Japan has one of the longest lived and healthiest populations in the world, and let Japanese startups are playing a relatively small role in the recent longevity-tech boom.

The longevity market includes everything from health-tech wearables, to foods and supplements, to lifestyle coaching, to invasive medical procedures. The offerings themselves range from the incredibly useful and helpful to the wasteful and the outright dangerous.

To make sense of all this, today we talk with Bilal Kharouni the CEO of Ekei Labs, who explains his startup’s pivots through multiple sectors of the budding longevity market.

It’s a great conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

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Show Notes

  • What exactly is “biological age”
  • Where health tracking apps are useful and where they are dangerous
  • How to market supplements in Japan’s tightly regulated  market
  • The business and medical challenges in direct-to-consumer health tech
  • Pivoting from supplements to consumer test kits to research
  • The path for commercializing  today’s university medical research
  • Business models that work for startups in medical research
  • Advice to founders coming to Japan to start a startup
  • How to sell in Japan with limited Japanese abilities
  • How foreign founders can recruit Japanese advisors for their startup
  • How Japan’s new via restrictions will affect foreign entrepreneurs in Japan

Links from the Founder

Transcript

Welcome to Disrupting Japan, Straight Talk from Japan’s most innovative founders and VCs.

I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.

Japan is one of the longest lived populations in the world, and as you get older, well, you start thinking more and more about getting older. Of course, getting older is much better than the alternative, but we all want to slow it down a bit and do it in a healthy way.

Now those of you who know me won’t be surprised to learn that once I got interested in this topic, I got a little obsessive. I have a smart scale and a smart watch and a smart ring all confidently telling me slightly conflicting things about the state of my health. And anti-aging startups are a mixed bag at best, ranging from difficult, boring, but very effective medical advice about diet and exercise to fund cutting edge wearables and trendy supplements and treatments that are a complete waste of money and everything in between.

Well, today we sit down with Bilal Kharouni, the CEO of Ekei Labs, who’s going to help us make sense of all this.

Now, the Ekei Lab’s journey and their pivots while trying to find product market fit in the anti-aging market is really a microcosm of the whole wellness industry from supplements to consumer facing tech to medical research to well, I’ll let Bilal explain where it all ends.

Now, interestingly, Bilal and I had this conversation in Okinawa, home of Japan’s longest lived population. And we talk about finding product market fit in health tech, how to sell to Japanese enterprises when your Japanese ability is limited, and how Japan’s new visa restrictions are going to impact startups here.

But, you know, Bilal tells that story much better than I can. So, let’s get right to the interview.

Interview

Tim: I’m sitting here with Bilal Kharouni, the founder and CEO of Ekei Labs, who’s selling direct to consumer longevity testing and support services. So thanks for sitting down with us.

Bilal: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Tim: Now you’re based in Tokyo, but we’re sitting here in Okinawa today. You’ve recently joined the OIST incubator, so tell me about that.

Bilal: Yes, we work on aging and longevity. So for us, there’s not a better place than the blue zone of Okinawa to really sit our lab and working on aging. Actually, we pivoted quite a lot from direct to consumer longevity tests. So we really have a platform that is more intended for joint research. We went much further in terms of research, so having both the lab and the talent and also the perfect location too.

Tim: Well, I mean Okinawa famously as one of the longest lived populations in the world. Is that coincidence or does that inform your research in some ways?

Bilal: So, it’s pretty consciously I will say, the reason why Okinawa and people live the longest are part due to diet or social activities being surrounded by their loved ones, which is great. But what we’re investigating is mostly therapeutics to increase healthy lifespan. So, it’s a deep tech zone I would say. However, for people who have an interest in longevity and living longer and who wants to work on these topics, it’s a very attractive location and it’s an attractive location for hiring some of the best people. We had the chance having members quitting the job for Tokyo to join us in Okinawa to work with us.

Tim: Well, I can certainly see the appeal of coming to work here. So, let’s talk about biological age. Because this is something that fascinates me. But what exactly is it, like my smart scale at home tells me about biological age. I think this wearable also will give me a biological age, but what exactly is it?

Bilal: So, it’s a very interesting question, and that can be quite confusing for many people because as you’re mentioning, you have so many different biological age for one chronological age. So, it’s really looking at the spectrum. So that can be, for example, your cardiovascular health, your fitness or any kind of biomarkers and see how you benchmark compared to rest of population. So, you might be 32 years old, but for example, your cardiovascular system might correspond to a healthy individual of 18 years old. So, you could say that your cardiovascular health is of someone of 18 years old and…

Tim: But is it something that is scientifically defined? Is there like an accepted way to measure these biomarkers and calculate it this way? Is there an accepted scientific consensus about how to calculate it?

Bilal: There is not a scientific consensus yet and that’s actually big challenge in our industry. We have different ways of measuring chronological age using, for example, evidence marker, glycome marker proteomics, and the big question in which ones have a clinical translation. Because I can give you a chronological age, but if it doesn’t mean anything in terms of risk of the disease or physical conditions, it’s frankly huge metrics.

Tim: I’m also curious about. Okay, not necessarily the way you calculate it specifically, but industry-wide. So, when biological age is calculated, is the actual chronological age always used as an input or can it be calculated independently or is it more of like an adjustment factor?

Bilal: So when you do the algorithm, you have a dataset with the metadata sets with the gender, that helps calibrate the chronological age. And ultimately you would want when you take input from a patient not knowing the chronological age and estimates the biological age independently of the chronological age and industry-wide, there are different clocks. And now there’s a huge work for having this clinical and scientific validation. So each year, actually I’m going to Boston in October for the biomarkers of aging symposium that takes place at the Harvard Medical School. So that’s really ongoing discussions in the field.

Tim: So your offering also involves a mobile app? This app provides insights and advice on how people can improve their biological age. So, what kind of insights and what kind of lifestyle changes does it recommend?

Bilal: So for the app, low hanging fruit for someone like the diet, sleep, physical activity, and we put this app for use for clinicians and they can be also very helpful for the clinicians who have both a surgical age metrics as well as information the lifestyle of their patients. Because can be quite difficult for the clinics to know how well the patient eat or sleep. And then the medical doctor can really guide the medical journey to help them in their longevity medical journey.

Tim: So, what are the biomarkers you’re looking at? I mean, you’ve recently been selling like a home test kit for that’s like a blood sample. So, you’ve got the blood test and what other information goes into the calculation?

Bilal: So we have two type of product services. So, the one actually describes is for our individual use and we use a biomarker called IgG glycome. And what is amazing with this biomarker, it is that is very responsive to interventions, an intervention of eight to 10 weeks and do another test. You can see a data, you can see a difference in this biomarker like, and what is also great with this biomarker that is extremely linked with chronic inflammations and chronic inflammations are linked with a myriad of chronic disease.

Tim: So, is that like just a coincident marker or is that actually directly related to biological aging?

Bilal: That’s a great question. Menopause is probably one of the condition that is the most linked to medical aging. And when we say that so many times it’s misdiagnosed and mis-documented. So, having ways of getting the early science through this IgG glycome measurements and then having better medication or better health optimization or better response from the medical doctors, we think is extremely important. And probably the first longevity drugs that we could see on the market will be a drug targeting menopause and perimenopause. That may be one of the first age related condition that we might be able to treat one day.

Tim: Excellent. Let’s take a step back for a minute and kind of talk about how Ekei Labs came to be and how we ended up in this room having this conversation. So, you actually launched in 2019 with a completely different business model. Selling supplements. You relatively quickly decided to pivot on that. So, walk me through like how that happened. What was the story there? What was that like?

Bilal: Absolutely. So with my co-founder Mehdi, we were facing the topic of longevity around 2016 2017. He was then finishing his thesis at Keio University and he had some first insights on clinical trials on humans with NMN and 2018 I quit my job and I just went full on.

Tim: Even back in 2019, your goal was to focus on biological age measurement or?

Bilal: So in 2019, what we wanted to do, it was consumer platform system that other company has launched where you have like regular medical testing for consumers and then supplements, and then you could do like personalized those age depending on your result. That was like the first concept of Ekei Lab. And then we pivoted to really focus on one thing. So, we chose measurements. You need to measure something well first before being into my doing it.

Tim: I misunderstood. My understanding is that in 2019 you were doing just the supplement sales?

Bilal: Yeah. So, actually like the supplements we had like some prototyping and then COVID hits and it put like the operation on pause for a while.

Tim: Okay. Because I mean, the supplement market, it’s fiercely competitive.

Bilal: Yeah, it’s fiercely competitive. And also it’s already some problems. The clinical validation and the scientific validation are not always here. And same thing also for medical age measurement. That’s why we took another step back.

Tim: I’m curious though. So the supplement market is an interesting one. Both for enterprises and for entrepreneurs. For example, in the US the supplement market is very, very lightly regulated. There are certain claims you can’t make, but you have to kind of imply and then an all is good. What about the Japanese market? Is it similar to the US or is it pretty tightly regulated here?

Bilal: I would say it’s pretty tightly regulated. So you have an application called Food with functional claim where you have several claims that are either already listed improved, and then you can put these indications on your supplements. Or if you want to create a new claim, you need to have a really solid clinical data.

Tim: How did you go to market under that regulatory regime where you couldn’t make any kind of explicit claims about longevity or benefits or could you make claims?

Bilal: No.

Tim: So, how did you market them?

Bilal: So, the idea was, so NMN is derived from nursing so nursing is already highly very documented. So, we could have similar claim or we could have general claim good for wellness or good for general wellness, but you cannot have any claim related to aging. You cannot say, for example, good for healthy aging.

Tim: So, yeah, that can make the marketing difficult.

Bilal: It can make the market difficult, but also I think it’s a good safeguard for consumers not being misled with the interventions. Especially in the early days to what motivated us actually to launch a NMN company was that the price for NMN products in Japan, were extremely expensive. I’m talking around 200,000 yen for a bottle.

Tim: Oh my God.

Bilal: Yeah, it was extremely expensive.

Tim: Was that just because demand was so low?

Bilal: I think demand was so low and then you had like one company who was distributing it. It was really like the early days and they had this premium marketing and idea was we’re in connection with the laboratory in China who were like producing NMN for clinical trials and for academia. And we knew the price and we knew that there’s no way it would cost 200,000 yen for a bottle. But that’s the thing, if you have no safeguards, you can have, I think like predatory behaviors of people selling interventions that are clinically validated, scientifically validated with false claims at a pricing that can be predatory. And that’s definitely not the method of the consumer.

Tim: So after the supplement business model, I don’t want to say fall through, but…

Bilal: Yeah, that’s true.

Tim: After the supplement business model fell through, you decided to pivot to direct to consumer anti-aging testing kits?

Bilal: Absolutely. So that was really the idea we wanted to think, okay, there’s some scientific and clinical validation for those biomarkers and it can be a good realization for consumers of what they could improve in their lifestyle. So, many of my friends, for example, are going to be very healthy for a couple of months, but because they don’t see an actual results in the mirror, they don’t see an actual results like on their phone. They can really give up being healthy in a very short period. So we thought that the medical matrix could be a great motivator for people to keep being healthy for longer terms.

Tim: Yeah, I love the whole concept of kind of gamified health, nudging yourself into better habits and better behaviors. I think it’s good business and good for society as a whole. But in some ways it seems like the direct to consumer testing is sort of similar to supplements in that it’s lightly regulated and as you mentioned, there’s no real definition of what biological age is. So, did you face the same type of regulatory restrictions about your claims as you did during the supplement era?

Bilal: So, in terms of regulation, so aging is not a disease, so we cannot diagnose aging as a disease. So, there’s a way for market entrance that is pretty easy I would say. In terms of challenge that we’ve had and why we pivoted from B2C was more the value we can actually bring to the consumer in Japan. What is the interest for a Japanese consumer to pay a hundred of dollars out of pocket for a test when there’s already ningendoc, kenkoshidan existing and such a strong healthcare system.

Tim: But even looking at the test kits as anti-aging, I mean, medically it’s not a diagnostic device, so that makes sense. You’re under much less regulatory scrutiny. But from a consumer point of view, from a marketing point of view my impression would be that when people are ordering these kind of test kits, they’re not trying to diagnose a disease or something, they’re trying to get more of a general sense of their own wellness. So, does that necessarily compete or run up against the ningendoc and the health insurance program here.

Bilal: In some way I would say so because the idea, like when you want to know your medical age, if it’s higher or lower, you want it to have been information about your health in general. And also because what we measure is related to chronic inflammations, that’s also really linked to the potential of the onset of certain chronic disease. So, in a way I would say that is quite competing with the existing health infrastructures.

Tim: Yeah, I could see that, there certainly is that overlap. Getting it back to our earlier conversation about having like no scientific consensus about what biological age is. So there are lots of different home test kits and wearables and scales all telling us our biological age. Are any of these like benchmarked against clinical trials or how do people come up with these numbers? How are they verified?

Bilal: So, the first person who really introduced a solid integrated medical age was Steve Horvath in 2013. So he looked at the epigenome, the gene expression layer that is regulating gene expression. And he saw some patterns on which genes were regulated or not by measuring the methylation on the DNA. And he noticed that those patterns were not random. They actually correlate with age. And that was the first time that we could think, okay, maybe this biomarker could be a great interpretation of the medical age. So that was the first biological clock in 2013, and it was actually very correlating with the chronical age. And then we are now at the fourth generations of biological clocks. And the idea is to find markers, for example, in the epigenome that correlates more with the onset of disease in because of aging more than correlating relief with the chronological age.

Tim: The science is fascinating. And long term, I think the science is clearly important, but there’s this gap between the science and the direct to consumer products. So certainly during COVID and after COVID, there’s been this explosion of direct to consumer test kits for all kinds of things. And none of them are diagnostic devices. And I’m just curious with the science at such an early stage and moving so fast, how do these test kits in general test for accuracy? Do the manufacturers self-test? Is there some sort of governing body or?

Bilal: Yeah the large majority of those tests have academic publication and the ones who don’t have academic communication, should be avoided at all costs. But there is an academic communication and there is a peer review work and there is collaboration and there’s an outcome of academic collaboration.

Tim: Well, I’m not talking about the academic use. I mean, I’m talking about the pure direct to consumer sales.

Bilal: Yeah, exactly. So they use algorithm that have been peer reviewed and there is academic publication, so they don’t come from out of nowhere. And you can read the papers on nature for both of them and look what was the data sets, how they correlate with certain disease. So there is this academic background and moving to consumer kits, even though we know that those markers, for example, of course can correlate with aging or certain disease. The clinical translation is not as evident as it is right now, and that’s why it is a big topic on a field now. How can we use those clocks for clinical translation and actually improving the health of the consumers or the patients?

Tim: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So, with the kind of the strict regulatory regime in Japan and kind of the limited appeal of these kind of home test kits, you decided to take the company through a third and most recent pivot, which brings us back here at Okinawa.

Bilal: Yeah, the line of thinking is actually quite similar of the element. First, we saw a market, we saw pricing and we thought like, okay, how can we do it ourself and decrease the price? So we are very interested in epigenetic testing and we have a team members are really experienced in NextGen sequencing and biology of aging who are very experienced with those methodology. And we manage to build our own proprietary methods to do epigenetic sequencing at a much higher resolution and lower cost than the industry standard technique and realize that the value of having this high throughput, high resolution methods were not so much for consumers, but more for the researchers. And we are collaborating with research institutions who want to have this data from their own samples to accelerate their research.

Tim: So, your current customer base is research institutions or does it also include things like pharma companies?

Bilal: So, all of our revenue now comes from private institutions and R&D departments of larger groups as well as biotech startups.

Tim: It’s still squarely focused on longevity.

Bilal: Exactly. So, ultimately our methods could be used in any area of life science because many areas of life science are interested in getting epigenetic data, but our focus on specialty now really relies on company who wants to have a target for aging of the market in the coming years.

Tim: It’s kind of interesting in a way that every university in Japan is working to try to figure out how to commercialize their research. And you’ve kind of inverted that where you sort of had the market first and backed into doing the research and funding the research.

Bilal: Yeah, we went from like the most thing that can be available for the consumers and stepping back to now doing fundamental research in clinical trials to try to find new interventions.

Tim: So, let’s talk about your long-term go-to market and your long-term business models. So, do you plan to establish yourself and grow as an independent research organization? Do you plan to eventually move into medical diagnostics and clinical trials? What does the future look like?

Bilal: So, now 95% of our revenue comes from B2B. So it took us around two years of R&D to have this epigenetic research platform operating. And we’ve had a lot of great commercial attractions. We’re now processing thousands of samples. And how do we make money currently is we make money for each sample that we sequence using our methods. And for some clients we also propose custom AI model. We have a very talented team member and we can also make money by delivering those dedicated AI model, not built on noisy publicly available data, but on the highest throughput data that we’re going to sequence from the sample of our clients to make sure that the data set is really pristine and for the unique phenotype of our clients.

Tim: So AI is always exciting, but won’t this eventually face the same challenges you faced with the supplements and the direct to consumer testing where to have real scalable value, it needs to get either certification as a diagnostic tool or isn’t there sort of that natural ceiling in the market

Bilal: For the research actually, we’ve seen great examples of research departments using those biological clocks to get the R&D and actually finding great potential gene target, for example, for origination. So, there’s been very exciting progress by using those AI models to guide the R&D. So, that’s why we are very excited of being in this field. We think that now the clinical validation of using these clocks for patients might be a bit early and we still have some research to do. But using those models for longevity R&D is actually very promising even for invitro research. And this is where we are mostly interested on collaborating, really doing the fundamental biology and early work to find aging target.

Tim: The whole longevity field is still relatively young. At least this generation young. But how long do you think it will take for what you’re doing now to move from the research stage into the commercialization stage?

Bilal: So, that’s a great question. In terms of indication and market accessibility, we work with very large companies who have pipeline for product that may be found in every company in three to five years. And on the other side of the spectrum, we work with very cutting aid startups as are working on gene therapy or stem cell therapy. So there’s quite a large spectrum of intervention that are being investigated.

Tim: For an R&D business model that’s great news and really exciting. But as a consumer facing or even a scalable product company, are you planning on like co-developing products with these companies or sharing IP? What’s the long term plan on that?

Bilal: The long term plan for us is having a platform model. So, now we make money piece of service on one side with a wet lab with the samples and then with a dry lab, with a licensing modeling that we are moving forward to. We want to productize our wet lab. So, we identifying compounds that we could patent and manufacture rates for other companies to replicate our great data without having to send a sample. So, we could send them a kit and then they could just basically plug it to the sequencing machine and then reproduce the same quality of data. And for the dry lab, what we want is licensing based in class models that we’re working on, and those models will be trained on the data that we produce, which mean that it’ll work hand in hand. If you would want to use our best in class models, you will need to use our platform to use it and then purchasing a kit. And that makes things much more scalable because now we are limited by the amount of people that we can have and are allowed to receive samples and to treat them. But if we have this politicization and licensing, then the scalability is much higher.

Tim: Excellent. That makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk a bit about Japan and foreign founders in Japan. So, you were actually the first foreign founder sponsored by Shibuya Startup Support.

Bilal: Yes.

Tim: And you work closely with the French Tech. And as a new arrival, you have a better understanding of the situation than I do. What are some of the most important things that people need to understand when moving to Japan to start a startup?

Bilal: The things can take longer time than in other geography.

Tim: What accounts for that? Is it just these Japanese customers are notoriously slow at making decisions or are there other structural problems?

Bilal: I would say it’s mostly culturally and you need to have this relationship of trust that is very important. And if you haven’t graduated from a Japanese university, if you don’t have the traditional ways of socializing with Japanese individual and Japanese decision makers, well you have to do the field work and build this trust and it takes time.

Tim: So, how did you build that trust?

Bilal: So, we had the chance of being in a very hot area, longevity. Many large companies and many researchers are very interested in what we are doing. So, very early in the creation of our company in 2022, we’ve been talking with decision makers in very large companies and large organization, and they’ve been just following our progress for a long time.

Tim: So, it’s just making those contacts, keeping them updated, letting them see you’re making progress.

Bilal: Yeah, exactly. And also what I would advise, and that’s also because also that’s kind of the case in biotech, but also that’s kind of like the concept of the POC, a proof of concepts that are very popular in collaborating with corporation is going to monetization as soon as possible to really show that first you can be trusted and also creating a commercial relation with someone. And I think that the relation with clients in Japan is really beautiful in a way because it’s really creates a strong bonds.

Tim: Yeah. And I think that’s so important and it’s something that a lot of founders overlook with proof of concepts in that most POCs don’t really lead to anything you need to keep your eye on kind of a long-term ball. It’s like, are we establishing a long-term relationship? Is this going to be a financial relationship moving forward?

Bilal: Yeah, absolutely. I think that giving updates and having a floating relation with decision maker is good, but having this bond of really working on something together and having them entrusted you, even if it’s a small amount of money, completely flips the relation. And it’s a great way of building a deeper relation and in our case led to great business.

Tim: So, you don’t speak Japanese, right?

Bilal: Not as good as I should.

Tim: So, what advice do you have about growing a startup when you don’t speak Japanese? Yeah, I mean, how do you do sales? How do you build partnerships?

Bilal: So, first it’s spend more time studying Japanese. I think that’s…

Tim: It’s a hard language. I mean, I’ve been here over 30 years. I still study a little bit every day.

Bilal: I got a bit confidence and I stopped studying for a while and now I’m just opening back my Konji book and studying again because it’s just so easy to forget. But yeah, no, I think that no matter what, speaking Japanese is important and spending sometimes learning it’s important.

Tim: But if you’re on a two year visa, there’s only so much Japanese you can absorb in that time.

Bilal: True, true. So that’s why I think like, just making the best to have a bit of time to just learning some Japanese every week can be meaningful. But also what helped us the most in our case was very early on having advisors or having a team of Japanese people that could just really help us both get the cultural clues or getting the cultural context to do business in Japanese.

Tim: So, how did you recruit those advisors? Or is that something that Shibuya startup support was helpful with? Or French tech? How did you connect with those people?

Bilal: So, before moving to Japan in 2022 with startup visa and actually spent quite some time in Japan, it’s already had quite a strong network of people who could support us. And then just being active, like I think like just naturally by building your startup, you just end up meeting people who are interested in what you do. And then it’s all about the CEO job to trump them and having them…

Tim: I say 90% of success is just showing up. So just being there, talking to people, letting them know what you’re doing.

Bilal: Absolutely. And that’s why I think it’s very important to really be passionate about the problem you’re solving because naturally you would encounter people who are so passionate about the same problem and who would want to join you, and then you can really move forward.

Tim: Actually that really resonates with me because what I’ve found, especially, so all of my startups have been enterprise software. So, I’m used to selling into the enterprise. And if you go into a sale with like an abundance of enthusiasm, most of the time it’ll fall flat. Most of the time you’ll be across the table with people who have no expressions and you’ll get no questions. But every once in a while you’ll get that one person who is just as passionate as you are, but he’s stuck inside this big company and he sees you as like, yes, this is what I’ve been wanting to do, and he will become your champion.

Bilal: So yeah, it’s really is. And we have the chance with the longevity field is that, especially in Japan, that’s one of the reason we are here in Japan is because it has a real long culture of rejuvenation therapeutics. Most notably Nobel Prize of 2012, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka really opened the pass for cellular reprogramming. So, for example, all of the companies in the US that make like really the headlines Jeff Bezos putting 3 billion in Altos Labs, Sam Altman with bioscience, the common point is working on the Yamanaka factors and it’s origin from Japan. So, you have a lot of Japanese individuals and decision makers who studied biology, who are very passionate about the sequestering. There’s really a really strong culture here in Japan.

Tim: Is that research continuing or was it more of like inspirational to lots of other researchers who pursued it?

Bilal: So, now there’s a lot of the research is pursuing, for example, to find a safe dosage. Other people are finding other factors that are linked to the Yamanaka factors, but that can be safer having other ways. For me, it’s one of the most interesting fields, and there are a lot of roles of startups who former students of Professor Yamanaka. So, there’s really a very strong ecosystem around this technology and these achievements.

Tim: So, over the past month or so, Japan has really been tightening up its visa restrictions. How do you think that’s going to affect foreign entrepreneurship in Japan or entrepreneurship in general in Japan?

Bilal: My honest opinion is that when you’re for an entrepreneur, you remain an immigrant, and then you’re part of the most fragile part of the population somehow. And then unfortunately you face those changes. Sometimes it can be brutal about visa restrictions so like anything else, I just see it as a part of the job, a part of the condition. It’s unfortunate, but that’s just being an immigrant in any country of the world. But I just feel like it wouldn’t change much. It’s just a new regulation.

Tim: So, not much of a long term impact one way or the other?

Bilal: I don’t think so. I think that it’s just another box to check it going from 5 million to 30 million. It’s consequence and maybe like some businesses are not aware might be impacted by this if the capital cannot be sustained. But I just feel like it’s just another box to check.

Tim: Yeah, I agree with that to some extent. I mean, founders are problem solvers by definition. And in growing your startup, that’s not even going to be one of your biggest problems.

Bilal: That’s what I’m thinking. So, and also I feel like this is not a Japan problem. I just feel like in any geography, in any market, in any territory, you’ll have some administrative issues coming up out of nowhere. So this time it’s the visa requirements were different, in other markets maybe something different. It’s kind of how I see it and just part of the job.

Tim: Part of founder life. Well listen, Bilal, before I let you go, I want to ask you what I call my magic wand questions. And that is, if I gave you a magic wand and I told you that you could change one thing about Japan, anything at all the visa regimes, the way biotech is regulated, the education system, anything at all to make it better for startups and innovation here in Japan, what would you change?

Bilal: I think it’s something that many people would want, but I would say a stronger yen to be able to have wages who are more competitive internationally, to keep talents in Japan and to attract talents out of Japan.

Tim: Have you had challenges trying to get people to come to Japan to join you?

Bilal: We’re lucky enough that our collaborator from overseas, especially not about what we do, fully believer of a product and we’ll move from overseas to Japan. Well, I can see it be a challenge proposing salaries from people in Europe or in the US for biotech position because we’re planning of accentuating our growth in the next couple of years. So I’m already preparing the hiring part. And yeah, I can see it being a challenge when you just compare the salary dollars. And also I see more and more talented people in Japan who can find position overseas.

Tim: Yeah. I mean, salaries in San Francisco can be double what they are in Japan. And so yeah, that can be tough to compete against.

Bilal: Especially if people don’t know the quality of life you can have with a salary as a half one in San Francisco.

Tim: It doesn’t feel like half, that’s for sure.

Bilal: Exactly. I mean, personally, I’m a true believer first of the Japan ecosystem. I think that a lot of great research, a lot of great innovation will change the world coming from Japan on one hand. On the other hand, I just love living here, so I’m fine with the weak yen, but ultimately down the line, I can’t see being a challenge to being ready, competitive for talents worldwide.

Tim: Well thanks so much for sitting down. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Bilal: Thank you.

Outtro

And we are back.

You know, unlike most other startup sectors, the primary driver in today’s boom and age tech startups is not new technology or a recent change in market dynamics. It’s simply disposable income. Selling wealthy people the promise of long life or even immortality has been a solid business model for at least the last 2,500 years or so since the quest for the elixir of life first began.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that there’s no meaningful innovation or that startups do not have an important role to play. Clearly there is, and they do.

Ekei Labs series of pivots through the age tech sector just so perfectly show the avenues and the challenges of a small startup trying to make both a profit and a meaningful contribution in this space. Starting out in mass market supplements and ending up in supporting the advancement of core medical research.

And as the very first recipient of the Shibuya startup visa Bilal’s advice to new founders is excellent. Putting time into relationship building and keeping in touch is critical In Japan, potential customers will stay on top of your updates looking for signs of progress and of market validation. But never forget that this is a sales process. Your keeping in touch is not strictly social. You need to be moving the conversations to a close. The progress you share with your prospects needs to be focused on overcoming their objections. And every meeting needs to be framed in terms of your future business relationship.

You need to get the ball in the goal.

And the fact that Bilal and so many foreign founders are managing to do this with limited Japanese ability is truly impressive. And it should be encouraging to every foreign founder in Japan. If the problem you’re solving is hard enough and important enough, even the most conservative Japanese institutions will be more than willing to meet you halfway and to work with you to solve their problem and to grow your startup.

 

 

If you want to talk more about medical and age tech startups in Japan, Bilal, I would love to talk with you. So come by disruptingjapan.com/show245, and let’s talk about it. And if you enjoy disrupting Japan, share a link online or just, you know, tell people about it. Disrupting Japan is free forever and letting people know about is the absolute best way you can support the podcast. But most of all, thanks for listening. And thank you for letting people interested in Japanese startups and VCs know about the show.

I’m Tim Romero and thanks for listening to Disrupting Japan.