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

Release Date: 08/03/2026

Dr. Mark Hyman on Function Health & GLP-1 microdosing | E2334

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo - Northwest Registered Agent - Rippling - Today’s show: Your doctor almost certainly isn't testing your insulin. Dr. Mark Hyman sits down with Jason to explain the broken system that Function is fixing, and what 100 million biomarkers say about how sick America actually is. Learn why insulin beats blood sugar as an early warning for TKTKTK. Why might "normal" lab ranges be unreliable? PLUS, how does an expert like Dr. Hyman feel about GLP-1s and psychedelics? Guests: Dr. Mark Hyman on X: Function: Relevant Links: The Dr. Hyman Show...

Becki DeGraw on spinouts, IP licensing & clean exits | Wilson Sonsini Startup Legal Basics

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Wilson Sonsini Today’s show: Spinouts are everywhere right now, and most founders get the cap table wrong. Jason sits down with Becki DeGraw, partner at Wilson Sonsini, to break down how to do it right, starting with his 80/20 rule for splitting the new cap table and why letting the old company keep too much of it kills your ability to raise. Becki also covers the legal side: who owns the IP, non-competes between the two companies, and the trap founders fall into when they're still on the old board. PLUS, the one question every Series A...

VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333

This Week in Startups

VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333 This Week In Startups is made possible by: partner 1 - link partner 2 - link partner 3 - link Today’s show: Are we one step closer to data centers in space? Katelin Holloway of Seven Seven Six and Paige Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures break it down what it would take. Plus investor interest is surging in Physical AI companies. Paige explains why she backs applications of physical AI over general-purpose robotics, and how her thesis on multimodal AI led to the largest check she's ever written. We then dive into the...

Are AI Agents forming "civilizations" or is this just a psy op? | 2332

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent CLA Rippling Today’s show: Hugging Face's $399 Microduck and the art of companies taking on side quests. Then, we get into Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," which blew up online this weekend. Jason calls the "secret AI civilization" framing deliberate PR, and thinks it's inflammatory enough that someone might attack a data center over it. Then, Anders Forslund of Heart Aerospace shows off the X1, a battery-powered electric airliner designed for regional flights that can fly for 30 minutes...

Breaking down Nvidia’s Hugging Face and Poolside bets | E2331

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: DigitalOcean Every.io PayPal Today’s show: *Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, just days after quietly licensing Poolside’s coding model for $6 billion+. On TWiST, Jason lays out why this is actually the biggest AI story of the year. Nvidia plans to offer enterprises unmetered, unlimited on-prem compute, pulling them away from reliance on Anthropic and OpenAI’s frontier models and products. PLUS we’re chatting with Halter founder & CEO Craig Piggott about how his company helps farmers optimize their land use via...

Bill Gates foresees massive AI job loss: these VCs disagree | E2330

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lightfield Northwest Registered Agent Rippling Today’s show: *Bill Gates dropped a 6,000 word warning: AI will be “the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst sort of injustice.” The Microsoft icon has an AI agenda for the US: new national institutions, AI use taxes, and jobs legally reserved for humans only. Our VC roundtable guests — Sheel Mohnot (Better Tomorrow Ventures), Dave McClure (Practical Venture Capital), and Hussein Kanji — push back hard. Is taxing profits a better fix for AI taking jobs than taxing the tokens...

You Can’t Fire a VC From Your Board: Here’s Why | Wilson Sonsini Startup Legal Basics

This Week in Startups

Today’s show: Can a founder actually fire a board member? Short answer: almost never. And the reason why may surprise a lot of founders. On this edition of Legal Basics, Wilson Sonsini partner Becki DeGraw joins Jason for a deep dive into who really controls your board, when investors start earning seats, and the differences between a board member and a board observer. Check out an episode that might just save your cab table someday. PLUS they walk through the full lifecycle of your startup’s board, exploring what it actually controls, when founders should start adding their own board...

China wants you to cheer for the robots taking your job | E2329

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo Quo Conservation Fund how old a movie has to be for me to be able to show a part of it on youtube Generally 10 seconds or less of a film clip can fall under fair use for commentary or criticism — which is how most podcasts and talk shows use clips without issue. But there's no hard legal rule based on age. What actually matters more than age is fair use, which considers: Purpose — commentary, criticism, education = stronger fair use case Amount used — shorter = safer; a 5-10 second clip for reaction/discussion is generally fine ...

Open source is going to win it all: Harvey proves it | E2328

This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Superhuman Sentry Lightfield Today’s show: Jason’s been saying it for years now (and we’ve got an All In clip from 2023 to prove it). Open source will win the AI race. This week gives us a major evidence point, as $11B legal AI company Harvey released its own in-house model, trained on an open-weight Kimi K3 base. Harvey made a proprietary specialized solution without having to risk sharing its precious expert-compiled data with the major frontier labs. PLUS we’re checking out the FREE AI dictation app Willow with co-founder Allan Guo,...

Taste is the new programming language (w/ Astrocade CEO Amir Sadeghian) | AI Basics

This Week in Startups

The TWiST AI Basics series is made possible by Google Cloud! Build context-aware AI workflows using DeepMind models and orchestration tools with Google for Startups’ new Startup technical guide on generative media. Get the guide here: Astrocade is building super-intelligence for the interactive world. Build the future of fun: Today’s show: *Making a video game once required a studio, an engine, and a team of five or more people working for six months. But with Astrocade, users just describe the game they’d like to play and share, and an AI assembles it from minutes, ready to publish to...

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Today’s show:

*Before Bespoke’s “travel concierge” chatbot could actually hold a conversation, founder/CEO Akemi Tsunagawa and her team quietly answered customers themselves. That “fake it till you make it” strategy paid off. Bespoke landed Narita Airport as a customer based on the strength of their “chatbot” answers, and now the team runs three companies, and is expanding into shipyard robots.

In the fourth and final edition of TWiST Tokyo for Summer ‘26, Jason and Akemi discuss her thesis: “solve the labor gap first, [then] build the tech to math.” Plus insights into Japan’s tourism boom, how founders should consider the country’s accelerating population decline, the economics and politics of importing foreign labor, and why AI may already be taking over more jobs than you think.

Guest

Akemi Tsunagawa on X: https://x.com/AkemiTsunagawa

Bespoke: https://www.be-spoke.io/

Bebot: https://www.bebot.io

BeTrained: https://www.be-spoke.io/en/be-trained

Relevant Links

Disrupting Japan: “Silicon Valley Has Chatbots All Wrong”: https://www.disruptingjapan.com/silicon-valley-has-chatbots-all-wrong-heres-how-they-really-make-money/

CNN on Japan’s population decline: https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/asia/japan-biggest-population-decline-record-intl-hnk

Paul Graham: “Do Things That Don’t Scale”: https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html

Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/

TripAdvisor: https://www.tripadvisor.com/

KPMG on Japan’s Business Manage Visa Reforms: https://kpmg.com/xx/en/our-insights/gms-flash-alert/flash-alert-2025-195.html

Business Traveller on the “Akiya” renovation trend: https://www.businesstraveller.com/insights/features/japan-akiya-boom-buying-abandoned-homes/

THR on the 2004 satirical film “A Day Without a Mexican”: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/a-day-without-a-mexican-20-years-later-1236293209/

Founder University x Japan: https://tokyo.founder.university/

JETRO: https://www.jetro.go.jp/en/

Antler in Japan: https://www.antler.co/location/japan

Timestamps:

0:00 Founder U Japan Cohort 3: Coming in Jan 2027!

1:06 Introducing Akemi Tsunagawa, founder of Bespoke

3:08 Why investors passed in 2015

4:49 Selling Narita Airport on Bebot

6:29 The roots of Japan's tourism explosion

9:27 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at https://Odoo.com/twist

14:17 Japan's population decline, by the numbers

20:06 Quo (formerly OpenPhone) - Quo gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free at https://quo.com/TWiST

21:38 Training foreign workers via smart glasses

27:50 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist

33:06 Moving into shipyard robotics, too?

37:44 Some customer development lessons

48:21 Plans for even more expansion

52:52 Q&A: How AI changed hiring

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