886 Studios Blog

Applications for the Fall '26 batch of ikigai Launchpad are now OPEN!

886 Studios — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:37:31 GMT

🚨 Applications are OPEN for ikigai Launchpad Fall 2026 (F'26)!

Led by Kevin Lin (Co-Founder of Twitch) and Kai Huang (Founder of Guitar Hero), ikigai Launchpad brings together $100K USD in funding, mentorship from founders who've done it before, and a program designed to help early-stage founders move faster and go further.

If you're a founder ready to level up your startup, or a builder with the drive to start something, ikigai is your launchpad.

Here's what you'll get with the 10-week program:

➢ $100K USD in Funding

➢ Weekly 1-on-1 Office Hours w/ Kevin & Kai

➢ Founder-Led Workshops: sessions on product, growth, fundraising, and go-to-market led by the 886 Studios partner group

➢ Investor Introductions & Fundraising Support: warm intros and hands-on help when you're ready to raise

➢ Guest Speakers: a lineup of founders, VCs, alumni, and operators

➢ Access to the 886 Studios & Lifelike Capital global network

➢ A Tight-Knit Founder Community: batch activities and a all-batch retreat

➢ Office Space & Corporate Perks: free office space in our Taipei office, plus exclusive corporate perks worth over $10K+.

Spots are limited, apply now!

First round of acceptances closes July 31st.

We want to start working with founders as early as possible and are accepting applications on a rolling basis. We will fund upon acceptance so don't wait.

Apply now to build with the best and experience a slice of Silicon Valley in Asia.

Link to the application here.

Link to our website here.

If you’re interested in learning more, want to talk through ideas, or anything, we’d love to talk! Book a call with us here.

Find Truth Faster

Carter Wang — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:28:36 GMT

The birds are chirping, the flowers are blooming, Taipei is warming up, and the new ikigai Spring 2026 batch is locked and loaded.

ikigai Launchpad S'26 batch orientation

We started this accelerator less than two years ago, and in that time, the “building environment” has already changed entirely.

With much gratitude to AI, what once took weeks or months to build can now be compressed into hours and days. The cost of building has collapsed, teams are leaner, and the old benchmarks for what’s possible in a given timeframe no longer apply. ikigai batch Partner, Kai, who’s been in the startup industry for decades, said at orientation he’s never seen change happen this fast in his career. Ever.

So this is the message we gave this batch from day one: SPEED IS EVERYTHING!

A few key reasons for this:

The playing field has been leveled. The advantage goes to whoever moves fastest.
The same tools available to you are available to every other founder, including the ones entering markets you’re in. The floor to build anything has lowered (even I, who’s measly non-technical, am vibe coding lol), which means the relative advantage now goes to whoever moves fastest and iterates most aggressively with these tools. And if you’re not using these tools…well, you’re behind.
The arena is heating up.
You’re not only competing with startups, you’re also competing with incumbents & major AI labs. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and others are productizing features at a pace that didn’t exist before. If you move slowly, you’re not only racing other startups, you’re also racing the possibility that a major player ships your product natively.
Most valuable markets only have a brief window before the opportunity to create or capture value closes.
This could be due to a regulatory shift, a behavioral change, or in our current case, the emergence of an extremely powerful and disruptive technology. Being several months late can mean the window is already gone.
You can build in days now, but you can’t compress distribution.
Getting users, building trust, and establishing a brand still take time, which means the clock for getting distribution needs to start as early as possible. This is the one thing AI cannot accelerate.
Early users generate data that can make your product materially better than a competitor who launched later.
If you’re able to figure out who you’re building for, ship it to them, receive feedback, and iterate, the gap between you and the team that shipped months after you grows and compounds over time. But this data flywheel only starts spinning when you ship.

The core framework we gave every team: ship, learn, adjust. In this equation, it’s shipping and learning are the comfortable parts. Adjusting is where most teams get stuck, because adjusting could simply mean iterating, or it could mean killing what isn’t working and changing direction altogether. Overcoming the sunk cost fallacy and detaching from an idea you’ve embedded into your identity is hard, but that’s also where the teams that make it separate themselves.

Truth arrives through contact with reality, and as Brian Armstrong, co-founder & CEO of Coinbase, likes to say, “action produces information.” So just ship it. The market will tell you if it works or not.

Godspeed.

Some pics from the first 2 weeks

5 Thing We Learned from the Founders of Retro

Carter Wang — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:36:11 GMT

886 Studios x Retro fireside chat

Social media was built on a promise to help people feel more connected. But somewhere along the way, that promise got distorted. What began as sharing our lives with friends slowly became a performance, and now lives in a jungle of content served by an algorithm that forces everyone including strangers, advertisers, and increasingly AI to compete for attention.

Retro was built as a response to that. It’s a friends-only weekly photo journal that recently hit #1 on the Taiwan App Store.

Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting the founders, Nathan Sharp and Ryan Olson, in Taipei for a fireside chat. They were in town visiting one of their hottest markets, and it turned out to be one of our favorite conversations we’ve had!

Here are 5 things we learned from our talk with them:

1. They built Retro because they wanted better social media to exist

Nathan and Ryan spent a combined 13+ years at Meta working on some of the company’s biggest products including Instagram Stories, Facebook Dating, Campus, and more. They eventually left because they saw a gap that they wanted to be met: a social app dedicated to close friends, with a business model that did not require harvesting attention.

Most consumer apps are built for a hypothetical user. Retro was built for themselves, their family, and their friends who were frustrated that an app like this didn’t already exist.

This served as a deeper fuel when things became hard that had nothing to do with metrics or pressure from investors. A genuine belief that phone addiction and social isolation are serious enough problems to work on, a small like-minded team that shared the same conviction, and a deliberate rejection of the “fail fast” mentality that Silicon Valley tends to adhere to is what kept them going on their way to millions of users.

If you’re building something where you think you’re actually like contributing to something that’s going to like lead to a better version of the future, you kind of don’t really want to fail fast. - Nathan

2. The design is the philosophy

Most social apps let you post anything, anytime, for anyone to see. Retro made an intentional choice to constrain that. You post once a week, as a kind of weekly recap, and it’s only visible to your friends.

the simple & clean design of Retro

The insight came partly from a Google Photos investor who observed that most people have at least one meaningful photo per week, but not necessarily every day. This framing was built into the design philosophy of the product.

Surprisingly, this created a behavioral shift. Users started reporting that Retro made them want to take more photos, look at the world differently, and to actually go do things worth documenting. The app was creating a positive feedback loop with real life rather than competing with it.

3. Taiwan as a blueprint for social growth

Retro has over 435,000 users in Taiwan who’ve collectively posted over 1 million photos. The growth didn’t come from a big marketing push though. It came from achieving what Nathan calls “density,” which is enough friends in one place that the app works the way it’s supposed to.

Nathan & Ryan at National Taiwan University (NTU)

Taiwanese users tend to jump on trends quickly, which meant friend networks formed fast. Once a critical mass of your friends is already on the app, when you download it yourself the experience is immediately more compelling. You don’t have to drag people in.

One counterintuitive insight from Taiwan is that engagement actually drops during Lunar New Year, when people are physically together with their families, and picks back up when they return to school or work. Being near your friends makes you want to share more with them, not less.

4. Your business model changes who you’re building for

Ad-supported social media has a structural problem that has nothing to do with the intentions of the people building it.

When your revenue is tied the amount of time spent on a platform, every product decision gets evaluated against that metric. Features that increase engagement get built and ones that would improve user wellbeing but reduce time on platform are deprioritized. Over time this compounds, and the product gets more engaging in ways that aren’t necessarily good for users.

So it’s not that “Big Tech is evil”, but more that business model they’re operating within pulls in a different direction.

They are always going to have an incentive to take more of your time, more of your attention, make the product more addictive. Even if that’s not the creators’, the engineers’, the designers’ intent, that’s the incentive at the end of the day. - Ryan

To build a business that’s aligned with users, Retro is betting that subscriptions are the way forward. And the proof that subscription supported social can work at scale is already there too. Snapchat has over $1 billion in subscription revenue and Strava runs an ad-free social network on subscriptions alone. When users pay you, you work for them.

5. Building is the best form of complaint

Nathan closed the night with a banger of a monologue. He and Ryan started Retro out of frustration with what social media had become and a belief that they could build something better. The act of building was itself the argument. It was proof that a different kind of social app was possible and that you didn’t have to choose between a great product and a business model aligned with users.

A lot of people complain about things. I think founders play a really important role in society in the sense that you’re not just deconstructing something, criticizing something. You’re actually building the solution, proving that something different can be true and be a reality. And so it’s super hard and you don’t have to do it at all phases and seasons of your life, but if you have it in you to found something and complain by actually building a better alternative, then you should do it. - Nathan

Thank you to Nathan and Ryan for coming through!

If you haven’t tried Retro yet, download it and check out the new Sticker Recap feature!

And if you want to come to more of our events and be part of our growing startup community, subscribe to our Luma calendar and join our Discord.

ikigai Launchpad Spring 2026 (Sp'26) Applications Are Now OPEN

Carter Wang — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 04:11:07 GMT

Hey everyone,

We have a few announcements we want to share!

1. ikigai Launchpad Spring 2026 (Sp’26) applications Are Now Open

We are officially opening applications for the next ikigai Launchpad batch, happening in Spring 2026.

We are building the Silicon Valley of Asia and looking for ambitious founders who want to build the next generational company. The program is led by Kevin Lin (co founder of Twitch) and Kai Huang (creator of Guitar Hero) and gives early stage teams the funding, mentorship, and community to move faster and go further.

Here is what the 12-week program includes:

100K USD in funding
Weekly 1-on-1 office hours with Kevin and Kai
Founder-led workshops on product, growth, fundraising, and go-to-market
Guest speakers from founders, VCs, alumni, and operators
Access to the 886 Studios and Lifelike Capital global network
A tight-knit founder community with batch activities and a retreat
Free office space in our Taipei startup hub plus corporate perks worth over 5K
Demo Day with top investors across the US and Taiwan

If you’re ready to level up your startup or you are a builder thinking about starting something, ikigai is your launchpad.

Deadline to apply: January 31, 2026

Batch begins: March 3, 2026

Duration: March to May 2026

Apply here.

More info here.

2. ‘Pitch and Connect’ Night on Nov 25!

We are hosting a ‘Pitch and Connect’ night on November 25. This is an open pitch night for founders, builders, and anyone curious about the startup scene in Taipei.

After wrapping up our S’25 batch and Demo Day, we wanted to host something more casual where people can share what they are building and meet others in the community.

What to expect:

8–10 short pitches (1-3 minutes each, no Q&A, all in English)
Networking with Taipei’s startup community
Drinks, snacks, and a fun, casual vibe

Date: November 25, 6:30 to 9:00 PM

If you want to pitch, you can select that option directly on the Luma page when you register!

3. New Discord Channel: #find-talent

We just launched a new channel in our Discord called #find-talent.

Our community has a lot of smart and talented people - founders, aspiring founders, engineers, growth people, ops, and more. We often get asked for intros, so we created this channel to make it easier for everyone to connect directly.

You can share who you are, what you are building, what you are looking for, or whether you are hiring. Let’s make it easier for people to find talent & opportunities!

If you haven’t joined the Discord, join here.

That’s it for now, thanks everyone!

ikigai Launchpad S'25 Demo Day!

Carter Wang — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 05:21:05 GMT

The two ikigai Batch Partners: Kai Huang (Creator of Guitar Hero) & Kevin Lin (Co-founder of Twitch)

The first-ever ikigai Launchpad Demo Day is in the books!

Over this past summer, we backed a batch of early-stage startups in this cohort of ikigai Launchpad. Each team was armed with $100K from us, a plethora of seasoned mentors (aka, the 886 Studios partners) by their side, and a gritty but fun 3-month program packed with office hours with the Partners, workshops, and guest speaker sessions.

The culmination of the program was Demo Day. We hosted one virtual session for our investor friends in the US in the early morning, and another in-person event later in the afternoon in Taipei.

Photos from the in-person event!

Let’s take a look at the startups from this Summer 2025 (S’25) batch:

EchoTree

Tim Chen, CEO & Co-Founder of EchoTree

EchoTree is an AI mental health companion that provides 24/7 support through empathetic conversations using science-backed methods. Unlike most mental health apps that only chat, EchoTree transforms therapy techniques into 30-second practices embedded directly in conversations. So users don’t just talk, they actively practice real-time coping skills.

One in four people face mental health challenges each year, but most never get help due to the high cost of therapy, long wait times, and the stigma that comes along with it. EchoTree meets users when they need it the most: at 2 AM during panic attacks, before big presentations, and whenever traditional therapy isn’t available. Life is tough. It’s easy to get caught in a spiral where negative feelings and thoughts echo in our heads. EchoTree offers a “different kind of echo”. One that gives you the space to talk, reflect, and feel better.

The founding team is Tim Chen (engineer) and Sharon Wu (designer), 2× founders who’ve built six apps reaching over 500,000 users and $600K ARR in six months. Starting from their own mental health struggles, they’re building an app that packages their experiences and healing tools to help not just themselves, but 3 billion people worldwide facing similar challenges.

They are now raising $750K.

Check out their app here.

Connect with the founders here.

Tell It Now

Ryan Yang, CEO & Co-Founder of Tell It Now

Tell It Now is a platform that connects brands with nearby creators through location-based “missions” dropped on a map. When creators walk near stores, they receive notifications to step inside, experience the business, and create authentic content. This results in a win-win scenario where the creator earns money on the spot while brands get hyper-local UGC they can reuse across their marketing channels.

Their vision is to democratize marketing by turning everyone with a phone into a potential marketer, creating an experience where people have the opportunity to earn money alongside their daily routine.

They’ve already activated major clients like Family Mart (25,000 stores globally), Pizza Hut, and GNC, generating 600+ campaigns and $100,000+ in creator budgets within six months.

The founding team includes Ryan Yang (CEO), a second-time founder who graduated from Carnegie Mellon and is a former engineer at Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, and Pacha Chen (COO), who came from Trend Micro and Arc Dev.

They are now raising $1M to expand their AI-powered matching engine to reach $3M ARR within the $97.6B influencer marketing industry.

Check out their app here (iOS) and here (Android).

Connect with the founders here.

InstaPodz

Ansen Huang, CEO & Co-Founder of InstaPodz

InstaPodz is Duolingo for any topic, helping busy professionals learn anything on the go through personalized AI podcasts.

It’s targeting 2.4 billion auditory learners globally who are frustrated with current audio learning platforms that offer lengthy, irrelevant content or lack follow-up options.

Instead of fixed content libraries like traditional podcast platforms, InstaPodz generates custom conversational podcasts tailored to exactly what each user wants to learn, and automatically creates follow-up episodes that progressively deepens understanding. Their mission is to make learning efficient, consistent, and entertaining for the 2.4 billion auditory learners worldwide.

The founding team consists of Ansen Huang (CEO), along with Po Yu Huang and JJ Liou, all builders who’ve worked together for six years with experience at PicCollage (an app with over 260 million users) and launching multiple AI-native consumer apps.

They are now raising $500K.

Check out their app here.

Connect with the founders here.

PictureCook

Yaohua Yang, CEO & Co-Founder of PictureCook

PictureCook is your child’s AI companion for language learning. It adapts to their level, inspires daily English conversation, and helps them grow through story-based learning.

Instead of traditional apps that teach kids through flashcards and drills, PictureCook creates an AI friend that children can naturally converse with, play with, and practice language skills through genuine interaction.

They’re addressing an over $100B global market in foreign language learning, with an initial focus on Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

The founding team includes Yaohua Yang (CEO), who brings experience in children’s development services and building an FDA-approved medical device, Hogan Sung (CTO) who brings large-scale engineering experience from Roblox and Yelp, and Ling Chiu (CPO) who brings consumer product success with 100M+ downloads and her perspective as a design professor.

The team came together after realizing how much games and digital platforms shape children’s growth and how important it is to create more positive, meaningful experiences. They are positioning themselves at the forefront of the “AI-Native Generation,” believing that within 5-10 years, AI companions will be as common in children’s lives as tablets are today.

They are now raising $700K.

Check out their app here (iOS) and here (Android).

Connect with the founders here.

Sugar AI

Jarshan Chen, the CEO & Co-Founder of Sugar AI

Sugar AI is building a platform that licenses characters from IP creators and allows users to chat with their favorite anime and manga characters through an AI messaging app.

For the past one hundred years, the characters in our favorite movies, TV shows, and anime, lived within the bounds of the page, trapped in stories while we could only watch and wonder. Sugar AI is now turning these one-sided relationships with fictional characters into genuine, two-way interactions where fans can talk to, connect with, and build relationships with the characters they love. And they’re working directly with creators to make this happen.

The founding team includes Jarshan Chen (CEO), a former machine learning engineer at LINE, and Jerry Lee (CTO), a former AI engineer at ITRI (the organization that launched TSMC). The two met at Garage+ incubator, worked together for two years on their first startup, and won awards at the Google Annual Development Competition and NASA Global Development Hackathon.

They are now raising $700K.

Check out their app here.

Connect with the founders here.

Feel free to reach out to any of the teams you’re interested in, and if you’d like, we’d be more than happy to help connect you.

Thank you to everyone who joined the Virtual Demo Day and the in-person Demo Day in Taipei for this special occasion!

And thank you for the support from the 886 Studio mentors: Phil Chen, Jacob Hsu, Chris Wang, Jameson Hsu, Joe Hei, James Hong, Charles Huang, Kevin Chou, Steven Chiang, Tim Chen, and last but not least the ikigai Batch Partners, KAI & KEVIN, the LifeLike Capital partners: Jason Lin and Randy Lee, our guest mentors and speakers who joined throughout the program: Jenny Hsu, Annie Hseih, Christine Orchard, Insik Rhee, Maureen Fan, and Patrick Lee, and for the 886 Studios team: Freya Wu, Ginny Wu, and Carter (me, lol).

And congratulations to the 5 teams for their hard work and achievements! You’ve only just begun!

Thanks for reading and see you soon,
Carter

Us, up in the early morning for the 7 am Virtual Demo Day!

A look into ikigai

Carter Wang — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 05:11:19 GMT

the ikigai Launchpad S’25 batch

Hey guys, Carter here again!

Last month, we kicked off our summer batch of ikigai Launchpad, our accelerator in Taipei where we fund, mentor, and support founders of early-stage startups.

This is our second ever batch of ikigai Launchpad, and we’re super excited to share what’s been cooking. I wanted to give you guys a quick behind-the-scenes look into the first few weeks of the program.

Enjoy!

Day 1: Welcoming the Founders!

Everyone piled into a conference room in Taipei Tech Arena (the home of 886 Studios & our ikigai Launchpad accelerator), where we - the 886 Studios team, partners, and the batch founders - finally gathered together for the first time.

It kicked off with an introduction from the batch partners, Kai & Kevin, sharing the story behind 886 Studios and why they decided to build ikigai Launchpad. Randy and Jason, partners at Lifelike Capital (the partner fund for ikigai), popped in via the air to say hello and welcome the batch!

This was followed by a short orientation led by Ginny, our program mastermind, where she set expectations and gave a quick overview of what the next 10 weeks would look like. It ended with Freya, our GM, sharing a personal anecdote and displaying her amazing ability of connecting things and weaving it into an inspiring story. This one was about broken glass at a bar she visited. The bar kept the glasses from past accidents and put it on display, not to hide the mistakes but to show they were part of the story. She tied it back to startups, reminding us that painful moments are often what make the journey meaningful.

From left to right: Kevin & Kai welcoming the batch, Freya's mini-TED talk, brand new S'25 ikigai t-shirts for everyone

Next up was the welcome lunch, where we brought together alumni, partners, and other startups in our community to meet the new batch and swap stories about what everyone’s building.

From left to right: around the room intros & Jameson (co-founder of Mochi Media & 886 Studios partner), Kevin, and JJ (S'25 batch founder) kickin' it

Batch Retreat

One of the biggest benefits of joining ikigai, or any accelerator for that matter, is your batchmates. These are your peers for the program. The people you’ll be building alongside and leaning on for support, sharing ideas with, inspiring, and pushing each other through the long days.

To help everyone settle in and connect, we took the entire batch on a retreat to Yilan, often thought of as Taipei’s backyard, located on the northeast coast of Taiwan. Founders, partners, and the 886 Studios team all squeezed into a bus for a quick getaway from the city. We hiked to a waterfall, ate seafood, networked with capybaras, and played poker late into the night (fun fact: i won LOL. Sorry, I just had to include this).

Waterfall hike, fun in the bus, great food, and a Beatles impersonation

Additionally, we were joined by Chris Wang (co-founder of Playdom, Thundercore, and an 886 Studios partner) and our guest mentor, Lyle Fong (co-founder of Lithium and Gamers.com) where they took part in a fireside chat alongside Kevin & Kai. They shared about their failures, their struggles, and the kind of stories you wouldn't normally read in TechCrunch. Failure isn't something to run away from, as the partners shared, it's something to embrace.

Fireside chat w/ Kai, Lyles, Chris, and Kevin

The next day, we explored a bit more of Yilan, then headed back to Taipei. The next ten weeks had officially begun. The beginning of the next 10 weeks has officially begun.

Time. To. Lock. In.

Workshops w/ the Partners

Throughout the 10 weeks, the batch gets to learn directly from each of the 886 Studios partners through workshops and talks on everything from how to find product market fit, to talking to users, to storytelling, and more.

We kicked things off with a “Mission & Vision” workshop led by Kevin. We run this early in the program because having a clear mission:

helps teams to align on shared goals and values and gives them the clarity to know what to focus on and prioritize.
creates consistency across your brand & marketing. It gives you a clear narrative - why your company exists and where you’re going.
acts as a guiding hand for decisions, which is especially important when things inevitably get tough. A mission reminds you why you're doing this in the first place. It’s fuel.

Jarshan & Jerry jamming on their mission statement

Chris followed with product feedback sessions. If I could summarize his advice in to a few points it’d be:

release the app to the public as fast as possible so you can get feedback as fast as possible. then iterate on that.
track where users are dropping off. Is it the app store page? Onboarding page? A specific page of the sign-up flow? Your goal should be to decrease friction as much as possible.
optimize your App Store page. That’s often the page where you’ll lose the most potential users. Make it easy to search and easy to understand.
additional tip: add a daily bonus. It’s one of the simplest ways to drive retention. The points or tokens don’t even need to mean anything significant.

Ryan and Pacha deep in thought while listening to Chris

Later in the week, the batch sat down with Jacob Hsu.

Jacob is a serial founder who scaled Symbio to $750M, led 23,000 engineers worldwide, and later became CEO of Catalyte, a company focused on unlocking overlooked tech talent. He’s now a Partner at 886 Studios and runs a venture studio in Maryland.

Over lunch, Jacob shared his career journey, thoughts on founder mindset, and lessons from building in B2B vs B2C.

Here were of some the key takeaways from his talk:

relationships are long-term leverage. Earlier in Jake’s career, he committed to meeting one new person a week for a year, without any agenda. This could be anyone from his taxi driver to someone who worked in his office building. That simple habit led to career-defining friends, business partners, and deals.
one creative advantage is remixing, aka, borrowing proven concepts or business models from other markets and adapting them to. You don’t always need to invent everything from scratch. Execution and fit matter more than originality.
in B2B, you're not only selling a product, you’re selling a transformation that must be justified to multiple stakeholders with different incentives. Success depends on understanding an organization’s internal politics, building champions (people who can advocate for your product), and proving ROI with numbers.

Jacob’s sharing

Weekly Mentor Office Hours

Every week, founders sit down for mentor office hours with Kai and Kevin. It’s dedicated time for hands-on advice and support where they work through product questions, strategy, and any challenges or roadblocks they’re facing.

I won’t spill any info from these top-secret meetings, but here’s a picture below.

Pictured: Kai and Benedikt

Talks from Guest Speakers

We invited Jenny Hsu, a former Wall Street Journal journalist and PR manager at Alibaba, where she helped lead global communications and shape the company’s media strategy. She is now a communications consultant, angel investor, and a guest mentor at ikigai Launchpad. During this initial talk, Jenny and her partner, Annie Hsieh (founder of Edge of Impossible) shared insights on how to become a more persuasive and confident communicator.

Here are some of the things we learned:

the most powerful persuasion tool is a story. Stanford Research found that memorable stories increase memorability by 22x.
our physical state has a huge impact on our “aura” and delivery. Leveraging a routine like CALM (Calm, Anchor, Visualize, Activate), before a pitch, board meeting, etc, can actively prime our bodies and mind which can improve confidence, which in effect will improve our persuasive power.
while facts are important, truly connecting with people comes from being authentic. Sharing your "why" and being vulnerable can create a strong emotional bond, making your audience, or whoever you’re speaking with, feel like they're part of your journey, not just listening to a polished presentation.

“Inside Out Pitch Mastery” by Jenny Hsu & Annie Hsieh

We also invited Patrick Lee, the co-founder and ex-CEO of Rotten Tomatoes, a leading site for movie and TV show reviews, and now founder of Fanverse. He spoke to our founders about focus, (which, if you’ve made it this far in the newsletter, thank you for demonstrating!).

Here are some of the things he shared:

the most effective marketing is achieved by building a great product that people naturally want to share with others. With Rotten Tomatoes, the "Certified Fresh" status, the film studios themselves would heavily promote this status in their advertising, trailers, and DVD covers, essentially marketing Rotten Tomatoes for free.
if the product isn’t catching on, pivot. This means changing something fundamental, whether it’s the main feature, who you’re selling to, or the whole idea. Trying to make an unfocused idea grow will likely lead to failure, as we’ve seen with WeWork and Quibi. These were companies that crashed after expanding too fast and into too many directions.
focus is one of the most critical traits for a startup. As Pat puts it, sunlight alone won’t start a fire, but when concentrated through a magnifying glass, it can generate enough heat for a spark to ignite, or in a startup’s case, product-market fit.

All eyes focused on Patrick

And that’s it for now! We’re super excited to have kicked off our summer batch of ikigai Launchpad. Stay tuned to hear more about our batch teams and where they’re going.

See you next time!
- Carter

Also, come hang out with us on Discord!

The LLM Wars Continue, Humanoid Robots on the Rise, and More!

Carter Wang — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 04:38:18 GMT

Welcome back to the 2nd edition of ikigai Insights, a newsletter by 886 Studios!

My name is Carter, an associate here at 886 Studios. In this monthly newsletter, I’ll be sharing the latest and greatest tech & startup news stories that we’re following, hidden gems from around the internet, a window into what we’re doing at 886 Studios & with our ikigai Launchpad accelerator, fresh takes from us, and more! Join us and subscribe, it’s free!

🎨 We are hiring! We’re looking for a Graphic Design Intern to support our design projects and marketing campaigns. Whether you're a student or a freelancer, if you love creating, we want to hear from you!

Know someone who’d be a great fit? Share this! We’re hiring ASAP.

👉 Apply here

What’s Happening!

Earlier this month, Kai Huang, our Managing Partner at 886 Studios, moderated an insightful panel at the JP Morgan x UC Berkeley Healthcare Conference in Taipei, featuring Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, and other industry leaders. The discussion dived into their entrepreneurial journeys, lessons from growing their companies, and the evolving startup landscape in Taiwan. They also explored how stronger ties between Taiwan and Silicon Valley can unlock new opportunities for startups on both sides. As Taiwan’s startup ecosystem matures, fostering these connections will be key to driving innovation and global impact!

Kai Huang (Creator of Guitar Hero and Managing Partner at 886 Studios) and Steve Chen (Co-founder of YouTube)

Our team also joined the Gold Card event, where our Partner, Phil Chen, took the stage to share his experience returning to Taiwan, leading the development of the first Android phone at HTC, launching his battery startup Cold Electric, and building Taiwan’s pro basketball league with the New Taipei Kings, starring NBA champion Jeremy Lin. It’s always great to see new faces and connect with Taiwan’s growing Gold Card community!

Pictured: Jonathan Liao (Managing Director at the Gold Card office, CEO of Futureward), Phil Chen (CEO of Cold Electric, CEO of the New Taipei Kings, and Partner at 886 Studios), and Freya Wu (GM of 886 Studios)

Gold Card Community group pic!

At 886 Studios, we’re always looking to work with ambitious founders ready to take their startups to the next level. If you or someone you know is building something cool, apply for our accelerator, ikigai Launchpad. We provide funding, hands-on mentorship from successful founders, and access to an invaluable network of experienced founders and investors in the US. Our next batch begins in June and applications are open NOW!

Apply here!

🚨Top Stories of the Month🚨

A curated selection of impactful, interesting, and fun news

📰 Around the World 📰

xAI released Grok 3
- xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has released the highly anticipated Grok 3, their most powerful AI model yet. Grok 3 has been trained with ten times more computing power than its predecessor, Grok 2, utilizing the massive Colossus data center equipped with around 200,000 GPUs. This extensive training has resulted in huge improvements in understanding, problem-solving, and contextual awareness. Early evaluations show that Grok 3 outperforms models from OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Google in math, science, and coding. It’s the first model to score over 1400 on Chatbot Arena, making it the top publicly available reasoning model. Grok 3 also introduced advanced reasoning capabilities of the likes we’ve seen from GPT o1, o3, and Deepseek’s R1 model and an Advanced Voice mode. You can try Grok 3 for free through X, the Grok app, or on the grok.com website (also they dropped a new logo, and I think it looks absolutely beautiful).

Humanoid Bots! There’s been a TON of announcements in the humanoid robot industry in the past month. We may be seeing humanoid bots walking around much sooner than we think 😳!
- Clone Robotics revealed, Protoclone robot, a “bipedal musculoskeletal android” which they describe as a faceless, anatomically synthetic human with 1,000 myofiber muscles and 500 sensors. The video went viral, racking up over 50 million views on X, with reactions ranging from awe to outright unease - some called it “dystopian” and “terrifying”, and we, at 886 Studio, can attest to this sentiment. Though no release date is set yet, the humanoids’ lifelike movements are a big leap forward.
- Figure unveiled their Helix model, a “Vision-Language-Action” system that lets their Figure-02 robots take voice commands and work together on tasks like putting away groceries (watch the video here). Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure, posted on X, that Helix has advanced faster than the company had originally expected and thus, they have moved up their home timeline by two years. They will begin alpha testing this year!
- 1X, a startup from Norway, has revealed their Neo Gamma home robot, the successor to their Neo Beta from August last year. It’s another prototype meant for testing in homes, focusing on safety and affordability, which is key for domestic robots.

Microsoft creates a new state of matter (I had no idea this was possible!)
- Microsoft unveiled the Majorana 1 chip, powered by a “topoconductor”, a new state of matter beyond solid, liquid, or gas. The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella called it a “breakthrough”, leveraging topological superconductors for stabler qubits, potentially cutting quantum computing timelines from decades to years. You can think of this chip as a supercomputer on steroids, built using a new type of material that allows it to process information in a completely different way than regular computers. Unlike traditional quantum systems prone to errors, this could scale more effectively, though practical applications remain years off. (Microsoft) (Satya’s X post)

Digg is coming back! The once-iconic social news aggregator that earned the nickname, “the homepage of the internet”, announced a surprising revival led by founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who repurchased the brand from Money Group. Originally launched in 2004, Digg peaked with 40 million monthly users by 2008 but crumbled after a disastrous 2010 redesign (v4) that favored publishers over users, losing ground to Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook and eventually selling off in pieces. Partnering with new CEO Justin Mezzell (ex-Google, Facebook, and PROOF Collective), Rose and Ohanian, once competitors, aim to resurrect Digg’s original spirit of community-driven discovery while leveraging modern AI tools and fun quirks. The prototype, teased at reboot.digg.com with over 1.2 million upvotes at the time of writing, targets a private beta in June 2025 and a full launch by September. (Alexis Ohanian’s X post)

🗞️ More Stories We’re Reading 🗞️

Mistral AI releases its AI assisant, LeChat (Mistral AI)
Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP (The Verge)
Elon Musk escalates Sam Altman feud in battle for AI's future (Axios)
Anduril takes over Microsoft's $22 billion US Army headset program (Reuters)
Righting a major wrong (Coinbase)
Apple debuts iPhone 16e: A powerful new member of the iPhone 16 family (Apple)
Thinking Machines Lab is ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new startup (TechCrunch)
Waymo One is now serving 200k+ paid trips each week across LA, Phoenix, and SF (X)
Introducing Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Anthropic)
Perplexity launches $50M seed and pre-seed VC fund (TechCrunch)
Introducing GPT-4.5 (OpenAI)
Katy Perry, Lauren Sánchez, Gayle King: all-female crew to helm next space flight on Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket (The Guardian)
Microsoft is shutting down Skype after a 21-year run. Here’s how it lost out to video call rivals (CNBC)
Ramp, a 6-year-old fintech startup, has more than doubled its annualized revenue to $700M (TechCrunch)
Anthropic raises Series E at $61.5B post-money valuation (Anthropic)
Trump and TSMC announce $100 billion plan to build five new US factories (Reuters)
Trump signs executive order establishing U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve (CNBC)

📋 The Bulletin 📋

Our top picks from around the web.

Reading 📖
- Three Observations - by Sam Altman (Co-Founder & CEO of OpenAI)
- What happens when knowledge is commoditized? by Jack Raines
- Why Everything is Becoming a Game by Guruwinder
- The Addiction Economy by Evan Armstrong
- Why America's future could hinge on Elon Musk by Noah Smith
Podcasts 🎧
- Palmer Luckey - Superhuman Soldiers, AI Missiles and Exoskeletons in Warzones | SRS #171 (YouTube)
- Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicated AI’s Trajectory | Dwarkesh Podcast (Spotify)
- Rolex | Acquired (Spotify)
- JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant | All-In Podcast #215 (YouTube)

Thanks for reading and see you soon!

Join us on Discord to be a part of our growing community!

Rocket launches, Wooly Mammoths, the TikTok roller coaster, Deepseek and more!

Carter Wang — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 05:02:41 GMT

Hey everyone, welcome to the 1st edition of ikigai Insights, a newsletter by 886 Studios!

My name is Carter, I’m from Southern California, and an associate here at 886 Studios. In this monthly newsletter, I, along with my team, will be sharing the latest and greatest tech & startup news stories that we’re following, hidden gems from around the internet, a window into what we’re doing at 886 Studios & with our ikigai Launchpad accelerator, fresh takes from us, and more!

Our goal with ikigai Insights is to pierce through the noise and bring you the stories, ideas, and insights that keeps you informed, sparks curiosity, makes you think, and maybe even makes you laugh! This won’t be your typical corporate email, it’s a newsletter you’ll actually enjoy reading. So join us and subscribe, it’s free!

First off, I want to briefly share more about who we are and what’s brewing at 886 Studios.

For those of you who aren’t familar, 886 Studios is a venture firm in Taipei, here to help founders across the globe take their bold ideas and turn them into global successes. Started by a crew of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who’ve built companies like Twitch, Guitar Hero, Playdom, HTC Vive, Taipei Kings, and Kabam, we know what it takes to build impactful companies, and we’re here to share that experience.

That’s why we created ikigai Launchpad - an accelerator designed to supercharge founders and accelerate their growth.

Last October, we launched our inaugural batch, officially kicking off our accelerator journey here in Taipei.

Weekly mentor office hours with Kai Huang, Founder of Guitar Hero & Batch Partner for ikigai Launchpad

We’re building something special: an accelerator rooted in the values and best practices of Silicon Valley, but here in the heart of Taiwan, and we are excited to announce the early-bird applications for the next batch in Summer 2025, are now OPEN!

We are accepting applications on a rolling basis so don’t wait, apply soon!

If you want to learn more, check out our website.

…and now, on to the news!

🚨Top Stories of the Month🚨

A curated selection of impactful, interesting, and fun news

📰 Around the World 📰

On January 16, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, successfully reached orbit with its rocket, New Glenn, for the first time ever since its founding in 2000. New Glenn is a large, reusable rocket meant to carry a huge amount of satellites into orbit. This accomplishment marked a new era for Blue Origin, introducing it as a direct competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, in the rapidly growing space launch market. (Blue Origin)
- New Glenn has also been tapped to help launch Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband internet satellites, which could become a competitor to SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation. Amazon already has a license to launch over 3,000 Kuiper satellites (SPACE.com)

TikTok went dark in the US after failing to sell it’s operations to a US company due to a law that required ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to divest TikTok or face a national ban. However, per a Trump executive order, the app’s ban has been delayed for 75 days so Bytedance could have more time to find a U.S. buyer. It’s now back online but time is ticking! Microsoft, Oracle, Mr. Beast, Larry Eliason, Perplexity AI, and Mr. Beast have all been rumored to be potential buyers for TikTok’s U.S. operations.

Us, at 886 Studios during this whole fiasco

Colossal Biosciences, the company that’s famously on a mission to bring back the woolly mammoth and two other extinct species, has raised a $200 million Series C at a $10.2 billion valuation. The company claims it has made significant breakthroughs on each of its main projects: resurrecting the Wooly Mammoth, Dodo bird, and Tasmanian tiger. Their approach in resurrecting these extinct animals, involves mapping the entire genome of the species and then comparing it to their closest living relative (in the mammoth’s case, it’d be the Asian elephant), then using the gene-editing tool, CRISPR, to edit the cells. In the last step, those cells will be put into an egg cell, and the embryo will be implanted into an elephant, which will hopefully give birth to a baby mammoth. To do this, they are building out various technologies, including artificial wombs, and it is there in the process of building resurrection technology, where investors believe the value lies. (TechCrunch)

A ton of announcements from OpenAI
- Stargate - OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle announced "The Stargate Project”, a $500 billion investment in U.S. AI infrastructure. The venture will immediately deploy an initial $100 billion, starting with massive data centers in Texas before expanding nationwide. If the Stargate Project follows through with the $500B, it will go down as the largest infrastructure spend in history and significantly accelerate the already startling pace of data center development post-ChatGPT.
- Operator - OpenAI released an agent that can go to the web and perform tasks for the user. Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling. Operator acts as an agent for receptive tasks and can perform actions autonomously like buying movie tickets, filling out forms, ordering groceries, and more. It is currently a research preview and available to try at operator.chatgpt.com in the US. (OpenAI)
  - Extra Reading: We Tried OpenAI’s New Agent - Here’s What We Found (Every)
- Deep Research - On February 2, 2025, OpenAI announced the launch of "Deep Research, an AI agent integrated within ChatGPT. This new feature is designed to conduct extensive, multi-step research autonomously, leveraging the internet to find, analyze, and synthesize information from hundreds of online sources. OpenAI writes that you simply “give it a prompt and ChatGPT will find, analyze & synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report in tens of minutes vs what would take a human many hours.” Deep Research is powered by a specialized version of OpenAI's latest AI model, o3.

Deepseek, a Chinese AI startup, has recently shaken up the tech world with its open-sourced AI model, R1. This model nearly matches the performance of leading American AI models but was developed at a fraction of the cost of around $5.6 million, or so they claim (Note: SemiAnalysis has reported that Deepseek has actually spent over $500M on GPUs w/ a capex spend of $1.6B). This resulted in an explosion of attention triggering a selloff in AI & big tech stocks. Nvidia, the AI industry’s powerhouse, suffered the largest single day valuation decrease ever of $600 billion, as investors grappled with the potential for lower-cost AI models to disrupt the landscape. At the time of writing, the Deepseek app is #1 on the US App Store.
- Extra Reading: Here is a helpful analysis from Stratechery by Ben Thompson.
- More extra Reading: Another great analysis from Semianalysis.

Boom Supersonic, a US aerospace startup founded in 2014 by Blake Scholl and backed by YC, is working to bring back supersonic commercial air travel, something that hasn't been seen since the Concorde was retired in 2003. In January, Boom’s XB-1 jet, successfully flew at supersonic speeds reaching Mach 1.222 and breaking the sound barrier. This was the first time an independently developed jet had done so. “XB-1’s supersonic flight demonstrates that the technology for passenger supersonic flight has arrived,” said Boom CEO Blake Scholl. “A small band of talented and dedicated engineers has accomplished what previously took governments and billions of dollars. Next, we are scaling up the technology on XB-1 for the Overture supersonic airliner. Our ultimate goal is to bring the benefits of supersonic flight to everyone.” (Boom)

🇹🇼 In Taiwan 🇹🇼

Nvidia backs MetAI, a Taiwanese startup that creates AI-powered digital twins (TechCrunch)
Ministry lifts overseas limits on TSMC (Taipei Times)
Nvidia eyes Taipei for Taiwan headquarters (Taiwan News)
Google buys part of HTC’s XR business for $250M (TechCrunch)
Taiwan launches overseas tech startup hub in Silicon Valley (Taipei Times)
Taiwan's first lunar mission successfully launched (Focus Taiwan)
Cabinet approves new Silicon Valley plan for southern Taiwan (Focus Taiwan)

🗞️ More News 🗞️

Microsoft to Spend $80 Billion on AI Data Centers This Year (Bloomberg)
Amazon bought more renewable power last year than any other company (TechCrunch)
Nintendo unveils the Switch 2 (Nintendo)
More Speech and Fewer Mistakes (Meta)
SpaceX launched its 7th Test Flight for its flagship Starship rocket (SpaceX)
Nvidia Accelerates Humanoid Robotics Development (Nvidia)
Trump launched a meme coin and it became worth $72 billion overnight (Axios)
Databricks closes a $10B Series J funding round at a $62B valuation (TechCrunch)
Announcing Helion’s $425 million Series F (Helion)
Trump signs executive order promoting crypto, paving way for digital asset stockpile (CNBC)
Google expects to spend $75 billion this year on the AI race (The Verge)
X Partners with Visa for the launch of its X Money account (X)
ElevenLabs Raises $180M in Series C Funding (X)

📋 The Bulletin 📋

Our top picks from around the web.

Reading 📖
- I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life - by Vinay Hiremath (co-founder of Loom)
- Reflections - by Sam Altman (Co-Founder & CEO of OpenAI)
- The Short Case for Nvidia Stock - by Jeffrey Emanuel
- On Deepseek and Export Controls - by Dario Amodie (Co-founder & CEO of Antrhropic)
- What’s in your stack: The state of tech tools in 2025 - from Lenny’s Newsletter
- TikTok is just the beginning - Noahpinion by Noah Smith
- Design Literacy - by William Van Lecker
- Prophecies of the Flood - by Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing)
Podcasts 🎧
- Satya Nadella - BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner (Spotify)
- The Naval Podcast - Naval Ravikant with BeerBiceps (YouTube)
- #780: Cyan Banister - From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ more) - The Tim Ferris Show (Spotify)
- #2255 - Mark Zuckerberg - The Joe Rogan Experience (Spotify)
- Wait but Why - Tim Urban - Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferris (Spotify)

Thanks for reading and see you soon!

Join us on discord to be a part of our growing community!

Welcome to ikigai Insights

886 Studios — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 08:46:32 GMT

The tech and startup industries move fast, but information moves faster.

At 886 Studios, we’re on a mission to empower early-stage startups to scale globally by providing funding, mentorship, and connections rooted in Silicon Valley’s best practices. Through our accelerator program, ikigai Launchpad, we work with ambitious founders to turn bold ideas into impactful companies.

ikigai Insights is our way of sharing curated insights from the tech world, spotlighting interesting stories and keeping you updated on what’s happening! Whether it’s the biggest news in tech, hidden gems in podcasts or blogs, or essays from the 886 Editorial, we’re here to keep you informed and inspired.

Hop on aboard and subscribe, it’s free! Every new post will be sent directly to your email inbox.

Join us on discord to be a part of our growing community!

Learn More

To learn more about 886 Studios, click here.

To learn more about the ikigai Launchpad accelerator, click here.