A podcast from a 26-year-old founder living on the edge
Hi, I'm Haruyoshi Hattori, also known as coiai, 26 years old and in my first year running a company.
On this show, I — a brand-new IT company CEO (ha) — talk candidly about the state of my company and about tech topics.
As for us, it's been a year since we founded the company on January 23rd of last year. I'd like to keep sharing our finances candidly too.
Recently one of our employees disappeared, so we're basically starting from zero again. We're still friends, honestly, so I'm hoping to have him back on the podcast at some point, ha.
I'll go through this in the usual flow — tech topics, then startup talk, then some small talk.
The tech topic might actually be useful this time, so please give it a listen!
Maybe now really is the moment for first-party tech
By "first-party tech," I mean the official, native tech stack straight from the platform itself.
Up until now, there's been an explosion of tools designed to make coding easier under the assumption that a human is doing the implementing — things like Firebase, Amplify, and cross-platform languages. People used to reach for these tools out of necessity, because of limited time or headcount, but with how far AI has come, I feel like that necessity is disappearing.
Cross-platform frameworks like Flutter and React Native exist, but when you get into the details, they still fall short of Kotlin or Swift. So if AI is making development this much faster, why not just build native for each platform separately?
Languages themselves keep getting easier, and we're entering an era where AI just writes the code for you.
What is Kotlin?
Kotlin was adopted by Google as the official language for Android development back in 2017.
From what I've heard from a Java-engineer friend, it apparently has strong interoperability with Java.
What is SwiftUI?
SwiftUI is a user-interface framework that Apple announced in 2019 for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It's written in the Swift language and enables declarative UI construction.
Getting a clean, polished UI just from writing the code is a huge strength.
Do we even need Amplify or Firebase anymore?
I used to reach for Amplify or Firebase for personal projects and mockups, but I've started to feel like that's no longer necessary.
You can use Cursor together with the AWS CLI to deploy directly.
I've set things up with a shell script called deploy.sh that lets me deploy in one shot.
Also, AWS CloudShell is incredibly convenient. You can knock out configuration tasks in one go, and it pairs really well with AI.
It really drives home how a GUI is, at the end of the day, an interface built for humans.
What it takes to start a company
Recruit an unemployed friend
I really don't think starting a company is something you should do alone. It's called a "company" for a reason — I think you're much more likely to stick with it if you start with more than one person.
In my case, I had a friend from high school who wasn't working at the time, and we started the company together.
I'd been working the whole time, but he had the time and money to spare, so he joined in.
Build connections ahead of time
Joining a big company is a good move. Getting into a good university is a good move too. Basically, the more friends and acquaintances you have who can connect you to work, the better.
Back when I was a sole proprietor, most of my work came from friends and acquaintances.
Selling is harder and more important than making
There's no shortage of products you could sell. What actually mattered was the ability to sell. I can build pretty much anything, but I don't have the ability to actually sell it, and that's exactly what I'm struggling with right now.
Weekly
This week I built an app called Sonivium.
It's a macOS app that reacts to sound.
I've also been involved in developing an XR-related service — I'll share the project name once the part I worked on ships, but this week I worked on the design side of that project!
Thoughts from my alterations side job
I've set my officer compensation at the legal minimum, ¥58,000, so I work part-time two or three days a week.
Sewing is something I love enough that it could be a lifelong pursuit, so since I'm working anyway, I work at an alterations shop. It's basically an all-housewife workplace.
I watched a coworker take in a Margiela four-stitch tag for repair at 800 yen, scrutinizing it intently to check whether it looked authentic, and it made me wonder what fashion even is.
That's way too much responsibility to put on a spool of #30 polyester thread.
Does everyone know what kind of aesthetic sensibility goes into the AMF stitching machines used on luxury garments? What about the philosophy behind how overlapping fabric is finished? Or the ironwork? Or the aesthetic behind the side seams on a pair of Levi's? It feels strange to me that people evaluate clothes purely on styling that's gone in a flash, without ever touching on these traditional craft sensibilities.
Did fashion ever go through its own version of modernism?
In design history, someone like Raymond Loewy gets criticized in hindsight for excessive styling, but in fashion, it feels like the exact same kind of excessive styling gets praised instead, as if it were some kind of abstract expression with a concept behind it.
Closing
coiai works on web, XR, core systems, and on-premise AI adoption support.
We can take on pretty much anything, so if you've been turned down elsewhere or gotten a quote that felt too high, feel free to reach out — quotes are free!
See you again next Monday! Subscribe to the channel and I hope you'll come listen again next week!
Thank you!