Sissi chose East Asian studies at the University of Tokyo because of its breadth. Languages, economics, politics, and culture, all in one program. It trained her to observe carefully and think across cultures.

"East Asian studies taught me how to look at things from different perspectives. But at some point I realized I also wanted to build things with my own hands. It's not something you learn from lectures. You have to just go and do it. So instead of grad school, I wanted to get out there and start making things."

She started looking for places to do exactly that. A summer program at Harvard was the first.

"It was a summer program under Harvard's business school, where we learned about negotiation and conflict resolution. What I loved was that it wasn't just lectures. We had group work and activities where you'd study something and then immediately practice it. Negotiation is exactly that kind of skill. You can't learn it by only listening. That combination was what got me."

She also spent six months interning at a traditional Japanese company.

"I did a half-year internship at a Japanese company. Sitting in the same office every day, at the same desk, on the same schedule, I learned two things about myself: I need control over my own time, and I need new challenges every day. Once that became clear, I knew the traditional path wasn't for me."

After the internship, she took on a different kind of work: editing videos and creating content for a Chinese influencer who built her own products and projects. It showed her what the opposite of the traditional path could look like.

"Maybe startup is another path.”

In her final year, Sissi joined a startup bootcamp in Tokyo. One of the presentations was from Jurin AI, and what she heard stayed with her.

"The presentation was different from what other venture capitalists usually talk about. The most important thing about a startup is that you have to sell it before you build it. Rise talked with 300 customers before he actually decided to build Jurin AI. It's not that you have a good product then you sell it. You talk to real customers, see whether people really need it, and then you build it. That was kind of mind-changing.”

She wasn't the only person from her cohort who became interested in Jurin AI. But she was the one who got a message asking if she'd like to come in.

To this day, she still has no idea how Rise found her resume. She asked. His answer: it's a secret.

The opportunity arrived just as she was wondering what came next.

"Jurin AI just popped up at the time I was thinking, what should I do after this? Whether to join a Japanese company, start my own startup, or something else entirely. Everything just seemed perfect."

In November last year, Jurin AI held its first full company offsite in Karuizawa. For many people on the team, it was the first time meeting each other in person. Sissi arrived with a camera and no prior introduction to anyone in the room.

Rise had told the team beforehand that a new person was joining for the trip. Nobody knew who it was. She was the mystery newcomer documenting everyone else's first meeting.

“Before the trip, I had no idea what the team was like, how many people were coming, or what we were even going to do there. I just showed up with my camera, filmed everything for two days, and then edited it all. That one left me a great impression.”

The strangeness of that situation stayed with her. A team that had been working together for months, many of them only ever seen on screens, suddenly in the same room. People who had only existed as names on Google or faces in small video thumbnails were suddenly full-sized humans with heights and laughs and food preferences.

"Everyone was meeting each other for the first time, and for me, everyone was completely new. Before the trip, they were just names to me. Then suddenly they were real people with faces, voices, and personalities. Two days later, I felt like I actually knew them.”

Sissi joined as the only person focused on video. There were no past references on what to do, no previous person in the role to learn from. The first few weeks were spent experimenting, joining marketing meetings, and figuring out where she could make the biggest impact.

"After knowing the boundaries, it's more helpful to be creative and to do more stuff within them. I think it's at a good balance between the boundaries and the freedom."

The role felt very different from the creative work she'd done before.

"When I was working for one person, she was mainly in charge of the video and I was there to help. But at Jurin I'm in charge of the video. I have the freedom to decide where I film and how I edit it. The content is also something I'm more interested in because I'm closely involved in all of the videos and the products. I do enjoy Jurin more."

For her first few months, most of what she made documented things that had already happened. Team trips. Company moments. Internal stories.

Then came a product video featuring Asuka, Jurin AI's Head of Diplomacy.

The concept followed a busy executive juggling phone calls, emails, and messages arriving in different languages before showing how a Jurin AI agent steps in to handle everything.

It was the first product advertisement she'd created at Jurin AI.

"Asuka's video was a new kind of format. Instead of recap videos, we're really doing marketing and advertising. That's something I want to do more of in the future."

Working at an AI company has also changed how she approaches her own work.

"I don't really feel every day that I'm very different from everyone else because I mainly have meetings with the marketing team. But being in a tech company, I do feel I need to learn more about coding and the tech side. That's my plan this year, to understand more about that and to learn from the engineers."

She has already started. Working with Claude, she built a plugin that generates English and Japanese subtitles from video and handles translation automatically.

"It's currently a bit hard to edit videos with AI tools because how you put the videos together is your own logic. It's hard to borrow from AI. But what AI can do is add subtitles. I worked with Claude to create a plugin to generate English or Japanese subtitles based on the videos and also translate them. That does help a lot. It's 70 to 80% accurate now. AI is actually improving the efficiency for even video producers."

Karuizawa was Sissi's first time meeting anyone on the team. By the time the company gathered again in Bali in June this year, everything felt different. She knew almost everyone. Conversations came naturally.

But the team had grown a lot, and there were newer faces she hadn't really spoken to yet.

"Through the past year I've got more familiar with people and there are more people coming into Jurin. Everyone has their own stories, why and how they joined, their personal stories. I do want to do more interviews with people, really get to know them, discover the story behind them."

She filmed a lot. The videos are coming. Stay tuned.

Sissi spent time at a startup boot camp studying what it looks like to build a company from scratch. Now she is inside one.

"Jurin is something I used to learn about in textbooks and lectures. I heard the stories but I'm really a part of it right now. I really see how it's built from scratch. Rise is very frank about his thought processes, how he built the company, what the difficulties are. What I learned at the startup boot camp I'm now seeing and experiencing on my own at Jurin AI."

The culture surprised her too. Not the work pace, which she expected, but how flat the company felt.

"There isn't a strict hierarchy within the company. Everyone is a colleague. It's not like Rise is the boss. He has one-on-ones with everyone and he's friends with everyone."

People jump on calls instead of writing long messages. Everyone owns their work. Nobody waits to be told what to do.

"Everyone loves their job, so they're happy with what they're working on. They're very active and even though they're given a lot of freedom, they just get on with it. That kind of environment is really nice."

Rise has a way of framing things that changes how you think about what you are actually doing here.