason. So you know when it's happening.

1:03:18Great 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 the land of the robots. And there's a lot of human robot interaction research here on aging and the use of social robots. So my question is, if loneliness has a measurable biological impact through stress, inflammation, conductive decline, do you think that perhaps a sufficiently capable social robot could measurably improve biomarkers of aging? That's a great question. If the robot can actually create a link with a person and have a feeling of care, I would assume so.

1:03:57And I don't know if you've seen like the dog robots that were with Sony and there were some studies 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 yeah now we're talking he has a robot company working on now we've got in the spirit he's got a robotic company that's working on the software to create companions well done great 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 A to A, Asian to Asian.

1:04:35But my question is something different. Okay. I'm curious about your opinion on working culture. Today, Suicom Barre has a very hustle culture, such as, you know, 996 or 007. And do you think 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 similar tradition, I guess, especially in traditional company in Japan. Yeah, you work late nights. Yes. Okay. Okay, yeah. No, it's extremely important, extremely interesting. And today I read an article about the Prime Minister Takeuchi, who was saying that he was sleeping between zero to three hours a night for her job.

1:05:33And I basically think that he'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 passionates us, right? we have a team that would have the choice to either work in some of the best universities in the world or some huge biotech startups and they take the choice of building something with us. So usually they have this motivation to just work long hours and every single 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 rest.

1:06:22And 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 their aging was increasing a bit too fast that's maybe a sign that they might be closer to a burnout. Yeah. But definitely, I don't know if you have an opinion on the workload in 1986. 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.

1:07:04venture tends to be slower over the holidays because no deals get done between December 15th and January 10th, maybe. So you have this nice respite. And in the summer, other VC firms, essentially the VCs go on vacation for weeks and they will be lightly active, but they do a lot of travel and they try to enjoy it. For startups, I think you should work extremely hard and try to beat your competition. But you do need to understand that if you work hard, you have to play hard. And then I don't have a problem with founders who put three or four hard years in fail and then decide to take a year off and kind of explore and recharge their batteries.

1:07:40And 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 that's like well no they're an olympian they're trying to set a record you know for the you know uh 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 but Or some of them are just addicted to it and they just stay in shape.

1:08:30But I do think you need to make a very personal choice. And then superimposed on that choice is if you have a partner. If you get married and you have kids, now you have a different responsibility. So I've seen many people go into their older years, 40-year-old founders, 50-year-old founders with families. And what they do is they're ruthless about their time at work. So they get up at 5 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 focus 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.

1:09:27And they're like, yeah, but I want to walk you to 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 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 2X speed. I'm busy. I got three daughters waiting to go have dinner with me in Tokyo. I have to give them some time too. Right? So I think this is the philosophy I take. So different times in your... When I was young, I was at the office seven days a week.

1:10:02I made my career. I just said, I am going to out-hustle everybody. Anytime a competitor started... When I had the magazine business, another competitor started a weekly email newsletter, and they beat my cadence of once a month. And I went crazy. And I told my team, we're doing a daily email newsletter. Because they kept scooping us. Then we did a daily. and then somebody else said, oh, 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.

1:10:36And 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. Namaste. How do we get to Founders first? And I just came up with a more efficient idea. So efficiency can beat hours.

1:11:11But efficiency and hours can beat everything. So just be ruthless about efficiency. And then with hours, you have to follow your energy. you like this sleeping zero to three hours a night is dumb. Yeah. Because you'll make more mistakes and then that will work against you. I believe you should get seven hours of sleep, even if you're like a crazy young person. There's no reason not to. Just stop watching TV. Like who cares about TV and movies, whatever. Like just pick one show a year that you love. Go see like whatever number of movies. Also, you have to be healthy. Like this is so critical. The founders who were unhealthy and I was unhealthy.

1:11:44I was 40 pounds heavier. When I was unhealthy, I didn't think as crisply as I do now. When I lost the weight, my thinking, my energy just totally changed. We'll save some questions for next time. Let's give it up for Kilal. His company, of course, is E-K-E-I-Labs.com. You're hiring, I assume? Yeah. 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. and you can go check out all the amazing jobs and we'll see you next time on This Week in Startups.

1:12:22Good job, everybody.