FateTell Through the Documentary Lens: Our First Two Months Working Together

After moving into our new office in Hangzhou, we finally had a place where everyone could meet each day.

For a long time, FateTell was a distributed team. We lived in different cities and worked through screens. The product had already reached users around the world, but the people building it rarely shared the same room. When NHK came to Liangzhu, its crew captured the first two months of a major change: we had started coming to work together, discussing ideas face to face, revising the product side by side, and forming a daily rhythm of our own.

NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, is Japan’s public media organization. Its international service, NHK WORLD-JAPAN, reports on Japan and Asia for audiences around the world through television, radio, and digital media. This shoot felt less like a short interview and more like close observation. The cameras entered our office and followed a young AI company as its shared working life began to take shape.

That is what we value about this record.

Startup stories often focus on product launches, funding, growth charts, and turning points. A company’s daily life is built from stretches of time that have no headline: a few people returning to the same question, continuing to debate when they disagree, discarding something that seemed good the day before, and turning an abstract idea into something users can see, read, and use.

NHK’s cameras stayed with this side of FateTell.

We work in Liangzhu, close to the remains of a civilization that began five thousand years ago and among today’s new AI products and young founders. We live with two very different measures of time: language models changing at speed, and the centuries-old traditions of bazi, yin and yang, the five elements, and Eastern ways of understanding time and the self.

FateTell has always worked between those two worlds.

We want to do more than place ancient fortune-reading knowledge inside a new technical shell. Now that AI can work with language, reasoning, and personalization at a new level, we are exploring how Eastern knowledge can cross linguistic and cultural boundaries, find new forms of expression, and become part of contemporary life.

FateTell has continued to grow since NHK filmed those early days.

Nearly 100,000 people across more than 90 countries and regions have now used FateTell. They speak different languages and grew up in different cultures, yet they often bring the same questions to the product: What kind of person am I? Where am I in my life? Which direction should I take when things change?

Technology keeps changing. Those questions remain.

They are one reason we still believe Eastern wisdom belongs in the present.

We thank NHK for preserving this moment. Years from now, the film will remind us of more than an interview. It captured the first months after we moved from opposite sides of a screen to the same table and began building FateTell together.

Below is the complete NHK WORLD-JAPAN report. We invite you to watch it.

Original NHK WORLD-JAPAN report: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2022465/