Inside HACK Lab: Helpfeel's Silicon Valley Rotation
In July 2026, Helpfeel kicked off HACK Lab, a rotation that brings our engineers and PMs to Silicon Valley for short, hands-on stretches. Our CEO, Isshu Rakusai, and I sat down to talk about why, and what we're actually doing there.
Nobody asks what you do here. They ask what you're building
Most places, meeting someone new starts with small talk and a business card. Not here. The standard opener is "Hi, what are you building?" or "Are you working on anything interesting right now?" You'll hear it at a bar, a coffee shop, an art opening. It doesn't matter where. Almost everyone in the room works in tech, so the conversation drifts toward the latest models and tools without anyone forcing it.
Rakusai has visited Silicon Valley many times, and this trip he described it as a whole city functioning as one engineering lab. The billboards along the highway back him up: nearly all of them are ads for developer tools like Vercel and Intercom, aimed at engineers rather than consumers. And the density is real. Google, Apple, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic all sit within about an hour's drive of each other, packed into a metro area roughly the size of Japan's Kansai region.
Being surrounded by that concentration of frontier work does something specific: it shows you exactly where the edge of the field currently sits, and where your own product is sharp versus where it's soft. That clarity is hard to get secondhand.
Reading about AI online isn't the same as standing in the room
You can follow every AI paper and product launch from anywhere with an internet connection. What you can't get from a feed is the pressure. Share a big AI news story in Slack from outside the Bay Area and you'll usually get a polite "huh, neat." Share the same story here and people start planning a meetup within the hour.
Events move at a different speed. On the event platform Luma, someone can post a meetup three days out and still pull in a few hundred engineers. One recent AI event drew over a thousand signups within 24 hours of the announcement, more than the venue could hold. That "something big just dropped, let's get together tomorrow" reflex is just how people operate here.
I recently sat in on a knowledge-graph meetup that would be a niche topic almost anywhere else. Here it pulled 200-plus people, from Stanford faculty to junior engineers at seed-stage startups, all talking as equals. There's also a "move fast and break things" instinct running underneath all of it: fewer people trying to plan the perfect answer, more people just shipping something and seeing what happens.
And a lot of the most useful information never makes it onto a conference stage or a blog post. It shows up at a house party, over a beer, when a founder or investor tells you honestly what didn't work for them, or what GTM approach is quietly outperforming everything else right now. Getting access to that kind of conversation is one of the clearest reasons to actually be here rather than watch from a distance.
What we're researching: agents as customers, and why AI projects fail
The industry is shifting from copilots, AI that assists a person, to autopilots, AI that completes work on its own. I've watched this play out firsthand with Tesla's Full Self-Driving: door-to-door trips with no human intervention, something that felt theoretical not long ago and now doesn't.
That shift raises a question we think about constantly: once agents act autonomously on someone's behalf, what does the org chart look like, and what should a person actually spend their day doing? That's an open, active debate here, not a solved problem.
It also changes what a knowledge base is for. Search boxes and chat are the current interface, but the next one probably lets an agent understand intent and complete the action behind the scenes without being walked through it step by step. That points to something we call B2A, business to agent: if an AI agent is going to act as your customer's proxy, doing the researching and deciding on their behalf, it needs a knowledge foundation built to serve an agent, not just a person clicking through pages. That's the core research question for HACK Lab.
The other half of the work is less glamorous but just as important: studying why AI projects fail. MIT research has found that the large majority of generative AI pilots don't deliver a return. We want to understand why firsthand, by talking directly to teams that tried and hit a wall, and feed those lessons back into our own product and go-to-market decisions.
How HACK Lab actually runs
HACK Lab is a rotation, not a permanent relocation. Engineers and PMs from Japan come out for a few weeks at a time. Monday through Thursday, they keep working their existing projects remotely. Friday is set aside entirely, no regular work, for hands-on exploration of whatever's new. It's modeled loosely on Google's old 20% time: protected space to try something with no immediate deliverable attached.
That unstructured time matters. Some of the best ideas won't come from a scheduled meeting; they'll come from a hallway conversation in a shared kitchen during a short, intense stretch together.
Rakusai is aware of the obvious risk: when leadership spends real time somewhere else, it can widen the gap in visibility and pace with the team back home. He's planning to address that with more deliberate internal communication. But he'd rather take that risk than manage the effort from a distance. He wants to be the one at the front of this, not the executive telling everyone else to move faster while staying put.
There's a reason to believe the combination works. Helpfeel's engineering team has spent years meeting the standards of Japan's most demanding enterprise customers, banks, retailers, manufacturers, where a wrong answer is worse than no answer. That discipline is already in our foundation. Pair it with Silicon Valley's willingness to ship an imperfect version and learn fast, and you get something neither culture produces alone: quality and speed together, not quality or speed.
If you want more on where we're headed as a company, read why Helpfeel exists.