Liam Hwang

Every week, Anthropic or OpenAI ships something that would have taken a startup months to build — and they ship it at a quality level most startups can’t match even after months of polishing. Anthropic Managed Agents. Hermes Agent. New agent tooling every week — everyone says the world just changed. Maybe. But here’s what I keep seeing deploying agents into actual teams: the bottleneck isn’t the agent. It’s the tools the agent needs to talk to. ...

After Techstars ended, we decided to relocate to San Francisco. It’s been a process. Here’s the honest version. Why SF I get asked this a lot, usually with a tone that implies it’s an outdated choice. My answer is simple: if you’re building AI products, the density of people who understand your problem space is unmatched. In Seoul, I’d explain what we’re building. In SF, people immediately jump to “how” — how does your RAG pipeline work, what’s your chunking strategy, have you tried this new embedding model. The conversations are 10x more productive. ...

We did Techstars Oakland in 2024. Three months in the Bay Area, full-time accelerator mode. Here’s what actually mattered — and what didn’t. What mattered Narrowing the message Before Techstars, we described Runbear in too many ways to too many people. The program forced us to sharpen our positioning weekly. By the end, we could explain what we do in one sentence that landed every time. This sounds simple. It took 12 weeks of iteration. ...

In late 2023, we were deep in customer discovery — 60+ interviews trying to find a hair-on-fire problem. One thing was undeniable: every company wanted to use LLMs to improve productivity. Obvious, right? The harder part was what came next. The gap Companies wanted custom AI — trained on their internal knowledge, embedded in their actual workflows. But getting there required deep integration work that most teams couldn’t justify. The ROI wasn’t proven, the technology was still moving fast, and the teams we were targeting (technical support, SRE, internal ops) sat inside Series A+ orgs with long procurement cycles. ...