Why You’ll Choose an AI Doctor (feat. Fred Almeida and Max Weiss) | E2239

Is part of your thesis about healthcare that AI will have a profound impact on people doing self directed care?

0:00

Yeah, yeah, entirely. I actually think that the future of where this is going to go is that the AI will become your doctor in a few more years.

0:09

Your primary care doctor.

0:16

It'll be your primary care doctor and then you'll just go to diagnostic tool sets, which is part of the roll up. We actually are buying clinics to do diagnostics, but at a higher level. If you think about it, it's almost really changing how a diagnostic clinic will ever work.

0:17

Explain in layman's terms what diagnostic clinic means. What are the top five things they do? This Week in Startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business With Northwest in 10 clicks and 10.

0:32

Minutes you can form your company and.

0:46

Walk away with a real business identity. Learn more@northwestregisteredagent.com Twist HubSpot Check out the guide Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering from Basics to Expert in 7 Days. Download it for free at clickhubspot.com Twist 2 Sentry New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to Sentry IO Twist and use code Twist welcome back to this Week in Startups. I'm your host Jason Calacanis. I am just wrapping up an amazing week here, here in Tokyo where we launched Foundry University. Foundry University is a pre accelerator. You would go to Foundry University in year zero of your startup. You got two or three co founders, you've built a project, maybe you incorporated, maybe you haven't even bothered incorporating yet. You're in year zero. That's what Founder University is for. It's a 12 week program. We do it in Tokyo, we do it in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh and we do it in America. We have thousands of people apply and dozens of people we accept and we spend time with you working on your startup. So while I'm here I've been recording some episodes of this Week in Startups Twist as we refer to it in town. And I've been learning a lot about the ecosystem in here in Tokyo and as well discussing with a bunch of venture capitalists, angel investors and founders how they look at the market. Japan still third or fourth most important economy in the world. And something changed in Japan. For the last 20, 30 years young people wanted the safety of a job at a big company and they might work there for 40 years. Now the preference of young people in Japan has flipped over the last five years or so. They want to start companies and They've got quite a legacy and a tradition of innovation in the technology space. So I'm spending time here because I think it's going to be one of the great startup markets of the next 20 or 30 years. With me today, I've got two investors and founders. Max Weiss is venture capitalist. We had dinner last night. His firm is Pacific Bays Capital. He focuses on aerospace, defense, space, energy and basically making Japan more resilient, almost Japanese dynamism, to use the term we use in America.

0:47

Yeah, I think so. Anything related to economic security, really. And we believe that we need to partner with the US to make those kinds of things happen. So Japan focus, but also a strong economic security sort of partnership type of focus too.

3:09

Yeah.

3:24

And this is a very interesting time to be doing that. As I said or observed from the feedback I got this week, young people are looking at entrepreneurship in a different way. And the relationship with Japan in America is in a little bit of a crossroads. We're going to get into some of that geopolitics as well and the global dynamics. Fred Almadey is also with us. He's an entrepreneur and investor deep focused on AI and autonomous systems. You're the CEO of American Medical, which is a roll up.

3:24

Yeah, it's a mix. It's actually two parts of a platform.

3:51

Explain.

3:55

So we felt actually that there's a shift in the way that medicine is being provided to a lot of people, both in the US and Japan. And it's clear that we're not getting enough doctors coming out of the schools, especially doctors that have a more general approach to how medicine could be done. Everything's really specialized, especially in the U.S. and so we felt that the patient side needed their own version of an AI medical doctor. But we also needed to balance that out with the doctors themselves. So we actually started with a number of hospitals and we're already working with doctors to basically figure out how do doctors want to talk to patients. Patients through an AI platform.

3:56

Got it.

4:35

Yeah.

4:35

And this is under development. Launched.

4:35

It's under development, still pretty new.

4:38

All right, great. So I think that gives us two really interesting jump off points. And you heard my sort of preamble here about Japan. You're based in Japan?

4:41

Tokyo.

4:50

In Tokyo. Why?

4:51

Oh, this is. I mean, you've been here many times. This is a lovely country. I actually think, to be honest, some of my first startups were here in Tokyo and I built one of the first robotics companies here, self driving car company here in 2016. And that was way before anyone really understood what that, what it was going to mean and it was just, it just feels right to build AI and technology like robots here. And it just does.

4:52

And is part of your thesis about healthcare that AI will have a profound impact on people doing self directed care?

5:17

Yeah, yeah, entirely. I actually think that the future of where this is going to go is that the AI will become your doctor.

5:27

In a few more years, your primary care doctor.

5:35

It'll be your primary care doctor. And then you'll just go to diagnostic tool sets, which is part of the roll up. We actually are buying clinics to do diagnostics, but at a higher level, if you think about it, it's almost really changing how a diagnostic clinic will ever work.

5:37

Explain in layman's terms what diagnostic clinic means. What are the top five things they do?

5:51

So you'll actually find if you go to a doctor, a lot of doctors don't want to call for tests because AIDS really kind of painful for them. They have to fill out forms, they have to deal with a lot of issues with that. So they'll.

5:57

Insurance issues.

6:08

Insurance pre authorization in the US In Japan there's like limits to this.

6:09

So it's cumbersome. So they don't send you for tests.

6:13

Yes. And then so they send. So you end up spending more time doing basic testing with the doctor. Just looking at your ear, for example, if you have ENT and if you have an infection, and then it may take four or five visits before they actually realize after they do a diagnostic like a CAT scan or MRI that you have an infection in your tonsils instead of your ear. And then so we believe that if you actually fix diagnostics, it's not perfect diagnostics. You do get positive, you know, you get negative positives and positive negatives.

6:16

Right.

6:52

So ultimately what we want to solve is can we use AI inside the clinics to make it much better but at a higher level, as if you do a roll up across clinics, you can actually see how people are generally feeling. Right. And you can actually extrapolate trends and movements across it. So in a way, like it's the way you would do like a differential geometry of like a stock market, you can see the flow of how people are moving and then you can then make predictions on it.

6:52

So to translate that, I have some pain in my ear or maybe it's in my throat, I'm not sure. I've got a collection of symptoms. I type into an AI, these are my symptoms. It does a really good job.

7:21

Yeah, it'll actually do differential analysis on you.

7:33

Yeah.

7:35

And it does an amazing job today. In fact, a lot of the studies that are coming out today say it's exceeding, matching and exceeding doctors. Correct?

7:36

Yes, we already are actually. Yeah.

7:45

So that's today. Who knows what happens in a couple years it'll clearly be better. Then the second piece is. Okay, there's this weird thing where the system is so convoluted that a doctor might not want to send you to just get the test that would confirm this. But if you take out the doctor visit, which is how they make their money, which they're incentivized to say, no, come to the office. Come to the office. And that wastes tons of money and time. Why not just ask the AI? Hey, here are the symptoms. It says you need to go get a swab in your throat or a blood test, whatever it happens to be, and then we will know. So that's more efficient. So you're actually flipping it and saying just go right to the test.

7:47

There's a benefit of if you can go to the test early enough, we can catch disease at a level where you can treat it with very easy, like an easier way to treating it. So if you, if I find cancer at stage one, it's very fast. Right. You can literally not have cancer by just doing a special test. And on top of that, most people don't realize that the reason you're feeling bad is often you just don't have enough nutrients. And if you do, for example, a genetic methylation test, we can actually see what you're missing.

8:27

That's fascinating.

8:59

And then you just get it. And then. So you don't even have to go to the doctors at that point.

9:00

So this is extremely disruptive. There is a group of people, I'm wondering if you've been inspired by the tip of the spear. Biohackers, body hackers, self directed folks who are using their whoop, their aura, their eight sleep. We're investors in that last one. And then they're going to function. Health or whoop is doing labs. And this is the United States at least. And then Superpower is another lab one, I did that one. And they're proactively getting their blood work, using a concierge or AI to sort of analyze it. And then for me, the primary care doctor seems like the worst modality. Why not just get your blood debt work done fully twice a year and be ahead of the curve?

9:03

Yeah, no. And in fact, if you actually think about it, it's actually even cheaper even in the United States to proactively get Your diagnostics done. And then because we're trying to change the way diagnostics are done too. So, like, if you can imagine 500 clinics across the United States, all using AI to make, let's say you're getting a very simple blood test, the doctor calls for, like, certain markers, but we can do the whole thing for you, you know, and then we can get that, you know, somewhat paid for by the government, because they want the data, the metadata, not your data, the metadata. And now we can actually then look at all your markers.

9:47

Yeah.

10:20

And maybe we see something, and we can immediately tell the doctor what we see. So he gets a differential diagnostic from us saying, hey, we found this. And then right now, because of the way the laws work, you'd have to go see a doctor to get a prescription, but that's gonna change.

10:21

So this is all incentives. The incentives are broken. The system is backwards. And we could. There is a better way. And the incentives need to change.

10:35

Yeah, but also insurance needs to change.

10:45

And insurance needs to change. What a more delightful experience for the doctor to say, hey, here are your hundred patients as a primary care doctor. Here's their dashboard. We have done their blood work twice a year. We've done these other tests. Here's their complaints and what happened. Now when you meet with them, you're starting with this. You're starting with 80% of the work done. You can actually do better work. You can move up the stack and do higher level, more rewarding work.

10:47

So what we found when talking to doctors, we talked to a lot of doctors in the US and in Japan, and a lot of very young, talented doctors want to quit.

11:14

Why?

11:23

They hate being a doctor because most of their day is doing paperwork or talking on the phone with an insurance rep to the point where, like, sometimes doctors are in surgery and they get called out of the surgery to argue with the insurance company because they don't want to pay for the surgery.

11:24

That's insane.

11:43

While they're in the surgery, that type of stuff drives them mad. And considering we have such a small group of doctors in Japan and in the US you can't drive them insane. We have to treat them like Formula one drivers, from my point of view. And so if we can create a system that automatically creates all the paperwork they need, removes the government side of it, removes the insurance side of it. All you have to do is just confirm that diagnostic that you had, and then the system that we're creating for patients ensures the patient follows through with what you want them to do.

11:44

Got it.

12:17

Right. We Remind you to take your pills. Which pill? This one. Take this one now. So it's not to the point where, like, we're not yet creating like this perfect medical doctor that's going to sit in your pocket, but that will come out.

12:17

So, Max, let's move over to your business. Why did you pick, you know, Fred picked a really hard one. Healthcare, lots of regulations, lots of incumbents, lots of regulations, Insurance, Just so much friction. You also picked an area with a lot of friction going to space, atoms and bits. You know, the bits are easy, the atoms are hard. Aerospace and defense, energy. And in a very volatile world, I assume the volatility and the volume creates the opportunity. But tell me why you picked the verticals you're investing in.

12:29

For us, it's more of kind of looking at what Japan has to offer and going backwards from there. So I think this was talked about a little bit earlier at some point, I believe we're in the middle decade two in venture in Japan. The first decade was defined by consumer and software as a service, as I'm sure it was in lots of other parts of the world. But then you had this whole dynamic there. Now we're in a situation where, you know, maybe according to some people, this is decade one, depending on how you look at it. So the amount of financing, the amount of support, all this stuff is slowly getting to a global scale. So maybe you can call it a decade one, depending on how you look at it. But basically, I think a lot of stuff changed and now you're looking at folks who used to work at multinational corporations. And that's really where a lot of the technical talent lies and where I think Japan's sort of hidden strength lies. And those guys, what they're doing is materials and semiconductors. And that's why we focus on the areas that those could be applied to.

13:03

All right, when we get back from this quick break, I want to talk specifically about defense here in Japan. And Japan has an army or doesn't have an army. When we get back on this week's startups. Logs are an essential part of of just about any tech startup. You need to keep your eyes on how your product is being used, and you definitely need to understand what happened when things go wrong. But logs are notoriously messy. It's especially hard to gather the insights you need when your logs, errors and performance data all live in different tools. But now there's a solution. Sentry. Sentry's logs are trace, connected and structured, allowing you to follow everything clearly and understand the context Even if you're a non technical founder, whether you're debugging your front end, back end, your mobile app, whatever it is, Sentry will give you the context you and your team need to get the problem fixed. And to get on with your day, you got other things you gotta focus on. That's why more than 4.5 million developers are already using Sentry, including amazing high profile teams like Disney and Anthropic. Learn more by going to Sentry IO Twist and use the code TWIST to get $240 in Sentry credits. That's S E N T R Y IO twist. All right, we're back here in Tokyo wrapping up my first week of Foundry University. Did Angel University as well. My guest today, Max Weiss from Pacific Bays Capital and Fred Almade who is with American Medical doing a roll up and using AI to really reinvent healthcare. Max, you and I had some conversations last night over some outstanding wagyu and that was outstanding. Crazy. We went to this amazing Wagyu place and I said, you can't put wagyu on a barbecue, it'll light on fire. I've cooked wagyu many times. And he said, oh, this grill is a very hot grill. And the grill then has water running through the tubes where you would lay the meat on top of so that it doesn't light on fire.

14:08

Yeah, that was kind of a novel thing that I hadn't seen before either. But it went really well with the meat. You don't over overcooked it and yeah, it was great.

16:13

Yeah. And then you decided you found out I was paying and you did the caviar on the truffle supplement.

16:20

Yeah, just stuffed myself.

16:24

It was crazy. It was fantastic. I mean, if we had that dinner with the exchange rate and with just importing wagu to the United States, it would have been three times as much. I got the bill and I thought it was the wrong table's bill. I was like, this can't be right. This has got to be double. And it was not. And we had just such a spectacular marina, a spectacular conversation that eventually got to the relationship between America and Japan. This is a long standing, you know, and in our lifetimes, absolutely fantastic relationship. But part of that is the United States provides the defensive capabilities in the military for Japan. But Japan also has fighter jets and military equipment and they know how to use those. So Japan doesn't have a standing army.

16:26

Not officially.

17:16

Not officially, but they do.

17:17

But does have individuals who know how to operate military equipment.

17:19

Exactly, yes.

17:25

See, I have a high Tolerance for ambiguity. I understand exactly what's happening here. So. But the relationship between the two countries of late, America seems super focused on our hemisphere. The Western China has a certain concept of their relationship here in this region you have Korea, Japan, Singapore and then Australia, New Zealand forming some type of alliance or group. But how do the Japanese people look at the relationship with America? It's here we're on twist. So you give permission to be candid. What do you think of our changing stance in the world order? And then how do you. How does the average person in Japan think about their protection and their safety when North Korea is shooting rockets over the island?

17:26

I think that's a good question. I'll preface this by saying I don't think a lot of ordinary Japanese citizens are political like they tend to be back in the U.S. that said, you can kind of see these general trend. So, for example, over the past couple of years, I think we're seeing a shift to the right with a new sort of Prime Minister. And you've had these sort of changes to how Japan interprets the Self Defense Force that it has, which is what it's officially called, although by any practical means you look at it and say this could be a military. With the snap of a finger. Right.

18:19

So the people like to talk about politics. It's not the blood sport that it is in the United States. But the leadership here is acutely aware of, hey, the United States and their loyalty to NATO has been questioned. Maybe we'll even pull out of it. Maybe we don't need to be involved. So there is a sense like, hey, we might need to go it alone potentially.

19:01

I think, I think that's a little bit less a part of the discourse right now. There's this growing sort of, of reluctance to, towards immigration, for instance, things like that. So it could be a matter of time before the conversation does turn into things like that.

19:26

So this is something we're talking about and we're aware of and you're aware of because of your investment.

19:40

Yes.

19:45

Thesis, but maybe not the populace yet.

19:46

Yeah, I would say that there's, there is a change in that. I think Japan does think it's going to have to do it alone. And I, Japan being the people of.

19:49

Japan or the government.

19:58

The government. Because I think, you know, they're looking at what's happening in Europe, they're looking at how America is dealing with these, you know, the stresses of what's happening with Russia and Ukraine and what's happening in Venezuela and now Greenland and so they're looking at that and they're wondering, you know, maybe we should invest more heavily into our defense. And they're not being offensive. I don't think Japan's going to go take over countries or anything like that. But there is a push, you can see. One is they're, they're deciding not to import, you know, low, low skilled workers. What they really want to do now is actually invest heavily into AI robotics and start building. Probably something more like Lucky Palmer is doing.

19:59

Yeah, my Pat here.

20:40

Yeah, yeah, he's great. Friend of the P. So like really what I would love to see in Japan is, is really a lot of newer, new Lucky Palmers. Right.

20:41

And building tomrlucky.

20:50

Yeah, well, primary Lucky. Sorry, he's also Lucky. Yeah.

20:51

It might have been one of the things you were hinting at. And it's not that we're explicitly investing in defense tech in Japan. I think that's more of what we look at in the U.S. there are a lot of sort of technologies, for example, semiconductors and chips that could be used in satellites and other defense, things like that. And those can be found here. But it's, I think they're less likely to call it defense tech than they.

20:55

Are since we kind of dovetailed into immigration. Another, and I don't bring these topics up because I want to talk about politics here on this week. Startups. It's because startups are driving politics and it's hard to tell sometimes which is downstream of the other. Is politics downstream of the technological innovation or is politics driving technological innovation? It's kind of like these things are in orbit and there's gravitational pulls. Japan has traditionally been a very closed society and you can come here but you're not going to become a citizen. But with population decline and the need to take care of older people and to fill jobs. Immigration is one solution. But what we're scared of in America, job displacement. Robo taxis and Waymos taking all these jobs. China also very nervous about losing all those driving jobs. That is an opportunity here. It's looked at differently. There's so many people who are driving taxis who are 70 years old.

21:19

Yeah. Actually just today he was 80.

22:21

He was 80 driving a taxi.

22:24

Yeah.

22:26

I was like, I love those guys.

22:26

Strap those in.

22:27

No, I mean these guys know exactly where they're going.

22:29

Automation's never really been a dirty word here like it's been in other countries. Yeah.

22:32

Fascinating that it's looked at as a natural opportunity. And I think Waymo's driving some cars around and Uber has made a couple of announcements.

22:36

Waymo's here and a few others. I think Zoom might be here. Zoox, Zoox. Sorry, Zoox.

22:43

Listen, we all know ChatGPT is amazing when you just need to look something up quickly. But if you're not going really deep and getting strategic when you write your prompts, you're not getting the most out of this incredible tool. But I've got a free resource from our friends at HubSpot. It's called Advanced ChatGPT Prompt Engineering from basic to expert in seven days, HubSpot is giving you a complete system for structuring ChatGPT prompts using the Roses Framework, Role Objective Scenario, Expected Solution and Steps. Thinking about your prompts this way is a huge game changer and it's taken me from just hoping I get the right output I'm looking for to knowing with confidence that I'm going to get the information I need organized the way I want it. So level up the use of your AI and download the guide for free at clickhubspot.com twist2 that's click click HubSpot.com twist in the number two or find the link in the description and thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring this episode. When you're looking at those companies, tell me about Japanese startup culture and the Japanese capacity to build these type of companies. Because there's a big tradition here of doing it and do you have enough factory workers should do it, or is it going to be kind of As I was talking on the program about Uniqlo, you know, maybe people were making clothes here on the island previously, but now, hey, we're designing it, we're sourcing the fabrics, we're building the brand, we're building the technology for checkout, all that other stuff. But we will build it in another country. So what's the Japanese capabilities right now when it comes to defense tech, deep tech, etc.

22:49

You brought up Uniqlo, which is interesting because I think this is somewhat of a well known story. But they were laughed out of the room because they described themselves as a technology company, even though obviously they make clothes. But look where they are now. And I think that's what you'll see in a lot of cases here. The technology exists and it's great and top of the line. And semiconductors for instance, a lot of the tools and materials that are needed to create semiconductors that TSMC then produces can only find in Japan and in some categories it's a 90% monopoly. So we're confident in the technology part of it. What's missing is the sort of company building part of it. So I'm part of a fund, I'm part of several funds. But one of the funds, it takes university research and then does more of a sort of startup builder approach. And I think that's one thing that we need over here. I know that Jetro you're working with to bring capital, which is fantastic, I think. And the next step beyond that, I think is to then bring in foreign sources of revenue. There's customers. Customers. There's a phenomenon in Japan called English allergy. This is a term that a lot of people use here. So I think folks in the audience might be familiar with that. What it is, is it's not just an inability to speak English or to do English sales. It's just an allergic reaction.

24:32

They.

25:56

They feel physically disgusted by the idea and can't bring themselves to.

25:56

Wow.

26:02

Put themselves in front of an English speaker.

26:03

Right.

26:05

It's not because people can't speak it, although we're in the bottom 10% globally in proficiency, but it's just this, this fear of failure.

26:05

Ah.

26:15

To embarrass yourself by not speaking it well or not to be able to get the.

26:16

It's risk aversion. To embarrass yourself to not be able to convey what you want properly. So there's this whole philosophy called Genten Shugi Japanese, which means you're judged not by your accomplishments, by what you've screwed up. And this is how people in some traditional Japanese companies get decided whether you get a promotion, promotion or not, or whether you advance the company.

26:21

Right.

26:43

And so it's this deeply ingrained.

26:43

Your mistakes define you exactly. Yes. The opposite of America where we're like, you've screwed up so many times. What are you doing next?

26:45

Yeah, it's one of the things you have to address, I think as you bring Founders University here, it's like, how can you break out of that? And the key way is really just to have them fail faster, maybe. So they get it out of them. Do something fast, it fails, great, do the next one. They have to feel like there's less risk.

26:54

One of the interesting things about immigration today here is you have a lot of founders and investors who've been successful in the United States who look at. And you're both Americans born in America.

27:17

Yep, Canada.

27:29

Oh, Canada.

27:30

But I'm mostly American.

27:31

He likes to pretend he's.

27:33

I love America more.

27:33

No problem.

27:34

No problem.

27:35

Well, we're going to make it the 51st state. It depends on, I hope so, well, Venezuela, Greenland and Canada. It's going to be 1, 2 and 3, 51st, 2nd or 3rd. We're not sure how we're going to do it yet, but you know, it's, it's great. It would be, it's going to be great contribution to the American experiment when we start heading states.

27:35

You know what we're seeing though, like for, like for example, with a semiconductor company and a few others, a lot of Americans and Europeans want to come live in Japan.

27:53

Well, that was where I was going with it is this could change because Japan is open to high skilled, high skilled entrepreneurial and investors coming here. They have, they're very interested in that. Yeah, they may not be interested in not maybe people immigrating at lower skill levels or from cultures that may not integrate as well.

28:02

Yeah, they've had some problems with that. But there is really very little stress to come work in Japan if you do have skills, especially if you have a master's degree or better.

28:24

That was very different 20 years ago.

28:33

Yeah. Back then it was harder to come.

28:34

In here because they thought it was competition for jobs or they didn't really know.

28:38

I actually think it was just so new to them. I came here as a student and I was the only foreigner in the city I was in. And people would follow you.

28:42

Oh really?

28:58

Oh yeah, I remember that. Kids would follow you around. Like I'd be walking down the street to go to school and you'd have like 20 kids behind me.

28:58

Yeah, the first white guy I've ever seen. I had that actually happen in, I had that happen in Shenzhen over maybe 20 years ago.

29:04

Right. Yeah.

29:10

I went to an amusement park that was only for people from China and just literally 20 kids surrounded me and were touching me and touching my hair, wanting to take pictures with me, with. Yeah, I took so many film cameras. They had never seen a white guy before from America.

29:11

But we're seeing more hybrid teams. Like for example, my, my CTO and chief research officer are both Japanese, but my chief medical is American. So, you know, and it works really well. I don't know, there's, there's, I think mixing teams like that may actually be a very powerful.

29:26

It's good for the culture, it's good for broadening the skill set.

29:44

Yeah.

29:47

So the Japanese team would benefit from the audacity, aggressiveness, bluntness of the Americans. And the Americans might learn a little humility, hard working, discipline and discipline by working with a, with a Japanese team. Yeah.

29:49

And not just that, you can pay them less over here too, but we.

30:05

Come up with an idea that we shouldn't be paying less, but not as much as America. America's gone.

30:08

Well, let's just discuss it. What is a Japanese developer, let's say somebody who's been a developer for five or 10 years, what would they, their compensation be here? Broad strokes, working at a big company.

30:13

Amazon, maybe like a mobile developer. 7 million yen, which is about what, 45,000 K. What?

30:23

Yeah, that's at Amazon, that's a third by the way.

30:31

I want, I want to clarify something real quick. I'm not advocating for paying people way less than their market value. What I'm saying is you can bring in highly talented folks from abroad, but pay them closer to what the average salary is in Japan while paying them more, while raising the overall sort of, of salary level here. But you're, you're getting folks with very specialized skill sets from the US that are willing to move here despite the.

30:33

Pay cut because they would be coming for the pay cut but getting the lifestyle gains. Yeah, exactly. And then you could increase the salary of the Japanese executive and give them the opportunity to work with the Americans. So this could be win, win, win. The company has overall a lower average salary than in Silicon Valley, which is absurd because the cost of living is absurd. And then you get this great cross cultural functional team that gets to benefit from each other and the salaries can go up and the quality of life can go up. Living in San Francisco in fear and in danger is, you know, I was talking to some Americans who were here for the first time and they were like, I left my laptop out. And I'm like, yeah, it'll be there next week. You could literally leave your laptop in Starbucks at 8am and come back at 4pm It'll still be in the same seat.

30:59

I've lost my wallet, my bags, everything here. Every time it comes back, never, never.

31:51

Had it disappear in America, literally they've done like reality TV type shows where they'll put a laptop with a cable on it.

31:55

The funniest is France put it in.

32:04

Starbucks and literally within five minutes somebody's yanking it, falling on their face.

32:05

It took three seconds in France and it was gone.

32:09

So listen, I could talk to you guys all day long. It's absolutely fantastic to meet you. And we have five of the founders who came to Founder University. These were the ones that distinguished themselves out of the 30. And I was wondering if you would hear their pitch now, this is year zero and then give them, hey, this is what I think of your idea or what was solid in your thinking and then maybe a challenging question, one of each. Would you guys be willing to do that?

32:12

Absolutely, of course.

32:37

Yeah. And you'll be candid.

32:38

Very candid.

32:40

Well, here in Japan, this is one of the things I've been working on with the founders is we're going to be brutally candid. So just pretend it's like a Korean soap opera or just forgive us for being American, but we want to be incredibly blunt. We're going to tell you the design is a 4 of 10 needs to be an 8 of 10 or the business model is challenged for this reason. Okay, five extremely candid pitches live from Tokyo when we get back. One of the first things we teach in Foundry University is the value of forming a Delaware C corp even if you're not in Delaware. It may sound complicated, but this is a standard for startups, making you more attractive to an investors. And our friends at Northwest Registered Agent can help. They're the all in one business identity service that's going to get you a domain, a custom website, business email and phone number all in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. They're going to protect your privacy by using their own address on all public filings and they're never going to sell your data. Plus, Northwest Registered Agent has all sorts of free tools and resources to ease the process of becoming a first time founder and ensure that you that you can focus on building your business, not administrative tasks and paperwork. So get more from your Delaware C Corp with Northwest Registered Agent. Learn more@northwestregisteredagent.com Twist.

32:41

Hello everyone I'm Kaz Japanese founder CEO of Cascade. Cascade provides a digital ad optimization platform for the performance marketing. Here is our real customer Dio here he's a brand manager at cosmetic company. He runs digital marketing as agriculture channels many campaign at the same time. The problem is digital marketing never sleep so he has to check the rollout data and if not he wastes budget and miss growth. Here's demo so he can only connect Google Ad account win one click and he can check the data through. There are a lot of optimization from our AI so he can check the keyword to adapt and one click directly reflect to each other platform. And also we have the marketing AI agent here so he can ask what type of campaign need to for the gen Z for instance so our AI instantly responds to the response. And this is not just sexy UI UX we can save real time so we reduce the marketing operation monthly hours from 40 hours to the 1 hours so we can reduce the cost efficiency not only the efficiency, we can increase the performance. So in the D2C test we can reduce CPC cost per click by 33% and increase the cost the number of clicks 49%. Our business model is very straightforward, very cheap compared with the traditional agency. And also we are doing the SaaS model here and here. Tim Some executive founder who sold AI image generation startup for US$1.5 million in two years and two smart engineers are building cascade with me. All members have worked before together at Exit company so we can sip and parse productions and we are raising the US$1 million to boost our production, development and LOI combining into the paid customers. Thank you so much.

34:10

Hi, I'm Maya, founder of Outsource Global. We provide risk analysis risk intelligence for procurement team providing the intelligence to choose the right supplier for the team. Meet Sam. He's a director of procurement at US Electronics company. He's his job is to make sure his critical components do not disrupt the production or hurt the business. When Sam logs into the platform, he sees all his components scored for risks and he sees why it's risky and alternative solutions are listed over here. Before artsource he spent weeks searching for suppliers and validating their reliabilities. With this platform he can identify the risks and find alternatives in minutes. Our core revenue is annual SAS subscriptions. Optionally we also provide supplier discovery services but this is not for long term. So X axis shows multi country diversification and Y axis shows the transparency and risk diversifications. Risk mitigation also sits top right showing real time and actionable solutions. We are ready to onboard pilot customers and testing for real world. Our bottoms up approach allows us to scale from pilot to full platform serving for global manufacturers. I'm the founder. I spent nearly 20 years designing manufacturing and supply chain in global companies. I'm providing this also to give procurement team smarter faster supply chain visibility. Thank you.

36:14

Hi, I'm Matt Builder and founder of Gomochi Bite Size Momentum for goal achievement. Meet Aya, an SEO specialist Just starting a career pivot. She struggles to maintain focus so she can complete her goals. Now meet Gomochi. Aya comes across GoMochi and emails storygoalmochi.com with her goal. She wants to start a generative advertising consultancy Life with Gomochi. It's 7:30am and a personalized daily goal summary arrives. It has fresh research, an action plan for the day and and context from Aya's to do list and notion pages. Now Aya knows what to focus on. This morning 2:30pm Aya tells Gomochi, give me a story about today's prospective client meeting. She gets a narrative story about her at the meeting and it's infused with context about Aya and relevant research. Aya visualizes herself acing the meeting. She's ready. Aya's life with goalmochi. She has clear visualized goals. She can act on new ideas and insights and momentum for her goal. Gomochi has over 260 organic signups after our MCP server was published on Anthropic's GitHub. We've even received unprompted user emails saying they love it. Gomochi competes with ChatGPT and their Pulse feature, Stride's goal tracking app and productivity tools. Yet none of them are 100% goal focused, proactive first, and don't have a clunky UI. We see 812,000 obtainable goal focused productivity users out there and getting them could bring us up to $80 million in AR within a few years. Goal Mochi is a freemium product soon with a subscription and we want to target 100 daily active users by Q1 of this year and and 10x, our agentic abilities and productivity tool suite in Q2. Goldmochi will be increasingly capable. I'm Matt. I'm an AI First Technical founder and with your support I will hire an OPS and marketing bar raiser. I believe goals don't fail us because I believe goals don't fail because we lack plans. They fail because we lose momentum when plans are all we have. Goal Mochi solves this in a creative way. Thank you.

38:13

All right, Max, Fred, we saw three great startups, Kaz from Cascade doing AI tools that should save you 97% of the time when you're running your ad campaigns. We saw Maya from Alt Source Global doing supplier discovery and then we saw Matt from Gomochi doing an AI life coach. Let's start. I guess. Fred, which one was the most interesting to you as an investor through the investor lens? Which one? Not just personal that you want to use, not what you think would become the most successful in the world, but if you had to put $25,000 or $10,000 into one of these companies, which one would you think will get the best return?

40:30

I personally liked the Outsource Global.

41:08

Why?

41:11

I think it's actually a problem, it's kind of a large problem to actually find good suppliers and I've done, I've worked in robotics and, and just to find the right motor, it's impossible. And I think your friend Elon in the end, just basically decided to make his own motors.

41:11

He didn't want to be a slave to the supply chain.

41:31

You couldn't find anything actually.

41:34

Which one was your favorite as an investor? Putting your investor hat on.

41:35

Yeah, I agree with Fred. Number two is the most regionally relevant one, I think, for what Japan is strong in. And I could see this potentially becoming a global service perhaps.

41:39

Okay, well, source was your favorite as well. I had a hard time with this because I liked all three. But from an investment perspective, I go for the weird one that I think has outlier potential. And I thought the weirdest one was Matt's Gomochi, this AI life coach. And I thought, well, this is just a commodity.

41:50

You can.

42:05

I know people are doing life coaching inside of ChatGPT, but I thought, well, the device of getting it every day, if you were to put a human in the loop and have a human writing some prompts, I think you could delight and surprise users with a coach. That really did become addicting. And there's many things you can wrap around a coach. I got many questions about it. So, okay, that's our. From an investment perspective, what we think the pitches were all solid. So then let's move to the next step, which is asking a question about the business itself to each of the companies. So, Fred, who pick a company and ask a question.

42:06

I guess I'll start off with golmochi because I actually thought of an idea while you were pitching. So, for example, I know a very famous kind of nutritionist in la. You might know him actually. And I was thinking people pay him thousands of dollars just to sit down and really talk about food and just work me through that. And I was like, is Matt thinking of bringing in significant experts into them?

42:43

Your coach?

43:11

Yeah.

43:11

So they become your coach, not go mochi. You can make a Persona based on them.

43:11

It's a go mochi Persona based of like an expert and it's trained on there, the microphone.

43:16

Matt, you can answer that.

43:21

Gomochi actually has memory, so it can definitely play that role. It can, it can take on a Persona. And also I see Gomochi as being on the right side of model development because as they get better, it's just going to get more kick capable and take on that Persona and help much better over time.

43:22

Okay, well done. Max, do you have a question for somebody other than Matt? But it can be Matt if you want.

43:37

Maya. So I was curious what you were doing before since it looks like you have some sort of background in manufacturing.

43:42

I'm guessing my background is material engineering. I started as a design engineer, basically modeling for Body in White and I worked with many suppliers and then I also work for robotics company because Japan has a really large robotics company to work for. And I actually did AI integration as well. But so to make it short, I transferred to commodity management, global supply management after getting mba and I realized there's a lot of problem that I couldn't unsee. So I wanted to solve a big problem.

43:49

Okay, well done. I'll ask Kaz from Cascade a quick question. Hey, the two biggest ad networks are Meta and Google's and they both have very large significant leads in AI and they're obviously putting AI into every single product line. What will you be able to do with your AI tool that they won't have natively in their ad platforms?

44:31

Thank you, that's a good question. So we believe Google has of course integrating optimization too and Meta has also as well. However, Google cannot basically optimize Meta ads, right? And Meta also cannot optimize Google Ads. Right? So from a company perspective, they directly did ad optimization across all channels to grow their business.

44:56

This is a great answer. It's the one I expected. You know, a savvy founder would say. I'll just give you one little bit of coaching on top of it, which is there are also emerging platforms like TikTok, Amazon's platform, Uber's platform, Instacart, Snapchat, there are many other platforms. So we can take whatever's working on Meta and Google's platforms and then help you discover new platforms and and master those which most people are not taking advantage of the other long tail of ad networks including Reddit and other ones. So great answer, great job. To our first three pitches. We're going to take two more pitches and give two more sets of feedback and then I'm going to ask you to rank your top two.

45:22

My name is Gigi Random Chat, the zero star social network. When I say zero, what do I mean? I mean number of friends. In Japan, 1/3 of them identify themselves as no friends and more than half of them say they have no close friends in the US the same trend. So this is our solution. You just join without any setting and you can start to chat with people. Then you can join also group chatting. Also finally you can do become streamer or listen to others streaming and then super like it. Actually 11% of our active users become live audio streamer on our platform. It's a place where everyone can start from zero. All you need is I want to chat with someone you don't have need to prepare photos, you don't have to prepare your profile. And I asked how is it working? People said 60 67% of them said loneliness resolved by my platform and why is not solved by current social network? Because Snapchat for close friend, Instagram for top 10% content, TikTok for 1% talent. They all need friends or talent. How about 30% of people? And we already have tractions to answer these needs. We have 4 million downloads now, 200k monthly active users and each user spends 70 minutes per day on our app. And we have three revenue streams now in app purchase for microtransaction and ads and also subscription to remove ads after 0 to 1 next we will build their identity on our platform. They already have friends on our platform so next they want identity. So that's why AI can help us because we only had two people now all engineer. So now we are using AI to create visual identity for our users. That's all. Thank you.

46:05

Hi I'm Eugene, founder of AIR Inc. AEHR test is AI powered QA for the era of vibe coding. The problem Meet Matt, co founder founder of Noreply one of your companies actually he's scared about introducing bugs during a significant refactor. He provides a URL and within seconds our agents are analyzing his site. Within minutes we get right to the test. He has a full suite of automated tests covering his application. The competitors are providing AI tools but they put them in desktop apps. Ours is bowser based all in the cloud and time to value is minutes versus hours traction. We've got one paid customer and one mid market pilot Zyco. It's a local company, they're pretty awesome roadmap. We will expand into agentic bug fixes, UX gap analysis to tell the UX health of your site and security surface mapping to provide the Same vertical scrappy SaaS always on QA scale. UPS transforms QA engineers into velocity accelerators direct to consumer e commerce. They pay for manual testing. Offshore springs are onshore in house cheaper, better quality Pricing is seat based primarily for solo founders. 500amonth scale up 1k per month onboarding fee is a hypothesis I have which is time to value will allow for us to charge 5 to 10k up front to get them results they've been trying to get to for quarters market size. Top tier is existing companies with 10 employees and up 42 billion. Bottom is my speculative which is basically 75 million startups 0.05 get funded applied with that pricing seat. So it's, I would say, an explosive area that might be much more than 30 billion. Team is AI focused, machine learning. And tosh CEO, she's the builder of our team.

48:13

Raise.

49:51

I'm raising Runway for the next 24 months. Keep the team small until we get to 20 to 30k mrr and then we know how the mechanics of the business work. We can apply capital, scale it appropriately. The ask. I want everybody here, if you can, to send me one of your portfolio companies. I will analyze it, generate tests for it, provide you some results. Explosive velocity with automated proof. That's what AEHR Test provides. Thank you.

49:52

We saw two great companies in our second group. Gigi from Random Chat, Nobody's got friends. You can't fill out a profile, you've got no talent. Interesting idea. We're going to get your friends. Love it. And Then Eugene from AHHR Test, AI Q&A quality testing. Seems like a huge winner. Seems like a great strategy. Of the two, which one? If you had a gun to your head, and we don't have any guns here in Japan, but in America everybody's got two. So if I took my two guns and I put it to the side of your heads, which one would you put 25k of your own money into it?

50:17

I feel like I would.

50:51

What?

50:52

I know now I'd go for the AI powered Q& A, but I feel like there's something I'm missing with the other company too. And I'm really curious with random chat going into that.

50:53

Yeah, got it. So you're intrigued by random chat, but your gut says, hey, the safe bet is the testing. How about you, Fred?

51:01

I have a lot of questions for eir. I mean, I'm wondering about it because Facebook just bought Manus and, and, or did they? I don't even show you it went through, right?

51:09

I think.

51:17

Yeah. So they bought it and then you have. Now you have free code, open source.

51:18

Okay, so you have questions about competition. Yeah, competition, obviously important area. But which one would you pick if you had to put the 25?

51:23

To be honest, I like the random chat.

51:31

So you would. Okay, great. For me, this is a really difficult one because listen, we're only choosing between two. The safe bet is obviously the quality testing, like low risk because you know it's going to make money, but it's going to cap out, maybe, or not, who knows? But a super impressive founder in Eugene and then an equally if not more impressive founder in Gigi, who. I was absolutely riveted by your pitch, Gigi. You understand something. Every founder has a secret. Every founder understands something. Your command during that presentation was the strongest of all five. We saw you understand. And the confidence you radiated in telling us why they should exist in the world had me captured. And so I would take the bigger risk and go with random chat. And I have a new name for you. That being said, I'd probably just give you each 12 5. I will tell you. I'm not going to tell you the name now. I'll tell you secretly, just the two of us, so nobody gets the domain name. Okay, so a question I think, Fred, you wanted to ask Eugene about competition. Go ahead.

51:35

So most people don't know this, but there's been a bit of a controversy with Anthropic over the last couple of days because they changed the requirements for using CLAUDE code on your system. So up until now you could basically use cloud code in different kind of solutions like inside of your IDE or whatnot. But now they're basically saying you have to stay inside of the. Inside of the ecosystem. You cannot use it with cursor. You can't use it with Google's development tool that they just released. I can't remember what it's called. Antigravity. That's it. The trend now seems to be that most of the closed source providers are going to move to ecosystem protections. Right. So if you're basing, I mean, I guess the real question is how would you get this to work if, for example, your customer is based on Accenture.

52:45

Or so I would say primarily the main value is that it's behaving and testing the application as if it were a user. So the system can't actually tell whether it's a user or if it's our AI. So platform is separate. The other kind of strategic importance I feel is separation of concerns. As you know, quality is like in this case, quality assurance system. Like this is kind of like a doctor in a way.

53:34

Right.

53:59

And it needs to have separation from the building of the thing. So if you put all the context inside the build system, it creates some really odd results where it tells itself it works correctly, but there's no actual external monitor to validate that. That's my main angle cloud QA that provides that monitor at scale separate from the core systems they used to develop them.

53:59

Great. Max, you have a question for one of the two.

54:17

So I feel like with media social companies, you know, rising tide floats all boats. And I saw at the end they have 4 million downloads. So I apologize if you've Already covered this. I might have been missing something, but I'd be curious to kind of understand the problem solution in the context of where is all the sort of movement happening right now in the space that you operate and you know, where's sort of the magic that you provide that allows you to grow to where you are now.

54:20

Basically we're mostly organic. That's how big the needs is. Seriously. So I personally do SEO and ASO myself. App Store SEO, sort of. So if you are in Japan, you type Japanese. I'm confident you can find me. If you want to chat with someone in Japan, not in the us. I need Jason's new name too to do that. In the English actually not just me, many. There are many service there because the needs is growing and nobody care of them because all people here has so many friends. How many friends do you have?

54:53

Too many.

55:28

Too many. Like you get at least 20 name card today. I guess so. But that's true then that's why democracy doesn't work now. You know, maybe it's too big, but it's because a lot of people, they have no friend. People say you are average of five friends. Right. But they don't have five friends. So people with agenda get into their kind of brand basically. So that's how. But some of them, they, they try to find a way to find their friend and the fattest way is to search, talk to someone online and that's where I catch the needs.

55:28

My question is more along the lines of. So for example, you mentioned a few social platforms, but one way to find friends is on Bumble for example. It's not necessarily just for romance. Then you also have Clubhouse. It's a good way to meet new people. Right. So I'm curious about just sort of with these options. Clearly there's some sort of trend in which a lot of Japanese people are gravitating towards some form of of media or meeting people.

56:09

They're almost hacking existing systems to solve the problem. Do you think like because Clubhouse isn't meant for making new friends, it's meant for conversations around topics. But that's interesting that you say in Japan people are using it to make friends.

56:35

Well, as much as people still use it, I think.

56:48

Yeah, that's a really interesting case study.

56:50

So recording Clubhouse and also I think Naval a famous actually he did air chat.

56:54

Yeah.

57:00

And it's kind of similar I think and also Bumble, all of them kind of encourage you to bring your real identity to the platform.

57:01

Yes.

57:10

Use your name, use your photo and again the 30% just, just. They don't want their real identity. They want a new start, I suppose. Or they just want something quick.

57:10

I think this is the magic of what you've done. You have realized that there is a cold start problem.

57:22

Yes.

57:28

And you've realized, let's just take all the friction out. If you're lonely, talking to someone makes you less lonely.

57:28

Yeah.

57:37

So why don't we let you talk with someone?

57:37

Yeah.

57:40

Which is what chat roulette was. So you're more like chat roulette. But chat roulette wasn't explicit. It was more for entertainment, not for friendship. And then I like your idea of the big reveal. We invested in a company many years ago called Whisper. That was a geography based one. So you would start chatting with people who are in your neighborhood. And these anonymous chats do have some issues you have to be careful about, maybe going after young kids, et cetera. So you're gonna have a lot of issues you're have to deal with. But if you're thoughtful about it, I think that you have the start of something that could be magical. Which is, okay, you start with no Persona, then you do a Persona.

57:40

Yes.

58:17

Then you can reveal your real self when you want and both people can choose to reveal themselves. And that could only be for paid accounts. So if you want to reveal, you have to be a subscriber. And then what you can say is you will verify their identity. So you have to have a verified identity with your driver's license services you can use for that. I don't know how it works in Japan, but in the US there are plenty of ways to do that or relatively understand this is who this person is. You verified their phone number, you verified their email, you verified the driver's license. All different ways. Credit card. You at least know something about the person to avoid some problems. I think it could be magical. It's weird, it's interesting and I think you're the right person to do it. Let's give all five companies a big round of applause. And now I ask you to pick your one and two. Your one and two. We'll start with your two and then go to your one. We'll go two. Two, two, One.

58:19

One.

59:10

I have my one picked. I have my two picked. I loved all five. These are five companies that I think are all investable. All five deserve angel investing to get to the next stage. All five are very frugal. I think they're not going to need a lot of money to get to their first paying customers. And to get to some level of product market fit. They have varying degrees of it. They're obviously in different stages here. But I am really enamored by all five. It's going to be very hard for me. In fact, I just changed my votes, changed my number two vote. Okay, Fred, you're looking up. So you have your number two ready. Just your number two and why?

59:11

I think my number two is probably eir.

59:50

Okay.

59:55

Because I do see where they sit in the whole software development life cycle. But I still have tons of questions.

59:57

But I do like your number two. Max, who's your number two?

1:00:03

My number two would. I think it's the same company, the AI powered Q& A.

1:00:07

So Aero testing was your number two. I considered that for my number two. I considered all Source Global as my number two and I considered Cascade as my number two. But I picked for my number two, Matt and Gomochi. And the reason I picked it was I think that there is a way to do this that has a tremendous impact on a set of people's lives and that it has massive upside. I think it has the lowest chance of succeeding of the five. But I think if it does succeed, it could have a profound impact. In other words, the execution is going to be extremely hard for you, Matt. It would have been much easier for me to pick either Cascade or Alt Source Global and certainly Air, which was on my other number two possibility because all of those are going to make going to be quicker and easier to $1 million in revenue, which means I did pick. I'll go number one first. We'll do this like a baseball auction. My number one is random chat and Gigi. And I already stated why I liked it. I found the founder had presence, passion and a secret and a knowledge that could unlock something. Also very profound. And now it's not lost on me that I picked the two consumer apps which are the least investable. But having done Robinhood and Uber and com and seeing the outcomes of how large consumer things can get, I sometimes lean towards them and not safety. Now, Max, you're number one.

1:00:12

Sure. So just caveating this, agreeing with you.

1:01:41

Didn'T change your vote, did you? Based on mine. Okay.

1:01:45

But clearly everyone's good enough to be on this stage with Jason. So again, great job, everybody. My number one would be. Sorry, Maya, I think it was Alt Source Global. Yes, AltSource Global. And I just put a lot of emphasis and weight on does this company have to be from Japan then from Japan. Does this have a chance of becoming a global company.

1:01:48

Oh, I like your frame. Yeah, great job, Max. Fred, who's your number one?

1:02:17

I actually liked outsource as well. And from my point of view, the reason why I liked it was that even in my space in medical world healthcare, it's actually very hard to find the right suppliers for doctors. In fact, if you ever go to a doctor run CL clinic, their back office is a complete mess. It is a mess. And so they don't. They're not very good businessmen doctors. Right. So it's a mess in the back. They don't know where to buy things, they don't know they pay too much, they order too much and all that stuff. And then the other side of it is for patients, they don't know where to go. So one of the other things we're thinking about is like, if you know you want to, you want to get a CAT scan. Where do I go to a CAT scan that's near me. If you don't know, it's actually quite hard. You're on Google, you're trying to find something you don't really understand. You don't know if it's too expensive or not expensive. So I thought there's a lot of ways that this risk management for processing supply chain is actually really quite interesting.

1:02:21

All right, there you have it. Another amazing episode of twist is in the can. See you next time. Bye Bye.

1:03:16