Find Truth Faster
ikigai Launchpad Spring 2026 batch has officially kicked off!
The birds are chirping, the flowers are blooming, Taipei is warming up, and the new ikigai Spring 2026 batch is locked and loaded.
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.
