Jaden Kwan

Founder of Tastefully. Waterloo Engineering opt out. Best Ethereum Hack at JAMHacks, 2nd place at ETH Toronto. Professional actor since childhood, from Chucky to Finch and Midland at the Golden Horse Awards (the Oscars of Chinese-language cinema).

I bootstrapped Tastefully from zero to ~$300K in revenue in its first four months with no outside capital. We make launch films and run launches for AI companies backed by Y Combinator, SoftBank, and Radical Ventures, and our work has driven more than 25 million organic views. We led the launches for Dedalus Labs, Oro, and Yutori; Dedalus's seed film, Cleared for Takeoff, passed a million views. The Village Voice wrote about how we bring film direction to a startup launch, and Distractify about startups becoming their own broadcasters.

A year ago I had no network in San Francisco. I took a one way flight, slept on couches and in closets, ate at founder events, and started cold pitching launch films to startups. That became Tastefully.

I run Tastefully like a software company, not an agency. We built an internal agentic pipeline that handles the work around the creative. Agents do the repetitive work; editors spend their time on taste.

Building that pipeline is how I found the limits. Agents could automate everything around the edit, but not the edit itself.

Models can write code, but they still can't edit a good video.

Coding has tests. Creative work has two halves. One half is checkable: is the clip the right length, are the captions there, is the audio clean. The other half is taste: pacing, the hook, which shot to open on, why a cut lands two frames later and dies two frames earlier.

So I keep coming back to a question I can't answer yet: what is taste made of? A good editor knows a cut is wrong before they can say why. Maybe that's a set of patterns nobody has written down. Maybe it's something that can't be written down at all. I'd like to find out where that line is.

My life follows one pattern: I get obsessed with something, go all the way in, and end up doing it for real.

In high school it was robotics and crypto. I was lead programmer on our VRC team, wrote a curriculum used to teach 50+ students, and taught myself smart contracts well enough to win hackathons.

Then it was film. I've acted professionally since I was young, and Finch and Midland, alongside Anthony Wong, took me from VIFF and Reel Asian to the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and the Golden Horse Awards.

After high school I spent a year landing in cities where I knew nobody: Vancouver, Mumbai, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Singapore, Johor Bahru. In Mumbai, the people I met became the post production team that powers Tastefully today.

Not every obsession survives. Snipes was a live map of what's happening around you. We launched it at Waterloo, 488 people joined in three days, and then the compute bill came due and we killed it.

AI will make building almost free, which makes taste the scarce thing. It's also the thing we understand least. Decoding it is the obsession I'm in now.

I read constantly: business history, biographies, film, psychology, advertising.