SPEAKER_00: all right everybody i am back in japan for founder university japan which is our second cohort and i'm here with a live audience which you're going to hear roar and clapping right now and then i'm going to teach you guys how to round out the clap this is very important you're going to clap like crazy like you won the lottery but then i'm going to go and as it comes down nice and sharp you stop okay we'll try one more time i'm here with a live studio audience in tokyo could be better let's try one more time live with the studio

SPEAKER_05: audience here in tokyo perfect what we like to do when i'm in japan is meet some founders working on interesting things who are a little further ahead than the founder university cohort what is founder

SPEAKER_07: university founder university is a pre-accelerator it comes before tech stars y combinator or the launch accelerator many of our companies have gone on to a16 speed run uh tech stars etc y combinator of course and our program launch accelerator we've run the founder university program on three continents now uh here in japan we do it in uh saudi arabia in riyadh twice a year with our friends at sanabu the pif and we do it of course in america internationally what is founder university as a pre-accelerator we help teams work on product market fit raising their first round of capital we have thousands of people apply a year for a couple of hundred spots the program is 12 weeks

SPEAKER_05: long we ask everybody to work really hard for those 12 weeks to try to make amazing progress on their products on their team and in working with their customers a startup in its most basic form is those three things a team that develops a product that delights a customer base and if you get that flywheel going everything is really easy now of course most startups fail but if you in the cross course of your career decide to do two three four startups you're going to hit success and so we love as a firm the launch fund which i run and we're now on our fourth fund we love to work with early stage founders we've been so lucky to hit you know just some world-changing startups of course uber robin hood com thumbtack athena zipline vast space so many great companies uh and a lot of new ai companies that have suddenly become worth hundreds of millions of dollars billions of dollars uh like abacus or micro one those are recent ones that you will be hearing about in the future because we're here live with a bunch of founders in the room about 40 of them uh we're going to talk about some topics today in

SPEAKER_08: terms of company building with our guests and we're also going to hear about his startup so our guest today is bilal caroni tony yes caroni now you have a french access not a japanese one your company is eki labs that's spelt e k e i labs.com you can go visit it you're a longevity startup yes and everybody's talking about longevity we'll talk about company building everything from product market fit to operating a company here in japan hiring people in japan cap you know um cap tables uh and all of those great things but i want to start with your business and what you're doing so eki labs what is

SPEAKER_05: the mission and how are you going after this very important space which is longevity i'm sure it is by design that you're here in japan where we have some of the longest lifespans uh and we have a massively aging population uh so tell us just a bit about eki labs yeah so to start with eki labs we

SPEAKER_09: generate high resolution and low-cost epigenetic data for drug development today we're getting paid for

SPEAKER_11: discovery on aging as well as for manufacturing quality control in cell therapy our mission is really to build an infrastructure for data generation to help advancing longevity research so

SPEAKER_07: there's a bunch of people yeah who are doing longevity research who are those people pharmaceutical companies startups big companies small companies tell us a little bit about your customers your

SPEAKER_11: partners um so we work with one of the largest life science conglomerate here in japan and we also work with early stage um biotech startups and startups that are quite advanced and already manufacturing their own cell therapies and you are mentioning one of the many reasons for longevity company to be here in japan but one of them on top of the aging society is the range of medicine space some of the best innovation have been created here in japan we can uh cite the nobel prize dr china yamanaka who created a new way to generate stem cells to make it very simple and we are very lucky to be working with some of the startups that were born from these movements and are extremely innovative uh here in japan now tell

SPEAKER_07: us a little bit about the product you've been working on it for three or four years now and it's in market you have paying customers so what is this product exactly and why don't they build it themselves i guess is always the question uh so tell us a little bit about the innovation in terms of the product

SPEAKER_08: you're building and you can get a little technical um and i'll help translate it since i am not a uh investor

SPEAKER_11: in biotech companies yeah great um so to make it quite simple on what our service is is we generate epigenetic data that don't exist yet for whoever wants to get a decision from it so what is epigenetic we don't epigenetic epigenetic yes so we don't we do not look at all of the dna code we look at a layer above it that silence or express genes now this signal is very important because it changes with aging it changes with therapeutic responses and we have our own methods to read the methylation which is a subset of epigenetics epigenetics uh methylation is some chemical tags that go on the dna that switch certain genes on and off and we have a way to read the signals in a way that is incredibly high

SPEAKER_25: resolution at an incredible low cost so it's a tool that lets you look at this layer above the dna

SPEAKER_05: yeah and understand how i'm aging when do you start tracking somebody and is it a blood test that is

SPEAKER_09: done i'm assuming so we're sample agnostic we work with different sample types and usually we work

SPEAKER_11: with uh our clients they have access to a large cohort and they want either to do fundamental research on aging so understanding how those patterns in ventilation change when aging and also how they

SPEAKER_05: change with some therapeutic response got it so if i was in this cohort being studied by a drug company you run tests on me as the patient and they typically have dozens of people in these trials so we're

SPEAKER_11: lucky enough to work with very large cohorts with hundreds and sometimes thousands of participants and yeah so basically this is when i was telling that we're getting paid on discovery on aging this is our project and also another area for which we're getting paid and for which we have a lot of traction in interest is also for one bottleneck in cell therapy manufacturing which is to answer three questions is my batch potent is my batch what i think it is and is it identical to the next one is this really consistent so we also run um tests on different stem cell batches for the manufacturing quality control

SPEAKER_05: what is the impact of these drugs today and with ai now i am assuming accelerating the ability to make these new drugs and these new therapies tell us a little bit about the state of the art today and where

SPEAKER_11: you think that'll be in five to ten years today it's quite exciting we've had our first ai design drug that's reached phase three um in the regulatory layer and so what we do is we generate data that's never been done generated before using our technology and then we use it to create new models for clients the reason we are generating and we are in the data generation business is because in ai for biology the mode is in data generation if you use public data it's not going it wasn't built for your phenotype it was not built for the indication your model targets and unfortunately you cannot really model your way out from a data set that isn't there so we start from the start uh with the data generation then we use uh relatively simple ai models like elastic regression to uh offer models either for like the discovery but also for other aspects of the drug development like patient certification making sure that your clinical trials is going to enroll the right patients or for the manufacturing qc so today it's really exciting we have our first um drug that's been designed by ai that are going above the regulatory rank and my prediction is that the next frontier for ai modeling will be virtual cell organism so currently data is being generated to try to find those models and to have a next alpha fold breakthrough and once we will have those virtual cell models the new drug that will that will hit

SPEAKER_37: the market will be absolutely uh groundbreaking it's the worst nightmare of every founder you've built a product everything's working great then real users start flooding in and suddenly it all breaks what a disaster you need to get it back up and running and you got to do that fast you're looking like an amateur that's why you need a partner like century applications can break in many different ways but century sees everything you'll get all the relevant details like stack traces commits releases and even the developers who push that problem code in the first place with century you're not going to be jumping around between different tools trying to figure out what happened and seer centuries ai debugging agent uses all this data and context to identify the root cause of the problem and suggest a fix it can even take a look at your code before it ships and warn you if any problems are likely try seer and century for free if you're a this week in startups listener at century.io twist use the code twist for 240 in century credits make sure you use that code make sure you use that url

SPEAKER_05: century.io twist so they know your uncle jay cal sent you yeah and so today is it mostly when people do longevity is it supplements is it anti-aging yet is it making my telomeres not get as short and maybe trying to reverse aging what are because i hear from my friends they like to do off menu items things that you can't do in america so they go down to mexico costa rica south korea and they do stem cells yeah and they i guess have blood plasma taken out it's spun and there's some blood blood plasma treatments um so there's this idea of tourism based on longevity i'm 55 now i know it's hard to believe but um people my age are getting really into this peptides uh blood transfusions and stem cells are

SPEAKER_07: the ones i hear most about tell us a little bit about who is going to benefit from this and how um

SPEAKER_11: so true so in terms of longevity treatments you have a really large umbrella uh from therapeutics to lifestyle-based interventions and right now there's not really a consensus of what would actually work uh for the for the patients and that's why with a collapse we want also to build an infrastructure that can actually measure aging to really being able to have a clinical validations of those treatments um and actually it's quite exciting that in 2026 we've had the first clinical trial um for a drug that might actually reverse aging it's live bioscience from dr david st clair that you might uh be uh aware of um as well as new limit that was funded by brian armstrong uh pharmacy of um conveys they've had great data and they should have uh the first clinical trial we hope uh by uh by next year so i think that we're slowly moving from off menu items to actually um actual drugs that went through the fda uh programs now targeting clinical indications that are not aging but i hope that one day aging might be recognized by the fda either clinical indication that we will have actual therapeutics that we will be um reviewed with the same scrutiny and with the same rigor uh for aging for the

SPEAKER_21: individuals i know who are going to panama going to south korea and doing these stem cells um are they wasting their money is it legit or is it just uh like a fad uh this stem cell research in your mind would you if you were my friend and maybe we're friends after this uh over time would you advise me to follow them and do some of these things or would you tell me it's a waste of money and if i had the money to waste would you tell me if it makes you feel good do it but it's probably

SPEAKER_42: not going to do anything be honest with me about stem cells and some of these things so

SPEAKER_09: it's quite similar stem cells can be uh in cell therapies in general um it can be absolutely

SPEAKER_11: amazing but it really depends on what is the clinical indication that you're going for if it's for general aging i do believe that some treatments might be really beneficial for uh for aging but yeah i'm not a medical doctor and also uh doing things off menu and with your own will without like a framework and someone following you i think can be dangerous and unfortunately we have um you know there's some bad stories of people having issues following those treatments it's something that we need to be aware of that is not uh sometimes um the efficacy is not there it doesn't it's not here and also the safety i need to be really uh look at um yeah i was a little concerned when i had

SPEAKER_05: friends going to panama or going to mexico and doing this but they had nothing to lose was kind of the situation they were sick or they had some indications and then other ones are doing it because maybe they have a knee that had meniscus surgery or a torn acl and i have heard that some

SPEAKER_21: folks kobe bryant has gone uh rest in peace but kobe bryant went when he tore his achilles or shoulder or whatever it was and a lot of mb players went to clinics in germany i believe to do this blood plasma kind of stuff and i know you're not a doctor it may not be your specialty but there is some

SPEAKER_47: efficacy there 100 so that's what i was where was during the line yeah is if it's not following

SPEAKER_11: clinical indication and just for general wellness and aging um at the moment i am not sure of the scientific consensus but if you look at a clinical indication i 100 believe that can be part of a medical journey that tremendous value and the other thing when you're mentioning your friends that had nothing to lose i'm also a huge believer in the right to try um some states in the u.s are really pushing for this right that's for patients that unfortunately don't have another solution to

SPEAKER_07: have access to a care that's sometimes right to try yeah it's pretty explanatory in the name you have the right to try a drug it's your choice as a human on planet earth to take that risk but explain legally

SPEAKER_05: the framework as best you can for us as lay people you know if a state decides to do this what's the practical implication of it we heard that there's somebody high profile who's 80 years old in the united states who has some issues uh taking redditrutide this new uh you know glp and people were speculating it was the president of the united states you've heard this speculation i i we have no way of knowing if it's president trump or not but redditrutide is not there yet people are taking it already from compounding pharmacy someone who's not me has experience with it and said it's pretty amazing there are many people i know in the states who are taking redditrutide very quietly so maybe you could talk about what is exactly the right to try and why you believe in it and you

SPEAKER_08: believe in it also for young people who maybe aren't sick but want to try peptides want to try redditrutide

SPEAKER_11: before it's approved etc so the legal framework of the right to try is very complex but it would be the right for if you have for example an integral disease you have the right to try a therapy like a cell therapy a gene therapy that haven't been approved yet but you take the risk knowingly that might save your life and you have politicians in the u.s more and more who are having a movement to put that in law and give access to care that could save life to patients that would not have access to the scales in the current situation so i think that's absolutely a great thing um and now for the right to try for younger healthy people i think that's a very interesting ethical questions uh for doctors me personally i mean i'm an entrepreneur and i have like a sense of risk for me personally i i would like to try like certain um certain therapies that are not on the market that are not maybe scientifically approved but that would be my 100 percent my choice and the real that will really take but i can definitely understand that the ethical choice for doctors to inject a drug to a patient is healthy

SPEAKER_07: can be also hard to take for the for the doctor but you believe as uh an entrepreneur and maybe as

SPEAKER_05: somebody who is freedom loving yeah i think and uh you were previously a martial artist who got injured um you say hey maybe um there's a personal freedom here that should be allowed if the person goes in

SPEAKER_08: knowingly and they've you know signed off on it that they want to take the risk and there have been

SPEAKER_05: trials i i don't know if they're called challenge trials where people could during covid say i'm okay with taking the risk of giving me covid in advance giving me a therapy because i want to try to help the world i'm willing to take a payment for that or i'm willing to do it for the good of society now in america this would be foreboding but in other countries my understanding is if somebody wanted to

SPEAKER_07: say yes inject me with covid and inject me with the cure i want to do it for the good of society this to me seems like a beautiful thing for somebody to do now i would be concerned if it was a poor person

SPEAKER_05: who was doing it just for the money because that would seem like oh we're using a power imbalance an economic imbalance there so i have deep concerns about that ethically but if somebody who you know was not destitute financially and they went through multiple screenings with the psychologist with the counselor and they said no i during the height of covid i would like to take the risk of getting covid i don't i think i'm a low risk healthy individual what do you think about that category of like actually uh somebody joining something in that brave way like being it's almost like being an astronaut or something and you know you're willing to risk going to the moon very interesting

SPEAKER_11: i've never heard of this particular case of people getting sick to advanced medical research and for me it's still like the ethical question of getting someone sick even if you can advance the research is um maybe like a border that i would not cross yeah um but ethically it's a really

SPEAKER_69: fascinating one yeah right like it's it's very challenging yeah and for me some i think it's a

SPEAKER_11: border that will cross but and also i would question the motivation of the person who will be ready to get sick so would it be truly um i mean yeah if the if as you mentioned if it's like space exploration is really to advance human health that would be amazing um motivation but i would definitely

SPEAKER_71: also think about what would be the motivation do you know anyone in your personal cycles that were ready

SPEAKER_05: to uh i mean i don't know anybody who would do that but i could imagine if they were given uh compensation if it was irreversible so hey if you do die from this your family would get a million dollars or 10 million dollars if you were going to get sick and there was some ongoing long-term covet let's say if you believe in long covet uh you would get free health care for life because of it you know as a society we have people do many brave things we have people who go to war we have people who are firefighters who run into burning buildings my brother was one of them and he's run into many burning

SPEAKER_07: buildings is there a difference between the bravery of an astronaut the bravery of a firefighter the

SPEAKER_05: bravery of a soldier and the bravery of somebody who wanted to be part of advanced medicine to try to push the human spirit and the human and reduce human suffering to me you know i've thought about it and i i think you know i i have nothing but respect for those people who choose to take those risks for the better of betterment of society but i would be lying if i didn't think um it is ethically and morally challenging and has to be really well thought out and considered which

SPEAKER_11: i think is what you're saying as well um yeah it's what i'm thinking i think the ethical because i was thinking about the firefighter example which is uh great but for example we do not burn the skin of firefighters to then study uh how to uh do um skin um skin healing so that's where i would draw the line is that if we actually inoculate patients and the lc people with a disease to have been science we do still um deteriorate their health which i think is a line that personally

SPEAKER_80: i would not uh i would not cross our show is filled with helpful and practical advice for founders but

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SPEAKER_21: guy yeah uh who and we'll put a link to it in our show notes who uh collected venomous snakes

SPEAKER_05: and injected himself with the snake venom to build up a tolerance for it over time after building it up his blood plasma was able to create um i don't know what they call the antidotes for poisons uh like

SPEAKER_07: this and toxins but he moved that science forward now he had done it on his own so that he would slowly build up a tolerance to this so he could handle his own snakes but this person has given more to the advancement more people have survived venomous snake attacks because of this individual

SPEAKER_05: he saved thousands of lives i believe so very interesting frontier we're on now huh yeah that's

SPEAKER_90: a really great example yes um tell me about the regulatory which um modern societies have a very

SPEAKER_05: progressive thoughtful way of advancing the science given the risks united states i think is the most

SPEAKER_17: conservative with the fda or extremely conservative in the top 20 of conservative and it is a fairly

SPEAKER_71: conservative but you have more and more intention from the fda to act fast track cell therapy and

SPEAKER_11: gen therapy so that is still very early and also i am not a legal specialist especially of the us healthcare system but other countries like south korea japan japan is uh very advanced so in 2012 dr shina yamanaka won the nobel prize for discovery on pluripotent stem cells in 2013 if i'm not wrong the regenerative medicine law act was enacted and that's really fast track um cell therapies and gen therapies in japan so in japan we have access to numerous therapies that you do not have access uh to in the us and you have the really high quality medical care in japan so i think that's an extremely interesting uh unique situation and that's also one of the reason we are here with second abs when we get back from this

SPEAKER_08: quick break i want to talk to you about company building yep here on this week in startups great job

SPEAKER_07: that was awesome all right we're here we're in tokyo for founder university our second cohort of founder

SPEAKER_08: university in tokyo we've got an incredible guest bilal is here from eki labs you can go find out more at e-k-e-i-l-a-b-s dot com uh let's talk about building a company why did you choose to place your

SPEAKER_21: company in here in tokyo and i understand okinawa yeah so here in tokyo and japan is of course as you

SPEAKER_11: mentioning super edge society great legal framework to fast track relative medicine as well as great scientists and we work on aging we want to build an infrastructure to really accelerate aging research so in terms of like macro environment it makes a lot of sense and why okinawa so funny enough it's one of the blue zone where the life expectancy is really high but this is not the reason we're there the reason we are there is because of the okinawa institute of science and technology that's um i don't know if you're familiar with it it's pretty unique so it depends directly from the prime minister office by status the language is in english 50 japanese people 50 foreign people only from phd graduates and it's really a center of excellence for fundamental research great science great environments great talents and we have located all of our rnd in okinawa so we have our own lab bench so when we receive the samples from our clients directly in our lab in okinawa and now we have actually a great bridge from graduated academics from hoist to come and work directly from us with us so it's a very great situation in which we do the business development uh fundraising here in tokyo and all of the science

SPEAKER_102: in okinawa tell us a little bit about uh we get the talent base right so that's great you have a great

SPEAKER_07: customer base you've got a great framework for uh regulations here those are all um i guess wind in your cells um as opposed to headwinds if you were in other places um let's talk about raising money in

SPEAKER_21: japan versus the united states or other places now you were born in paris you spent time in thailand now you're in japan so i just got back from paris incredible i forgot how amazing paris is and then you get to tokyo and you're like wow these are two of the great societies and you've got to live in both

SPEAKER_71: yeah yeah pretty lucky so when was the last time you went to france and to paris i probably well i was

SPEAKER_21: there like i said for two weeks uh just recently and then before that it was about 10 years before that

SPEAKER_55: it has changed yes quite a lot especially for the startup space yeah they're really cooking with oil

SPEAKER_21: there's a lot of great startup energy um and i think they're becoming a little bit more flexible

SPEAKER_05: in terms of hiring people firing people there were some laws that made it very difficult to hire folks

SPEAKER_21: um or to take risks in hiring folks because you couldn't um 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

SPEAKER_109: that's why a lot of founders who are taking high-risk startups maybe have a little bit of a

SPEAKER_11: challenge there yeah yeah absolutely and um it changed a lot like being regulatory space but also

SPEAKER_110: the amount of international international founders and talents coming to paris i actually grew up 10

SPEAKER_07: minutes from station f and station f is this beautiful uh old train station i believe or warehouse

SPEAKER_21: that's been converted into a we work a co-working facility exactly and the whole neighborhood is

SPEAKER_96: completely different from the time i grew up so it's definitely interesting to come back when i can

SPEAKER_05: and you have a great startup community here that's emerging lots of talent that's why we're here uh we're watching so many uh young folks and uh people who would have normally uh worked at a big company for life decide hey i'm gonna try a startup and their parents are supporting them i was talking with the journalist today he's gen x as well and uh i asked him for his three kids he had some kids who were 17 and

SPEAKER_07: 20 years old and i said um would you be happy if your kids took the risk of doing a company he said oh i'd be thrilled now he works for essentially the new york times of japan so he's you know a business

SPEAKER_05: reporter uh i said would your parents as a gen xer you know he's got gen z kids would your parents as a gen xer be happy if you started a company or would they be scared he said oh scary they wouldn't have wanted to so we have this great moment where we have so many great founders here and they're taking

SPEAKER_08: 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

SPEAKER_07: great vcs you have corporate vcs and they also have grants so you fund in this company with a

SPEAKER_108: million dollars in seed funding and some and some grants yeah exactly so we raised uh capital from

SPEAKER_11: japanese vcs as well as with from great um japanese angels so not japanese angels and as well as europeans who have lived in japan and um led huge companies in japan for decades so we have very strong investors and what is quite unique and what your audience especially in the us might be quite surprised that we also had numerous startup loans so actually regional banks um are risk takers and they do give

SPEAKER_07: loans to biotech startups which is incredible yeah there are banks yeah that have been given money by

SPEAKER_05: the government and allowed to take the risk of backing startups yep 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

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SPEAKER_11: 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 um over a long period of time and more importantly you have official institutions that are grantors which mean that they also test takes the risk of granting the loan and so you mentioned there's a lot of great vcs in japan but the early stage funding is still sometimes slow and with small checks and for us it's being able to leverage what we raise in equity to have more than what we raise right so yes we have one

SPEAKER_125: and then we're going to have another one from the from the banks we can have for every dollar you raise

SPEAKER_21: you can get a bank dollar and then if you fight hard you might be able to get some grant money

SPEAKER_07: because you're in this technology yeah most angel investors here what's their check size and the

SPEAKER_48: range um i've really heard uh of uh everything anything um you know from a couple of thousands

David Friedberg: of dollars to a few like hundreds of thousands of dollars okay so you could have a 5k 10k check

SPEAKER_07: a 25k check even 100 or 200k check so that's lower than america and at lower valuations but you raise less money per round because the cost of running a business here is significantly less than

SPEAKER_32: san francisco yeah um exactly so you raise less sorry that was your question yeah yeah so yeah you

SPEAKER_11: raise less absolutely because um definitely uh less expensive than running a startup in san francisco

SPEAKER_48: and also in our case is we know that we can take the risk of raising less because we can add other sources of non-delutive funding right incredible so we can keep a clean cap table and have more than

SPEAKER_11: what we raise for and actually that's quite interesting because um more and more u.s biotech vcs come to japan and they're quite amazed at what a japanese uh startup that's raised 200k they were able to accomplish right look at the data that was only made with this amount of resources so i think something that we can be really proud in japan is how much we can achieve um with some

SPEAKER_05: really uh small resources well and this will be an arbitrage opportunity american vcs raise large funds but they can take make a couple of bets here at a lower valuation the valuations in the

SPEAKER_07: united states have become disconnected from reality again we had that happen previously in 2019 2020 before covet they got disconnected during the sas period where they were giving people incredible

SPEAKER_05: valuations um so looking internationally you can find great teams that accomplish a lot on a small dollar amount then you have to look at well can they exit for a large amount of money so you're

SPEAKER_07: incorporated as a japanese company or a delaware company so we are incorporated as a japanese company

SPEAKER_11: and we are talking more and more with us vcs and we might uh flip flip yeah yeah and the flip would

SPEAKER_05: then allow them if you were texas uh company uh 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

SPEAKER_90: sensitive you can run the company here and then when it's time for an exit or an ipo uh you can become an american company yeah um 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

SPEAKER_05: 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

SPEAKER_11: yes um actually the regulation have changed a lot uh to do an ipo the japanese series b for a really long time used to be uh the ipo incredible with as little as five or ten million in revenue exactly so the tokyo stock exchange actually stopped that and now um do you know why they stopped

SPEAKER_05: doing that is it was it because there were too many failures or yeah i think there was too many like

SPEAKER_71: zombie companies on the stock markets and also i think that they want to uh encourage merger and

SPEAKER_48: acquisition as exits and i think that would be really healthy right because we're mentioning that the

SPEAKER_11: checks signed by the angels are pretty low is because also we don't have a lot of founder that's exited for a lot of cash and then that can really recirculate uh the money with uh angel investments so now it's a lot of restructuration i think being made with japanese vcs and japanese lps because the question is if the startups cannot uh do an exit by the ipo around like the series b timing

SPEAKER_96: where do they get the gross funding and how do they exit so that's definitely interesting uh time in uh

SPEAKER_05: in japan for this mergers and acquisitions would always be the second option for an exit uh for an

SPEAKER_21: american company we had four years where it wasn't allowed we had a woman named lena khan running uh you know for the biden administration the uh rules around m a and they block them and so people gave up on m a president trump joined uh became president for a second term 47 president united states and he has been very pro m a in fact inserting themselves into it and advising people and uh asking for certain ones to be approved and other ones not to be approved there are some problems there i guess

SPEAKER_05: 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 recycle circulates cash talk a

SPEAKER_21: 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 uh environment for equity we have founders who will basically decide hey i'm going to do four years at google my four years are up i'm not happy with this equity grant i think google's fully you know i think their valuation is fully realized or it's going to grow more modestly now which is what happens when companies uh mature i'm going to go to uh 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

SPEAKER_07: open ai shares uh or at many other ai companies the expectation here is there isn't as much of a

SPEAKER_05: cutthroat environment employees don't even in some cases understand and you might be the first person to give them equity do they believe you that it has the potential to have value or do they just

SPEAKER_21: think uh this is just like um a lottery ticket and uh 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

SPEAKER_11: it really depends um on the employees we've had some who wants to fight uh to have more stock options and you have more equity in the company some um less but we try to really make them understand that our success is shared with all the company that's very important for us but more and more um i think japanese employees look at equity in the companies so there's been a lot of talks in the news about um how the stock options regulations got eased in japan so now definitely um it is more uh accepted

SPEAKER_05: and understood by uh were there some technical issues around taxation and uh the awarding of them

SPEAKER_81: yeah so i'm not really uh familiar with the topic because that's uh happened just before we really

SPEAKER_11: started issuing a lot of discussion but from what i've heard yeah it was um on top of the taxation it was also quite hard to grasp uh the previous framework and now it's really simplified um

SPEAKER_05: to uh yeah 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 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

SPEAKER_07: decisions maybe what were the sign maybe when you were less focused on product market fit did you make some mistakes and build things you didn't need to just explore and let's open up that topic so it's

SPEAKER_11: quite interesting so we have this epigenetic services right so now we focus really on drug development but we also used to offer the services to longevity clinics that want to measure aging for their for their patients and we actually had quite some growth with the clinics a lot of prospect lots of meetings but we decided to completely terminate this business and the reason why it was because it felt like a distraction from what will really make the value of the company explode which is a race for data generation so we really just focus on improving our methods to have even higher resolution in um in epigenetic and the idea is to being able to generate data that nobody else can and from this data derive assets that will give us an advantage that could be new diagnostic that could be new therapeutic assets and that's i think what will be the vision of product market fit is when we'll be able to really derive

SPEAKER_05: 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 yeah and it's not going to accrue significant value to the equity holders to the corporation yeah and so let's go for the long

SPEAKER_21: value creation and that's trading short-term greed and opportunity for long-term greed and opportunity

SPEAKER_48: yeah we really believe in the clinical importance of by markers of aging in clinics we didn't exit the

SPEAKER_11: market for that but what we believe is that we can if we keep improving our methods to generate data at a higher resolution lower cost we might be able to come to clinics with an even cheaper and better products so we really want to focus on uh on the rnd we 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

SPEAKER_05: early there is a certain amount of runway in the bank you've got 18 months 12 months and you can pick up some quick revenue you see weeks 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

SPEAKER_07: 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

SPEAKER_21: have a board of directors and now you get caught maybe you have an angel on the board maybe you know you have some people who are nervous from corporates maybe you have people who are vcs who they just want the power law yeah they would rather nine out of ten companies go to zero and one go to a billion then have you know five of them have 100 million dollar exits because just on a math basis 500 million

SPEAKER_07: versus a billion or two billion dollar outcome they're going to push you for that so have you

SPEAKER_48: experienced that tension yet here in year three or four um no actually and i think that one of the reasons why is uh in our cap table so we have angel investors but they're all um first well versed in biotech and second of all this is not the first the first check the science so they know um how it plays

SPEAKER_11: but also what is important even uh before having the approval from your board of directors you also need to have a consensus inside the company right you need to talk with all of the team and just decide

SPEAKER_81: this is a company we want to build this is a risk we want to take and this is these are the changes we

SPEAKER_08: want to have on the world uh i want to go back to one topic i didn't hit on when we were talking about your company which is biological age yeah i have a whoop yeah i did blood tests with superpower and function health and all these things and they one of them gives me like oh you're not sleeping at the same pattern so you're a little bit older and then my blood tests are excellent oh you're a little

SPEAKER_21: younger these are just two different modalities one is the blood test one is like sleeping patterns

SPEAKER_08: 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

SPEAKER_07: 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

SPEAKER_08: up really early and want to do a workout i don't want to live by that strict of it and try to game

SPEAKER_07: that metric um and i don't want to take a ton of supplements and try to make my vitamin d go up just

SPEAKER_08: so my blood test can say it i'm having a hard time making sense of this what is biological age and

SPEAKER_11: 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 you we can look for example at the methylation of your dna and estimate that you have meditation patterns that is some one of someone who is like 45 years old or we can look at another marker and estimate that your biological age is 55 years old so it's really finding a biomarker and then just looking how you benchmark um and what you were mentioning with the whoop and how to uh try to game the the system i think is very important because at some points that's why actually i'm making a star for my ua ring is because it looks like you're trying to optimize for biomarkers that can be disconnected from your actual health from how you feel and um so for consumers i would say that the value is really uh for the trends that's actually encourage as a population level people maybe to sleep better to eat better but if we look at the medical age and biomarkers of aging for drug development then you can find some value right because you can have to have a marker um that is objective that is not perfect but it can really help uh designing your clinical trials protocol that can help you help uh for your drug discovery

SPEAKER_07: amazing uh finally blue zones yep okinawa is one of them there were some in italy i understand there's

SPEAKER_21: 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 uh because maybe they got some benefits of saying they were a little bit older in some towns so some of that research has been reversed but the japanese people

SPEAKER_05: are known for living longer on average and they're in some cases living in cities for to a long age do you has there been enough research now to understand the truth about these blue zones and

SPEAKER_08: okinawa obviously is one that is legitimate i believe and maybe the ones in italy were the ones that weren't um so tell me a little bit about the controversy there so the papers that was released for

SPEAKER_32: the controversy was basically um it made an observation that most of the blue zones were the poorest uh

SPEAKER_11: areas of those countries and so it's not really intuitive to think that the poorest areas of some countries or where the lifespan are the highest so they went uh did some field trip and they realized that some people for example that we estimated to be 100 180 years were just dead and people were collecting collecting the pension the family for example um that being said in okinawa and in most

SPEAKER_32: of the blue zones there's some strong uh links is sociability sociability sociability why would

Chamath Palihapitiya: that make somebody live longer they're happier they have lower stress yeah what is the theory there

SPEAKER_48: that socialization correlates with longevity exactly so i think it's first um if you have someone who

SPEAKER_11: knocks at your door every day to see that you're in good health you have someone to actually care for you and therefore you tend to live higher and having healthier behavior and also i think that mentally having someone to look to look at and to have a regular routine with some people that you appreciate you to feel the support is actually extremely important to be in good health and unfortunately i know some people who've had this really strong um supportive networks for years and when the supportive network disappear they can actually um decline decline yeah extremely fast so this socialization is um extremely important and i've seen it firsthand in uh in okinawa with some solidarity networks that last for a really long time with people that have been peers for decades

SPEAKER_96: and it's really beautiful to see and as well as diets can make um definitely different especially in

SPEAKER_90: italy the mediterranean diet is uh yeah yeah uh and i saw a study last week and again this is a

SPEAKER_08: very early study yeah and i like to find these research stories as they happen it said the chances of alzheimer's parkinson's were dramatically lower in people who are bilingual or lower in people who

SPEAKER_07: are bilingual and who knew a second language and dramatically lower in people who are able to speak four languages or more yeah and i thought wow that's fascinating there's something about the plasticity of the mind that if you speak multiple languages your mind is healthier which then makes sense it's almost like it's working out and because it has and this is i don't know if you've heard

SPEAKER_11: this study that's just in the last year or so i read it it would be interesting to see if blue zones also zones where you have more dialects and therefore uh more brain health more brain health yeah

SPEAKER_21: because that is one of the big diseases right you have heart you have um uh and brains uh and lungs

SPEAKER_77: like there's like some specific ones that tend to the fourth horsemen of the death yeah and i think

SPEAKER_180: these are some of the big ones uh well this has been a fascinating discussion let's give a big round

SPEAKER_90: of applause to our guest and we'll do a couple of questions from our founders here uh if you have a crisp great question we're gonna we have a microphone here we'd like you to come up to a great question would be amazing uh either about his company or uh just about running a company

SPEAKER_183: and so it could use three great questions well thank you for the talk yeah my question is when you decided to cut one of your services as you mentioned with the clinics did you base it on data of the earned or the with the earned and the booked uh amount or did you also play into the forecasted one if you're going to be closing this certain project well actually

SPEAKER_186: if we were looking at the numbers and if we're looking at the books we would have for black kept the business because it was revenue generating and growing it was more of um strategic question like where do we want to grow the company and where do we really want to focus 100 in terms of development and we made a difficult choice of cutting a service that was actually generating cash regularly and predictably to really being able to focus on the r&d and uh trying to cut distractions

SPEAKER_07: for the time being all right great question uh and that really is what it's about you you have only so many cycles as a founder and a founding team and focus is so important yeah and especially today

SPEAKER_11: because so we do work with ai and we generate data for ai models but we are not like a ai uh first company and today it feels like every week where you don't grow expressionably is a week that you might waste forever i don't know if that makes sense yeah 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 uh industry where we are we have to follow the pace of experiments and and the lab and we really just want to give us um all the force to grow as much as we can and working

SPEAKER_36: on the most difficult uh topic because this is where we will really create value yeah uh it's inherent

SPEAKER_90: in the japanese culture i believe the term is kaizen continuous continuous improvement yes uh yeah i'm

SPEAKER_21: getting nods okay uh pronounced it correctly yeah kaizen um and this is one of the reasons why when i bring um investors or angels or venture capitalists and uh 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 uh or you know their tailor uh or they work in the subway they've been trying to be a little bit better every week for many years my favorite audio guy every time he just tries to make the audio 10 better right and that spirit is so important um and founders have it

SPEAKER_07: inherently but most people don't and they they don't understand that compounding improvement just like compounding interest is one of the most powerful forces in the world and to your wasted weeks this is so critical because it's not just if you waste 10 weeks a year if you could have could have gotten your startup to be three percent more efficient that week and then three percent i mean it compounds and it compounds yeah and instead of having you know that kind of improvement you'll just have this is what

SPEAKER_11: we hope and um and now i think we'll be we are like in one of the most exciting times to build a startup and i don't think that we can afford to not try to go push yeah you really want to try to accelerate

SPEAKER_08: it and are you uh let's take another question if somebody has one go ahead and go to the microphone and uh 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 um if this is america they would be pushing each other over

SPEAKER_21: to get to the microphone to plug their company and embed a plug for their company into the question

SPEAKER_08: uh but one question for you i think you know when you look at this uh improvement how are you using ai to

SPEAKER_05: run the company uh and how do you decide to hire the next person or maybe solve those problems with ai

SPEAKER_11: um great question so as an organization we are still like ai 1.0 i would say we don't use agents for example so oh wow we have no agents we we're still no cron jobs no agents no cron jobs okay exactly so we still like have a lot of like lab work that is quite manual but for ai yeah unfortunately like we do um hire for example like junior people and uh in terms that have learned um that have a background

SPEAKER_30: in machine learning for example and that we know they can actually use ai as a base they came to accelerate uh their uh their work yeah yeah this is a term at amazon jeff bezos and the team over

SPEAKER_05: there had called a bar razor yeah so you have a group in your company company and uh you say oh we want to add somebody who's really good at pr social media and just

SPEAKER_21: doing corporate communications okay uh 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

SPEAKER_07: knowledge base than anybody on the team so when they come in the bar has been raised now we know somebody who really knows how to write a blog post do a video do write a tweet go on linkedin and tell us how to promote there and then everybody in the organization the bar 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 then the boss is going to like them better and maybe my job's at risk or they'll take work away from me but they got everybody to agree let's try to hire bar raisers let's try to hire the people who can drive the company

SPEAKER_11: you know higher especially at the beginning at the start of your company right because you need those people who really going to bring something that the team doesn't have so it's really essential to have uh 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 multiplied the quality of their work and became you know world-class levels uh engineers so it's uh very uh exciting uh yeah

Chamath Palihapitiya: let's take uh another question from our amazing founder university founders hey thank you very much

SPEAKER_212: for the session um i have a question um i wanted to know how do you know the best time to exit

SPEAKER_215: are there some factors you look at are there signs to let you know this is the right time this is the

SPEAKER_32: right to sell your company yes great um so for us we have envisioned like three times we could be

SPEAKER_186: uh acquired and it's really um thinking okay if we get high career now can we push the company at a much higher valuation in the next couple of years in the next three years or is it better to just sell the asset now and let someone else take take the hand so we try to build a company that will grow into a platform a platform is basically we have the engine to generate ip and to generate different assets and the question for us to exit would be okay if company a wants to acquire for assets do we sell them or do we just want to keep pushing to develop even better assets and more assets to have this component effect and take the risk of not selling now um so that's would be for me the idea that uh i would have about the exit it would be really about can we keep generating more uh ips and

SPEAKER_21: more assets yeah and i would say when i talk to founders about this and they ask me for my counsel

SPEAKER_90: if the founder um 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

SPEAKER_05: 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 uh 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 um that's going to take five years out of our mission we're going to have unlimited funding we have unlimited resources and they have unlimited go to market i'd like to do that um 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 i will get offers that will accelerate the mission i'm going to turn them down because i want to independently pursue

SPEAKER_90: 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 dollar firm that's going to invest in 30 companies they expect 25 to go to zero three to return two or three times their money and they're looking for one or two to be outliers if they have one that's an outlier and returns 30x 40x 50x maybe they have a 2x fund if they have to 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

SPEAKER_05: company at 20 million they've got a 200 million dollar fund and they own 10 of your company okay they own two million in equity in your company if your company gets to 10 billion uh and they're diluted 50 percent now they own five percent they get 500 million dollars they're a two and a half x

SPEAKER_07: company that's if they invested just in your company and you become a 10 billion dollar company think about how hard venture capital is that's how hard it is that's why so many people are quitting

SPEAKER_90: venture capital and do one or two funds and just quit uh 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 uh we want to do our diligence with our board and the board has gone out and selected you as one of the the people we're going to talk to we have 12 people we're talking to would you like to review our company and where we're at would you like to meet our management of those 12 targets six say yes and then you've got two offers and of those six another three offers come in now you have five offers now you say okay we'd like everybody to put their bid in then we're going to go to the final two bids and then we're going to do one more bake off and you explain that bidding process

SPEAKER_21: and so yeah ruloff told me that at sequoia uh when he yeah and he said great companies are bought not sold if you're in the selling process and trying to convince people it's going to go for a low price if you have multiple offers it's going to go for a high price and you'll just know because people will want to hang out with you all of a sudden the founder of another company will call you

SPEAKER_90: 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 uh or some artist or the most interesting person in the world and be friends with him if steve job wants to be with you it's for that reason so you know when it's happening great job okay let's take another question now we're talking now now the dam has

SPEAKER_225: broken now we're talking okay question but uh japan is the land of the robots and there's a lot of human-robot interaction research here around aging and the use of social robots so you know

SPEAKER_228: my question is if loneliness has a measure measurable biological impact through stress inflammation cognitive decline do you think that perhaps a sufficiently capable social robot could measureably improve biomarkers of aging ah that's a great question um if the robot can actually create

SPEAKER_186: a link with uh with a person and have a feeling of care i would assume so and i don't know if you've seen like the dog robots that were uh with sunny and there were like some study that actually showed that there was an affectionate link being created so i would love to believe that there will uh be a

David Friedberg: value for it yeah all right and that now we're talking he has a robot company working on now we've got now we got in the spirit he's got a robotic company that's working on the software to create

SPEAKER_233: companions well done great question all right let's take another question now we're talking now

SPEAKER_21: you guys are acting like americans okay would you like to promote your company in the form of a question

SPEAKER_236: go i'm doing something about a2a agent to asian okay my question is something different okay i'm curious about your opinion on uh working culture today silicon valley has a very hustle culture such as you know uh 996 or zero zero nine uh zero seven and uh using it it is bad for longevity oh i mean or

SPEAKER_243: sometimes startups should do that kind of you know resolution that's a good question yeah the intensity

SPEAKER_244: of 996 which is a chinese thing not a japanese thing is it uh i think so but japan also has similar

SPEAKER_243: tradition i guess especially in you know traditional company in japan yeah you work late nights

SPEAKER_11: yeah yes okay yeah um no it's extremely important extremely interesting and it's really today i read an article about the prime minister takeuchi who i think that he was sleeping between zero to three hours a night uh for her job and i basically think that is not sustainable so of course in a startup we

SPEAKER_186: have marathon and we have crush and the 996 is just inevitable uh we work on difficult things and we work on uh on a uh on thing that also really passionate us right we have a team that would have the choice to either work in some of the best universities in the world over 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 uh invisible days that being said um at the company at ak labs we really value uh work-life balance and we really value um personal time and we think that in the long run you need to allow some uh some kind of uh of uh of rest and um we've seen some companies that were actually taking the medical age of their uh employees to find out if they were like overworked or not so if they aging was increasing a bit too fast that's maybe a sign that they might be closer to uh to a burnout yeah um but definitely

SPEAKER_05: i don't know if you have an opinion on uh on the workers um you know at my firm i say to folks try and keep up with me yeah i work 60 hours a week uh 70 hours some weeks um but i try to enjoy life and

SPEAKER_21: i think having a sustainable culture is good yeah now sometimes we have intense moments like we're kicking off a program other times things are a little bit slower venture tends to be slower over the holidays because no deals get done between december 15th and january 10th maybe so you have this nice respite and in the summer other vc firms essentially the vcs go on vacation for weeks and they will be lightly active but they do a lot of travel and they try to enjoy it for startups i think you

SPEAKER_05: should work extremely hard and try to beat your competition but you do need to understand that if

SPEAKER_21: 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

SPEAKER_05: and then they come back and i watch them do it again and i'm like super proud of them it's an extreme pursuit uh 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

SPEAKER_21: 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 but i do think you need to make a very personal choice

SPEAKER_05: and the and then super imposed on that choice is if you have a partner if you get married and you

SPEAKER_90: have kids now you have a different responsibility alone 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 gonna 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

SPEAKER_21: 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

SPEAKER_05: just give me your best price sorry i'm in japan sorry just give me your best freaking price and i'll tell you yes or no and they're like yeah but i want to walk you some products and we're really competing with this company i was like i just literally said to them i don't care i just want the best price and i'll make a 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

SPEAKER_21: tokyo i have to give them some time too right yeah so i think this is like um the philosophy i take so different times in your when i was young i was at the office seven days a week i made my career i

SPEAKER_05: 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

SPEAKER_21: 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

SPEAKER_05: newsletter uh is doing a conference and they had like 200 people show up i said what and i said we have

SPEAKER_21: to do a conference and we need to have 2 000 people there and i got 2 000 people to come and pay a thousand dollars each and i just said anybody who creates a competing product we have to do it

SPEAKER_07: better and we have to crush them and make them feel like they cannot compete that's crazy and i'm still

SPEAKER_90: crazy like that but what i do is i do it in a more thoughtful way and more strategically and now i say i'm not going to do some projects i'm just going to be strategic so founder university is very strategic for me we we know we can get to founders before the other programs so i just sat and i meditated how namaste how do we get to founders first and i just came up with a more efficient idea so efficiency can beat hours but efficiency and hours can beat everything so just be ruthless about efficiency and then with hours you have to follow your energy like this sleeping zero to three hours a night is dumb yeah because you'll make more mistakes and then that will work against you i believe you should get seven hours of sleep even if you're like a crazy young person there's no reason not to just stop watching tv like who cares about tv and movies whatever like just pick one show a year that you love go see like whatever number of movies also you have to be healthy like this is so critical i the founders who were unhealthy and i was unhealthy i was 40 pounds heavier when i was

SPEAKER_21: unhealthy i didn't think as crisply as i do now when i lost the weight i was like my thinking my energy just totally changed so all right we'll save some questions for next time uh let's give it up for kilal and his company of course is ekey labs e-k-e-i labs.com you're hiring i assume

SPEAKER_05: yeah and so if you want to live an amazing life in okinawa or in tokyo uh go to his website i'm sure

SPEAKER_21: there's a jobs board absolutely and you can go check out all the amazing jobs and we'll see you next time on this week at startups good job everybody okay