How Bespoke faked AI until it actually worked (w/ Akemi Tsunagawa) | E2320

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
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 gonna do a third cohort in January. If you would like to be part of Founder University in January, we're gonna open up the applications on the 1st of September at founder.university. You can apply. And then we also had Angel University here in Tokyo at Jetro's special meeting space.
And this time, I think we had 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 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 Akemi Tsunagawa, and she is the founder of Bespoke, and she has three very interesting businesses here in Japan, working on workers coming here in Japan where there is a labor shortage, yes?

**Akemi Tsunagawa** (1:29)
Yep.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:30)
So welcome to This Week in Startups.

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**Jason Calacanis** (2:06)
You've been an entrepreneur here doing this startup for over 10 years. You started with a business, Bebot, where you were doing a multilingual chatbot.
That business did very well, yeah? And had good revenue?

**Akemi Tsunagawa** (2:19)
I would say so. Otherwise, you wouldn't have founded two more businesses, right?

**Jason Calacanis** (2:23)
Right. So that business did well. And visitors who are coming here can talk 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?

**Akemi Tsunagawa** (2:41)
Yes, it has. When we first 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?
Back then, it was not like that. So when we first started offering the chatbot service to help non-Japanese people traveling to Japan, people thought we were crazy. And this is also the time before like all the ChatGPT and, you know, Gen.AI came out. So investors did not think it was a good idea.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:15)
And why didn't they think it was a good idea? What was your insight that was working, that you believed in it? And why didn't investors see it?

**Akemi Tsunagawa** (3:23)
The thing investors 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 was no other chatbot service out there that people were using like actively. So they did not think it was possible technically and also culturally.
But then like we did a lot of test run, right? We also had human, including myself, chat with people pretending to be a bot.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:00)
You faked it, yes.

**Akemi Tsunagawa** (4:01)
We faked it, yes. Multiple occasions.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:04)
Yes. Well, 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 a 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, you know, maybe going into a store or getting a visa or planning a trip, getting a taxi, it wasn't as smooth in 2015 as it is now. Yeah.

**Akemi Tsunagawa** (4:40)
Correct. And then things got even more interesting after 2017 when Narita Airport signed us.