Kazuki Hayashi: Solving the Friendship Problem That Follows Adults Across Borders

Kazuki Hayashi knows what it feels like to start over. He has done it across Japan, Singapore, and the United States, and each move taught him the same lesson in a different setting. A new city can be full of people and still feel empty. A phone can be full of apps and still offer no real path to friendship. For Hayashi, that gap stopped feeling like bad luck and started looking like a design failure.

Two numbers sharpened that feeling into something harder to ignore: 61 percent of young adults report serious loneliness, while 70 percent of Gen Z say meaningful relationships matter more than anything else.

Those numbers sit in tension with the story modern life keeps telling. We are supposed to be living in the most connected era in history. We can message anyone, follow anyone, watch anyone, and react to almost anything in seconds. Yet the ability to stay in contact is not the same as the ability to build closeness. Hayashi believes a lot of people feel that mismatch every day, especially when adulthood strips away the built-in social structures that school and youth once provided.

“You can have access to people all day and still have no real entry point into friendship,” he says. “That is a very different kind of isolation.”

His view is not abstract. Hayashi was born in Japan and dropped out of university before beginning his career as a freelance social media marketer. He later built that work into Yusura Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, a full-service agency, where he also took on a leadership role in the Web3 marketing space. On paper, that path looks social by nature. In reality, it gave him a front row seat to the difference between reach and relationship.

“I kept seeing products that were very good at circulation,” he says. “They were not very good at helping someone new feel comfortable enough to begin.”

That point matters. Hayashi argues that one of the deepest failures of existing platforms is not simply that they are noisy. It is that they were not designed to lower the awkwardness and uncertainty that come with starting from zero. Most of them work best when users already have a network, a history, or a public identity they can carry in with them. They are strong at maintaining visibility. They are weak at helping new relationships begin.

“The hardest part is not staying loosely connected to people you already know,” he says. “The hardest part is building one honest connection when you are new, adult, and outside the circle.”

In Hayashi’s view, people do not open up just because a platform gives them a profile, a feed, or a chat box. They open up when the environment makes the first step feel more natural. That was the pattern he kept noticing as he moved through countries and communities. The issue was not a lack of users. It was a lack of structure that made it easier to begin.

“A lot of products ask people to perform before they belong,” he says. “That is backwards if the goal is real friendship.”

By the time Hayashi relocated to Silicon Valley and studied startup formation at Stanford, the pattern had become hard for him to dismiss. He had seen the same social reset problem in every country he lived in. He had also spent years watching how digital platforms shaped behavior. The result was a question that would eventually become a company: what would a network look like if it were built for the beginning of friendship, not just the display of identity?

That question led to Re, which Hayashi describes as the world’s first same-generation social network. The idea is simple in plain human terms. People often connect more easily with others who are moving through a similar phase of life at the same time. Shared age does not guarantee closeness, but it can create an easier starting point because people are often carrying similar pressures, references, and transitions.

“If two people are dealing with the same chapter of life, the conversation starts in a different place,” he says. “You do not have to spend as much time explaining the basics of who you are and where you are.”

He is careful not to present Re as a feature added to an older model. He sees it as a different starting point. Many platforms begin with content, audience building, or preexisting social graphs. Re begins with the conditions that might let a new relationship form in the first place.

“I was not interested in building another place to scroll,” he says. “I wanted to build something that gives people a better first step toward each other.”

That mission has already drawn some early validation. Hayashi reports a waitlist around 1,000 users, centered around Stanford University, built with zero paid acquisition, along with an ambassador network spanning more than 30 university campuses globally. He has also secured advisors that include the CTO in Residence at Microsoft for Startups and a Techstars and Plug and Play mentor.

Still, the larger appeal of Hayashi’s story is not just startup traction. It is the way his company taps into a problem that many adults can name but few platforms have treated as central. Friendship in adulthood often depends on luck, timing, and repeated exposure. When those are missing, people are left to improvise. Hayashi is betting that the process can be designed with more care. “People talk about finding your people like it is magic,” he says. “Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is also about whether the system made room for that to happen.”

His long view for Re is ambitious. He wants it to become the defining network for every generation, a place where people first find the relationships that matter. That goal is large, but the emotion under it is recognizably human. It starts with the quiet moment many adults know too well, arriving somewhere new and realizing that connection is not nearly as easy as the internet promised. Hayashi has lived that moment more than once. Now he is trying to build a platform that answers it differently.

To learn more about Re, visit edirq.com.