SPEAKER_00: my time in japan is sadly coming to an end for this trip we had an amazing founder university for three days here with our partner jetro and that is our second cohort good news we're going to do a third cohort in january if you would like to be part of founder university in january we're going to open up the applications on the first of september at founder.university you can apply and then we also had angel university here in tokyo at jetro's special beating space and this SPEAKER_01: time i think we have close to 20 angel investors the angel investor community is growing here in japan as the number of startups grow and the opportunity grows and as part of this we have SPEAKER_00: founder university here we have angel university here and i like to tape a couple of episodes of this week in startups while i'm here for the english version of this week in startups but i'm considering trying to find a host and a partner to do this week in startups japan the japanese version and maybe even to cover some of the other great startup centers around japan and as part of that i asked my team to research some of the great founders and today i'm very happy we have akimi uh soagula and she is the founder of bespoke and she has three very interesting businesses here in japan working on uh workers coming here in japan um where there is a labor shortage yes yep so welcome to this week in startups you've been an entrepreneur here doing this startup for over 10 years you started with a business uh b-bot where you were doing a multilingual chat bot that business did very well yeah and uh had good revenue i would say so otherwise you wouldn't have SPEAKER_03: founded two more businesses right right so that business did well and visitors who are coming here SPEAKER_01: can talk and on different websites for governments and get prepared to come here 60 million tourists come here every year and that's increased a lot over the last 10 years hasn't it yes it has when we first SPEAKER_08: started back in 2015 tourists were not like you know everywhere like today we walk around the street and it's very difficult not to see any tourists right um back then it was not like that so when we first started offering the chapel service to help um known japanese people uh traveling to japan people thought we were crazy and this is also the time before like all the chat gpt and you know junei came out so investors did not think it was a good idea and why didn't they think it was a good idea what was SPEAKER_11: your insight that was working that you believed in it and why didn't investors see it the thing investors SPEAKER_08: did not believe in was like how people would communicate with ai when they need help because back in 2015 ai was not popular at all and then there were there was no other chapel service out there that people were using like actively so they did not think it was possible uh technically and then also culturally uh but then like we did a lot of um test run right yeah we also had human including myself chat with people uh pretending to be a bot and you faked it yes we faked it yeah multiple occasions yes uh well SPEAKER_00: this is important you have to do things that don't scale as paul graham would say at y combinator and it's a good insight to have the human in the loop because you learn and i think you learned that there was a market for this and people were starting to come here but the japanese culture is inspiring but also for people coming here can also be intimidating it's a tough language to learn and um you know maybe going into a store or getting a visa or planning a trip getting a taxi it SPEAKER_18: wasn't as smooth in 2015 as it is now yeah correct and then things got even more interesting after 2017 SPEAKER_08: when narita airport signed us oh it's one of the largest airport sure haneda and narita yeah exactly SPEAKER_09: and then narita came to us and they said look um people are lining up at the information counter and our people keep quitting the job because it's stressful being like yelled at in russian korean chinese all sorts of different languages um these workers like didn't speak um multiple different SPEAKER_08: languages right right so the airport came to us and said like hey look if you can automate the communication between hotel guests and the hotels you should be able to do that with the airport Chamath Palihapitiya: much easier like easier yes so it's stressful to travel uh people are cranky they came here on a SPEAKER_00: flight and maybe their luggage is lost or they don't know about their connecting flight and so you send them to a web interface they get on their phone and they can chat in whichever language and this is SPEAKER_31: before google had their product or did you partner with google how did you do the technology we actually made it all in house crazy huh yeah well i mean it didn't exist as a service so you had to build it SPEAKER_00: so let's talk a little bit about tourism and then we'll go into your two other businesses because it's a good opportunity i think for entrepreneurs who are listening to this week in startups to from first principles your experience looking for problems that you can solve because of things changing in a society right so one thing that changed was so many people coming to japan and not just coming but making a yearly trip or coming back over and over again so now 60 million people coming why do you think personally and through your data why do you think japan has become SPEAKER_08: so popular there are multiple reasons um of course like the big factor is the weekend weekend currency right oh it is a big driver yeah i think it is a big driver japan used to be an expensive destination a long long time ago right but now i think it's one of the cheapest like the most affordable SPEAKER_00: destination you still get high quality people are delighted to come to something that's extremely high quality at a very fair price what you would pay for an average good in america in a new york city san francisco you can get a luxury experience here i think so money is not the only factor but i SPEAKER_08: think for larger audience like the average tourist it is a big factor yeah and then after that food SPEAKER_00: shopping culture beauty tourism exactly there's so many things people come for also skiing has become very popular very popular i understand yes there are some cities where it's too popular huh and maybe some of the and i've seen this firsthand in niseko there are some cultures japanese culture very specific and some cultures may be a little bit loud or different and there's a little bit of tension maybe people don't know how to behave when they're uh be respectful in kyoto or on a lift line in niseko or how to behave in a restaurant yes yeah maybe you can talk a little bit about this uh tension because i understand also maybe some restaurants uh don't put their name in english and try to hide SPEAKER_08: the restaurant so only the locals come yeah it's true it is completely true so over tourism has been a problem not just recently it's been a problem probably even about like since 2017 2018 when we saw like the SPEAKER_09: surge of tourists so one of the uh trigger before japan became popular was the government's decision to loosen the visa requirements for um non-western tourists to come in because they're the major SPEAKER_08: like tourists right the majority of the tourists so that was the beginning and then um the whole manner thing became a problem so some restaurants were like even yokans like the japanese inns like they've decided not to take any known japanese tourists which is bizarre but they do have their own SPEAKER_09: reasons of like not accepting uh but then there are like there's also like majority of like SPEAKER_08: other shops and like um hotels like welcoming um foreign like non-japanese tourists SPEAKER_41: and uh that has also become major part of the businesses like the profit founders are scrappy by SPEAKER_51: nature and many like you like to dig in and get started building without worrying about admin they run the SPEAKER_52: whole business on excel then keep adding on more random tools as needed but here's the problem none of these tools and platforms know how to talk to each other so you wind up playing go-between with a cluster of different systems it's a franken business it's a frankincite and it's a huge waste of time but now there's odoo the all-in-one management software that's serving 16 million users across more than 170 SPEAKER_51: 000 companies in over 120 countries now your crm sales accounting manufacturing website inventory and point of sale they're all in one easy to find place and most importantly every app talks to every other app sell a product on your website and the invoice gets created instantly and your inventory gets updated automatically so if you're stitching together spreadsheets and keeping track of five different logins get started today at odoo.com twist that's odoo.com twist to level up your business Chamath Palihapitiya: what should an american coming to japan just two or three simple things they should know to be respectful SPEAKER_08: of the culture take off your shoes when you enter new accounts um that's the first thing second thing maybe talk slightly softer or quiet when you're surrounded by a lot of people um i'm still SPEAKER_57: practicing i can i'm trying i'm from brooklyn we talk very loud so i've i've had to adjust right here SPEAKER_00: you can talk as loud as you yes here on this podcast i went to a listening one of my new favorite things to do is um they have a vinyl bar i'm sure you've been to one or you know it so we went to the vinyl bar and they were playing beautiful music on a very old stereo system and we're drinking very nice uh scotch having a nice cocktail and my friend who was with me she's very loud louder than me and you're supposed to be there to listen to the music and in america people are very confrontational very blunt they will tell you shut up you're talking too loud in japan she was talking too loud and so the uh hostess came and she said please enjoy music and my friend was like what was that about and i SPEAKER_60: said you're talking way too loud so she calmed down she talked a little bit lower then she started talking loud again the woman came back please enjoy music quietly now oh okay yeah so take your shoes off SPEAKER_08: you don't have to talk super loud and then the third thing yes uh just accept things are different yes things are different a lot of difference here uh some people appreciate it other people get frustrated but it's different for a reason right i had to adjust um being from brooklyn new york SPEAKER_01: if you uh want to get a table at a restaurant you go to the maitre d the host and you take a little bit of money and you hand it to them and say oh uh thank you if uh we have like four people if there's anything you can do and in japan they say oh you should make a reservation next time and they show you SPEAKER_00: the reservation link and i said yeah and they don't know what to do with the tip they give it back to you and they hand it back to you immediately and just it's very confusing or maybe even insulting right and so you have to understand it's not personal there's a rule at the restaurant and one of the rules might be everybody has to order a drink and uh some food yep and that's because they're running SPEAKER_01: a business so it's a minimum uh spend kind of thing so even i have to learn some rules i can't buy a table it's not for sale uh etc so uh now 60 million people here also the taking of pictures SPEAKER_00: i think is people in america think oh the japanese people have selfie sticks they take too many pictures but then the americans come here and maybe they'll be in kyoto and there'll be some locals and they try to take a selfie with them without asking and just they're very obnoxious with the pictures yeah and waiting in line properly is the other one it's okay to wait in line right yeah SPEAKER_70: if you're traveling you probably got plenty of time to wait in line yes so don't worry about it um okay SPEAKER_31: so now um the you identify this problem good business great customers and you solve some real problems SPEAKER_00: then you found another uh challenge in japanese society which is um the population has gone down SPEAKER_01: a little bit maybe one percent a year one and a half percent i think is the number so i don't have SPEAKER_08: the exact percentage but uh every year we lose population equivalent of yamanashi prefecture that is SPEAKER_09: around uh 700 000 to 800 000 and then this number would go up rapidly uh to 1 million soon like each SPEAKER_08: year we lose a population like almost like 1 million so that is very significant it's very significant and SPEAKER_00: you have an aging population and it's a very affluent they have money they own some cases an apartment or another house but there's so much housing stock outside the city that it can't even be maintained all kinds of second order impact to the population decline and so we'll talk about maybe increasing SPEAKER_01: population and why it's not happening i have some guesses of why it's not happening it might be because people aren't having babies it's just a guess but i think the population would go up if people SPEAKER_78: had babies yes population can go up it's a joke you got me the joke didn't land in order for the SPEAKER_00: population to grow you have to make babies yeah yes but people don't want to uh maybe have babies or SPEAKER_81: start a family for some reason as much i think it's for obvious reasons actually tell me yeah tell me SPEAKER_08: the obvious is it too expensive to have a family i think so so having family has become a luxury because it's too expensive in tokyo wages have not gone up as much as it's not keeping up with inflation ah is SPEAKER_00: there a government plan to make it easier to start a family whether it's tax benefits or maybe trying SPEAKER_09: to raise wages not just for the baby purpose the government has been trying to pressure companies SPEAKER_08: and organizations to increase wages but not every company can transfer the price right so they can't just suddenly raise the service price to actually be able to increase pay yes for their workers so it SPEAKER_09: works in some companies especially large companies but not in smaller companies um the government has done some other things there are of course tax benefits as well but i don't think those are enough and in my personal experience so i have a child and i never got married but i have a child and so i've David Friedberg: been single mom since almost five years ago oh wow congratulations it's great to be a be a parent SPEAKER_08: thank you but then because i don't have anyone to rely on what i do is i take my child on every SPEAKER_09: business trip that i go on wow it's not there are not enough child support like system here i feel SPEAKER_31: like so you have to bring your five or six year old with you to every business trip almost every business SPEAKER_09: trip with no nanny or you have to try to find one so we tried to find nannies like at our destination so last month we got invited to uh by spanish government to be in spain for one month for work and i couldn't leave my son at home so i took him with me and we found three nannies in three different cities in spain and yeah he hung out with the nanny while i worked this is um incredibly impressive to SPEAKER_00: me that you're building this huge business and you're able to like take care of a child as well it's incredibly hard i have a partner and she's full-time raising three daughters and it's so hard on her and we have some nanny support maybe this is why startups are important if startups and stock options can provide uh greater wealth then maybe having a family won't be as much of a luxury decision it could be something that everybody can do more of but the other problem is because there's not so many young people you don't have the nannies you don't have people working in service jobs so you have to import people into the culture uh vietnam indonesia philippines many workers coming SPEAKER_08: here to work in construction and other service jobs shipyards hotels restaurants nursing many different SPEAKER_31: industries yeah at the easa i took my family to an izakaya last night and it was you know like maybe half japanese servers and the restaurants but the runners like the bus boys uh were all probably from SPEAKER_00: vietnam or indonesia i think so you created uh be trained a service to help train the folks who are coming from other countries yeah and this is also another cultural issue because it's a very specific culture here for full time so not only is are the japanese people having to deal with 60 million uh tourists you're having to deal with how many foreign workers are here now oh i don't have that SPEAKER_08: number with me right now i only know it is increasing very rapidly millions millions like back in the day so SPEAKER_09: japan always said no to immigration so um you were if you are non-japanese worker um blue color SPEAKER_08: workers yeah then you're only allowed to uh you you're only allowed in japan as a training it was supposed to be training thing but some industries like uh went to the government uh organization went to government and they said look like we simply don't have enough people so the government decided to change the regulation in 2019 and now if you are if you work in the list of like industries specified by the government then you are allowed to come in as a worker but you can only stay for five years unless you pass like certain exams then suddenly you can stay almost like permanently you've heard me SPEAKER_104: say it many times now if you're an early stage startup or small business every single new potential SPEAKER_106: customer is extremely valuable you can't afford to have a team that's missing calls if your communication is inconsistent your customers will notice that's why today's episode is brought to you by quo q-u-u-o the smarter way to run your business communication i use quo all day long i love it and it's just great to have that one number that my team and i can share so that we don't lose any customers quo is the number one top rated business phone system on g2 and it's already trusted by more than 90 000 businesses they're going to bring all of your calls texts and contacts together in a shared collaborative space that means your entire team is going to use one shared number so there's zero chance anyone is going to fall through the cracks money is on the line always say hello with quo try quo for free plus get 20 off your first six months when you go to quo.com twist that's q uo.com twist this is one of my favorite products in the world it gets my highest endorsement you do be trained what does your service SPEAKER_00: do to solve this problem for these employers and for their customers their employees are essentially their customers they need them as part of this equation and to recruit them sure so we do two SPEAKER_08: different things the first thing is to provide vocational training so these workers don't speak japanese SPEAKER_09: so experienced japanese walkers let's say like wallpaper specialist uh they only speak japanese right they they won't be able to train vietnamese workers um so what we do is we send out smart glasses and then have the wallpaper specialized specialists like put on the glasses and record how they do things um this person would be talking like oh here uh there's a little um hole here so this is how you SPEAKER_08: fix it or like you know explain now right and then we take out the video put it on our platform just like youtube right and then suddenly this video turns into a training video in different languages SPEAKER_09: and once you finish watching the video each video um it generates kind of like a test like quits SPEAKER_08: yeah so you can um as an hr manager you can verify the knowledge of the person you know if he or she SPEAKER_00: really watched the video and understood the comments so the training is part of it now let me ask a cultural question you you have um kaizen uh approach in all trades very high standards and then people who are coming uh from an emerging country uh maybe even a frontier market i think vietnam would be uh frontier maybe is i think the designation uh or an emerging market they may not have the same uh inherent training or schooling or discipline uh of the workers there that is demanded in japan i don't know if SPEAKER_01: that's the case with vietnam indonesia or philippines i know philippines have very good work ethic SPEAKER_00: work ethic because i have two of them work for me so as my athena assistants full-time to athena assistants like executive assistants um so very smart very hard working but um how is that you know kaizen obsession with perfection and doing a really good job how is that translating with these workers are they able to hit those notes or not were they able to hit those you know real uh high performance really SPEAKER_08: depends on the company and the industries i would say like some companies really try so for instance they would upload videos of defects then every manager watches the video and learns here is how defects happen that way they learn what not to do right right but then some other companies they just get um non-japanese workers do very basic stuff they treat those workers like low level Chamath Palihapitiya: yeah yeah do the basic stuff and then we have the high level skill for the detail work exactly SPEAKER_09: more important so it kind of depends on like how companies like separate uh division of labor right Chamath Palihapitiya: division of labor yeah there's also you know when we look at cultural um assimilation and harmony SPEAKER_00: in america we have a term the melting pot everybody comes and they put you know their ingredients into the pot and hopefully everybody learns english and becomes an american but there have been been tension with maybe some folks coming to europe or america or perhaps here in japan and not learning the language and i understand there's been some or there are some rule changes coming i know in finland and i think sweden they're now saying we could only accept a small number of non-english speakers because the school system for their kids and you know we just don't have enough people who speak the language who can even teach their children so you have to learn finnish or swedish to go into that country so here in japan not an easy language to learn but a great country to come live in so there should be some motivation tell me about the requirements that are about to change for people who are coming here to work full-time i think permanently they come maybe for five or ten years i'm not sure how long the visa is SPEAKER_35: but there's a requirement now or coming soon tell us about it yes so there is a japanese profit language SPEAKER_09: test um that's been around for a long time and then for um some industries like companies still would SPEAKER_08: prefer to hire people with people who have those like you know who have passed those tests uh there's SPEAKER_09: like n4 and three and two and one right and one is like me okay you speak perfect japanese almost SPEAKER_08: but then now with the new changes and i suppose you need to have n4 to come in and four and four SPEAKER_126: which means you could order lunch or find the bathroom a little bit more than that a little bit more SPEAKER_08: i think it was almost like you need to be speaking japanese like 10 years old like a 10 year old okay yeah that is actually pretty good advanced yeah that's pretty advanced yeah i hope i'm not mistaken SPEAKER_31: though yeah okay no it's close enough i think directionally correct um and so does that mean um SPEAKER_00: though that'll draw in higher level workers because they'll have to maybe have more motivation uh or uh higher um education level to learn another language to that level or is it going to um just also help so those communities can integrate into society and not be two separate societies you know here's the indonesians here's the filipino uh workers and you know here's the vietnamese workers but they don't uh you know share the japanese language and culture right i feel like we probably need SPEAKER_17: to separate two problems so industry so the government is probably thinking that way like SPEAKER_09: you can't just create let's say like the vietnamese village and they just hang out in that community SPEAKER_08: that won't work in japan maybe in the us it would still work to some extent but not so much anymore SPEAKER_00: where i grew up in brooklyn you have enclaves like little areas and there's a chinatown in brooklyn and manhattan and there's a little uh saigon and there's a uh odessa for russians but so you can SPEAKER_31: get away with not learning english immediately but eventually you probably want to yeah okay so you've SPEAKER_136: identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe SPEAKER_51: in so you're all set to launch your new company right not so fast if you want investors and potential customers to take your new business seriously you need to consider forming a delaware c corp and that's where northwest registered agent comes in they're going to give your new company a real identity that means an address for your public filings a domain a custom website a business email and of course a phone number 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 us you're operating from visit northwest registeredagent.com twist for more SPEAKER_08: details and the links are in the show notes and here the government doesn't want that situation to be SPEAKER_09: created so they try as much as they could and then also it is city government's responsibility right um for um kind of like making sure like non-japanese workers won't create tension uh between the residents in that area so it's been like headache for almost every city government that we meet SPEAKER_08: but on the other hand companies and industry associations they simply don't have enough people you'll be shocked if you go to like shipyard or factories there are just simply not enough people like these shipbuilding companies have orders booked for the next three years and some of them used to produce let's say nine ships but they annually but now they their production SPEAKER_09: capacity has gone down so much and now they can only only produce six ships per year simply because they don't have enough people so i don't think these industry associations think about how these people like assimilating to like different culture and all that like their bottleneck is the labor shortage SPEAKER_00: right so and this is where government has to uh adjudicate or mitigate this issue for society because yeah in japanese culture to have 10 blocks go from japanese culture to a vietnamese culture or any other culture would be very strange and the people who live in that area would be very upset i know because on twitter x.com are you on twitter yes it's very popular in japan right i now uh have you seen the feature where it translates english to japanese and then so now i have japanese uh followers coming into my feed and i start reading their posts and immigration is a big um people are very honest on twitter from their anonymous account how they feel and they are very upset when you know two or three blocks go from being japanese culture now all of a sudden a different SPEAKER_78: culture whatever it is yep but then i feel like the reality is a bit like have you seen a movie called a SPEAKER_09: day without mexican yeah i've never seen it but i know it yes i think japan is kind of experiencing Chamath Palihapitiya: that today yes is uh they they they need to appreciate uh this group of people coming to help SPEAKER_19: and then also still maintaining the culture it's a delicate balance how is japan doing if you were to look at it you think is doing a pretty good job of managing the issue um we can certainly do better SPEAKER_09: got it in many different areas for instance the multi-language information um is also one thing city governments could do right um so the number one problem um oftentimes occur in each area like local area is the taking out the garbage yeah this creates problems like um non japanese workers won't follow the local rules because they can't read the instructions and the instructions are somewhat SPEAKER_01: complex it is complex yes yes i literally at my airbnb it was this big with tons of pictures explaining it combustible not combustible plastic with food on it plastic without food on it and trying to explain it is like um yeah a little bit of work yep there's a resistance to putting it into a foreign language or it's just a burden for the local community to do that i guess um it's it's a bit both so like locals SPEAKER_08: would say things like they don't belong here and they can't even follow simple rules right but then city governments need these foreign workers right so local factory can operate so there's all this tension SPEAKER_00: yeah it's interesting tension now there's a third business you discovered there's a tension here and the immigration is not going to solve the entire problem it may take them from six ships to maybe not going to five and not going smaller but it might not bring them to nine but there's some revolution going on right now with uh human robotics and even non-humanoid robotics so this is another area you've identified for a future product so tell me about the problem you discovered and then how you're SPEAKER_08: thinking about your third business line sure so now i spend half of my time inside chemical tanks at shipyard chemical tanks chemical tanks yes yeah very glamorous yeah thank you yeah well my work has never been more excited than this um really um and then um when we first started offering the training solution to SPEAKER_09: shipbuilding companies construction companies many different companies um they all appreciated the SPEAKER_08: service but then after a year or two some of them said there's only so much we can do with non-japanese workers certain tax tasks need to be done by human but not every task and they asked is there anything more that you can help automate we're not robotics company um we didn't think there was not there we didn't think there was much we could do at that point uh but then we actually spent more time SPEAKER_09: um you know speaking to these construction workers and shipbuilding uh especially shipbuilding experts and then we um as we spend more time looking at how they actually do their jobs we thought it might be a good SPEAKER_08: idea to actually create a robot uh that can help automate part of the inspection that they do shipyard SPEAKER_158: this is a single task for a robot it's a repetitive task it's a boring task very boring i think uh perfectly SPEAKER_00: suited for a robot and then that robot can report into maybe one person you could have 10 robots reporting SPEAKER_08: into one person instead of having to fill those 10 positions exactly so one of the things that we looked SPEAKER_09: into first was scaffolds so scaffolds are everywhere at construction site shipyard and scary thing is SPEAKER_08: even though the law requires you to inspect manually every day before you use it no company has resources SPEAKER_09: to do so right so they may skip it they skip it almost 100 of the time okay and then it does result in injuries and like severe accidents in in extreme cases people could die yeah very tragic yeah and SPEAKER_00: there's no reason for it because you could with a very simple robot and cameras do a better job and you could inspect it 10 times a day for free i mean once you have the robot an incremental inspection SPEAKER_09: is got probably zero cost yeah exactly um at first we thought it was going to be very easy um but then we learned that like a shipyard or like plants that's another segment we're trying uh to help there are shiny metals so the reflections make it very difficult so we use v-dam um to solve that problem what SPEAKER_08: we are essentially trying to do is uh the robots climb up scaffolds by itself grabs the joint shakes it and then record each joint is safe or not and then send the inspection records to uh whoever's actually in charge of the inspection so that person can come in and fix it um before accidents right and they SPEAKER_133: could even take a video i'm sure if they wanted to so they could pre-inspect it yeah exactly but then next SPEAKER_09: problem we encountered was because no one inspects scaffolds it's not a sexy thing and it doesn't SPEAKER_08: produce any profit right for companies we spend more time interviewing them and learn there are other type of inspections we could also automate with the same robots so a pain thickness inspection a shipyard SPEAKER_09: some companies that produce ship over like 200 meters they would be spending more than a thousand human hours to do the pain thickness inspection they literally just scan uh the ship um with a device like this yeah and then it's like okay this is enough and then you scan SPEAKER_08: scan scan thousand hours that can be easily automated with a robot at twenty dollars per hour it's uh SPEAKER_00: twenty thousand dollars and every ship you have to do it over and over again and probably the human SPEAKER_09: could make mistakes exactly so there are like three other type of inspections we're looking to automate SPEAKER_00: it would be all done by one robot you know it's very interesting when i hear your story and your approach it's very similar um to um you know what we do in america which is spend a lot of time doing customer interviews did you learn that technique from some startup book or is it just you understand hey the hanging out with the customer and asking and being curious is the secret to developing great SPEAKER_08: products how did you learn this technique it was from the first business the chapel business we didn't create a chatbot company first when we first started a company it was a simple our product was just a simple website similar to tripadvisor but local version of it SPEAKER_09: right and then we well i have finance background but not like the product background i didn't know what to do so i just went to shibuya crossing or roponi station grabbed any tourists with a giant suitcase SPEAKER_08: asked a bunch of questions and uh user interview cut us to the next business which was the chatbot SPEAKER_40: and some founders have a hard time doing this because they're nervous in front of other people SPEAKER_42: right so do you get nervous uh stopping somebody at a train station and saying can i ask you questions SPEAKER_08: they might think you're crazy i got kicked out of rapongi station many times i also got banned from SPEAKER_178: major shrine oh wow we also when i got they put your picture up in the security office don't let her in SPEAKER_75: the security guards all knew me so i stayed away strange she keeps asking them how they could have a better experience in tokyo it was a very strange thing huh yes and then we also ended up using like a dating app to source users because at the time there were like some some known dodgy dating SPEAKER_09: apps we could find all sorts of like non-japanese tourists so that type of experience helped me learn actually speaking to the end users is the quickest way to build successful business yeah SPEAKER_172: any other startup hacks that you've learned along the way or stories of you know frustration that led to SPEAKER_08: opportunity there are so many um other things but then my favorite one is when our chapel broke down during christmas holidays that was a high season for us we had high-end hotels as customers and we had narita airport japanese government all sorts of customers and then after our engineers made update to our software it just simply stopped working so for the next one week i was the chatbot but then no sleep no sleep i responded faster than anyone um and then during that time we learned that like SPEAKER_09: human-like communication actually increases the user engagement so we went back and then copied the whole user interaction uh between me and the users uh and then tried to uh implement the same type of conversation into our chapel and then suddenly the engagement has gone up so much and then our chatbots became very popular um even beyond the segments that we were trying to go after so you had to make the SPEAKER_03: chatbot less efficient more human maybe a little more chit chat yes uh interesting because i used to think SPEAKER_08: chatbot is just to answer question you have a question and you want your question um answer as quickly as SPEAKER_09: possible but that wasn't really the case with the tourism and but then we also have emergency response project and then that works very differently for that purpose uh for emergency response you want the evacuation center address as soon as possible so you don't want any chat chat but a different chatbot SPEAKER_00: for different use case so just asking somebody is it your first time in japan or what are you looking forward to in japan or something like that increase their utilization and their nps score their happiness with they definitely did yes yeah such a good insight and what have you learned about raising money from venture capitalists who didn't understand the first business and then you have gone into i'll tell you what would seem to an investor as three completely different businesses but i understand the thread SPEAKER_40: each time spending more time with customers seeing the same problems around language and around work SPEAKER_00: projects that are under resourced each one is an under resourced problem right they they're trying to get a job done but they don't have the resources so you come up with a better resource one better resource is an ai chatbot another good resource is video training like youtube style video training and quizzes another technological source for not having enough employees is a robot so you are trying to solve not having enough employees yeah that's the theme yes and then actually even technology wise SPEAKER_08: there are some consistencies so we still use chatbot for the second video learning business when people have questions then we answer and then also um we generate um quiz of the videos it's still like the text right yes and then for the third business uh the second business does involves recording and a video processing and it's kind of similar for the third business as well because we still need to get people uh workers put on the smart glasses and record how they do inspections right then we process the video and then create simulation so it's kind of connected but then it was difficult to convince investors SPEAKER_00: one of my friends uh you know built a rocket ship company and then he learned a lot about materials and he was working on a car company and in the car company he learned a lot about batteries and then the battery technology and the stamping of metal from the uh and building a factory for the rocket ships then informed how they built the factory for the cars and then they needed energy and then the cars needed connectivity and uh all the material science he was able to apply to both companies and eventually when i asked him when we were talking um and he said really my job is just to make a machine called a factory and that is what elon does elon musk his job is to make a factory and so that's his speciality and the new factory is to make robots and the other new factory is to make chips but he's already made a factory to build rocket ships a factory to build satellites and a factory to build cars so just you're just building another factory right and so the tools you know uh they are going to be different but the factory is a factory yeah uh and so very very interesting um what have you learned about raising money though in venture capital and i'm assuming i know you've raised a little bit of money but are you able to build these businesses without a lot of capital or do you still need to raise a bunch of capital right so for the initial SPEAKER_08: business for the top of business we raised about 450 million japanese yen or so uh but the last round was back in 2020 so march 2020 like right in the middle of covet and then we've been self-sufficient SPEAKER_01: ever since got it so you've raised low millions of dollars i think i'm not sure what 450 million is in SPEAKER_09: u.s uh so that's like three million uh us dollars and we also secured um a lot more bank loans because we have a lot of government contracts i learned along the way that like we can use the uh government contract as the collaterals and which is much faster than um speaking to investors ah so this is very SPEAKER_00: unique in america very hard to government or banks don't give loans to startups they only get in america they you know who they give loans to rich people when i had when i had no money and i was starting my businesses the only loans i could get were american express and visa and they made you give the money back 30 days 60 days later no banks would give you a loan and then when i made some money the banks SPEAKER_01: would call over and over again and say would you like lots of loans we'll give you as many loans as you like and we'll give you you know two percent interest three percent interest if you want to buy a home we'll give you no inch only interest payments for five years it would be 10 years just interest then you pay principal and anytime i wanted to buy a house or anything they just give you a loan because you had uh some assets and they just made it so easy right and it's kind of backwards the the rich people don't need the loans they have assets and it makes it easier for them to increase their assets because they don't ever have to sell an asset they can keep their stock they can keep their homes and they can keep appreciating and they get loans against it it's a very big problem in america where we really do need to give you know small businesses loans but the problem is they can default on it right SPEAKER_08: here as long as you're profitable you can secure loans so it's a bit difficult for startups but as soon as we turn profitable it was quite easy and what do they base it on they look at like oh if SPEAKER_00: you're making one million dollars a year in profits we'll give you two million or is there some like SPEAKER_31: ratio how do they did they actually look at the contracts and make sure they're like a strong SPEAKER_08: contract in our case uh they demanded the government contracts and then the loan they give up was equivalent to the amount of the collateral we provided ah so contract if the contract was for one SPEAKER_31: million dollars they'll give you one million exactly would they give it to you for the life of the SPEAKER_03: contract or just in advance or do they give it to you for a little longer for the short-term loan SPEAKER_08: it's only until you get paid but for the long-term loan um the longest we have is 10 years amazing SPEAKER_31: yeah and then it's like one percent interest rate or something so beautiful oh wow so you know SPEAKER_00: this is interesting it there should be more startups and but i understand the goal of getting to SPEAKER_01: profitability now getting to profitability means you don't have to sell your equity so you get to keep more equity as the founder correct well this is good uh and then so what is the outcome for your business do you aspire to just keep growing here in japan or do you think hey maybe um i should go SPEAKER_00: to other countries and apply this there because in the middle east in uae in qatar in saudi they have the same exact issues the society is growing it's very um the society needs workers and they're you know you might have um 500 000 qataris and a million immigrants so it's like two to one immigration but they have the same issues around training around integration into life um and just SPEAKER_01: not causing uh you know friction in society so have you thought about expansion plans globally or you have SPEAKER_35: so much work here to do we have thought about it and then right now we think at least for the next SPEAKER_08: two years or so japan is the hottest market so we want to get to the point where the robots are working and we buy a couple factories and then try to kaizen those factories yes um and then we take that model SPEAKER_01: overseas just to give you uh a little bit of credit here you want to go from building a chat bot to SPEAKER_08: building robots and having your own robot factory um so we'll buy let's say like a small shipyard and then deploy our own robots to show them how efficient it could be there are successor problems in japan so there are many companies that go bankrupt here are actually profitable they simply don't have SPEAKER_00: successors that's amazing so i just want to make sure i understand there are profitable businesses companies that go out of business yes because they don't have somebody to give the business to SPEAKER_08: yeah not bankrupt exactly just to go out of business because they don't have anyone taking over the SPEAKER_09: business they have no kids to take over the business oh my god it's such a big opportunity SPEAKER_04: younger generations don't want to be factory owners we want to be factory owners i want to own a factory SPEAKER_01: this is a great idea wow i want to invest in this company go buy factories and what would they charge you if SPEAKER_00: you're the person retiring what would they charge you to buy their factory like one times revenue or they're just happy to get anything could be lower could be lower so you could even maybe they give you um owner financing too would they give you owner financing where the owner sells it to you and then you give them money every year for until it's paid off or do you have to go to a bank and get the money i think it depends depends on the term yeah this is an incredible opportunity it reminds me when i go out to go skiing in hokkaido um there's a bunch of americans now on instagram and they were telling me you know six or seven years ago when i started skiing there oh um you know you can get a house here for free or for one dollar or they'll just give it to you if you pay your taxes and you keep the house SPEAKER_01: from collapsing because all the houses outside of naseko and in the countryside they just keep collapsing because too much snow and nobody's lived there for 10 years or 15 years uh and so these young um kids from america are coming here and they go renovate the houses in the countryside and then they rent it during ski season and that's their revenue stream uh and then they talk about it on their instagram accounts and all these people in america now want to come and have a countryside house SPEAKER_19: and and rebuild it it's very interesting phenomenon this incredible opportunity yeah it's everywhere in SPEAKER_08: japan i think every city you would go to like outside of um tokyo metropolitan area they have exact same SPEAKER_31: problem and it's because young people can't find work there or they just want to live in the city SPEAKER_09: because the city is so much fun and convenient and so great so when kids turn let's say like high school age SPEAKER_08: like they maybe oftentimes there is no high school in that area so they already leave their town to go to school in the city or like maybe university right once they leave they don't come back because there's SPEAKER_166: no job wow so all of those towns are getting uh hollowed out they're turning into ghost towns SPEAKER_00: there's so many of them yeah so this is what happened in uh i made a friend out in naseko in hokkaido he found an old ski resort there's hundreds of ski resorts in japan that are abandoned as well and he convinced the local town to let him take over the ski town and the ski resort but all the lifts were broken except for one so the one lift is available to the locals the remaining locals um or anybody japanese who wants to drive out or take the train um and then the other ski routes he has um like a cat you know like with the tracks and he drives people to the top to ski one run every hour so you ski seven or eight runs you know you can do it maybe 45 minutes to an hour depending on the length of the run drive up for 15 20 minutes ski down for 10 15 minutes do it again do it again do it again but he had to convince the local town to give it to him uh so incredible SPEAKER_01: opportunity i think ai is allowing you to do more with less employees are you playing with these tools with agents claude code or claude co-work has it infected your company yet to make you build products SPEAKER_08: faster so yes to all of those questions um because we've been doing ai since 2015 uh we of course you know adapt many different ai tools in-house um half of our team is actually non-japanese we have 65 people but more than half is actually non-japanese and on the engineering side every single person of course uses claude many different services so in fact last year when our german um germany engineer had to move back to her country we didn't replace her because we just decided hey like everyone can use ai agent like the cold review is now faster and then there are things we can still improve in the process so instead of like you know spending extra efforts to hire train um and manage the person why don't we just like you know get everyone learn how to code with ai so it's very interesting um SPEAKER_00: we're now asking our startups to teach us as investors in their companies um when they are going to consider a new hire how do they make the decision to hire a human or automate with ai right and so we're seeing many of them where you know at a certain point of scale like 60 people you might go hmm we need to have uh three accountants we need to have three people in hr and uh you know this type of thing and uh you know maybe three people to do meetings and scheduling and assistance and now people look and go huh i think we could have one person who builds you know the hr department and if you write SPEAKER_01: a job description now uh have you used ai to write a job description recently all of it yes and it's SPEAKER_08: mind-blowing yeah it's so much better than the ones we used to write i've had this conversation now SPEAKER_00: with like three or four founders where we all had the same experience i've been writing job descriptions SPEAKER_01: for over 20 years i've had hired people and i used to pay them a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars to write a job description because the right job description could you know get 10 times more applications and then i started asking claude and it had access to our slack to our notion to our gmail and it would incorporate things from the company for that position and then i would ask it in free flowing i use a microphone whisper flow to just talk about what i want the person to do and it structured it so perfectly and i wondered to myself how can it make such a perfect job description better than i can and it's so obvious there's so many message boards online with jobs yep and they've all been indexed by the ai companies exactly so they actually there's never been a human who had all the job descriptions in the world in their brain and now ai has every job description in every country in every language in and it's crazy like what it can do so amazing so we do rely heavily on ai to do SPEAKER_08: pretty much everything like every job in the company is now done by ai and then sometimes i even wonder SPEAKER_01: if i if the company still needs me i think it's a lot of people who are in the management positions who their job is to make everybody at the company better well the ai understands everything they're doing it has perfect insight so i have been thinking about creating a second ceo like uh but that ceo has access to every email of every person in the company at all times and can know every slack message and everything they've ever done so we can get better advice so that's what i'm working on right now in my company is um i had everybody connect and ask claude co-work give me a summary of my week on saturday based on my gmail my notion edits my slack messages and my calendar and i used to have the human do that tell me at the end of the week what you accomplished and then tell me what you're going to do next week the ai does it and then the next phase is to ask the ai what should i be doing what should i do next and that's the question we always ask ourselves as ceos or leaders what am i supposed to do next and the only way you figure that out is either by meditating on it if i go skiing i can maybe figure out what what am i supposed to do next and well it's your choice right you're the main character so you SPEAKER_149: get to choose what do i do next but you know do you have a coach like a ceo coach do you have one SPEAKER_08: so my number two person at work yeah is almost like the ceo coach he's got a lot more experience than i do he's american we imported him from the u.s oh good and so he can give you coaching and SPEAKER_00: yes this kind of thing yeah so this is what i'm thinking about is hey what did i spend my time on was that the highest use of my time and what else can i do right and what should i do um and i'm trying do you guys use slack what do you use for this is i think and you've been using it for how many years 11 years yes same with us we so we have the entire knowledge in slack but do you have the enterprise plus version or the regular version enterprise press so like it's very expensive so with enterprise plus you can see every dm or every like group people chatting you have full access so now that you can connect the api to it so i just upgraded this week i've been working on it and i'm going to ask it just to look at the history of the company and make a timeline SPEAKER_01: and say what could we have done and how should that inform what we do for the next 10 years what did we do for the last 10 years what could i have done and the whole team done better SPEAKER_268: and then do forward have you connected like and created like an oracle a god a slack god yet SPEAKER_08: we haven't yet uh we're still carefully evaluating because um part of me feels like we shouldn't be going through some of the messages even though i am not going to personally go through them yeah SPEAKER_00: i think you have to let i let everybody know at the company even dms everything's recorded because we're a finance company of course in a finance company that exists so hopefully employees aren't complaining about the boss in dms there's hopefully they're smart enough to do that um so your people SPEAKER_01: laughing are you please don't i don't know are you guys uh no kabir's like nope i'm smart we do that on signal we we complain about the boss on whatsapp disappearing messages but i think this will be the big unlock is to have the oracle doing it so um but i've been thinking maybe there should be a new slack like um a more open source slack or i'm thinking about maybe having cloud code or building our own version of open source slack kind of thing that is made for this purpose like what should we do as an organization the other thing that's pretty crazy is one person on my team said um you know there was this person who was at the company for seven years this person was five years this person retired this person would do anything would you like me to recreate them oh genius idea i haven't SPEAKER_08: thought about that approach so genius idea it's genius then you don't need to rehire them well you SPEAKER_03: can go exactly you don't have to rehire them or if you have a question you can say ghost of jason SPEAKER_01: um what happened in the first five years of the company with these three investments and it goes ah yes i can tell you the conversation i had with that person so it's like uh luke skywalker being able to talk to obi wan kenobi's ghost you have a ghost jedi you know the movie yeah where they come back as like a force ghost so i thought well this is incredible for continuity then i was like do i SPEAKER_274: need the permission oh do you need permission if i don't think you do if the person is no longer with SPEAKER_04: the company you don't need a permission right but to use their name and likeness yeah you kind of SPEAKER_01: need a permission maybe you change the name i think you have to change the name like if it was jason we call it ghost jason is that enough i don't know if it's enough or not but it's going to be a brave uh new world okay listen um akimi it has been incredible to talk to you let's give her a big SPEAKER_00: round of applause i'm very interested in your business specifically buying factories it sounds like a really i think you should raise money to do a factory roll-up oh so exciting all right we'll see you next time on this week in startups bye bye