On Sept. 2, Biteye hosted an online AMA with founders who had just come back from Bhutan after joining EASY Residency S4, a five-week in-person program built around one simple setup: teams living and building in the same place.
The speakers were Calix (@calixbit), founder and CEO of @FinTax_Official; Dora (@realdora_eth), co-founder of @facto_to; Elena (@deelenaxx), co-founder of @de1_ai; Jeffrey (@jeffrey_hu), investment director at @yzilabs; and Peter (@dreambig_peter), co-founder of @facto_to.
Arriving in Bhutan and slowing down
Elena said the hour-and-a-half mountain drive from the airport to the hotel told her right away that Bhutan was nothing like a loud major city. The mountains. The architecture. The whole local mood. It snapped her out of that constant hurry. She said she went in expecting that five weeks of living and building with a group of strong founders would bring more than product progress. It also felt like a shot at deeper human connection and a chance to rethink why they started at all.
The moment she remembers most happened during heavy rain, when four people in the car could not find where they were going. The driver never complained. Never got impatient. He just kept smiling, taking detours, asking around, and in the end got them there. For Elena, little scenes like that kept happening across the five weeks. To her, they showed the calm and kindness of local people. Away from the usual pace of work, she found herself asking what all the talk about AI, financial innovation, and building faster was really for.
Dora said she flew into Bhutan from Nepal on a small plane. After landing, she saw Calix and Jeffrey. At that point, the group hardly knew each other and just traded polite greetings. But on the drive to the hotel, they started talking about their projects, and she realized in a much more concrete way that the cohort was working on very different things, even though everyone was strong.
Her clearest memory came the day before Demo Day. She went back to the office with Chris and Jon to clear out keyboards and laptop stands people had left behind. A few weeks earlier, the room had been packed. Now it was empty, except for things waiting to be packed up. She said that was the first time it really hit her that their shared period of living together was ending, and the first moment she strongly felt she did not want to leave.
Peter said most of what he knew about Bhutan before the trip came from the internet. He knew it was a small country, and he had heard landing at its airport was difficult, so he arrived with doubts. Then he settled in. And it was not nearly as underdeveloped as he had imagined. The city was small. The streets were clean. No constant honking. No nonstop noise.
He usually takes time to make friends, but in Bhutan people worked and ate together every day, and that sped everything up. One of his strangest memories came from the gym. He said he never works out in normal life, yet in Bhutan he ended up training often with other participants, and it somehow became part of his routine.
Calix said he had almost the opposite feeling when he arrived: the place felt familiar. Earlier in his career, while working on mining-related business, he had spent time in parts of western Sichuan. Bhutan’s natural setting and some of its architectural styles reminded him of western Sichuan, and the use of hydropower for Bitcoin mining reinforced that similarity.
He left Bhutan midway through the program and later came back. During those trips, he ran into the same local driver several times, and bit by bit they became friends. At first, the driver proudly asked what he thought of Thimphu. Later, he kept asking about mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore because he hoped he might one day get a chance to see the outside world. For Calix, making a local friend was one of the most interesting parts of the trip.
He also said he respected the other founders in the cohort. Even with a big change in living conditions, their projects kept moving. And the pressure before Demo Day did not make anyone ease off.
Jeffrey said every cohort tends to start the same way offline: people are unfamiliar with each other and a bit reserved. What made S4 different was that everyone lived in the same place for five weeks. Given enough time, people started opening up about deeper issues, and that created collaboration across projects. In his view, that is the whole point of an offline residency and concentrated co-building.
What was hard about building there
Asked about the hardest part of building in Bhutan and how it compared with New York or Silicon Valley, Calix first pointed to infrastructure and the limits it created for B2B work. FinTax usually needs frequent in-person meetings with clients and partners, but in Bhutan a lot of that had to shift online. He said he did not handle the Demo Day pitch himself and focused instead on logistics and support for his co-founder.
At the same time, he said there were not many distractions fighting for attention. Hiking. Meditation. The local rhythm. That gave him space to sit quietly and think through business strategy.
Peter said Bhutan’s small scale sat at the center of the whole experience. Thimphu has a limited number of places to eat and hang out, so founders saw each other during the workweek in the office and often traveled together on weekends. He said those five weeks felt like being back in school.
In New York or any other big city, there would have been far more options, and attention probably would have scattered. That, he said, would make it much harder to build the same kind of close relationships. As for the work itself, it did not exceed the usual pressure of startup life. The real intensity came from repeated practice before Demo Day and then stepping onto the stage in front of CZ and the King of Bhutan.
Dora said the living conditions were very different from New York or Silicon Valley, but that difference turned Bhutan into a small, unusually pure container. Founders backed each other up and got a much deeper understanding of one another’s products. Some projects even became potential partners.
She also brought up a failed payment. A merchant had no way to contact her and no guarantee she would return to settle the bill, yet still agreed right away that she could pay later. She said that kind of trust between people shaped how founders dealt with each other and how they worked together. In her opinion, if S4 had happened in New York or Silicon Valley, those relationships would not have formed in the same way.
Jeffrey said the most concrete operational problem was internet access. During weekly check-ins, the conference room connection often dropped. The same thing happened at the hotel and at the co-working space, and yes, it did interrupt the work rhythm for some teams.
He added that the choice to hold S4 in Bhutan came out of long-term ties between YZi Labs, the Binance world, and the local setting, along with a bit of chance. Looking back, he said the five weeks of offline interaction produced deeper friendships and new cooperation between teams, which made the cohort feel very different from the previous residency in San Francisco.
Elena said New York and Silicon Valley are packed with meetings, exhibitions, social events, and outside noise. Those conditions make it easy to keep sprinting. Bhutan did the opposite. It slowed people down. More time to focus. More time to talk. More room to test cooperation.
For her, the biggest challenge was not just hardware or infrastructure. It was also the sheer information density of each day. Founders were constantly getting feedback from mentors and other builders and had to decide what to keep and what needed to change. Meanwhile, their companies were still moving fast. Teams had to step back and rethink, then jump straight back into execution. She said the biggest challenge and the biggest source of value were, in a sense, the same thing.
What YZi Labs contributed
Asked what helped most from YZi Labs, Elena said the weekly catch-up meetings focused on project progress, current blockers, and specific needs. The YZi Labs team did not just give advice. It also connected teams with customers, partners, and resources inside the BNB Chain world.
For De¹, she said, the clearest result was finding a starting point for entering that world. The team began thinking about how its financial world model could work with upstream and downstream scenarios tied to Agent Studio and Agentic OS.
Dora said Facto had first planned to start with smaller payment service providers and move step by step. YZi Labs pushed the team to rethink that. For an early-stage company, she said, time, technical capacity, and credibility are limited. If a team puts its resources on the most important top-tier clients, then one early adoption among a few major accounts can make later expansion much easier.
She said the help was not limited to sales strategy. YZi Labs also introduced the team to customers and gave it credibility that mattered in those discussions.
Calix boiled YZi Labs’ biggest contribution down to one word: courage. FinTax had already planned to move into government and large financial institution markets, but the team was not sure when to start or where to enter. Over the five weeks, conversations with CZ, Ella, Jeffrey, and others helped confirm that government departments really did have demand for compliance infrastructure. That cut down on unproductive hesitation, and the team moved to adjust its plan and push the business ahead.
He said that decision also changed the company’s financing rhythm. After finishing its seed round, the team launched a pre-A round to prepare funding for larger-scale B2B and TO G solutions. At the same time, it began connecting more directly with partners inside the Binance world that had clear needs.
Why they applied to EASY Residency
Calix said he had known about the program for a long time and knew how competitive it was. His team had thought about applying in earlier rounds but backed off for different reasons. By the time S4 came around, many friends were urging him to try, but he still felt the business, valuation, and customer scale might not be mature enough yet.
Getting accepted, he said, was a real affirmation for a team that had spent years working on tax and compliance infrastructure and had also gone through rough periods.
Peter said Facto had been watching EASY Residency since S1. Back then, the team was still building a lending protocol, had not fully figured out product direction, and its first application did not get through. The team kept following each cohort and came up with the idea for Facto two years earlier. After waiting a long time and still not seeing others solve the same problem, it fully committed near the end of last year.
When S4 opened, Ricky reminded them to apply again, and this time they got in. Peter said the credibility YZi Labs later provided did help move sales forward for a B2B company.
Elena said De¹ was already relatively mature when it applied, and at first she was unsure how much value an accelerator could still add at that point. A friend who had joined S3 strongly recommended the program. She also reached out to participants from S1 and S2 and found that, beyond funding, the residency could offer ecosystem resources and strategic exchange.
She said that friend reminded her again before the S3 deadline, and that was when she finally sent in the application.
Application advice and what investors look for
Asked what applicants should pay attention to and what YZi Labs values most, Elena said her first piece of advice was subtraction. Do less. She said teams should not cram product, technology, market, vision, milestones, and traction into the same set of materials. Reviewers have to read a huge number of projects in limited time. The key is leaving them able to explain in one sentence what problem the team is solving and why that team should solve it.
Her second point was blunt: do not reshape your direction just to fit the story that seems hot in a given cohort. In her view, experienced investors can tell the difference between a founder talking about something they actually believe in for the long term and one trying to guess what the judges want to hear.
Dora agreed on subtraction and said applicants also need to explain clearly what makes their project different. YZi Labs looks through thousands of projects each cohort, she said, so there is no need to show every achievement. What matters more is explaining the problem being solved and why the product is different.
Even if the product is only halfway built, or still mostly a hypothesis, she said it still deserves attention if the pain point is real and the direction stands apart.
Calix added the idea of having a clear and unique position. A project or team needs a visible point of distinction in its ideas, direction, and judgment. Because YZi Labs has seen so many projects, it examines those differences from a stricter angle, and that uniqueness also reflects the team’s taste.
Jeffrey said that from an investor’s perspective, the screening process has two parts. One is the founder and the team: how they think, how they execute, and how they respond when conditions change. At the early stage, he said, investing is often first an investment in people.
The second part is the project itself: what problem it solves, what method it uses, and whether there are already early signs of revenue, user demand, or go-to-market ability. An accelerator can connect resources and help growth, but the team has to show some initial proof that can be expanded.
Peter said teams should not take direct interview feedback too personally. If an application gets rejected, they should go back and ask what each piece of feedback really showed: whether the project itself has a gap, or whether the team failed to present capabilities it already has.
How Demo Day pitches were built
Elena said the hardest part of preparing for Demo Day was squeezing the full story into three minutes while still making people want to hear more. In practice, there was far less space than expected, so the team had to keep cutting and rewriting.
At the first rehearsal, Ella gave her one pointed note: “Bring stronger presence.” Elena said she later realized that Demo Day is not the same as a normal introduction. A founder’s presence and conviction directly shape how the audience reads the project.
Peter said the process again came down to subtraction. Founders naturally want to stuff every strength and every proof point into a short talk, but an audience can only absorb so much in a limited stretch of time.
In the end, the team had to figure out what was most unique about the product and explain in the simplest possible way what it did and what problem it solved. He said that exercise also helped the team separate the core value from the secondary features.
Amelia said a three-minute talk first has to close a logical loop: who the core user is, what the sharpest pain point is, and how the solution addresses it. Each part has to connect cleanly to the next.
The feedback that hit hardest, she said, was: “Your current numbers do not prove Product-Market Fit.” She did not take that to mean the product had no market. Instead, it pushed the team to find data that could truly demonstrate demand. After checking the business again, they ended up using the repurchase rate of existing users as that proof.
Jeffrey said the most common rehearsal problem was simple: going over time. Everyone wants to include more. But Demo Day is not structured like a normal meeting or a standard investor pitch.
Within three minutes, he said, teams need to answer clearly what problem they solve, why they are the right team, where their edge is, and whether they want investment or cooperation from the audience. Rehearsal is what compresses all of that into something clear enough.
What they would tell themselves before applying
Calix said he would tell his earlier self to be more confident and more active about grabbing opportunities. A team does not need to wait until the business, valuation, and customer scale all look perfect before making a move. First step: apply. Only then can new collisions happen.
Peter said he would tell himself to go all in on the application. If the team does not get accepted, that should not be taken as a personal rejection. The better move is to understand what sits behind the feedback and then decide what needs to be added or changed.
Dora said she would tell herself to trust what she genuinely wants to build. Sometimes the issue is not the product direction or the product itself, but market maturity and timing. Founders need to stick with what they believe in over the long run, even when external conditions are not fully ready.
She linked that to climbing Tiger’s Nest twice. The first time, she did not know how much climbing was still ahead, and every step came with uncertainty. The second time, the route had not changed, but she knew where the next turn was, and the fear was much smaller. She said many startup problems work the same way: only by moving forward does the unknown become known.
Elena said people may arrive carrying a product, but leave carrying a bigger vision. The value of residency is not just executing the original plan faster. It also pushes founders to rethink how existing technology, products, and resources could be amplified by 10x or even 100x, and what they actually want to build.
S5 timeline and reapplication
On where to find information about S5 and whether previously rejected teams could apply again, Jeffrey said official details could be found on the YZi Labs website and the EASY Residency X account.
According to the plan at the time, the S5 application deadline was Sept. 13. The program would start with several weeks online and then move into an in-person stage in Thailand. Demo Day was expected to be close to Binance Blockchain Week, scheduled for late November in Bangkok, though he said the official website and @EASYResidency announcements should be treated as the final reference.
He added that teams that had applied before but were not accepted could apply again. Because the new cohort’s form had changed, he suggested submitting a fresh and complete application so it could enter the review process as a new project.
What changed after five weeks
The final audience question asked about the biggest tangible progress in products and teams after the five weeks.
Amelia said that when XHunt entered the program, it still was not fully sure about the real needs of some B2B users. During the residency, the founders around them were themselves potential customers, which gave the team repeated chances to talk and validate demand. By Demo Day, the product they showed was already different from the one they had started with.
Elena said the biggest shift for De¹ was moving from a single-product mindset to an ecosystem mindset. Before the residency, the team had mostly focused on building the product well. Later, it started thinking about how to use a mature ecosystem to expand the product’s value.
She said a financial world model needs real markets, real capital flow, and large-scale user participation, which means upstream and downstream cooperation and ecosystem nodes are no longer just external resources. They become part of the product itself.
Dora said Facto’s biggest concrete step was building deeper partnerships. The company’s next move, she said, is to work with Binance Pay and embed Facto’s services into Binance Pay payment scenarios.
The AMA did not spit out one neat formula for entrepreneurship. Some teams left with a bigger vision. Some found key customers. Some started pushing business lines that had been stalled for a long time. But those five weeks of living and working together did sharpen one thing: which judgments were worth holding onto, and which parts needed to change right away.