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

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, I am back in Japan for Founder University Japan, which is our second cohort. And I'm here with a live audience, which you're going to hear roar and clapping right now.
And then I'm going to teach you guys how to round out the clap. This is very important. You're going to clap like crazy, like you won the lottery. But then I'm going to go. And as it comes down, boom, nice and sharp, you stop. Okay, we'll try it one more time. I'm here with a live studio audience in Tokyo.
Could be better. Let's try one more time. I'm live with the studio audience here in Tokyo. Perfect. Now we've got it.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:45)
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**Jason Calacanis** (1:24)
What we like to do when I'm in Japan is meet some founders working on interesting things who are a little further ahead than the Founder University cohort. What is Founder University? Founder University is a pre-accelerator. It comes before Techstars, Y Combinator, or the Launch Accelerator. Many of our companies have gone on to A16 Speedrun, Techstars, et cetera, Y Combinator, of course, and our program, Launch Accelerator. We've run the Founder University program on three continents now.
Here in Japan, we do it in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh, twice a year, with our friends at Sanabel, the PIF, and we do it, of course, in America internationally. What is Founder University? As a pre-accelerator, we help teams work on product-market fit, raising their first round of capital. We have thousands of people apply a year for a couple of hundred spots. The program is 12 weeks long. We ask everybody to work really hard for those 12 weeks to try to make amazing progress on their products, on their team, and in working with their customers. A startup in its most basic form is those three things. A team that develops a product that delights a customer base. And if you get that flywheel going, everything is really easy. Now, of course, most startups fail. But if you, in the course of your career, decide to do two, three, four startups, you're going to hit success. And so we love, as a firm, the Launch Fund, which I run, and we're now on our fourth fund, we love to work with early stage founders. We've been so lucky to hit, you know, just some world changing startups, of course, Uber, Robinhood, Com, Thumbtack, Athena, Zipline, VastSpace, so many great companies, and a lot of new AI companies that have suddenly become worth hundreds of millions of dollars, like Abacus or Micro One. Those are recent ones that you will be hearing about in the future. Because we're here live with a bunch of founders in the room, about 40 of them, we're going to talk about some topics today in terms of company building with our guest, and we're also gonna hear about his startup. So our guest today is Bilal Kharouni.

**Bilal Kharouni** (3:36)
Tony, yes.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:37)
Kharouni. Now you have a French accent, not a Japanese one. Your company is Ekei Labs, that's spelt E-K-E-I labs.com. You can go visit it, you're a longevity startup, and everybody's talking about longevity.
We'll talk about company building, everything from product market fit to operating a company here in Japan, hiring people in Japan, cap tables, and all of those great things. But I wanna start with your business and what you're doing. So Ekei Labs, what is the mission, and how are you going after this very important space, which is longevity? I'm sure it is by design that you're here in Japan, where we have some of the longest lifespans, and we have a massively aging population. So tell us just a bit about Ekei Labs.

**Bilal Kharouni** (4:25)
Yeah, so to start with Ekei Labs, we generate high resolution and low cost epigenetic data for drug development. Today we're getting paid for discovery and aging, as well as for manufacturing quality control in cell therapy.
Our mission is really to build an infrastructure for data generation to help advancing longevity research.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:44)
So there's a bunch of people who are doing longevity research. Who are those people? Pharmaceutical companies, startups, big companies, small companies? Tell us a little bit about your customers, your partners.