Common Futures 2026 is a 14-week founder program for Taiwanese and Japanese entrepreneurs building ventures against the social problems our two societies already share — an aging population, a collapsing housing ladder, shrinking cities, and a generation of young people who can't afford to start the life our parents expected of them. The centerpiece is a 1-Night 2-Day hybrid hackathon in Taipei and Tokyo, bookended by 4 weeks of LMS preparation and an 8-week Follow-up Batch.
```Every founder we know in Taipei and Tokyo is already building against the same four problems — but almost none of them are building together. This program exists to fix that. The evidence we point to is not hypothetical; it is in our feeds right now.
```This is why a bilateral program, and not five more domestic hackathons. The fastest path to a working answer is not more talent in one country. It is mixed teams, building for a market twice the size, with a 10-year time-shift advantage built in.
```A 1N2D hackathon alone produces great slides and no startups. Common Futures wraps the intense event inside a sequence that makes the work actually stick: you arrive prepared, you build under pressure with a partner from the other country, and you leave with 8 more weeks of coaching to turn the prototype into something real.
```The hackathon is not theatre. It is an 8-block production line, designed so that by Sunday 6pm every team has something live on the internet and a pitch that a real investor could evaluate.
```Country-head welcomes, TW + JP problem-reality briefing (live data from both countries), and 3 founder stories from previous cohorts. You leave this block knowing why you're here and what evidence you're building against.
Facilitated matchmaking across hubs — teams of 3 with mandatory JP+TW mix. Each team picks one concrete problem from a pre-curated shortlist (aging care, housing affordability, akiya / vacant homes, rural depopulation, climate adaptation).
Teams move from problem → user → hypothesis → prototype scope. Each team ships a one-page hypothesis doc and a wireframe by the end of this block, reviewed by roaming coaches.
Dinner delivered to the hub. Teams build until 22:30. Coaches available on Zoom until midnight. AI-tool clinic runs in parallel for teams who need v0 / Cursor / Claude help.
Each team runs 3 user tests with real users (elderly care-seekers, young renters, rural residents — arranged by the program). Teams incorporate feedback in real-time. This is the block that separates demos from products.
Non-negotiable deliverable: by 14:30 each team has a live landing page on a real URL describing the product. Coaches pair-review. This is the team's first public artifact.
1:1 pitch coaching from TW and JP operators. Each team rehearses twice — once to a kind coach, once to a hostile coach. Deck template and pitch rubric shared.
10 teams × 5-min pitch + 3-min jury Q&A. Joint JP–TW jury of operators and VCs. Top 3 teams get automatic entry to the 8-week batch with seed funding. All other teams are reviewed for conditional entry.
We select 40 founders for Cohort 01 — 20 from Taiwan, 20 from Japan. You do not need a co-founder; you will find one here. You do not need a registered company; you need proof of motion.
```Working on an idea related to aging, care, housing, rural decline, or climate adaptation in East Asia.
Working inside care organizations, housing cooperatives, NGOs, municipal governments, or research labs — considering a leap to founding.
Engineers, designers, researchers who are technically ready but looking for a problem worth 5 years of their life.
— Every serious program should be able to explain not its schedule, but its cause-and-effect chain. Here is ours.
```A Taiwanese founder and a Japanese founder, working on the same aging-care problem, one in Taipei and one in Osaka — will almost certainly never meet each other, and will almost certainly solve the problem twice, badly, alone.
A bilateral startup model becomes the default for East-Asian social-problem ventures. A Taiwanese founder's first customer is often Japanese, and vice versa — and the solution to a problem that hit Japan in 2010 reaches Taiwan before it becomes a crisis.
Program-wide working language is English. All LMS content and jury reviews are in English. Within your team, you use whatever works — we have had teams operating in mixed JP/ZH/EN with Claude translating in real time. Minimum bar: conversational business English.
Yes, and we need you. Cohort 01 is aimed at a 1:1 ratio of domain operators to technical builders. A nurse who has run an elder-care day program for 8 years is exactly as valuable as an engineer — probably more so, because the engineer can be taught the domain in weeks, and the reverse is not true.
Program fee is waived for Cohort 01 through our public-benefit partners. Accepted founders pay their own travel to their local hub (Taipei or Tokyo) for the 1N2D weekend; the program covers local meals, venue, and optional overnight accommodation. You do not need to cross borders — the program is deliberately hybrid so that visa status is never a barrier.
Need-based travel stipends are available for up to 6 founders per cohort. Apply with the main application.
You own everything you build. Period. The program takes no equity during the 1N2D phase. Teams that enter the 8-week follow-up batch sign a standard public-benefit founder agreement — it is publicly posted and peer-reviewed, and it vests no ownership to the program.
That's a valid outcome. Roughly 40% of teams historically disband after the 1N2D weekend — and we consider that a feature, not a failure, because those founders leave with a real cross-border network and a clearer read on whether this problem is theirs to work on. Alumni channels remain open for future re-matching.
If you can answer three questions in writing — (1) the specific problem you want to work on, (2) why you are the person to do it, (3) what you would build in 36 hours if we gave you the right partner — you are a fit. Applications take roughly 45 minutes.
40 founders. 10 bilateral teams. 14 weeks. One shared set of problems our governments have not been able to solve. Apply by May 31, 2026.
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