Reflection on 2025

It’s crazy to think that I’ve been doing this startup thing for about 3.5 years now.

The first 2.5 years were a mix of ups and downs - honestly, a lot of downs, or I should call it “learning from mistakes”. Looking back, 3.5 years sounds like a long time, but it’s gone very fast for me because every step of the journey has been different set of learnings, discoveries, wins and failures.

And the past 12 months have been completely different from the first 2.5 years. So I thought I wanted to write down a few of the (many) things that I’ve been through, before the end of the year (I’ve got only one hour until the new year in my timezone, haha).

It’s also crazy to experience how much the world has changed (and changing) because of LLMs and the ecosystem around them. For founders, it’s obviously exciting: product development is much faster with AI coding tools, and whole new startup opportunities are emerging everywhere. But it also forces you to think harder about what to build and where the world is heading. Maybe this is what it feels like to build during a major technology shift, like internet, cloud, or mobile etc.

After a number of pivots (I think I will write about those another time), we eventually landed on AI customer support/contact center for Japanese enterprise clients. Because of that customer base, I moved from London to Tokyo almost a year ago. I spent a long time in the UK for uni and work, so it’s been nice being back and work in my home country again.

Given the nature of the business - enterprise customers, Japan-based - we’ve stayed fairly quite publicly and operated in stealth (this is also something I learned: when being public helps, and when it doesn’t).

We started with just the two of us (me and my co-founder Keita), and we’ve grown the team and customers significantly. My role has changed constantly, from software engineer, CTO, technical delivery lead, product manager, recruiters, and many times all of them in the same week or day.

The team grew quickly, and hiring and building the technical team became one of my most important jobs. Early hires are very crucial: a great core hire can accelerate the company’s growth significantly, and the opposite is also true, especially when the team size is small and every member sets the culture and the high bar for the company.

Of course there are still challenges (and there always will be), such as building reliable LLM systems, making the system actually work in the real world, scaling the team and business etc. But even with all of that, this has been by far the best learning experience I’ve had in my career. And I am looking forward to what’s next - and learning even more along the way.