Disrupting Japan

Japanese labor law is very different from what is standard in the US or Europe, and more than a few foreigners have made simple mistakes that have cost them their jobs or their entire companies. Terrie Lloyd has started more than a dozen companies in Japan over the past 30 years and has hired hundreds of people here. Today Terrie shares a number of personal stories and also offers a lot of practical advice for westerners in Japan who need to hire, manage and retain Japanese staff, either for their own startup or as part of a larger organization. Of course, we talk about Japan Travel, Terrie’s latest venture, but we also cover the state of Japanese startups in general, how to best raise money from Japanese VCs, and we go over a few real-world examples of how you can protect yourself when things go horribly, horribly wrong. It’s an interesting discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes One mistake all founders need to avoid when building a platform business Why Japanese VCs have a blind spot to the travel industry How you know when to bootstrap and when to raise funds Why loyalty points are stronger than blockchain Why Japanese companies are afraid of open data The best way to recruit and manage Japanese staff How to find a startup niche as a foreigner in Japan How to get rid of problem employees without getting sued What you need to watch out for when getting legal advice in Japan Links from the Founder Check out Japan Travel Terrie's Take is a weekly newsletter that is definately worth reading Japanese Labor Law for startup founders A general overview of Japanese Labor Law JETRO's Guide to Japanese Labor Law Some good advice to startup founders from a Japanese Lawyer [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Okay, I want to explain in advance, this one is going to be a little long, but believe me, you are going to be glad you spent the time, and you know, you might even find yourself listening to this particular episode a couple of times. There's so much good stuff coming. Terrie Lloyd has started more than a dozen companies in Japan and he has hired hundreds of people over the past 30 years. Now, Terrie and I have known each other for a long time. In fact, when I was first starting out in Japan, I did some programming for one of his companies back in the 90s. I wrote for one of his magazines in the early 2000s, and you know, I'm not sure what took me so long to invite him to sit down and talk, but I'm glad I finally did. Of course, we talked about Japan Travel, Terrie's latest startup, but our conversation also turns into a brutally practical guide for any foreigner who wants to run a business in Japan. I will warn you in advance, our conversation lacks most of the startup hype and pep talking most founders exude, but you're about to hear some fantastic real-world advice about how foreigners can hire, manage, and occasionally even fire Japanese staff. Japanese labor law is well, different than it is in the US or Europe, and more than a few foreigners have made simple mistakes in this area that ended up killing their companies. Terrie has some great advice both on how to attract and to keep Japanese talent, and a few real-world examples of how you can protect yourself when things go horribly, horribly wrong. But you know, Terrie tells that story much better than I can, so let's get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I'm sitting here with Terrie Lloyd, the founder and CEO of Japan Travel and LINC Media, and BiOS and quite a few other companies, so thanks for sitting down with me. Terrie: It's my pleasure. Tim: Yes, I'm amazed how long it's taken us to get around to doing this interview because we've known each other for a couple of decades now. Terrie: Yes, that's right, absolutely. Tim: And I want to talk to you about Japan Travel, but there's a lot I want to dig into about the ecosystem itself and how it's changed, and some real practical advice for foreigners doing business here. So let's talk about Japan Travel. Can you explain how it works? I think it's a really interesting model. Terrie: Well, I started off as portal. I've been interested in media for a long time as you know, and so I wanted to create a community-driven media brand, basically. The impetus for making Japan Travel, of course, was to help with disaster, and so I wasn't really thinking too hard about turning it into a business per se. I thought it would be kind of like a good way to contribute to help rebuild Japan. As you recall, back in 2011, I went to meet people looking at the traveling to Japan. Tim: Oh, I see, so I mean, but

Japanese fashion is unique, and so is the entire Japanese fashion industry. Today I would like to introduce you to a Japanese fashion startup with a genuinely unique business model. Tsubasa Koseki and his team at Facy, have created a fashion marketplace based on instant messaging and relationship building between shops and consumers. Interestingly, this market is not dominated by major labels or global companies, but by more local, mid-market brands. Tsubasa and I talk about his plans for Asian expansion, Facy’s chances for global domination in this niche, and the major differences between fashion retailing in Asia and in the West. It’s a fascinating discussion and a great inside look at fashion retailing. Show Notes What is the last untapped fashion market The reason behind the recent boom in startup founders from Todai How SNS use differs between Asia and the West Why you may not be able to trust Japanese e-commerce reviews The biggest mistake fashion startups keep making Why the global fashion brands will be at a disadvantage over the next 10 years Links from the Founder Check out Facy Follow them on Facebook More about Facy on The Bridge [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Every once in a while, I come across a startup with a business model that only exists in Japan. Now usually, this is because the startup is responding to a market need or a consumer behavior that also only exists in Japan. Occasionally however, only occasionally, I come across a unique startup with a genuinely good idea that has potential to make a global impact, and today, I'd like to introduce you to one of those companies. Tsubasa Koseki is the CEO and founder of Facy, and Facy has developed a fashion marketplace based on, believe it or not, text messaging. Consumers with questions about fashion can ask for advice, and fashion brands and stores respond to those questions. Yes, yes, I know, messaging is already widely used in the fashion e-commerce industry, but Facy has a wonderful and minimal approach to it that really deserves attention. Now, I grant you that the fashion industry as a whole is a bit outside of my core competence and in truth, I have a fashion sense that is perfect for podcasting, but Facy's results really speak for themselves, and Tsubasa and his company have big plans for expansion as well, but you know, Tsubasa tells that story much better than I can, so let's hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: Okay, so we're sitting here with Tsubasa Koseki, the CEO and founder of Facy. So thanks for sitting down with us today. Tsubasa: Yes, thank you, Tim, too. I'm very happy to present our project. I'm a big fan of your podcast. Tim: Well, thanks. Let's get right into what Facy does, so you talk about o-to-o means in offline-to-online support services for fashion and apparel stores, so how does this work exactly? Tsubasa: On our service, user can ask their fashion needs like Quora. Tim: Quora? Like the Q&A site? Tsubasa: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. User can ask their own fashion needs. For example, I'm looking for sneakers for the office, shop staff can reply to the post by uploading their item in their stores. User can ask additional questions. If it's okay, they can buy or reserve item. Tim: I really think you got an interesting approach to e-commerce in general, but fashion in particular where it is this kind of calling response where you got customers texting like just random questions, and how detailed are these questions? Are they simple things like, "I'm looking for a new pair of sneakers for basketball"? Or do you get people saying, "I want a blouse that feels more like spring"? Tsubasa: We have a lot of customer. They ask unique question. In this year, the most interesting question to me, 14 years old, Junior High School student asked, "I am a fashion beginner. I start to running fashion. What do I have to buy fast?" She asked. Tim: Okay, and so how did the shops respond? Tsubasa: So many shops respond to her. One of the shop respond, which is Levi's 501, branch respond, "Wear sneaker." Tim: But I can see that being really interesting. It's bringing commerce back to a more one-to-one relationship and that's great, and so the business model is, you take 20%? Tsubasa: Yes, yes. Tim: Do the shops ship directly to the customer or do you handle the shipping? Tsubasa: Yes, we are handling shipping and payment. We ask Yamato, Yamato is the biggest logistic service in Japan, to pick the item directly to customers. Tim: That makes sense. Tell me about your customers. How many customers

There are a lot of passionate opinions about Japanese design. From the beauty and subtlety of the best Japanese anime to the design horrors of most corporate Powerpoint presentations, Japanese design covers a huge range. Things are changing though, and today we sit down and talk with Naofumi Tsuchiya, the founder and CEO of Goodpatch, one of Japan’s leading, and most richly valued, UI/UX design startups. We talk about how Japanese design is evolving and why we might be seeing (for better or worse) a more global design standard and sensibility. Goodpatch is one of the new breed of Japanese design firms, and they’ve been able to raise substantial venture funding. Nao and I also talk about how that venture money has forced his startup to move in very specific strategic directions. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. UPDATE: The conversation below on the future of Goodpatch's two products is a bit confusing. Goodpatch has stopped development of Balto, but is continuing development on Prott. They are now in the process of a major rewrite and will soon launch a revamped Prott 2. Show Notes How you can choose your customers in Japan, and why most startups think you cannot How a life-threatening illness actually turned Nao's life around What makes a product meaningful How to discover passionate teams hiding inside large enterprises Why it's hard for a startup to move from services to products Why design in Japan is so different today How to improve user acquisition by over 50% (at least in Japan) How we should be raising the next generation of designers Links from the Founder Learn more about Goodpatch on their homepage Check out Nao's blog Follow him on Twitter @tsuchinao83 Check out the Goodpatch blog In English In Japanese Listen to the Goodpatch podcast (sorry, Japanese only) [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Today, we’re going to be talking about design in Japan and it’s going to be good. Because Japanese design is a topic that people have a lot of strong opinions about. From the subtlety and nuance you see in the very best of Japanese anime to the visual horrors of Japanese corporate PowerPoint presentations. The topic covers both the wonderful and the terrible. And so, to dance us through this minefield is Nao Tsuchiya of Goodpatch. Now, Goodpatch is one of Japan’s fastest growing and most highly valued design startups. We’ll talk about Japanese design not only as it exist today but why we might see a global convergence of design, style, and UI sensibilities in the coming decades. Even if it’s inevitable, it’ll be sad to see the current global diversity disappear. And though we don’t talk about it during the interview, I first ran across now a while back when I recommended Goodpatch to one of my larger consulting clients. Before providing an estimate or drilling down into the requirements, Goodpatch sent back a detailed questionnaire, asking this enterprise about their dreams for the project and who their ideal users were, and how they normally communicated with them. Now, these are great, in fact, even common sense questions for designing a user experience. They show that the designers really do care about what they’re building over at Goodpatch. But the enterprise employees running this project simply did not know how to deal with it. And rather than trying to answer the questions and challenge their own assumptions about the project, they went with a more traditional and more obedient vendor. The final product was definitely the last because of that decision. I’ve been a fan of Goodpatch from the day I saw that corporate client questionnaire. But you know, Nao tells the story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Nao Tsuchiya of Goodpatch, one of Japan’s fastest-growing digital design firms. Nao: Thank you. Tim: Now, normally, I avoid service companies because the demand for web and mobile app design, this demand rises and falls with venture investment but Goodpatch is doing things a little bit differently. You’re actually creating your own products, Prott & Balto. Nao: Yeah. Tim: So tell me a bit about those. Nao: We decided to stop making those. Tim: That’s interesting. When did you decide that? When did you make that decision? Nao: We made the decision last month. They’re already some released to the public. Tim: So just announced? Nao: Yes. Tim: A little later on, let’s talk about why you made that decision and the challenge of product versus service. Because I think that’s really important. Tell me about your customers. Who are your main customers right now? Nao: Our custo

Video is taking over the internet, but in many ways, it has not changed significantly in the past 40 years. The way we discover and pay for video content has changed significantly, of course, but we still consume video in a continuous, linear sequence, and that’s about to change. Sandeep Casi and his team at Videogram are using deep learning to change the way you and I discover and watch video. They’ve already had success in the enterprise realm, and they are now bringing the technology to consumers. Interestingly, Videogram was not founded the way most startups are, and Sandeep’s approach to leveraging the intellectual property locked up inside Japan’s large corporations might represent a unique and important avenue for innovation here in Japan. One that might become every bit as important as traditional seed-funded startups. We also dive into the paradox of enterprise innovation, and Sandeep explains a few things that all startups need to understand about corporate accelerators before joining. It’s an interesting discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes Why the key-frame model of video presentation is broken How General Motors pioneered VR in the early 90s Why there are fewer breakthrough technologies than you think What a startup can do when you are too early to market Why technology companies need to be content companies Why we might see more spinouts from Japanese enterprise How to raise funds as a foreigner in Japan How the Olympics will force Japan's video market and culture to change How to overcome the aversion some Japanese VCs have to foreign founders Links from the Founder Learn more about Videogram Check out Sandeep's home page Follow Sandeep on Twitter @sandeepcasi Friend him on Facebook The Increasing Interplay of Video and Social Media How Machine Learning Unlocks the Value of Video [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. Today, we’re going to be talking about the future of both how we create and how we consume video. Now I grant you, this may sound like something that’s pretty hard to do in an audio format but I think is some ways it’s actually easier. After listening back to this interview after I recorded it, it became clear that imaging the possibility in your mind’s eye us much more powerful than laying it all out for you in two dimensions. But we’ll get to all of that in just a little bit. You see, today we sit down and talk with Sandeep Casi, founder and CEO of Videogram. We talk not only about the future of video but also about a new model for unlocking some of the intellectual property that’s currently locked up in large Japanese companies. Sandeep and his team followed a very different startup model than what we see in Silicon Valley. It’s something we might be seeing a lot more of in Japan because the model is so well-suited to conditions here in Japan. Sandeep also has some really practical advice for participating in corporate accelerators and for new things startups absolutely must keep in mind when trying to sell innovative products to large enterprises. There are definitely tradeoffs. In fact, you could say there’s almost a built-in conflict of interest. We also share some real-world suggestions on how foreign founders can successfully raise multiple funding rounds in Japan. But you know, Sandeep tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Sandeep Casi of Videogram, which is an amazing video product. Thanks for sitting down with me. Sandeep: Thank you, Tim, and thanks for the opportunity to talk to your audience. Tim: It’s so hard to describe video on an audio podcast. But if I understand it correctly, you use AI to create paneled previews of videos. It’s kind of a storyboard or a comic book view. Sandeep: What you see as an end product is what you just described which is more of a pictorial summary of a video. But what’s going on in the backend is a much more deeper technology. We actually use machine learning to understand the context of a video, whether the video has scenes that’s of interest, celebrities that have certain status that we think we should be surfacing for discovery, as well as objects which might be interesting for monetization within the video. Tim: As it scans through the video, it could actually recognize not just there is a person here but wow, that’s Angelina Jolie or -- Sandeep: Yes. Tim: Wow. Sandeep: Or it recognizes maybe something she’s wearing, maybe sunglasses that she’s wearing. And if you have trained the system, we can also recognize brand of that sunglass. So what we do is we index the video down to its most atomic level. If you look a

Today I have a special in-between episode for you. At this year's big Tech In Asia Tokyo event I moderated a panel on artificial intelligence with some of the leaders in the field in Asia. We talked about how to separate the AI hype from reality, where companies can and are finding competitive advantage in AI, and whether in the decades to come artificial intelligence will be serving us in the future or whether we will be answering to our robot overlords. Joining me on the main Tech in Asia stage were: Alexis Zheng - Product Lead, Uber Toshitada Nagumo - CEO, Fenox Japan Takahiro Shoji - Venture Partner, Zeroth.ai It was an interesting conversation, and I thought I would package it up and bring it to you exactly as it happened. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Apologies, but there is no transcript of this show.

There is far more to startups in Japan than SaaS software and IoT hardware companies. Biotech startups are beginning to make a mark here. Today we sit down and talk with biotech pioneer Mitsuru Izumo and talk about his ground-breaking work at Euglena. In many ways, the team at Euglena succeeded where even NASA failed. They have developed a process to cultivate this microorganism, also called Euglena, affordably and at industrial scale. And Mitsuru and his team use using Euglena to create everything from inexpensive nutritional supplements to biological jet-fuel. Mitsuru tells an amazing story of how he took his startup from inspiration to proof of concept, to IPO, and how the real innovation is just getting started. I think you’ll really enjoy this one Show Notes Why the same organism can produce both food and fuel Why Euglena has been impossible to cultivate at industrial scale The world does not have a hunger problem; it has a nutrition problem How to move forward when no one believes in your vision How small companies can get to scale in Japan Why Japanese startups must IPO sooner than those in the West Why NASA gave up on Euglena, and why they were wrong Links from the Founder Learn about Euglena, the company Learn about the Euglena, the organism Follow Euglena on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. Today, we’re going to talk about slime. Well, actually no, not slime exactly we’ll be talking about algae. Well, actually, the biology nerds out there and I think it’s awesome if you are one, will point out that technically, we aren’t actually talking about algae but a unique organism called euglena, that has both animal and plant characteristics. And we’ll also be talking about a unique company, also called Euglena, that is cultivating this organism at scale and turning it into everything from nutritional supplements to jet fuel. In fact, in this episode, we drink our opening toast not with our usual Anchor Steam beer but with a glass of euglena. Now, I know what some of you are thinking and yes, university research labs and crowdfunding sites are packed with companies claiming that their pet organism is the key to solving a wide variety of mankind’s problems. But Euglena is not operating in a lab but commercially and at massive scale. And today, we sit down with the founder and CEO, Mitsuru Izumo, who explains how he overcame initial market skepticism to get financial backing. How he was able to achieve what NASA could not. And how and why he decided to take his company public. But you know, Mitsuru tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: Cheers. Mitsuru: Yes. For starting. Cheers. Tim: That’s pretty good. So, I’m sitting here with Mitsuru Izumo, the founder of Euglena. Thanks for sitting down with us today. Mitsuru: Thank you for coming today. Tim: I think most of our listeners are not familiar with Euglena, either the company or the organism. First, what is the organism? Mitsuru: Euglena is a kind of tiny microorganism. You can’t see it directly. You have to see through microscope because the length is only 0.1 mm. Tim: So that’s about the diameter of human hair? Mitsuru: Yes. Exactly. Very similar to the human hair. Little bit smaller than the hair. Euglena is green colored microorganisms and euglena have a lot of chlorophyll. Euglena can do photosynthesis by capturing carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and carbohydrate. Tim: Euglena, it’s a single cell organism. Is it a type of algae or is it its own unique type of organism? Mitsuru: It’s difficult to answer. Euglena is a kind of algae, green colored and categorized as a plant. What makes euglena unique is that euglena is a kind of algae and at the same time, euglena can move by itself. Tim: Okay. Mitsuru: Euglena has both plant and animal characteristics. Euglena have both plant and animal genes. And Euglena can produce both plant and animal nutrition. Tim: So it’s a difficult organism to classify. But if we think of it as kind of a single celled algae, we won’t be too far off? Mitsuru: Mm-hmm. Tim: What’s it good for? Mitsuru: Euglena can produce plant, dietary fiber, fruits and vegetable vitamins, animal protein, dietary fatty acid. You can see in fish oil, every 59 types of nutrients, euglena can produce at one time. Tim: So as a food supplement for people or as a standalone food? Mitsuru: Yes. Standalone food. And it can be cultivated under the sunlight like normal plant. Every plants your see in nature have are very flexible so it’s difficult to be digested. Euglena can move by itself, doesn’t have [flexible] at all therefore the nutrition can be very easily be digested

There’s a very good reason most Japanese hardware startups fail. Today we sit down with Takuro Yoshida CEO and founder of Logbar, and we dive into the reasons and also go over Logbar’s strategy for avoiding the mistakes that have killed off so many other Japanese IoT startups. Takuro is the creator of one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns and two of the most successful IoT projects in Japan, the Ring Zero, which is VR controller in wearable ring form and the ili automatic translator, which is just starting to gain real traction. Of course, we dive into how he managed to create and bring these products to market, and we also talk in detail about Takuro’s unusual journey from professional bartender to successful startup CEO. It’s a great conversation, and I think you’ll really enjoy it. Show Notes How to go from bartender IoT startup founder Why a successful Kickstarter campaign can be a danger to your company Why the Ring failed as a hardware controller Why hardware translators will succeed where software-based translators have failed How hardware devices will survive in the world of a standardized mobile phone platform Why even in Japan all publicity is good publicity Why Japan has fallen behind in hardware and how it can catch up Why Japanese VCs don't want to invest in hardware startups Links from the Founder Find out about Logbar Info on the Ili translator The video that got Logbar so much attention [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. You know. One of the biggest changes I’ve seen in Japanese startups over the last 20 years, in the increasing number that are coming out of Japan’s top universities. I’ve got to say there’s both a positive side and a negative side to the large number of new startups being founded at these universities, particularly at the University of Tokyo. On the positive side, it’s great that so many of Japan’s top students, students who have the option of a fast track career in government or a Japanese industry are choosing to take a risk and start a company. It’s a concrete sign that things really are changing in Japan. However, the fact there there’s been such a large number of founders from the University of Tokyo in particular, shows that in some ways, not that much has changed. The fact is that when Todai ramped up their entrepreneurship program, they brought resources to bear that only they could. Todai students have access to government connections, funding, and industry programs, and alliances that no one else in Japan had. Some founders in Todai rely heavily on these connection, some almost exclusively, and others barely use them at all. And in the end, of course, outside of a small handful of startups that rely primarily on government investment, all startups will succeed or fail in the same public marketplace. Still, however, sometimes the most inspiring founders are those who come from somewhere you don’t expect, someone who takes an unusual and u likely path to entrepreneurship. And Takuro Yoshida of Logbar is a founder in that mold. When I first met him four, five years ago, he was tending bar and trying to innovate bartending. Over the past few years, he and his team have run one of Japan’s largest Kickstarter campaigns and developed, released, and secured national and international distribution for two completely hardware products. And I think you can learn a lot from him. But you know, Takuro tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [Interview] [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Takuro Yoshida of Logbar, one of Japan’s most creative internet of things startups. So thanks for sitting down with me today. Takuro: Thank you. Tim: Logbar has created both The Ring and ili automatic translator. So before we get started, why don’t you just tell me a bit about the company an about your products? Takuro: Okay. So we started our company from since like 2013. Actually, Logbar comes from real bar. Tim: Right. Takuro: I was a bartender and then I was making a cocktail -- Tim: Well, actually, that’s right. The very first time we met, I was running EngineYard and you were running the bar and you just developed a system that would let people order drinks on the iPad. Takuro: Yeah, that’s right. Tim: Yeah, I remember. Takuro: Okay. Yeah. We are doing that. That was fun. You can order a cocktail in the bar and then you can communicate with people. Tim: I want to talk about your history in a little bit. But first, tell us about The Ring and tell us about the automatic translator. Takuro: Okay. So Ring, you put in the finger and then if you do the gesture, maybe you can turn on the TV or you can control the music in the app or

Disrupting Japan is three years old, so we decided to invite a few hundred movers and shakers from Tokyo's startup community over to have few drinks and to hear three of Japan's most successful startup CEOs talk about what it takes for Japanese startups to succeed globally. Our panel included the CEOs of some of the most innovative startups in Japan. Ken Tamagawa (@kentamagawa) - CEO, Soracom Takuma Iwasa (@cerevoglobal) - CEO, Cerevo Shin Sakane (@laundroid_0 ) - CEO, Seven Dreamers We talk about strategies for global growth, how to best manage multi-cultural teams, and the likely future of hardware and IoT startups in Japan. In fact, we talk a lot about the challenges hardware startups are facing in Japan today. Japanese hardware startups are at a crossroads. The old model of hardware innovation is failing, but there is a new model, unique to Japan, that might just take its place. But, as our guests explain, things are far from certain. It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. On a personal note, thank you for reading and listening and for being a part of Disrupting Japan. When I started this project three years ago, I never imagined how big it would become, or how large, passionate, and global the interest in Japanese truly is. I want to offer a sincere thank you to everyone who has pitched in to help make Disrupting Japan a success. There is no way I could have built this by myself. I have access to a bottomless well of innovative and genuinely interesting Japanese startup founders, and I look forward to continuing to introduce them to you and to bring you their stories. Thanks for listening! [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. You guys are joining mw. You guys are awesome. Audience: [Cheering] Tim: I’ve got to admit, that is the exact response I hear in my head every time I say that phrase. Audience: [Laughing] Tim: Before we get to the kampai and to the panel discussion proper, there’s a few people I really want to thank, who without them I couldn’t have put this show together. The first of which is Creww. What Creww does is they run about 80% of the corporate accelerators in Japan. So if your startup wants to hook up with a large corporation or you’ve got a big company who want to hook up a startup, you need to talk to Creww and Segawa-san is hanging around somewhere. Where is Segawa-san? Waive. I can’t see you from up here, so. There he is in the back. Talk to Segawa-san and also, Creww is opening a new co-working collaboration space to help startups connect with enterprises. It’s just up the street. Second, I want to give a big shout out to the Carter Group. Dominic Carter is here somewhere, himself. There is Dominic over there. And so, for those of you who have done business in Japan, which is pretty much everyone here, the things never quite work out as you expect them to. The Carter Group provides market intelligence and market research that help companies grow their business here or come here in the first place. Their processes and the prices are extremely startup-friendly. So if you want to grow your business here, talk to Dominic. And last but certainly not least, I want to give a big shout out to Digital Hub. Now, you’ll see these guys running around with cameras and microphones, documenting this for all of posterity. Don’t talk to the guys with the cameras. But they also do some great corporate video work. So if you’re looking for video — and who isn’t these days — talk to Steve, who is over there. Audience: [Applause] Tim: So, I’d like everyone to raise their glasses and thank you guys so much for being with me for three years and over 100 episodes. And I hope you come along with me for the next 100 episodes in the next three years. Thank you so much. Kampai! Audience: Kampai! Tim: Cheers! All right. Audience: [Applause] Tim: Now, we get to the meat of the show. Now, I want to introduce the panel myself because I know these guys. If I just let you talk about your companies, you’re going to use up all the time. So, on my far left is Shin Sakane of Seven Dreamers. They have been one of the most innovative in aggressively exporting hardware companies in Japan. You’ve done everything from carbon fiber golf shafts to a medical device that fits in the nose for some reason. But you’re most known for the Laundroid, laundry-folding robot, which you’re releasing overseas and Japan at about the same time. Shin: Right. Tim: In the center is Ken Tamagawa of Soracom, who makes extremely affordable and flexible connectivity for internet of things and connected devices, and who is in the process of selling his company to KDDI. Nothing’s been officially launched but it’s been leaked all over creation. And on my immediate left is Takuma Iwasa of Cerevo, who is one of the most innovative d

Corporate Japan is about to go through a major transition in its approach to computer security. In the past, Japan-only payment systems and the Japanese language itself provided a barrier that kept international fraud and attacks at a very low level. All that is changing now. With payment systems becoming increasingly global, and free, instant translation available to anyone with a browser, fraud is on the rise in Japan. Today we sit down with Atsuyoshi Shimazu of Caulis, and he’s going to both explain the new threats and explain exactly what he plans to do about them. He’ll also explain why Japan’s current approach to the internet of things means that things might get worse before they get better. It’s a great conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes Why 50 million accounts are at risk in Japan Why some Japanese companies avoid taking security measures Toyota's vision of connected cars in the gig economy What security looks like in an IoT world Why online fraud is about to skyrocket in Japan Japan's susceptibility to ransomware attacks Why hacking insurance might be the future of security Why Japanese CSOs and CIOs are so bad at their jobs Links from the Founder Connect with Atsuyoshi on LinkedIn Friend him on Facebook Find out about Caulis Follow them on twitter @CaulisJP Visit them on Facebook Find out if your account has been hacked at Have I Been Pawned [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. Today, we’re going to talk about fraud. Online fraud, hackers, scams, identity theft in Japan, and what exactly we can do about it. Now, I’ve been involved professionally in IT in Japan for more than 20 years, and that includes both enterprise scale big IT and startup scale little IT. Corporate Japan has always had a strange relationship with computer security. On one hand, companies are very sensitive to security concerns and they’ll pay top dollar for security hardware and software systems and evaluations. But on the other hand, day-to-day security practices are often neglected. Operating systems remain unpatched, firewalls are set up and then never touched again, and backup systems are rarely tested. Right now, however, Japan is going through a bit of a security transition in both their understanding of fraud and how susceptible their systems are to fraud and hacking, and walk you through some of these important changes. Today, we sit down with Atsuyoshi Shimazu, founder and CEO of Caulis. Now, Caulis offers a distributed online fraud prevention service called Fraud Alert, and it’s solid technology that has a special appeal in the Japanese market. Now, Atsuyoshi also explains how the internet of things is going to force all of us to radically change the way we think about online security and security in general. He also explains why the instances and losses due to online fraud is set to skyrocket in Japan over the next two years. But you know, Atsuyoshi tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Atsuyoshi Shimazu of Caulis, the makers of Fraud Alert, which is an online security and fraud prevention tool. I’m sure you can explain it much better than I can. Thanks for sitting down with me. Can you tell me a bit about what Fraud Alert does and what Caulis is? Atsuyoshi: Fraud Alert protect the corporate website from the fraud attack such as brute force attacks. At first, we protect the log-in page and also conversion page such as money transfer pages. Tim: You’re preventing unauthorized access to web pages and monitoring the behavior on those pages as well? Atsuyoshi: Yes. Also, we protect the smartphone apps. We check how to type the word and the behavior. Tim: So like behavioral profiling? Atsuyoshi: Yes. Tim: Okay. So how does it work exactly? Do the systems make an API call to your systems? Is there code level integration? Atsuyoshi: Yes. Tim: How does the system work? Atsuyoshi: First, the client should introduce our JavaScript in their log-in page and also client should set the API connection to our website. Tim: There’s a different JavaScript callback in every page so you could track users’ behavior? Atsuyoshi: Yes. Tim: What type of things qualify as unusual user behavior? Atsuyoshi: Now, I’m using the MacBook and using the Google Chrome in the location of the Otemachi area. So this is an unusual behavior. But if the hackers use the same ID and password but they use Windows 10 and Internet Explorer outside, this user’s behavior is not normal. Tim: Okay. Right. So someone is coming in from a new location or if the same IP address tries to log in with a bunch of different user names, that’ll look s

Welcome to our 100th show. If you are new, welcome to Disrupting Japan. If you are a long-time follower, thank you for being part of the community and helping to make Disrupting Japan what it is today. This is a special, and rather short, episode. Today I'm going to tell you a very personal story of startup failure, and let you in on what's coming next. Both for me, and for the show. Thank you for listening, and I think you'll enjoy this one. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan episode 100. Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan's most sucessful entreprenuers. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Wow. One hundred episodes! That’s right Orson Wells only made 64 movies. The Rolling Stones have only recorded 53 albums. Lord Byron only published 83 poems. But Disrupting Japan has now released 100 episodes. And I’m pretty happy about that. When I started this show, almost exactly three years ago, I never imagined it would grow into the big international community it has become, and I want to thank you for being part of it. Wether you were one of our 14 original listeners or one of the thousands who have signed up more recently, thanks for joining the conversation about some of the truly amazing things going on in Japanese startups and innovation today. I knew I had to do something special for our 100th show, and gave a lot of thought to exactly what that should be. I thought about doing a clip show with many of Japan’s startup founders saying a word about startup in Japan and wishing us a happy 100, but that seems kind of, I don’t know vain and self-congratulatory. I thought about getting a big name on the show. There are a couple of world-famous Japanese founders who I could have probably brought on for the big anniversary, but that didn’t feel quite right either. I mean, we’ll definitely get those guys on later, but what you’ve been telling me — pretty consistently — over the past three years, is that it’s the human stories of success .. and failure and challenge that really meet to matter. And that makes sense. It’s not the dot.com billionaires that are diving innovation in Japan. It’s the thousands of individual innovators and the millions of Japanese people newly willing to take chance and try out these new ideas that are really driving the change. In a way, the billionaires are just as much a result of these historic changes as they are a cause of them. The real change, the real engine for innovation in Japan is the creative people who are willing to take some very real social and economic risks to follow their dreams and try to create something new. I mean, they are not selfless. Very few of them are doing it for the betterment of Japan. No they have their own reasons some financial, some personal, but they are willing to put themselves out there, both economically by starting a company, and socially by, among other things, coming onto this show and talking very frankly about what they feel, and what they fear … and what they really want. This kind of public openness about true hopes and fears. This kind of sharing. It’s never really been a part of Japanese culture, but that’s changing. At least among startup founders. And that’s a great thing. So, in that spirt of openness about failure and success and hopes and dreams, for this special 100th episode, I’ve decided to share a personal story of my own. I’m going to tell you about one of my startup failures, and then I’ll tell you about my new job. I can talk about it now, and if you haven’t heard yet, you are in for a surprise. Ah, but before I tell you about dreams of future success, I owe you a story of past failure. This is adapted from an article I wrote a little more than a year ago about why I decided to shut down my latest startup a few weeks before launch. The article was originally titled “Why I Turned Down $500k, Pissed off my investors, and shut down my startup.” That article went viral. For a while it was the top story on Medium and Pulse. It was reprinted by Venture Beat and Quartz, and many others. It’s been read by over 3 million people and translated into four languages — that I know of. And let me tell you, its strange spending two weeks as the worlds most famous failure. I got more than 4,000 emails and messages during that time. Most were supportive, but the experience was overwhelming and a bit surreal. But I would like to tell the story to you, and as a member of the Disrupting Japan community, I think you will enjoy it, but you will actually —- understand it. You know, a few weeks ago a close friend told me that between my articles and my blog and Facebook and Disrupting Japan and my general oversharing, that I was living my life as some kind of performance art. Now, me being me, I came up with the perfect response to him about a week later, but at the time I just kind of laughed and said something stupid like “Yeah,

Fewer than 1% of Japanese consumers have ever purchased a product or service from a sharing economy platform. It's actually quite puzzling. Social and economic factors all seem to indicate that Japanese cities would be ideal for sharing economy businesses, but for a number of reasons sharing economy startups have not really taken off here. Today we unravel a bit of this mystery as we sit down with Chika Tsunada, founder of Anytimes and the Director of the Sharing Economy Association Japan. Anytimes is a P2P sharing economy startup with a unique and participatory business model. Chika explains why she chose that model and the challenges it presents. Even under ideal circumstances, building a P2P marketplace is hard. It's one of the most challenging business models to execute, and to succeed today requires doing something truly unique. Chika has chosen an unusual path both for herself and for her business. It's a great discussion, and I think you'll enjoy it. Show Notes The best strategy for building a two-sided marketplace Why even Japanese entrepreneurs discourage their children from joining startups How to start a web-startup when you are not a programmer or designer Is it better to go deep or go wide in creating a marketplace? One technique for fighting online review fraud Why the Japanese labor market is unique in regards to the sharing economy Why freelancing has not yet taken off in rural areas The spark that will ignite the sharing economy in Japan How licensing and administrative guidence stifles innovation in Japan Links from the Founder Friend Chika on Facebook Follow her on Twitter @chikageena Check out the Anytimes homepage Anytimes for Andriod Anytimes for IOS [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. You know, when I run startup workshops and classes on entrepreneurship, by far, the most popular business model used by the students for their startup ideas are two-sided marketplaces. Everybody wants to be a marketplace. Why not? There’s a lot to love about being a marketplace if you can pull it off. Aspiring founders imagine themselves running a platform that matches up buyers and sellers and takes a small piece of each transaction. They imagine dozens of other ways to monetize both the relationships they have with the participants and the data and the insights they gather about the market itself, and they all scale up easily and can be run with a relatively small staff. Really, online marketplaces seem like the ideal business model, and on paper they are. The reality, however, is that marketplace businesses are hard. I mean, really hard. Sure, once you have millions of users, marketplaces can be insanely profitable. The problem is getting that first 1,000 or maybe 10,000 active users. That’s hard. To do that, you need to be doing something unique. Well, today, we sit down with Chika Tsunoda, the CEO of Anytimes and the director of the Sharing Economy Association of Japan, and she explains how she’s been building a P2P services marketplace with a unique Japanese twist. It’ been a bit of a crazy journey for Chika so far but she thinks that Anytimes is positioned to take advantage of a unique aspect of the Japanese labor market. But you know, Chika tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I am sitting here with Chika Tsunoda, the director of the Sharing Economy Association in Japan and the fearless founder of Anytimes. Thanks for sitting down with me. Chika: Thank you for coming and thank you for interviews. Tim: Anytimes is a skill-sharing and a skill-matching platform but I think you can probably describe it much better than I can. Chika: Anytimes is a skill-sharing platform to connect people who need help and those who want to work in the neighborhood such as everyday household chores, pet care, assembling furniture, language lessons, and so on. Tim: Tell me a bit about your customers. Who uses it? What are the most popular services people are sharing? Chika: Yes. Most popular customer is housewives, and university student, and seniors. Tim: What kind of skills? What are people doing? Are they putting together furniture for people? Are they cleaning homes? What are the services that are being offered? Chika: Most popular category is house cleaning, and next cooking, and next assembling furniture. But we also have other categories. For example, pet care, English lessons, Chinese lessons, guitar lesson. Tim: How much does something like that cost? Chika: The price average is one hour ¥2,000. Tim: Okay. Chika: So, not high cost. Tim: Right, right. The platform takes 15% commission? Chika: Yes. Yes, 15% commission is

The financial services industry in Japan is pretty unsophisticated. There are relatively few options for brokerages and mutual funds, and what options there are tend to be expensive. Furthermore, since pensions and taxes are generally handled by the employer there is not much reason for the average Japanese to think much about investments. Jin Nakamura of Money Design is trying to change that with a very interesting strategy. In a market that is dominated by price competition, Money Design has set out to create a premium lifestyle brand that has nothing to do with finance. And it’s working. Money Design has become the largest robo-advisor service in Japan and is partnering with some of the largest banks here. It’s a fascinating story, and I think you'll really enjoy it. Show Notes Why young Japanese are not investing Why it takes so long to launch a financial product in Japan The danger of using AI in investing How to reach $1 billion assets under management How to avoid competing on price in a price-sensitive market What it will take to get the Japanese public to believe in startups Links from the Founder The Money Design homepage Check out Jin's blog Friend Jin on Facebook Check out THEO. It's pretty cool. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan episode 98. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. Today, we’re going to talk about money, about investment. It’s not about exciting things like venture funding and ICOs but about simple somewhat stuffy stocks and bonds. Jin Nakamura cofounded Money Design as a way to introduce millennials and other young Japanese to investing. Money Design has created THEO, one of Japan’s first robo-advisors. Now, robo-advisors are a lot simpler than their name implies. Basically, all that’s happening is that you contribute a small amount of money each month and the robo-advisor will invest a certain percentage of that in stocks and another percentage in bonds and will make some adjustments if the allocations get too far out of alignment. I t’s a simple concept, really, but as Jin explains, young Japanese have shown very little interest in this kind of investing. So to reach them, Money Design created a lifestyle brand, one that had absolutely nothing to do with finance or money, and it worked. Young investors have been flocking to the THEO system and have made it the largest robo-advisor in Japan. In fact, Jin shares some of the insight that will be very important to anyone running a fintech startup or trying to sell financial services in Japan. But you know, Jin tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Time Romero: So I’m sitting here with Jin Nakamura, the CEO of Money Design and creator of THEO, a robo-advisory for retail investors. Thanks for sitting down with me. Jin Nakamura: Thank you very much. Thank you for coming in our office. Tim: Delighted to be here. I described Money Design in a very simple way but I think you can explain what you guys are doing much better. Jin: Our product is very simple. We are providing a robo-advisory service in Japan. And then our global competitor is Betterment and Wealthfront. We are one of the first venture company to provide robo-advisory services in Japan. Tim: For those of our listeners who don’t know, robo-advisory just means that individual investors can give you a relatively small amount of money and you invest it automatically for them. Jin: Yes. We are providing the very simple financial product by smartphone. Once you access our website and then you answer just five questions. We showed the portfolio for each customer. Currently, we are providing over 230 portfolios for the customers. Once customer put their money into our portfolio, after that, we manage that discretionally. Tim: Okay. You’re saying that there’s five questions. Jin: Yes. Tim: What kind of questions do you ask? Jin: The first question is, ‘How old are you.’ And then second question, ‘Do you have any experience in investment?’ Third question is, ‘Are you a conservative or aggressive?’ Fourth question is, ‘What would you do if the market is going down? Are you going to put your money more or do you withdraw the money?’ And then the last question is, ‘Are you afraid of inflation?’ Tim: It sounds like basically, you’re trying to get a sense of the customer’s risk profile and sensitivity to inflation which is probably like how long they plan to invest, right? Jin: Yes. But even you answered the very simple five questions, we put some kind of algorithm for the profiling, then we analyze not only the risk return but also your tendency for investment. Tim: Okay. Actually, I want to dig deep into that a little later on

Japanese enterprises are particularly susceptible to disruption, and Japanese startups have a harder time than most pivoting. Both of these problems stem from the same root, and today we are going to dig up that root and have a look at it. Today we sit down with Shogo Kawada co-founder DeNA, and we talk about both the challenges of the company’s early startup pivots and the post-IPO difficulties they faced with new disruptive challengers. Shogo is now one of the most active and successful angel investors in Japan, and he explains how both the role and profile of Japanese angels is shifting. He also outlines the reasons why their presence is leading to several positive changes in Japan’s venture capital ecosystem. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll really enjoy it. Show Notes How both eBay and DeNA screwed up auctions in Japan Why most business alliances fail Why startups will always have the advantage with new technology How to get started in angel investing The only thing the can force Japanese corporate VCs to change their structure Why the current startup bubble is different from the dot.com bubble What will happen when the current bubble bursts Why Japanese VCs never take technology risks Links from the Founder Follow Shogo on Twitter @shg A brief history of DeNA [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan episode 97. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Japanese startups have trouble pivoting. Business and social conventions make it really hard. Once the team, the company or the country has committed to a certain path, with Japan’s consensus-driven approach to decision-making and the importance placed on maintaining social harmony, it makes it very hard for an individual to stand up and say, “Hey everyone, I think we’re on the wrong path here.” Business convention in Japan requires you to simply pitch in and pull your weight. This is one of the reasons that Japanese companies, particularly the large enterprises are so susceptible to disruption. But some Japanese startups have been able to pivot their way through multiple business models and into a successful IPO and those are the ones that we need to study to find out how they did it. And today, Shogo Kawada, co-founder of DeNA takes us through the exciting story of one such case study. We talk about why DeNA was able to pivot relatively easily from auctions to commerce to mobile gaming but why it was unable to make the jump from web auctions to mobile auctions or from early mobile gaming to smartphone-based mobile gaming. We discussed the core reason for the problem and examine possible solutions. And we also talk about the rise of angel investors in Japan and how they’ve changed the way investing works here. But you know, Shogo tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Shogo Kawada, the co-founder of DeNA. Thanks for sitting down with me. Shogo: Thank you very much. Tim: I’m sure most of our listeners know DeNA. It was one of the most important gaming startups of the .com generation. You founded it with Tomoko Nanba in 1999 and you’ve become one of the most active angel investors in Japan now. So before we dig into current investment trends in Japan, I want to back up a bit and talk a little about you and DeNA. Shogo: Basically, we started DeNA as an e-commerce company. It first started, it’s PC-based auction service in 1999. Tim: Okay. So originally, the idea was to compete with Yahoo Auctions and eBay? Shogo: Yes, exactly. When we started, at that time, there’s no Yahoo Auction. Yes, there exist already eBay in US market but there is not C2C big market in Japan. Tim: That was a very interesting time for auctions in Japan because eBay very famously delayed their launch in Japan. Shogo: Yes. Tim: It took a long time to launch. In the meantime, Yahoo Auctions launched pretty quickly but DeNA was before them. Why didn’t DeNA dominate that market instead of Yahoo? Shogo: Because when we planned to start that the business, we had some alliance with Recruit and Sony. In 1999, Recruit was very strong in the internet area. Also, Sony was very still at that time more energized company, at that time. Tim: Yes, yes. In 1999, Sony was a incredibly powerful brand. Shogo: Yes, yes, yes. So we used their customer base to start our C2C market but in September, Yahoo started and they used their strong traffics into their new started C2C market. Tim: So it was just that you didn’t have enough of a lead to build up a market before Yahoo came in? Shogo: Yes, yes. So Yahoo Auction was the C2C number 1 market at that time. We chased a long time but still. Tim: They got further and further ahe

FinTech in Japan is far more advanced than most outside observers imagine it to be, and based on new deregulation and government incentives, finTech in Japan is about to accelerate even more. Today we sit down and talk with Toshio Taki, co-founder of Money Forward, advisor to Japan’s Financial Services Agency, and the head of the FinTech Institute of Japan. He not only tells the story of the founding and growth of MoneyForward -- one of Japan's finTech success stories, but he outlines how the Japanese government’s plans to promote financial innovation while still maintaining the integrity and stability of the industry as a whole. The Japanese banking regulators are, at least in this sense, far less conservative than you think, and they are setting up a finical ecosystem in Japan that will lead to far more innovative finTech startups than we are seeing coming out of Europe of America. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes How banking and credit card use is different in Japan Why most Japanese need multiple bank accounts Why finTech is evolving differently in Japan Who really controls household finance in Japan How Money Forward was reluctantly pulled into the B2B market How Japan's FSA is promoting finTech and financial innovation in Japan How the FSA is forcing Japan's banks to open up to innovation Links from the Founder The Money Forward homepage Japan's Financial Services Agency Connect with Toshio on LinkedIn [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Okay. For all of you fastidious followers and fanatical fans of all things FinTech, I have a fantastic show for you today. We’re going to sit down and talk with Toshio Taki, co-founder of Money Forward, about how the Japanese government is forcing the banking sector to allow startups to innovate. Well, perhaps forcing is too strong a word, let’s just say that Japanese banks are being strongly encouraged to work with startups. Now, Toshio studied under Peter Thiel at Stanford before co-founding Money Forward which has become the leading personal finance app in Japan. He’s also an advisor to Japan’s financial services agency and the head of the FinTech Institute of Japan. After listening to Toshio, you’ll understand why the Japanese banking regulators are far less conservative than you might imagine them to be and why the Japanese financial sector is about to become a whole lot more competitive than what exists in Europe or North America. Of course, this being Japan, risks must be understood and managed. And Toshio walks us through the Japanese government’s blueprint for fostering financial innovation while still maintaining the integrity and stability of the industry as a whole. This episode is required listening for anyone who wants to understand the future of FinTech in Japan. And you know, Toshio explains that much better than I can so let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Toshio Taki, the co-founder of Money Forward and head of the FinTech Association of Japan. Toshio: Cancelled meeting today and I’m very excited for this podcast. Tim: I’m glad to have you here because I think FinTech in Japan right now and Money Forward, it’s pretty amazing space to be in. Before we get started on the overall market, let’s explain what Money Forward is. I know it’s online financial management software that you sell to individuals and small business but tell us more about what it actually does. Toshio: Sure. In brief, Money Forward operates two types of businesses. One for the B2C where probably the most familiar name would be mint.com. We automatically gather information from every single bank in Japan by having people put in their credentials about the internet banking account and then make themselves a very simplified P&L statement for their individualized -- we deliver that for 5 million users in Japan which makes us the largest personal financial management tool in Japan. So that’s half of our business. The other half goes to the B2B market where it’s very much again like another name called Quickbooks that goes to the U.S. market. We operate a cloud-based accounting SaaS service targeted towards the SMEs. Around half a million businesses have an account in our platform. They employ either their accounting software of maybe their invoicing package. So we provide all sorts of these back office automation tools for the very small businesses. Tim: Okay. What’s the basic revenue model? Is it like a freemium? Is it application upgrades? Is it consulting? Toshio: For the B2C part, it’s the good old freemium model but it turned out to be a little of an exception in Japan where

(Photo Credit: WurFi) This is a short and very personal episode. Things will be changing for me and for Disrupting Japan, and sometimes when you are facing a lot of big changes, it really helps to be able to share your thoughts with people you care about. That's you. There is no guest this time. It's a story about me and magic and chivalry and startups. I hope you find something in it. Transcript Disrupting Japan Episode… well, that’s kind of complicated. Hi. Tim here. I’ve got some big news that I can only tease you with right now, but I wanted to share it with you in this special, short in-between episode. There are no ads this episode, because … well, because this one is not brought to you by our sponsors, it’s too personal. It’s brought to you by me. Now, no one has ever been surprised to learn that I was a huge nerd in high-school. And this was back in the 1980’s, a very long time before nerds were even remotely cool, and female nerds simply didn’t exist. Actually, no I take that back. I’m sure there were female nerds back then, but social norms being what they were, they had to stay in the closet and hide their nerdy nature from the rest of the world while pretending to be interested in cheerleading and quarterbacks and what have you. So I guess that the 1980s were a tough time to be a female nerd. Nerd liberation came later for girls than it did for boys, but the 80s were not a great time to be a male nerd either. Anyway, I was on the debate team and spent my free time programming my Commodore 64, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and arguing the finer points of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings with my equally nerdy friends. Now over the years, I’ve given up on the idea of debate for debate's sake, upgraded my computer, and I haven’t played D&D since high-school graduation. However, I still enjoy Tolkien and find myself re-reading his books every decade or two. The Lord of the Rings is a classic tale that is beautifully told, and generations of nerds have found in it not simply an enjoyable distraction, but as profound human insight and as inspiration on leading a life well lived. But recently, and as a result of this serial entrepreneur life I’ve chosen, the characters in The Lord of the Rings have been seeming a bit thin, and those of another novel have started to seem richer and richer. Back in high-school, I considered Cervantes’ Don Quixote an interesting enough story, but over the years as I’ve embarked on several radically different careers and started startup after startup, something about the novel started to resonate with me. As the Lord of the Rings began to feel more and more like a well-told fairy tale, Don Quixote began to seem, well a little bit like me. For those of you who have not read the book in while or who have only seen one of the movies, all of which miss the core point of the book, let me explain Cervantes wrote Don Quixote more than 400 years ago, and he tells a story of a man who lived in a time of overdue bills, nosy neighbors and bickering politicians. It was a time when the world was filled with petty people with tiny dreams wasting their lives in mundane and meaningless pursuits. Well, Quixote dreamed of a better world. A world where life had honor and meaning. He desperately wanted to live in an age of chivalry. A time of damsels in distress and knights errant, a time when there were still giants left to slay. He believed in his vision so passionately he began to see the world not as it was, but as it could be; as it should be. Farmers became noble squires, peasant girls became princesses, and most famously, windmills became ferocious giants. Now Don Quixote is not a heroic figure. He never managed to change the world. In fact, no one ever believed in his vision except for him. The world viewed Don Quixote as a somewhat amusing, but a pathetic and pointless person. When you read the novel, you get the impression that even Cervantes, himself, couldn’t quite make up his mind about whether he was on Don Quixote’s side or not. The author is ruthlessly cruel to the character, putting him through failure after failure and moving him from one manner of humiliation to the next. But every once in a while you glimpse the unmistakable theme that “Hey, Quixote is right. The world as he sees really is better. But this is what happens when one man is right and the rest of the world is wrong.“ Don Quixote spent his life following his vision and his passion to absolutely no avail. He led a life of failure and humiliation, but somehow managed a life well lived. And that is something that any startup founder should be able to admire. Now before you get the wrong idea, and before my investors get the wrong idea, I don’t pattern myself after Don Quixote, and I don’t identify with Don Quixote. I don’t seek out and pursue opportunities for failure or public humiliation. At least not consciously. Cervantes story resonates with me more than Tolkien’s. It’s more real. When we

Two of the most persistent and damaging myths about Japan are that it is hard to start a company here and that it is hard to do business as a foreigner. Well, those are not complete myths. Both of those things are indeed difficult, but no harder than they are in any other country. Today Marty Roberts explains not only how he started and rapidly grew a successful startup here in Japan, but how he got the Japanese government to pay for it. To contain health care costs, the Japanese government is pushing doctors to prescribe more generic drugs, and that is forcing the pharmaceutical industry to change they way they do business or to go out of business. Marty saw an opportunity in this shift, and his company has quickly grown to be the leader in its space. Marty also offers some very practical advice for anyone thinking of leaving a senior management role to start a startup. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes How pharma sales is broken in Japan Why work is about to get a lot harder for Japan’s Doctors How Japan plans on cutting medical costs in the future Why enTouch needed services to sell software How to negotiate non-compete agreements with your current employer Getting funding from the Japanese government Why you don't want to invest in technology early How enTouch will survive the next phase of market distortion What needs to change about childcare in Japan Links from the Founder Find out more about enTouch Follow them on Facebook or LinkedIn Friend Marty on Facebook Connect with him on LinkedIn [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan Episode 95. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Work is about to get a whole lot harder for doctors in Japan. Japan’s rapidly aging population combined with a pressure to decrease costs in the National Health Insurance program means that doctors and well, all parts of Japan’s health care industry are going to have to do a lot more with a lot less. Of course disruptive innovation in health care is rare and frankly, that’s a good thing. Most advances in health care are steady if unpredictable incremental innovation, and we’re going to be looking at one of those today. Japan’s pharmaceutical companies are under pressure not just from the drugs going off patent but the Japanese government’s plans to drastically increase the percentage of generic drugs being prescribed by Japanese doctors. This means a lot less money flowing to pharma and Japanese pharma companies are scrambling to cut cost and remain competitive. Marty Roberts saw a startup opportunity here and he founded enTouch which provides what the industry calls remote detailing services. Now, this basically means explaining drugs to doctors online rather than face-to-face meetings but as you might expect, there’s a lot more to it than that and Marty soon discovered that it required a very specific Japanese twist to make this technology work here in Japan. Marty also provides some very sober advice for you if you are thinking of leaving a large company position to start your own startup. But you know, Marty tells this story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Marty Roberts of enTouch. A company that lets pharma reps more efficiently connect with doctors. I know that’s a really broad description, so can you explain a bit better what enTouch does? Marty: You did a pretty good job there, Tim. EnTouch is focused on helping pharmaceutical companies communicate better with doctors so that doctors know about newest medicines, newest trends in health care so that they can treat their patients better. Pharmaceutical companies spend huge amount of money, like $20 billion a year promoting drugs to doctors in Japan and they do it with these really high price sales reps or they’re called MRs, medical reps. They’re always trying to catch the doctors in the hallway in the hospital and explaining to them the new medicine and we try to flip it around and let the doctor request online for more explanation. Tim: You were describing it to me earlier and it sounded like this unbelievably inefficient process where these reps would just basically camp out in the hospital hoping to catch a doctor as he passes by. Marty: Yes. And that’s exactly what it is. If you take a large pharma company in Japan, they tend to hire anywhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 or 1,500 or even 2,000 MRs to no fault of their own but they spend, I would say, the vast majority of their time waiting. The problem is that doctors don’t have time so the traditional pharma model has been we’ll just keep pushing the information and we’re going to get some time with you in the hallway fo

Japan has a long history of small shopping streets and tiny markets. In fact, despite the population density, American-style mall culture never took off here. The back streets of even the most crowded downtown office districts are filled with little specialty stores and vegetable stands. Akiko Nishiura, the CEO and founder of Nokisaki, wants to see that culture spread even further in Japan, and her company is helping small merchants find physical spaces for pop-up shops, vegetable stands and food trucks. Nokisaki is connecting these small merchants, who need just a little bit of space, with commercial landlords who have a little bit of free space and are looking for some additional foot-traffic. It’s an interesting business model, and Akiko and I discuss how it will work outside of Japan or even outside of Japan's big cities. She also explains how Nokisaki survived a crisis that would have bankrupted almost any other startup — at least any other startup outside Japan. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes Why parking is different (and difficult) in Japan How a new alliance is developing between big-brand stores and tiny retailers Why it's so difficult for Japanese moms to return to work after having kids How the Japanese market reacts to new challenges How a security risk shut down her company How Japanese retail culture differs from the West How Nokisaki will out-maneuver her much better-funded competitors Links from the Founder The Nokisaki Homepage Nokisaki Parking Nokisaki Business Nokisaki Parking on Facebook Nokisaki Business on Facebook Friend Akiko on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 94. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Napoleon supposedly once called England a nation of shop keepers. And while the comment was undoubtedly meant as an insult in the context it was offered, there’s something to be said in favor of being a nation of shop keepers particularly in this age of e-commerce, Rakuten, Amazon stores, and drop shipping. In fact, Japan, more so than the U.S. has a culture of tiny little neighborhood shops that have never been pushed out completely by big box stores, shopping malls, and chain stores even in the big cities. Well, today we’re going to sit down and talk with someone who’s accelerating that trend by making it easier for small shop keepers to pop up all over Tokyo. Akiko Nishiura, CEO of Nokisaki, connects commercial landlords with just a little extra space to small merchants who are looking for, well, just a little space. And in their spare time, the company is also trying to solve Japan’s horrible parking problems. The discussion of the company in the market alone would make this episode worth listening to. Akiko also shares a story of something that would have forced almost any Western startup into bankruptcy but due to the unique and frankly somewhat extreme notion of Japanese customer loyalty, it resulted in only a minor interruption of Nokisaki’s rapid growth. But you know, Akiko tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Akiko Nishiura, the founder and CEO of Nokisaki. Akiko: Yes. Tim: Thanks for sitting down with us. Akiko: Thank you, Tim. Tim: Now, Nokisaki is a parking space sharing and space sharing startup but I think you can explain it much better than I can. So tell me a bit about what Nokisaki is. Akiko: Okay. Tim, have you ever heard the word “nokisaki” and do you know the exact meaning of nokisaki? Tim: I have to admit I didn’t know it until I looked it up. Akiko: Right. But Nokisaki means tiny space under the roof like when you hide from the rain, for example, just a small space. We do business using that space. We are doing some special in-service but we are dealing with for example some unused space or space which are not being dealt in a traditional real estate market. We are offering a marketplace for a landlord of such spaces and those who want to use such spaces. Tim: Okay. Spaces is a very general term. Specifically, Nokisaki focuses on parking on the one hand and on pop-up stores on the other hand? Akiko: Right, pop-up stores. Yes. Tim: Tell me about your customers. Let’s do parking first. About how many spaces do you have in the system? How many users every month? Akiko: Currently, we have 4,000 parking lot listed in our website and the number of registered users is more than 130,000. Tim: I guess we should explain for our foreign listeners that parking in Tokyo is really different than it is in the rest of the world. Before you buy a car in Tokyo, you have to prove that you have a place to park it. Akiko: Exactly. Is it unique in

Platform as a Service (PaaS) has been a difficult startup business model in the US, but Wayland Zheng, founder and CEO of Mobingi, has found a way to make it work in Japan. His approach involves a combination of leveraging both a unique feature set and some unique aspects of Japanese technical buyers. Wayland also shares his story of what is probably a record for the fastest time to startup launch for any foreigner in Japan. Within two months of landing in Tokyo, and unable to speak the language, he had settled on a startup idea, found a Japanese co-founder, and been accepted into one of the most competitive startup accelerators in Japan. Three years later, Mobingi has an impressive and growing list of clients and investors. We talk about how he made all this happen, the importance of accelerators, and how you need to tailor your startup not just to a rational business model, but to the business culture of the market. It’s a great discussion and I think you will really enjoy it. Show Notes How Mobingi saves it's customers 80% on AWS services Why DevOps disciple has been slow to develop at Japanese companies The important difference between security and compliance Why cloud sales in Japan requires face-to-face meetings How to start a company after only two months in Japan The important differences between Japnese and American startup accelerators Why China is a better expansion market than the US What is the future of PaaS and middleware Why simple honesty is sometimes surprising among founders Links from the Founder The Mobingi Homepage Mobingi Facebook page The Mobingi Blog Mobingi on Instagram Friend Wayland on Facebook Check out his blog Join a Mobingi Meetup [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 93. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. You know, I get asked a lot about the difficulty of starting a company in Japan as a foreigner. I always have trouble answering that question because although I’ve started a number of companies in Japan as a foreigner, I have nothing to compare it to. I mean, I’ve never started a company in Japan as a Japanese person so I only have my own experiences to base a judgment on. Well, I’ve got good news. All foreigners who are griping about how hard it is to start a company in Japan can now officially stop complaining. I’ve got a pretty amazing guest and a pretty amazing story to tell today. I’ve got a pretty amazing guest and a pretty amazing story to tell today. Wayland Zheng started Mobingi only two months after arriving in Japan and he’s made a success of it. He attracted a co-founder, joined an accelerator, on-boarded customers, and raised funds all without speaking Japanese. Of course it wasn’t exactly easy. As you’ll see during the interview, it’s not even fair to say that he made it look easy. It was hard. But Wayland explains how he managed to overcome the language barrier and well, several other barriers as well. We’ll also dive pretty deep into startup accelerators, how they differ between Japan and the U.S. and what founders should reasonably expect out of them, because Wayland’s been to a few and sometimes, they did not work out as planned. But you know, Wayland tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Wayland Zheng of Mobingi. Mobingi is a platform as a service company but I know it’s so much more than that. Why don’t you tell us a bit more about what Mobingi is? Wayland: Okay. First, thanks for visiting my company. Mobingi is a software as a service. It’s a solution for helping companies to manage their application on the cloud. So basically, what it does is it helps engineers to automate their cloud applications workflow when they’re trying to deploy some applications to clouds or with like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud then instead of maybe we configure the resources, they can log into the console and just use their mouse and click and make the deployment automatically happens. Tim: Okay. Both Amazon and Microsoft already have tools that they say manage the application life cycle and can help automate these processes. What does Mobingi do that’s different? Wayland: Yes. A very good question. They’re trying to make the cloud computing more easier, like provide console is very cool. Cloud computing itself is very complicated. We have to face what is virtual machines -- how to configure storage, security groups. Those technologies require deep knowledge to manage. Like take an example of AWS, it has a lot of service, more than 30 services. If you really want to try to use AWS dashboard to automate everything, it’s almost nearly impossible. You have to configure a lot of stuf

It’s rare for a Japanese startup to challenge NTT and come out ahead. But that’s exactly what Takehiro Ogita and his team at TownWiFi have accomplished. TownWiFi is a mobile app that automatically detects and logins into available WiFi hotspots. Since TownWiFi was very modestly funded, Takehiro and his team relied on a better user experience and word of mouth to get the word out. Today we sit down with Takehiro and dive into that story, but we also look at the company's existing overseas userbase and his plans for global expansion on a shoestring. There is so much changing among Japanese startups right now, and Takehiro explains some of the social forces working for and working against new Japanese startups. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes The universal problem with free WiFi What allowed TownWiFi to gather a userbase so quickly Why Rakuten produces so many startup founders Why Takehiro had to hide his startup from his family How TownWiFi managed to beat NTT in direct competition A common sense plan for global expansion How pivoting from a C2C to a B2B model saved this startup Links from the Founder The TownWiFi Homepage Takehiro's Blog Friend Takehiro on Facebook And, of course, download the TownWiFi app [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 92. Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Takehiro Ogita started TownWiFi as a simple way to allow Wi-Fi hotspots to be accessed and shared to mobile phones or mobile device users in general. There are a number of free Wi-Fi finding apps out there today but there are a few particularly interesting things about TownWiFi. First, unlike almost all their competitors, TownWiFi has found a way to monetize this app. And while they’re not yet profitable, they are earning revenue. Second, and I love this for so many reasons, the dominant player in this space, when TownWiFi launched their product was NTT and little TownWiFi has absolutely crushed NTT in the marketplace. Don’t get me wrong. I like NTT. I have friends at NTT. NTT is actually doing a lot of positive things in the area of corporate development and open innovation. The reason TownWiFi’s story is so inspiring is that it would have been absolutely impossible 10 years ago. Back then, NTT DoCoMo was not only the dominant mobile carrier but strictly controlled which apps would be allowed to be featured on their platform and sold to their subscribers. This may sound vaguely like the way Apple runs the App Store but it’s not. At that time, Japanese carriers would select one or two apps in each category, usually from closely associated companies and then lock everyone else out. Apps did not really compete with each other and there is no way that a serious challenger to the carrier’s own app let alone one made by an independent upstart would have been allowed inside their walled garden. Things are changing for startups in Japan, and when tiny little startups begin to beat NTT at their own game, it means great things are on the way. But you know, Takehiro tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Takehiro Ogita of TownWiFi. Thanks for sitting down with us today. Takehiro: Thanks for having me. Tim: TownWiFi is an app that helps you find free Wi-Fi hotspots but I know it’s more than that, and you can explain it better than I can. So why don’t you tell us what TownWiFi is? Takehiro: We are providing app which can auto-connect and authenticate to the public Wi-Fi. Our biggest point is that we are auto-authenticate, and auto-login, and auto-register to very public Wi-Fi of the world. Tim: So that means that the user can just kind of keep this app running in the background -- Takehiro: Exactly. Tim: -- and the phone will just automatically connect to publicly available Wi-Fi when it can? Takehiro: Yeah. There’s many public Wi-Fi spot in Japan, in Korea, and all over. The UXO using Wi-Fi is not good at all, the WiFi Mark at the iPhone. You cannot connect after that. You have to open up the Safari, it will redirect you to registration pages of each Wi-Fi. Tim: Right, right. Takehiro: It’s super annoying. Tim: You’ve got to go through at least three or four different pages and forms. Takehiro: Exactly. Exactly. Tim: Okay. So the real selling point is all this happens in the background. Takehiro: Exactly, yeah. Tim: Excellent. Tell me a bit about your users. Who is using this? How many hotspots do you have registered? How many companies? How many subscribers? Takehiro: We have 1.5 million Wi-Fi spot all over the world. Tim: Wow. That’s a lot of spots. So how many of those are in Japan versus global? Takehiro: In Jap

This is a rather personal episode. We have no guests this time. It’s just you and me. We talk a lot about Japanese startups on this show and the role they will play in shaping Japan's economic future. Well, today we are going to look at this from a different angle; one that puts the hype aside and looks at some cold hard numbers. The result is sobering, surprising and, believe it or not, kind of inspiring So let's get right to it. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan Episode 91 Welcome to Disrupting Japan straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for listening Once again, I’ve got a special show for you today. There will be no guests, no beer, no playful banter with someone speaking English as a second language. Today it’s just you and me. For the next 20 minutes, I’ll be whispering in your ear about something I consider very important, but that not enough people are talking about. It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these solo shows. They tend to among my most popular episodes, I get a lot of requests for them and I love doing them. I would like to do more, but you might be surprised at the amount of research and revisions that go into these solo shows. Not to mention the times when I get two-thirds of the way putting one together only to realize the primary thrust of my argument is flawed and the whole thing needs to be reworked. Unfortunately, I’m not really smart enough to just turn on the microphone and talk for 20 minutes. It’s so much easier sitting down and talking to amazingly creative Japanese startup founders and innovators who are doing and saying crazy things. Well, today, I’d like to share something with you that first occurred to me about a year ago. And the more I research it, and the more people I speak with, the more I become convinced it’s right. I’ve haven’t talked about it a lot before, because well, frankly, it’s something that a lot of people in the startup community here will disagree with — and some will disagree in very strong terms. But it’s important, so let’s strap in and get right to it. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] Over the next twenty years, startups are not going to revive the Japanese economy, nor are they are they going to be the primary driver of innovation in this country. Don’t misunderstand, startups have a role to play, a very important role to play, but they will not be the primary drivers of change. No. Japan’s mid-sized companies will be the primary drivers of both large-scale innovation and economic growth over the next ten years. For this to make sense, we are going to look at the role that mid-sized companies play in the Japanese economy today, we’ll then step back in time both to see how things get this way and to understand why Japan is at such a pivotal juncture today, and then look at how thing are likely to shake out over the next 15 years or so. Now, to the average podcast listener, this would sound like a dry topic, but you as a DJ listener are a special breed, and you’ll be rewarded for coming with me deep, deep into the weeds. If you come along, I promise that in twenty minutes you will have a new way of looking at mid-sized companies in Japan, and perhaps a new way of looking at Japanese startups as well. You see medium-sized enterprises are the middle child in Japan’s corporate family. The large companies, the brands you know Toyota, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Mitsui. For the most part are the remnants of the once incredibly powerful keiretsu groups. These companies are the oldest child. Everyone knows who they are. They are in the news. They have influence. They work closely with the Japanese government, both the legislators and the bureaucracy, to ensure that the needs of Japan’s large corporations are reflected in national policy and international trade agreements. And of course, the vast majority of government grant money, primary contracts, and economic stimulus programs are directed at these large corporations. Japanese startups are the little brother. Startup companies have captured Japan’s hearts and imagination not because of their economic impact, but because they are new. They say, do and build crazy things and the country loves them for it. Startups get fawning press attention from the smallest of achievements. “Oh wow! You shipped a product! That’s awesome. We’re so proud of you. Here. Have $1million.” Japan’s medium enterprises, however, have been stuck in the middle. For the past fifty years. they have quietly and reliably formed the backbone of the large companies’ supply chains, employing most of the workers and often thanklessly providing a steady stream of innovation. Doing the bulk of the work and getting almost none of the attention. And, you know, every time Japan faces economic problems it’s the medium enterprises that bear t

Most great startup ideas don’t grab your attention right away. It takes a while before the founder’s vision becomes obvious to the rest of us. On the other hand, the startups that immediately grab all the press attention often go out of business shortly after shipping their first product. Reality never seems to live up the to promise. And then there are products like Orphe. This LED-emblazoned, WiFi-connected, social-network enabled dancing shoe seems made for fluffy, flashy Facebook sharing, but only when you really dig into it, do you understand what it really is and the potential it has in the marketplace. Today we sit down with Yuya Kikukawa, founder of No New Folk Studio and the creator of the Orphe, and we talk about music, hardware financing, and why this amazing little shoe is finding early adopters in places from game designers to hospitals. It’s a great conversation, and I think you’ll really enjoy it. Show Notes The inspiration for musical shoes Why Yuya's first musical instrument attempt was a failure The biggest challenge in moving from prototype to production Orphe's technical specs How Orphe is being used in hospitals and other healthcare applications How small Japanese startups can achieve global distribution Where the next big startup opportunities in Japan will be Why most hardware startups fail Links from the Founder No New Folk Studio Hompage See Orphe in action Check out Yuya's blog Follow Yuya on Facebook Check out PocoPoco on YouTube [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 90. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. You know, most good startups are obvious. I don’t mean that I could have had the idea before the founders did. By obvious, I mean that right away you can understand the problem the company is solving for their customers and how they’re doing it. Naturally, that makes it easier for the customers to buy. Most non-obvious startups are in reality still struggling to find the product market fit and are probably not long for this world. And then there are products like Orphe, an LED-emblazoned WiFi-connected social sharing enabled dancing shoe. Yeah, it sounds like something you would find on Indiegogo and that one time not too long ago, it was. But when I sat down with Yuya Kikukawa, founder of No New Folk Studio and the creator of the Orphe, it became clear that this was not some quirky side project or some overfunded crazy hardware startup. This was something really different. We talked about the original inspiration for the shoe and what does and does not qualify as a musical instrument and how Orphe is being used by the artistic community in Japan. But we also dive into the technology inside it, and that, well, that’s something special. That’s why this quirky little blinking shoe is starting to get used by game and UI designers, as well as hospitals and sports trainers in Japan. It’s a fascinating discussion but you know, Yuya tells the story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Yuya Kikukawa of No New Folk Studio. Thank you for sitting down with me. Yuya: Thank you for inviting. Tim: Now, you guys make Orphe which is an LED dance shoe but it’s so much more than that. Can you describe what Orphe is exactly? Yuya: Yeah. Orphe is kind of world’s first smart LED shoes. Smart means it has a computer inside of the sole, at the same time there are about 100 full color LEDs. The computer can control each pixel. So the user can change the color through the smartphone application. Tim: Okay. It’s always so hard to describe dance and visual effects on an audio podcast. Yuya: Okay. Tim: So it’s basically a dance shoe with an array of LED lights around the sole that are controlled interactively both from the cellphone and from motion sensors in the shoes, right? Yuya: Yes. Tim: Okay. On a high level, the idea of putting lights in shoes isn’t new. I remember back in the ‘90s, there was a company, LA Gear or something, that made a shoe that lit up. Was that an inspiration or is what you’re doing completely different? Yuya: To be honest, I don’t think it’s completely different because the inspiration was actually come from the LED shoes itself. My idea is combine instrument function and LED shoes. I combined the two ideas. Tim: So your inspiration was really viewing the shoe as a musical instrument? Yuya: Mm-hmm. Tim: Well, actually when you think about it, there are some cases where the shoe is a musical instrument, right? Yuya: Flamenco, tap dance. Tim: So like tap dancing or lots of folk music. So yes, okay, that’s not so strange at all. Do you have global competition now? Are there companies doing what you do

After the March 2011 earthquake and the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, TEPCO and the Japanese government tried to assure us that everything was just fine. The repeatedly insisted that there was no serious danger posed by the radiation. Not very many people believed them. Reliable data from fallout areas was sparse at best, and many Japan residents doubted that the government was telling the truth in the first place. It was in that environment that Pieter Franken and his team created Safecast. Safecast began as a small group in Japan with home-made Geiger counters making their reading available to everyone. They have now grown into an international movement involving private citizens, universities, non-profit organizations and government agencies. Pieter also explains why environmental science will look very different ten years from now. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why Japan's disaster preparation failed Why you need high-resolution and high-density radiation monitoring Why citizens do not, and perhaps should not, trust their governments The advantages of creating a DYI kit rather than a product How to maintain data integrity for crowdsourced efforts Why both pro-nuke and anti-nuke activists opposed Safecast How governments have reacted to alternative data sources Safecast's plan to win over the scientific community The future of citizen science Links from the Founder Everything you wanted to know about Safecast Safecast's radiation maps Safecast's radiation report Connect with Pieter on LinkedIn Follow him on Twitter @noktonlux [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 89. Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. You know, crowdfunding and crowdsourcing in Japan largely gained in its popularity in projects related to the massive March 2011 earthquake, and ensuing tsunami, and the release of radiation at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. In fact, longtime listeners have heard the founders of some of Japan’s largest crowdfunding and crowdsourcing companies explain that breaking away from this image of crowdfunding as a social good was something that they had to overcome before their startups became truly successful. Well, today we’re going to sit down with Pieter Franken of Safecast, one of the earliest examples of widespread crowdsourcing in Japan. And we talk about how they’ve grown from a Japanese patchwork solution to the leader of a global movement. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, people throughout Japan were worried about radiation. TEPCO, who operated the facilities and the Japanese government assured everyone that things were under control and that everyone was perfectly safe. As you might imagine, however, most people were highly skeptical of these claims. The radiation data just wasn’t there or it wasn’t being shared with the public or it wasn’t believed when it was shared with the public. Pieter and his team started Safecast to make sure that lack of information and lack of transparency would never happen again and they began building low-cost Geiger counters that people around the country and then around the world could use to measure their local area and then have all that data uploaded into the cloud and made available for anyone. It’s an amazing story and it’s one that Pieter tells much better than I do. So let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Pieter Franken of Safecast. You guys make an open environmental data collection system for everyone but I think you can explain much better than I can what it is. Pieter: To explain what we’re doing, best thing is just to go back in time a little bit. Exactly six years ago in March 2011, we all witnessed the big earthquake and as part of that, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. And it’s really where Safecast started. It started from the need to know what was happening in terms of radiation exposure in Japan. Also, the folks that were here will remember very well there was lots of a concern about that but also the biggest problem was there was no data available. Whatever the authorities said was very sparse and most of it was not useful, nothing was really from Fukushima itself. We tried to solve that problem. Tim: Also as I recall that there was a lot of people that just simply didn’t believe what the government was telling them. Pieter: Yeah. Lots of people didn’t trust TEPCO’s own assessment. But the real problem I think in retrospect was there was very little information available. Whatever was available was not disclosed. By the sheer fact that information was not available, that created even a bigger distrust.

Selling innovative software to conservative Japanese businesses is never easy, but it’s particularly challenging in the cutthroat and low-margin restaurant industry. Today, we sit down with Masao “TJ” Tejima and talk about how he brought OpenTable into Japan, and why it took him much longer than he had originally hoped. It’s a wide-ranging and deep-diving discussion on how to identify which companies are most suitable for Japan market entry and TJ’s rather extreme approach to maintaining a consistent corporate culture between Japan and corporate headquarters. We also take a look at some of the biggest mistakes Western companies make when hiring a Japan Country Manager and a few simple ways those mistakes can be avoided. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll really enjoy it Show Notes Why leave a company after a successful market entry? How to build a product around a human network Why you need to run market entry like a startup OpenTable's real business model and how is was adapted for Japan How to sell new technology to traditional low-margin businesses The danger of over-localization Why the Japanese fast followers ran into problems How to build a global culture at a Japanese subsidiary The one type of Japanese General Manager foreign companies need to beware of Links Masao's official bio Sports for Life is Masao's latest project is running the Asia Pacific Corporate Games [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 88. Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan. I am Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Today, we’re going to be sitting down with Masao Tejima or "TJ" as his friends call him and I have to admit, that this interview did not exactly goes as planned. A few days beforehand, TJ and I agreed to sit down and talk about how he brought Open Table to Japan. And he used that experience as a jumping off point to give advice about how to bring in innovative software company to Japan and then sell to very conservative Japanese companies - and we did that. And then in the next forty minutes, you’re going to be hearing all about it. However, Open Table was not TJ’s first Japan market entry. He also brought in Macomedia and before that all this. And our simple talk, meandered him into ninety minutes history of desktop publishing in Japan and how he had to forge strategic alliances and corporate standards that allowed the technology to take route. I walked away with the makings of two amazing stories on tape. So, here’s what we’re going to do. Today, we’re going to tell you the much more recent story of how Open Table entered the Japanese market. And a bit later, we’ll have TJ on again to give us the blueprint of the right technology can let you disrupt an entire industry in only a few years, even in Japan. Today, we’re going to learn about how to identify what companies are most suitable for Japan market entry and talk about TJ’s rather extreme approach to maintaining a consistent corporate culture between Japan and corporate headquarters. We’ll talk about effective techniques for selling innovative software to conservative Japanese businesses and we’ll look at some of the biggest mistakes companies make in hiring their Japan Country Managers. But you know, TJ tells that story much better than I can. So, let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I am sitting here with TJ Tejima of well formerly, Japan CEO of Open Table. So, thanks for sitting down with me. TJ: Thank you very much. Tim: So before we get started with the history of this market entry and what went right and what went wrong, can you give us a brief explanation of what Open Table’s business model is? TJ: It was 2000 or 2002, I was a General Manager of Macomedia which has Aldus, Adobe. I have to be in San Francisco because headquarter is in San Francisco. I have to have a lunch, I have to have a dinner, but I try to make a reservation so sometime, Japanese restos not completely made then I found the system so-called Open Table Reservation System, in the website. And oh, it is great so I tried to use this type of system in Japan in the future and this was a first impression about this service, as a diner. Tim: Okay, so you approached the Open Table team and said I want to bring this company to Japan? TJ: I searched executive member of Open Table, fortunately, there are two people whom I know. Tim: Okay. TJ: And I send an email to them and I would like to have a meeting with you guys, I’d like to know the back ground of Open Table. It was 2004 and I already left Macomedia. So I would like to find a new type of a technology business after I designed Macomedia and I did several investment and they establish several business. Tim: Why did you leave both Aldus an

Education is one of the hardest sectors to disrupt -- or even improve upon -- and most EdTech startups struggle. Today we sit down with Go Arai and we talk about how his company, Arcterus, is taking a bottom-up approach to improving education. Arcterus has developed a service called Clear, which profits by helping students help each other study. Clear is basically a study-notebook sharing platform, and now Go and his team are building it out into something much more than that. We talk about Arcterus’ recent Asian expansion and why some seemingly small cultural differences made their product unviable in certain countries. We also explore why it's sometimes hard for Japanese startups to pivot and the effects of the company and the team when a radical change in direction is needed. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why notebook sharing works in Japan but not in America How lessons from a corporate turnaround were applied to a startup How a terrible skiing accident ended up launching a startup Why it took the team five pivots to find product-market fit What makes pivoting hard in Japan How to use Twitter to drive business Why other Asian countries are ahead of Japan in EdTech What today's textbooks will evolve into Links from the Founder Arcterus Homepage Everything you ever wanted to know about Clear Friend Go on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 87. Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. You know, for a few very good reasons and many very bad reasons, education is particularly hard to disrupt. I think a big part of this is that the goal of public education is far more than imparting a set of skills onto the students. Although my libertarian friends might disagree, public schooling provides not only the hard skills that students need to function in the society, but universal education provides us with a shared experience and shared frame of reference that helps us define society. It’s something that binds us together. Now, different countries have different approaches to creating this shared experience. In Japan, the Ministry of Education defines precisely what every child in the countries learning, in any given week. In America, there are no national requirements at all, and tremendous latitude is given to the states and to the individual school boards. One approach is not necessarily better than the other but startups that try to disrupt the way we impart skills to our children at the expense of that shared experience, are likely to fail. Or worse, succeed and do long term harm to our society. Well today, we’re going to sit down and talk with Go Arai, CEO of Arcterus, a EdTech startup that is trying to help students learn more effectively but also contribute, just a little bit, to that shared experience. Arcterus is a platform that allows students that share their study notebooks with other students and then profit from that sharing. We also talk about Arcterus’ recent Asian expansion. You know, we in the west often make the mistake of thinking about "Asian" culture. But there really is no such thing as Asian culture. Asian countries have an incredible diversity of cultures and Arcterus ran straight into that as they discovered that very specific cultural traits determine whether they will succeed or fail in a specific country. But you know Go tells that story better much I can. So, let’s hear from our sponsor and then get right into the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] (Interview) Tim: So we’re sitting here with Go Arai of Arcterus it’s a social learning app based on notebook sharing, but you can probably explain it much better than I can, so why don’t you tell us a bit about Arcterus and about your products? Go: The main product that we have is called Clear. It’s a platform for the students to share their study notebooks like Youtube users can publish their notebook, others users can see it and use them as textbook to solve their study problems and if you are very popular user, you can sell your notebook in the platform. Globally, we call it “Youtube of Study Notebooks”. In Japan, we call it a “Cookpad of Study Notebooks” Tim: Cookpad being a really popular sharing recipe site here in Japan. Go: Yes, yes. It’s very popular in Japan. Tim: Tell me about your customers. Who are your main users? The high school, or junior highschool, college or crams schools? Go: The users are mainly middle school students and highschool students. We also have university students and also primary school students. They use it mainly for preparing for school exams and entrance exams. So, when they difficulties solving the mathematic problems, they look into the notebooks in Clear. Ti

The translation and localization industry has seen some impressive innovations over the past decade, but in many ways, it has remained stubbornly resistant to change. Today we sit down and talk with Jeff Sandford co-founder of Wovn.io. The Wovn team has developed a way to take the pain out of web localization and translation. They promise to do it all with a single line of code. We talk a bit about the mechanics of web-site localization and state of the industry as a whole, and we also discuss some important but surprising differences between with makes compelling UI/UX design for Japanese and for Western users, and what kinds of tasks machine translation can really be trusted with. Jeff also explains why he decided to start a company with someone he had never meet. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll really enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why website translation is important but often overlooked Why Jeff chose to start a company with someone he had never met How to combat Japan's "Design by Committee" problem Why you should not trust machine translation for e-commerce When you need to change from a bottom-up to top-down sales strategy The challenges of working with Japanese enterprise customers as a startup Advice for foreign engineers and founders who want to come to Japan Why Japan needs to get uncomfortable Links from the Founder Wovn.io homepage Wovn.io on Twitter Wovn.io on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 86. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Today we’re going to talk about something that you and I, and probably everyone else listening right now has struggled with. Translation and localization. It’s been an industry that has both seen some impressive innovations over the past decade, but is also somehow quite resistant to change. Localization is a part of business that almost every firm has to deal with, but almost no one looks forward to. It’s a lot like dealing with lawyers in that way, I suppose. Well, today we sit down with Jeff Sandford, cofounder of Wovn.io who say they’ve developed a one line of code method for taking the pain out of localization and translation. We talk a bit about the mechanics of website localization and the state of the industry as a whole, of course. We also talk about the important and surprising differences between what makes great UI/UX with Japanese and western users. And what kind of tasks machine translation can really be trusted with. And Jeff shares a story of what made him decide to start a company with a cofounder who he’d never even met before. But you know, Jeff tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor, and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: Cheers. Jeff: Cheers. Tim: So I’m sitting with Jeff, cofounder of Minimal Technologies and the creator of Wovn.io. And thanks for sitting down with me today. Jeff: Thank you very much. Good to be here. Tim: Wovn.io at a high level is simply localization for a website. But it’s more than that. It’s more interesting than that so why don’t you tell us a bit about what it is. Jeff: So often people when you tell them you do website localization, they think translation, which it actually isn’t. Translation is a very integral part of it, but what we focus on is the system of localizing a website. So let’s say you have an English website, and you’ll like to create a Chinese version or Spanish version of that website, we handle all of the details of actually creating those versions, and also managing them and serving them to users. Tim: Now there’s a lot of companies that are doing that, but you guys have a particularly interesting approach to it. The Wovn.io promise, as it were, is the ultimate in simplicity, right? Jeff: Right. Tim: It’s a single line of code copied into your webpage. Jeff: Exactly. Yes. In the simplest case, you can really take a website, even a relatively large website, and have the entire thing translated within minutes. That’s the promise. That’s the goal. Right? Tim: You get little pieces out of JavaScript code. You sign up a Wovn.io. You get your API key. You put that code in your website, and suddenly the whole website is Wovn.io enabled? Jeff: Yes, that’s it. Tim: And how do you localize? How do you translate? How do you actually get the Chinese and the Japanese onto the page? Jeff: Okay, okay. So the next step is actually creating those translations and putting them in place. So what a lot of people do, especially larger websites or people who have websites that constantly change, is they use our automatic translation features and automatic page creation features. So you turn those on, and we will automatically add all the pages o

Seeking help for even minor mental health problems still carries a stigma in Japan. This is particularly unfortunate because clinical research shows that a significant portion of Japanese adults suffer from depression or other mental illnesses. Ayako Shimizu, the founder of Hikari Labs, has an innovative approach that represents a huge step forward in addressing this problem. Hikari Labs develops and distributes video games based on cognitive behavior therapy, and these games enable players to literally train their brains out of depression. Her approach bypasses both the stigma and costs involved in seeking treatment. Even in conservative Japan, she is seeing increasing and enthusiastic adoption by corporate wellness programs. But this whole project was almost shut down by the very people who should have been helping her. Ayako has a fascinating story, and I think you’ll really enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups How gaming can treat depression and reduce suicide rates Why marketing mental health games is so challenging The changing profiles of Japanese who suffer depression Why women have higher rates of depression, but lower rates of suicide How Ayako's University tried to put a stop to this project How to build a business model around mental health Why conservative corporations are on the forefront of improving mental health in Japan Links from the Founder Hikari Labs homepage Online counseling YouTube video Todai Shinbun article Follow Ayako on Twitter @Hikari_Lab_Inc Friend her on Facebook Try out SPARX SPARX for iPhone/iPad SPARX for Android Clinical Journal on SPARX [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 85. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Now long-term listeners know that this show is not really about start-ups. Well, of course it’s about start-ups, but it’s about so much more than that. Japanese start-ups give us a unique perspective on Japanese society. Looking at the problems that need to be solved, the path people are taking to try to solve them, and seeing what challenges society throw up against them can tell us more about a country or a society than mountains of surveys and piles of longitudinal studies. Start-ups tell us the kind of future that people envision, and how the present plans on resisting the future. Nowhere is this more true than with today’s guest. Ayako Shimizu, founder of Hikari Labs. Ayako is developing and marketing video games to treat mental illness, and she has the clinical data that shows the approach has real therapeutic value. And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, Japanese academia and the medical industry as a whole have been—Well, let’s just say less supportive of her efforts. But still she’s seen steady increases in both the number of users and growing interest from a surprising segment of corporate Japan. But you know, Ayako tells that story much better than I can. So let’s here from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Ayako Shimizu of Hikari Labs, and thanks for sitting down with me. Ayako: Thank you, Tim, for inviting me here. Tim: Now Hikari Labs is focused on improving mental health through software, I guess. But why don’t you tell us a bit about what Hikari Labs does and what it’s mission is. Ayako: Okay, well Hikari Labs currently have two services. One is online counseling called Kokoro Works, and another one is this game application called Sparx, which was developed at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. And our mission is to help shape a society that’s the psychological care is more reachable to people. Tim: Let’s talk about each of these individually. Ayako: Yeah. Tim: And later on, we’re also going to talk about your new AI project. Ayako: Okay, okay. Tim: But the Sparx project is really interesting. It’s a role-playing game that’s based on behavioral therapy. So what exactly is cognitive behavioral therapy? Ayako: Cognitive behavioral therapy is one kind of counseling, which effect has been proven in many studies for depression and for anxiety disorders. It’s basic level. Cognitive behavioral therapy considers that thoughts, emotion, and behavior are interconnected. So it aims to change one’s emotional behavior through altering one’s thought. So for example, if you say, ‘Well, there are several bad things that happened today, and today wasn’t a good thing at all.’, which is one cognitive distortion called over-generalization. Having a few bad things that day, doesn’t make our entire bad day. It’s your cognition that makes that entire day a bad day. If that’s— Tim: No, it’

Today we sit down with Dave McClure under the cherry blossoms and talk about startups, funding, failure Dave has long been involved in Japan and in the startup community here, and in this episode, we talk about the progress Japan has made in the past decade and the changes that still need to be made. We go over what Dave sees as the gaps in the Japan’s venture capital ecosystem and also dispel some of the pervasive myths that have spread throughout Silicon Vally and the entire startup world. We spend a bit of time diving into what Dave and 500 Startups consider to be a risky business model, and it may not be what you expect, but it’s great advice for anyone thinking of starting a company. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Who is doing most of the investing in Japan right now Why Japan needs more angel investors What startups should be looking for in investors How to find a startup idea What Japan should learn from Silicon Valley and what it should ignore Which business models are truly unproven The one thing Japan should change to encourage startups How to really learn from failure Links from the Founder 500 Startups 500 Startups Japan Follow Dave on Twitter @davemcclure Friend him on Facebook Connect with him on LinkedIn [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 84. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from CEOs breaking into Japan. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Japan, well most of the world really has an unhealthy obsession with Silicon Valley. I’ve been to Japanese language start-up events here in Tokyo where the phrases Silicon Valley, or San Francisco, were mentioned more than twice as often as Tokyo or Japan. And yes, I actually did keep count. And I’m sure none of my friends are the least bit surprised by that. My point is that while Japan can learn a lot from Silicon Valley, the reverse is also true. There are a lot of things going right in Japan, and many things that are developing differently here than they are in Silicon Valley. Well, today we sit down with Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, and we talk under the cherry blossoms about start-ups funding failure, and about some of the most pervasive myths surrounding start-ups and start-up founders. For our listeners who are not familiar with the Japanese tradition of Hanami, or cherry blossom viewing, I’ll explain it to you in both theory and practice because those two can be a bit different. In theory, Hinami is a time to reflect on the transitory nature of beauty, of our possessions, and of life itself. The cherry blossoms bloom only for a few days a year before their pedals fall. And almost everyone in Japan no matter how busy or sick will make at least a little time to go out and walk among the blossoms. The trees really are beautiful, and that beauty is made all the more precious by the fact that they can only be appreciated for such a brief period of time. In practice, people from all over Japan get together with their friends under the cherry blossom trees, get rip-roaringly drunk, sing karaoke, and have a great and boisterous time. So when Dave and I are talking and in the background, you hear school girls laughing, drunken cheering, and people suddenly breaking into song, you’ll know what’s going on. It was a great party and a great discussion. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: Cheers. Dave: Cheers. Tim: So I’m sitting hear with the indomitable and encourageable Dave McClure. Dave: Encourageable sounds right. Tim: So thanks for sitting down. I really do appreciate your time. Dave: Yeah. Tim: You’ve had ties to Japan for a long time. Dave: Yes, probably about 20 years or more. Tim: And you’ve been actively involved in investing here for about, what, 10 years? Dave: Maybe seven. I think the first investment I made was a company called Gengo that was, I guess back in 2010. Although I met the founders a few years before that. Tim: In the past, you’ve talked a lot about how much the start-up ecosystem has changed here obviously for the better in the last 10 years. Dave: Yeah, definitely. Tim: Let’s stroll down a bit on the VC side because those same technological trends, cloud computing, the sharing even information of open source that has allowed start-ups to be started for next to nothing has allowed venture capitalists to start for next to nothing. Dave: Well, next to nothing let’s say for companies maybe for half a million to a million dollars, and for VCs maybe five to twenty-five million dollars, but that necessarily fall from trees, or from cherry blossoms, I guess I would say while we’re here. But yes, it is a lot easier to secure capital from the entrepreneurs and from investors. Tim: What’s your opinion of sort of the high lev

Growing our meat in a lab or factory has been a science fiction staple for decades, but much like jetpacks, it has never quite worked out in practice -- at least not at scale. Yuki Hanyu and his team at Shojinmeat, however, are changing that. Actually, scientists have been growing muscle tissue in labs for more than 100 years, but Shojinmeat has developed techniques that bring the cost down to less than one 1,000th of traditional approaches. Now, that still leaves it too expensive for most commercial applications, but Yuki explains how his team (and others) will bring the costs down into the commercial range very soon. We also talk about both why Japanese life-sciences startups have such a hard time raising money in Japan and how Shojinmeat found a way to make the system work for them. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups How do you grow meat in the Lab? Why cellular agriculture doesn’t get funding Is lab-grown meat kosher? Combining open research and patent protection How to bring down the cost of cultured meat Solving the taste problem How cultured meat will become available Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Shojinmeat How Integriculture is commercializing lab-grown meat Check out Yuki's blog Follow him on twitter @yukihanyu1 New Havest talks about Yuki's project [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 83. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Today we’re going to talk about the future of meat. Many would say the future of humanity, but really today we’re just going to talk about the meat. Yuki Hanyu and his team at ShojinMeat are growing meat in the lab, and they’re doing it at a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Actually, it turns out that lab-grown meat or cellular agriculture—as the discipline is actually called—is not particularly new. It’s been in active development all over the world for well over 100 years. What’s different about ShojinMeat, however is that they’ve been able to bring the cost down by an astounding three orders of magnitude. And that brings a technology within striking distance of a lot of practical uses. We dive into the actual science behind cellular agriculture. And if you can follow all of it, it means that you’re a huge biology nerd, and I love you for it. Otherwise, it would be good just to let the science wash over you. It’s a pretty amazing topic. Another thing we talk about is why Japanese life sciences start-ups have such a hard time both raising money and growing here in Japan. And how ShojinMeat meat has found a way to make the system work for them. But you know, Yuki tells that story much better than I can so let’s hear from our sponsor, and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Yuki Hanyu of ShojinMeat, and thanks for sitting down with me. Yuki: Thank you very much for inviting me to the podcast. Tim: Today we’re going to talk about meat. Yuki: Yeah, meat. Tim: And most specifically, cellular agriculture. So to get started. Why don’t you explain what what ShojinMeat is? Yuki: We are a collection of volunteer students, artists, and people of various disciplines to develop cultured meat technology. Tim: So it’s a bio-hacker community here in Tokyo, right? Yuki: Yes. Tim: So how long have you been doing this. Yuki: If you’re talking about active wet novelty work, that will be about a year and a half. Tim: Okay. Yuki: And if you’re talking about people building a team, that would be about two and a half years. Tim: Alright. Okay, well actually before we go forward in this, let’s step back a bit and talk about the process. So exactly how does the process work? What are you doing? Yuki: So the basic ideas of cultures meat is quite simple. Basically you take this animal, get a few cells from that animal—It could be chicken, beef, pork—anything. You don’t even need to kill that animal. You take the few cells and then you get this into a culture medium, and grow the cells in culture medium. And at the end you get a mass of cells, which is basically meat. Tim: Okay. Now when you say, “Any cell.” Is it really any cell or any muscle cells? Do you need stems cells or anything at all will work? Yuki: Actually, most specifically there’s a special type of cells called myosatellite cells or myoblast cells. And those cells are so called the stem cell of muscle cells. Tim: Okay. In your own work, are you working with cattle, or pork, or chicken, or what type of meat are you growing? Yuki: For experiment, we’re using mostly muscles cells, and for actual foods development work, we’re using chicken now. Tim: Chicken? Yuki: Yes. Tim: Okay. Yuki: And the beauty’s the method t

Many VR startups are a solution is search of a problem, but Holoeyes is already in use at hospitals around Japan. Although the medical industry is one the most highly regulated, conservative and hard to disrupt, Holoeyes has made inroads by solving a very specific problem for surgeons. Today we sit down with Naoji Taniguchi, CEO of Holoeyes, and talk about the steps his startup had to take to sell into the medical market in Japan and to win over traditionally conservative doctors. Holoeyes builds up virtual reality models of organs from CT scans, and lets doctors analyze and discuss these matters much more directly and clearly than they could before. It’s a great interview and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups How VR can actually save hospitals money and improve outcomes Why the world needs a GitHub of surgery What Japanese startups get out of accelerator programs Why the real value in surgical VR is not what you think How Holoeyes achieves medical quality in low-spec devices How Holoeyes convinced conservative doctors and hospitals to try a new technology Advice for startups trying to sell to doctors Why more and more medical professionals will be getting involved in startups in Japan Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Holoeyes Follow Naoji on Medium Follow him on twitter @tani_yang Friend Naoji on Facebook See Holoeyes in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrYlsSldXSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu9RU03PPho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANN64JeUjog&t=2s [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 82. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. The medical industry is one of the world’s most highly regulated and hard to disrupt. And for the most part, that’s a good thing. But there are a number of innovative start-ups that have ways of improving things. Not disruptive change, mind you, but simple, more cautious, incremental change that will make life better for everyone. Holoeyes is one of those questions. And today we sit down with Naoji Taniguchi and we talk about how their VR solution is winning over doctors all over Japan, and changing the way surgery is done. Holoeyes builds up a virtual reality model of organs from CT scans, and let’s doctors analyze and discuss these matters much more directly and efficiently than they could before. We’ll get into the details during the interview. But one of the things that impressed me the most about Holoeyes, is that is is already in use today. So much VR tech and so many VR companies have an amazing wow factor, but only the promise of future applications. But you know, Naoji tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Naoji Taniguchi of Holoeyes. Naoji: Yeah. Tim: This is an application that uses AR and VR for medical training, and thanks for sitting down with me. Naoji: Okay. Tim: Can you tell me a bit more about the application and how it’s used? Naoji: Holoeyes make customized model for each patient. For VR, our mixed reality, our product helps communication between doctor, surgery team members, or training senior doctors and new doctors. Tim: So let’s just walk through from start to finish how it’s used. So how do you build up this VR model? Naoji: Partially use Diacom Viewer. Diacom Viewer is viewer of CT scan image. Now we are trying to use deep learning to automate, create, make part of a model from CT scan image. Tim: Okay, so it’s laterally taking a CT scan and building up the VR image kind of slice by slice? Naoji: Yes, yes. Tim: Alright, that makes sense. And then the doctors can use this to communicate and to show the model. Naoji: Yes. Tim: Now the demo I saw was basically viewing the model and using AR to zoom in and to rotate. What is the application for that? Would that be for example, teaching— Naoji: What they call 3-D movement. I think 3-D movement is very important for surgery. Before our product, doctors have to write in tickets some procedure of surgery. So it is very complex. So using our product, doctors do surgical procedure with game controller and head-mount display this way. They record the whole procedure of surgery. Tim: So for example, the lead surgeon could run the entire operation with the surgical team before the surgery, and say, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ And then everyone will be able to see it. And then when it comes time for the surgery, everyone understands? Naoji: Yeah, so it’s like private mode and car racing game. Tim: Okay. Naoji: Do you know? Tim: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Naoji: It’s like that. And in using VR we can see the movement at any angle. Tim: Okay, so it’s also used after the

It’s often surprising to discover which problems are hard for AI. We hear stories about artificial intelligence being better than the most skilled humans at go, chess, Jeopardy, and better than many at driving a car, and we assume that computers will be as smart as we are very soon. Then we discover how hard it is for AI to fold the laundry. Shin Sakane and his team at Seven Dreamers have been working on this particular problem for 12 years, and they are now rolling out the first commercially available laundry-folding robot. They will be first to the global market and have secured a production partnership with Panasonic. Shin and I talk a lot about AI and innovation in Japan, and also cover his rather unusual corse to innovation here. Seven Dreamers is not your typical venture-backed startup, and they might just provide a blueprint for innovation that many existing Japanese firms can follow. It’s a great interview, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why AI can drive a car but not fold socks Why starting a company in Japan is different today Shin’s formula for developing innovative products How to work with large Japanese companies Why the future of laundry is more disrupting than you imagine Why big data wants to hack your washing machine The need to go global quickly Can Japan once again lead the world in AI Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Laundroid Friend Shin on Facebook Seven Dreamers Homepage Find out more about Laundroid on Facebook or Twitter Nastent website Find out more about Nastent on Facebook or Twitter The carbon-fiber golf shafts on the Web and on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 81. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. You know, the term artificial intelligence is thrown around far too loosely these days. Every start-up using decision trees, Bayesian algorithms, or the simplest machine learning techniques, label themselves as world leaders in AI. Now there’s no question that projects like Google’s driverless cars and IBM’s Watson have pushed the limits of what’s possible, and have introduced astounding innovations in AI over the past few years. But sometimes it’s surprising to take a look at the kinds of problems that are extremely difficult for AI. It turns out that folding laundry is one of those problems. Today we sit down with Shin Sakane, CEO of Seven Dreamers and inventor of the Laundroid. The first commercially available fully automatic laundry folding robot. We talk a lot about AI in general. And the importance and the risk of attacking the really hard problems. And what he and his firm had to go through to make Laundroid a reality. It’s also worth noting that Seven Dreamers is not your typical venture back start-up. And Shin and I talk a lot about the role that mid-size companies have to play in kick-starting the Japanese economy and returning Japan to the global leader in innovation she was in the 60s and 70s. But you know, Shin tells that story better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Shin Sakane of Seven Dreamers, and we’ve been bumping into each other for a long time now. Shin: Right. Tim: So thanks for finally making time and sitting down with me. Shin: Thank you very much for coming. Tim: We’re here to talk a lot about the Laundroid. Now it’s a robot that folds clothes, which I guess is the simple way of explaining it, but why don’t you tell us more about what it is. Shin: Okay. We’ve been working on this project for the last 12 years almost. Tim: Wow. Shin: Yeah. We started back in 2005. This robot really folds daily life clothes and separate by categories or by family members. Tim: Oh, okay. Shin: Yeah. Tim: So it can put all the shirts in one pile, or it can put all of dad’s clothes in one pile, and mom’s in the other— Shin: Well, actually the key feature of Laundroid is that after you dry your clothing, you just put up to say around 30 clothes into insert box at the bottom. Then artificial intelligence and robotics with vision analysis technology, robot arms pick one clothing by one, and then it folds and put in the pick up box. If you choose separate by clothing category mode, then Laundroid puts towels in the towel tray, and t-shirts in the t-shirt tray. Tim: Okay, and since this is a audio podcast, I guess we have to— The Laundroid, it’s a large machine, it’s about— What, two meters tall? Shin: Yeah, about that. Tim: And about 75 centimeters squared? Shin: Right now it’s a little thinner. About 60 centimeters deep. Yes. And then 87 centimeters wide. Tim: Okay. Shin: So it’s a little thinner and wider. Tim: And it is literally a black

It’s hard to make money with music apps. The competition is intense, and most people simply are not willing to pay much for music apps; either because music is something they only do casually or because if it’s something they do professionally, they probably don’t have money. Akinori Fumihara of Nana, however, is succeeding despite the odds. Nana is a collaborative music creation app, where different users upload and submit different tracks to a song, which can be edited and remixed by others to create an unlimited number of arrangements. Today Nana has a highly engaged global user-base that numbers in the millions, but it almost did not work out that way. Three months after the initial release, Nana was running out of money and was watching new installs trend towards zero. How Aki and his team managed to turn things around is an amazing story, and one I think you’ll really enjoy. Show Notes for Startups Why "casual music" is important How to develop an overseas user-base by word of mouth Why teenage girls form the heart of Nana How a YouTube video inspired an iPhone app Why it's hard to monetize a music app Why startups in Japan (outside of Tokyo) struggle The difference between Tokyo and Kansai startup founders Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Nana Friend Aki on Facebook Check out Nana on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 80. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for music apps. The competition in this space is intense, and almost every niche seems to be filled. So trying to differentiate a music gap calls for a lot of creativity. But it’s usually their quixotic quest for business models that is the most interesting. The problem is that people just don’t want to spend money on making music. The amateurs and the dabblers don’t spend enough time on the hobby to invest much. And the professionals, well speaking as a former professional musician myself, I can tell you that professional musicians never have money in the first place. Well today, we sit down with Akinori Fumihara of Nana, and they might have just cracked the code. Nana is a collaborative music creation app where different users upload and submit different tracks to a song. Which can be edited and remixed by others to create an unlimited number of arrangements. Now Nana has become a huge hit with its millions of users. And just like Google, the name Nana itself has become a fully conjugatable verb in Japanese. “Nananu Nanateru, Nanata.” “I use Nana. I’m using Nana. I used Nana.” Now I’ll warn that Aki’s English is not as good as some of our other guests. But the man is really excited about reaching out to foreign listeners and so he decided to make it work and come on the show. Nana is a very cool app, and Aki’s a pretty cool guy. He’s got an amazing life story, and he started a fascinating company. But you know, Aki tells that story much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: Cheers. Akinori: Cheers. Tim: So I’m sitting here with Akinori Fumihara, the CEO and founder of Nana. Thanks for sitting down with me today. Akinori: Nice to meet you. Tim: That’s great. Now Nana is a social music platform, but can you explain what is social music? How does Nana work? Akinori: Nana is music collaboration. I’ve found and enjoyed that biggest feature is collaboration and over dubbing. For example, like the base line, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Next, with the base add drums, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So with the beat it adds piano. Tim: So each user adds a new part to the piece— Akinori: Yes, yes. Tim: And they collaborate to build the song. To build the orchestration. Do they record directly into their iPhones? Or do they upload tracks? Akinori: Yes, yes, yes. You can just use smartphone. Tim: Okay, so are there editing features within Nana, or is everything sort of recorded live to layer on top of other tracks? Akinori: User can upload and overdub. Tim: Okay, so this really is a casual music app? Akinori: Exactly. Tim: So the focus is not creating a finished work, it’s really just having fun? Akinori: Yes, exactly right. So in music is communication. Tim: Well, tell me a bit about your customers. Who uses Nana? Akinori: Okay, we have 3 million users and mostly teenagers. Tim: Mostly teenage boys, teenage girls, a mix? Akinori: Teenage girls. Tim: Mostly teenage girls? Akinori: Girls, yes. Tim: Alright. Nana’s also available in English, right? Akinori: Yes. In fact, we have 13 languages available. Tim: How many of your users are in Japan, and how many are global? Akinori: 2 millio

Soracom is one of those rare Japanese startups that has the potential to become a major global player and to change the way Internet of Things devices work. The real deployment bottleneck in the Internet of Things is not the hardware or the software, but the connectivity. There are still relatively few inexpensive, flexible and scalable ways that IoT devices can transmit and receive data. Cellular connectivity is expensive, and WiFi is largely limited to stationary devices in homes and offices. Today we sit down with Ken Tamagawa, CEO of Soracom, who explains his solution to this problem, and it's a good one. Soracom operates a mobile virtual network and provides widespread connectivity for IoT devices for pennies a day, and since their infrastructure runs completely on AWS their costs are significantly lower than the competition's. Soarcom is extremely well-funded, and they are quickly expanding globally. You are going to be hearing a lot about them in the future, so let’s get to know them today. I think you’ll really enjoy the interview. Show Notes for Startups What are MVNOs and why are they important for the Internet of Things Why replacing hardware with software drives innovation How Japan Taxi is taking advantage of the Internet of Things The most surprising thing about going global from Japan The future of the IoT in Japan Why play and serendipity remain important even as a company scales Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Soracom Follow Ken on twitter @KenTamagawa Friend him on Facebook Check out the Soracom blog Get started with the Soracom Developer Site Safecast P2P Radiation Monitoring [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Welcome to Disrupting Japan- straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. One of the most important problems of the internet of things is not the internet or even the things. The problem lies in connecting those things to the internet. In fact, much of the promise of the internet of things is based on the idea of thousands of connected devices working together. It turns out that building the hardware and writing the software has proven to be much simpler than developing an affordable, scalable, and secured network that enables these devices to communicate with home base and with each other. Some applications use WiFi and that's a great solution for stationary devices that operating homes or offices, or anywhere else where you can be certain to have a connection. But, many devices are mobile or need to operate whether there may not be a WiFi connection. Some applications paired with cellphones and that works well for personal devices and wearable’s and things will carry around with us. But for things like sensors and inexpensive autonomous devices, well, having a cellphone plan for each of them is simply cost prohibitive. So, right now, connectivity is the real problem for a lot of internet of things applications. Well, Soracom has a solution and a damn good one in my opinion. Today, we sit down with Ken Tamagawa, CEO of Soracom to talk about their solution which involves slicing up mobile bandwidth and using Amazon web services as their backbone and this enables a pay as you go remote communication package for pennies a day. We also discuss Soracom's global ambitions. Soracom is one of the few Japanese start-ups to raise a round of more than 20 million dollars and a lot of that is targeted on their global expansion. Soracom has something that is truly unique and you'll be hearing more about Soracom in the years to come. But Ken tells us story much better than I can. So, let's hear from our sponsor and get straight to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I'm sitting here with Ken Tamagawa of Soracom. Soracom is a communications platform for internet of things devices but you can explain it much better than I can. So, what is Soracom? Ken: Okay. Soracom offers IOT connectivity platform. So, basically, many IOT solutions or devices need the connectivity sending data to the cloud. I noticed, like I was working for Amazon web services before I founded Soracom, and many, many customers wanted to send data to the database cloud but there is no ideal connectivity yet. So, we built connectivity platform on top of the AWS and that is Soracom. Tim: Okay. You're operating which is called a mobile virtual network, right? For example, many developers will use the use of mobile phone as a connectivity device. What you guys are doing is something very different. So, on a technical level, what's happening? Ken: So, there's many people wondering how we provide that kind of cloud-base connectivity at the MVNO- Mobile Virtual Network Operator. So, let me talk about the mobile view of this industry

Miwa Tanaka, CEO of Waris, is working to make things better for working women in Japan. Although things are slowly changing, most Japanese women still must leave the workforce when they have children. The Waris platform helps them get back on track, either as a freelancer or by restarting their career. We talk about her startup, of course, but we also talk about the difficulties women still face, the kinds of roles they are traditionally placed into, and the traditional employment structures and roles are changing. It’s a optimistic interview and Miwa explains why she believes that corporate Japan truly wants to change things for the better. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why Japanese women leave the workforce when they have children The problem Japanese women face during negotiations How the Tohuku Earthquake changed Miwa's life path Why the Japanese government changed its opinion on freelancers What "diversity training" actually means in Japan and why it's important The importance of startups selling to each other and bootstrapping the ecosyste Why Japanese women are attracted to entrepreneurship and freelancing Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Waris Friend Waris on Facebook Follow Waris on Twitter @info_Waris The Waris community blog Cue for working women in Japan. Friend Miwa on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Welcome to Disrupting Japan, -- straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I am Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Miwa Tanaka, the CEO of Waris is working hard to make things better for women in Japan. The changing roles of Japanese Women in both start-ups and large enterprises is something we talked about quite a bit on disrupting Japan and Miwa has a unique perspective on this subject. Waris is a platform that is helping Japanese women who've quit their jobs to have children, rejoined the work force. Now, of course, we talk about the social and business conventions that results in Japanese women having to quit their jobs to have children in the first place. But often the best solutions to these kind of social problems are small steady improvements, and that's what Miwa is trying to do. In fact, hearing Miwa explained what Waris is shows us some microcosm of women in Japanese business, --- the difficulties women face, the kind of roles they've traditionally been placed into and also how those roles and the traditional employment structure are changing but more important, perhaps, how Japanese women themselves are choosing to adapt, to work around, occasionally, walk away from those restrictions. And as Miwa explains, another sign that things are getting better here in Japan is that Waris has a steady stream of corporate customers who are asking for diversity training. I think that this is a sign, much like it was with previous guest who discussed the demand for open innovation and LGBT sensitivity training that corporate Japan wants to change. I think much of corporate Japan and the government as well, are sincere on their efforts to make things better. But as Miwa explains, sometimes those changes can painfully slowly, but Miwa tells that story much better than I can. So, let's hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So, I'm sitting here with Miwa Tanaka, the co-founder and the CEO of Waris. So, thanks for sitting down with us. Miwa: Thank you so much for inviting me. Tim: Now, Waris is an online job matching service to help women continue their career after they've had children. I'm sure you can explain it much better than I can. So, why don't you tell us about what Waris does? Miwa: Okay. Thank you. Waris is a job matching company for women who have professional skill sets and we connect their skill sets with Japanese companies through a flexible work schedule, like a 3 days’ work a week or working remotely. Tim: Is it telecommuting? Is it part time? What's the usual situation? Miwa: Oh well, sometimes they work at the clients and they also work at their home. Tim: Okay. So, it's both situations? Miwa: It's both situations. Tim: And is it usually part time work or there's some fulltime? Miwa: Mostly they are part time worker. As you know, almost 60% of women quit their jobs after giving birth in Japan because in most Japanese companies, we have to work so long hours and it makes women very difficult to keep working. Tim: Actually, a little later on, I want to get back into exploring details about this dynamic of women having to leave the workplace and trying to come back in, but for now, are these jobs permanent jobs or they're jobs that last for a few months? Miwa: The average is 7 mon

From the transistor radio to the Walkman to the Gameboy and the Playstation, Japan has always been both a leading force in hardware technology and a Mecca for gadget geeks. Over the past ten years, however, Japanese dominance in consumer hardware has been slipping away. The falling price of not just computing, but of manufacturing and prototyping has resulted in some amazing connected devices appearing all over the world. But while Japan’s large corporations have been falling behind, Japan’s startups have been rushing ahead. Today we sit down with Ichiro Amimori of Xenoma to talk about why he left a successful 20-year career in materials science at FujiFilm to found a company that makes a low-cost, washable motion capture shirt they call e-skin. It’s a order of magnitude cheaper than existing technology and opens up the possibility of applications in gaming, sports technology and heath and medicine. We also talk about the challenges Japanese enterprises and universities have turning fundamental research into salable products, and a few trends that might just turn that situation around. It’s a great interview and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups What is e-skin and why is it important? Why leave a 20-year career to start a risky startup How FujiFilm managed to innovate and survive How to attract developers to a new hardware platform Why most early adopters are outside Japan How Japan lost it's lead in the gaming industry How motion capture can help the elderly Why Japanese companies have trouble in new markets The future of open innovation in Japan Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Xenoma A deeper dive on e-skin Ichiro's personal blog (in Japanese) Follow Ichiro on twitter @ichiroamimori Friend him on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Welcome to Disrupting Japan- straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. You know, Japan has always been the land of cool hardware, from the Zoom recorder I’m talking into to the Gameboy, to the Play Station, to the Walkman, to the transistor radio. Japan has always been a mecca to gadget geeks. Of course, things have changed in recent years, the falling price of not just computing, but of manufacturing and prototyping has resulted in some amazing connected devices appearing all over the world. And Japan, if we’re being honest with ourselves here, is falling a bit behind. Ichiro Amimori is a small part of the solution to this. He left a 20-year career in material science to found a company that produces what they call e-skin. It’s a tight fitting shirt that can sense the movements of its wearer and act as an inexpensive, accurate, motion capture device. It’s price and durability is something you might find a little bit surprising. Of course, with a cool hardware available now, attracting developers to your new platform, no matter how cool, is something of a challenge these days. Even Google is having problems in this area. Ichiro and I dive into some detail about how Xenoma is solving this. We also talk about the challenges that Japanese enterprises and universities have turning fundamental research into real products. And the steps that they’re taking to solve them. But you know, Ichiro tells that story much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Ichiro Amimori of Xenoma. You guys make e-skin. It’s like clothing, it’s motion capture, it’s just a shirt, really, but thanks for sitting down with us. Ichiro: Nice meeting you. Tim: Tell us more about what Xenoma is, and what this shirt really does. Ichiro: So we are a startup company from the University of Tokyo, and we established a company November 2015. What we are making is the e-skin, which is a smart apparel. We are not saying it is wearable, because shirts are obviously wearable. As you can see here, this is just a shirt. Stretchable shirt. Tim: Right, and it’s an audio podcast, so it’s kind of hard to explain. But it just looks like normal, stretchable, workout wear with kind of a Tron design to it. Ichiro: Right, everybody says that. Actually, so this Tron design, you see the silver stuff, is the electric circuit, which is stretchable. So in here, there is wiring and sensors, you can touch. Tim: We’ll put pictures on the website, so everyone can know what it looks like. But, the circuits don’t seem to be wires. They’re printed on here and, are they printed? Stitched? Ichiro: We are not saying the manufacturing process in detail, but we are using many kinds of manufacturing process which is conventional. The point is that… you see this silver stuff, so many people say, “Is this conductive?” Actually, the silver stuff is not conductive. All the cond

There are no shortage of startup accelerators, innovation spaces and startup community hubs, and sometimes it can be difficult to put your finger on what makes one a success and another a failure. Today, Tim Rowe the CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center walks us through what he believes will make or break a startup community. The CIC started as a small co-working space for a handful of startups, and now is the biggest facility of its kind on the world. They’ve expanded to several locations and are now int he process of setting up their Tokyo facility. Tim lived in Japan for a few years in the 1990’s and he understands that Japan is different, and that’s a good thing. It’s an interesting interview and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups What makes one startup space succeed and others fail When you need to turn down the money to support the mission How NGOs and governments can sponsor innovation A blueprint for a successful innovation space What approaches to innovation might be particularly effective in Japan What three things all innovation communities need to succeed What Japanese universities can do to foster innovation Links from the Founder The Cambridge Innovation Center Follow Tim on twitter @rowe WCVB-TV's video on Kendall Square and CIC [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Welcome to Disrupting Japan- straight talk from the CEO’s breaking into Japan. You know, I’ve always been a bit skeptical about co-working spaces, innovation centers, and startup community hubs. Some of them are well intended, but too often, the organizations that put these facilities together have a bit of a field of dreams mindset, where, if they just build the office space, the innovative entrepreneurs will come, and then the organizers will find themselves at the center of a thriving ecosystem. Sometimes that actually happens, but usually not. But when it works, when all the pieces really do come together, amazing things happen. And a community develops that is far greater than the sum of its parts. So what’s the real difference between the innovation spaces that flourish compared to those that stagnate? Well, today we get a chance to sit down and talk to Tim Rowe, CEO of Cambridge Innovation Center, or CIC, the largest innovation center in the world. And we have a conversation about what’s really involved in building an entrepreneurial community, and the CIC's progress on building a very large-scale innovation center right here in Tokyo. It’s a truly insightful conversation, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to our interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Romero: So I’m sitting here with Tim Rowe, CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center. This is a pretty incredible space that you have been running for 15 years now. So rather than having me explain it, can you tell us a bit about what CIC is and how it came to be? Rowe: Sure. CIC is the world’s largest space for startups, that is our Cambridge Space, specifically. We’re also in Boston, Miami, St. Louis, Rotterdam Netherlands, at the moment and we’ve got some more in the works. We call ourselves a community of startups. So we’re not an accelerator where we’re telling people how to build their business or investing in them. We have brought 15 venture capital funds into our location in Cambridge and some of our other locations, so there is access to money, but it’s more of an open platform. Romero: So the VCs actually have offices there? Rowe: Their entire firm is there. Romero: In terms of business, though, it’s a real estate business. You’re renting office space. You don’t make money by making investments or… Rowe: Yea. So we don’t think about it that way. You could argue that a university is mostly made up of real estate, but that’s not its purpose. It makes it’s money by charging people to live there and go to classes, but, it’s in the same way our mission is to make the world better through innovation. The space that we curate is like a little city of innovation. Yes, people have to pay to use space in that city. A lot of things we do are free and open to the public. A lot of things we do are non-profit. Our wet laboratories and our robotics laboratories are actually non-profits. So we’re a mission driven business that happens to use real estate as a means of getting innovators together. Romero: Let’s dig down on that, because, certainly over the last ten years or so, there has been an explosion of co-working spaces and non-financial accelerators, that are frankly, often run by real estate businesses. You have got over 500 companies in this space now. Rowe: Over 1400 companies in total now. In several different buildings. Romero: I guess I’m saying, what are you doing different? What do companies see in the Cambridge innovation Center that they don’t see in these dozens of other accel

Hiking, back-country skiing and mountain climbing are not usually the first things associated with Japan. Japan, however, has some stunning natural beauty and Yoshihio Haruyama of Yamap is trying to get more and more people to appreciate that. Yamap is a mobile app that allows hikers, back-country skiers and other outdoorsmen to know exactly where they are even when they are well outside of areas cell-phone reception, and the platform is also providing Japan’s outdoor enthusiasts with a way of connecting to each other. Yoshi also explains how relatively young Yamap managed to negotiate OEM deals with both Casio and Kyosera, and give practical advice for other startups hoping to partner up with large Japanese firms. It’s a great discussion and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why add gamification to a hiking app Why Yamap had to pursue multiple monitazation strategies What a startup needs to know to work with a large Japanese brand Why going global might require a business model pivot There are important differences between hikers in the US and Japan The importance of inbound tourism for outdoor activities in Japan How the Fukuoka startup scene is different from Tokyo Links from the Founder Everything you wanted to know about Yamap See a demo video of Yamap in English Check out Yoshi on Tumbler Follow him on twitter @haruyamayoshi Friend him on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan episode 75. Welcome to Disrupting Japan- straight talk from japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. Ah, the great outdoors, it is something that nerds like me do not get enough of, especially living here in Tokyo. Yoshi Haruyama of Yamap is starting to change that. Yamap is a mobile app that allows hikers, back country skiers, mountain climbers and other outdoors men to know exactly where they are. Even where they are far, far away from anywhere with cell phone reception, and to share this experience with others and to learn from them. If you are one of our overseas listeners, you might be surprised at how much natural beauty Japan has to offer, and if you are of our listeners in Japan you might be surprised at the average age of Japanese outdoors men. Yamap has also done some OEM deals with Japans largest brands. Yoshi gave us some practical advice on how startups can sell to and work with large Japanese companies on joint projects. Oh and during the interview we talk about a wireless transmission technology called Lora. Just so you know, it is a low power wide coverage network that is useful for transmitting large numbers of very small messages. So, now you will know it when you hear it. Let us hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I am sitting here with Yoshi Haruyama of Yamap, it is an application for hikers and mountaineers and other outdoors men in Japan but Yoshi I’m sure you can explain it a lot better than I can, so, tell us abet about a Yamap, what is it? Yoshi: Yamap is a social GPRS tracking application. You install the Yamap application. You can find where you are without mobile reception, such as mountain or foreign countries. Tim: Who are the main users, is it hikers, is it back country skiers, mountain climbers? Who uses it? Yoshi: The most of our uses are hikers and back country skiers. Tim: Okay let us see, you started the company in 2011 and you launched like two years later, right? You were working on this project for a long time and you digitized a lot of these maps by hand and were like marking the trails yourself earlier on. Was there problem that there just is not digitized information on hiking trails in Japan? Why did you spend so much time having to do it by yourself? Yoshi: The most difficult point, we made this application Yamap, so Yamap can work without mobile reception. So most applications are based online. We had to adapt our application online environment and offline environment. Tim: Mobile reception is good in Japan, but if you are in the mountains there is no cell reception. Yoshi: No, no no. Now we have a full set of aerial maps in Japan and about 100 areas in foreign countries like New Zealand, United States, Switzerland, and so on. We need enough time to make maps. Tim: Are you and the Yamap team still creating and entering the maps or are your users now doing that for you? Yoshi: Both. We take advantage of the information from users, but, we made a map which is based on our information. Tim: What kind of information? I mean it is easy to understand why a hiking map application that works with no cell connection is valuable, but what is the social aspect of it?\ Yoshi: We add information such as, hiking time to where the toilet is, where the parking lot is, to the map, so that is why we need to customiz

More than a few people dream of coming to Japan, starting an online business that gives you financial freedom and leaves you with enough free time to study the language travel and just enjoy Japan. I know that sounds like the opening to some terrible multi-level marketing pitch, but today we site down and talk with someone who has done exactly that — twice. Patrick McKenzie came to Japan more than 15 years ago and after enduring the soul-crushing boredom that is the life of a Japanese programer, he took maters into his own hands, left his job and began developing software products that he sold and supported all over the world the world from his home in the Japanese countryside. It turns our that life was not as idillic or as simple as it seems, but there are some important lessons learned and a great story to be told. I think you’ll enjoy this one. Show Notes for Startups What it's like working as a developer at a Japanese company The 30-year career plan Japanese companies have for their employees Why Japanese developers don’t start side businesses Why it's smart to focus on the foreign market when selling software from Japan What's the wrong way to generate a startup idea Why running a micro-startup can be more rewarding than getting investment What made Patrick give it all up and get a day job Why you need to develop the ability to do arbitrary hard things How to make failure a part of life in Japan, and why that would be a good thing Links from the Founder Patrick runs the Kalzumeus blog Check out some of Patrick's (aka patio11) prolific writing at Hacker News Stripe's Atlas Program Check out the Kalzumeus podcast, and tell Patrick to make more of them [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 74. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. One of the things I enjoyed most about making Disrupting Japan, is not only do I get a chance to sit down and talk with some of the most innovative people in Japan, but I hear from people all over the world who are thinking about bringing their company to Japan, or who are deeply involved in the startup scene in their own country, or who just have a love of Japan and enjoy hearing about startups and how things are changing here. I also get a pretty steady stream of inquiries from listeners with a very specific Japan-focused dream. There are a lot of developers all over the world who want to move to Japan, maybe move to a Japanese company, study the language, and then start some kind of internet business that would give them the financial independence and the freedom to just live your life in Japan. Well, if that sounds appealing, I’ve got a treat for you today. Today, we’re going to sit down and talk with my friend, Patrick McKenzie, and we’re basically going to give you a blueprint for doing exactly that. I’ll warn you in advance, it might not be as easy as you think it is, or as rewarding as you imagine it might be, and in fact, in the end, Patrick left that life behind. Before he did that, however, he created not just one, but two successful online businesses, that he ran from the comfort of the Japanese countryside. Now, you’ve probably never heard of either of Patrick’s companies, but he’s a more important part of the Tokyo startup ecosystem than he likes to let on. He’s an advisor, a connector, and someone whose name just keeps popping up in Tokyo’s startup scene, and he has a really amazing story to tell. So let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Patrick McKenzie of Stripe and of Kalzumeus software, and the illustrious Kalzumeus podcast, as a matter of fact. You’re really a unique figure in the startup ecosystem in Japan and you’ve done something that I think a lot of our listeners dream about doing, which is running two companies on your own here. Your ideas, your marketing, your coding, and bringing them to fruition, and so thanks for sitting down and talking with us today. Patrick: Thanks so much for having me, Tim. Hidey-ho, everybody, I’m Patrick McKenzie, better known as Patio11 on the internets. Micro tip for everybody: memorize a self-intro that is one sentence long and then you can just play it on every podcast, from now to eternity. I don’t know if I’m a very important person, but I have a less than common life story, so people apparently like hearing it. Tim: Well something that I think should be more common. You did what a lot of people want to do. You became a micro-startup. You went from idea, to code, to product, not once, but twice, in Japan. In fact, you were living in the countryside while doing it, so literally, doing your own business from anywhere. Before we really dig into the mecha

Gaming is very different in Japan than it is in America, but PowerCore is introducing technology that could lead to major changes in both of them. Toys to Life technology blurs the distinction between the analog and digital worlds by having digital gameplay react to the presence of physical toys. For example, after buying a figuring, that character would appear in the game. The first generation of this technology is already being used by powerhouses such as Disney and Nintendo, but the real change is yet to come. Today Jia Shen explains what the future holds for Toys to Life, and why he decided to start his company in Japan. It seems that the boundary between analog and digital is about to become a lot less clear. It’s a great conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why large companies have trouble crossing the toy-game barrier Why it made sense to build a distributed team from Tokyo The special appeal of physical goods in our digital life How Disney just made a big mistake Why children don't play with some toys Why Japan gaming might be the future model for the rest of the world Links from the Founder Learn more about Powercore Check out their Online Store Some cool toy pics on Instagram Follow Jia on twitter @mekatek Friend him on Facebook Jia on Instragram You really need to see the toys in action to appreciate them check out This video or this one this is cool too or this video [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 73. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. You know, gaming has always pushed the limits of both computer hardware and the interfaces we use to interact with computers. Jia Shen, of PowerCore, is blurring the distinction between the online and offline interaction. Powercore enables video games to react to the presence of physical object. For example, if you owned a figurine of a superhero, that hero could appear in the game. It’s a simple interaction that radically changes the way we view the digital-analog divide. Of course, as with all technologies, adoption is never smooth, and Jia explains some of the mistakes that burned Disney, and some of the major market players. It seems that, as is so often the case, the secret to introducing innovative technology, is to do only as much as you absolutely have to, and then watch how your users react. It’s a simple idea in principle but there are surprising reasons why some of the most influential companies in the industry have trouble following it. But Jia tells that story much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Jia Shen of PowerCore. Now, PowerCore does toys to life or sometimes it’s called offline-online business, but why don’t you explain basically what it is and who uses it. Jia: Sure. The toys to life is a model, that from our perspective, Japan has done a lot of pioneering, but the United States, in maybe the last 5 or 6 years, have made a very large business out of it. So we point to, in the US, Skylanders from Activision, Disney had a big one called Infinity, featuring a lot of the great Disney characters. Nintendo, LEGO, they all have some forays into this. And specifically it’s toys that are collectible, that have a strong interaction with video games. So the guys that do it on a large scale, they usually have console games, and you have different characters, which you can stick into the game, they have different power-ups, they have different game mechanics. Tim: For example, there would be a figurine, or a trophy, or a sticker of some kind that would activate a character in the game or would activate new levels in the game? Jia: Skylanders, I think, is the best game design. They really accentuate the collection of individual characters. So imagine a Super Mario game but different levels have different mechanics. For instance, certain ones require you to be able to have wheels as feet, to be able to run faster. Other ones require you to have big hands to be able to crawl up walls. Tim: So what is the physical tie-in there? Jia: As a player, you literally have your character in front of it when you’re walking through, and say there’s a specific enemy that you want to defeat that requires a specific characters, you immediately swap the character right on the pedestal, and that person immediately appears out of the game. Tim: Okay, so you’re swapping physical characters in the real world and that’s impacting the game in real-time, as you play it? Cool. Are most customers taking existing IP and making toys, like Star Wars or Frozen or Angry Birds? Or are they companies that have like a popular game and want to add a layer of physical ac

Selling services in Japan is very different than selling products or software. Everyone knows that relationships are important in Japan, but not many people understand why they are so important, and how you can use that understanding to build a successful business here. Today Sriram Venkataraman explains how he grew InfoSys Japan from a one man operation to over 1,000 employees and how understanding why Japanese enterprises must trust their vendors far more than companies in other developed countries. We talk about hiring strategies and techniques he used to get his initial customers and some of the most common mistakes that western companies make with their senior leadership in Japan. It’s basically a blueprint for how to grow a services company from nothing to thousands of people in Japan, and I think you’ll enjoy it. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Links & Resources Follow Sriram on Twitter @japansriram Connect with him on LinkedIn Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 72. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan. Today we’ve got some amazingly good advice for anyone who wants to sell services in Japan. Selling products or software is challenging enough, but selling services where relationships mean everything and where the quality expectations for service is perhaps the highest in the world, that provides a host of very special challenges. Today we sit down with Sriram Venkataraman, as he explains how me manages to scale Infosys, which provides outsourced Indian development services, from 2 people, to over 1,000 people in Japan. In a very real sense, he did it with a strategy that is pretty much the opposite of what you would expect from an Indian software services company. This is a real insight into the mind and the buying decisions of Japanese enterprise customers and Sriram has a different, very compelling perspective, on why so many foreign companies have trouble gaining real trust in the Japanese market. We talk a lot about finding the right people here in Japan, and how to avoid the hiring traps that western firms commonly fall into. Really, this interview is basically a blueprint of how to grow from nothing to 1,000 people in Japan. But, you know, Sriram Venkataraman explains that much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Sriram Venkataraman, of Infosys, and you have been with Infosys from the very beginning in Japan, and you’ve seen it grow from a tiny team to over 10,000 employees here now, haven’t you? Sriram: Not 10,000. Tim: No? That was on the website. Sriram: Our total Japan business is probably about 1,000 people today. But given the business model, not all of them are here. Roughly 65 to 70% of the teams are in India and the balance are here. Tim: Okay, let’s actually back up a bit to 20 years ago. The Japanese market is obviously a very big one but system integration is always a very local game, so what attracted both you and Infosys to the Japanese market in the first place? Sriram: So Infosys was founded by 7 people. The senior founder, I think he’s a true visionary . So one of the important dimensions for Infosys was, “How do we move away from a large dependence on the market of the United States?” Because our business is quite dependent heavily on the mobility of people’s ideas. If you are dependent only on one market, if there is a regulatory change, or if there is something else that happens, then you are not going to be able to sustain the productions that you make. Tim: And back then, what percentage of the revenues were coming from the US? Sriram: The year I joined, this company had a global revenue of $26 million. I was I think sales employee number 10. Tim: But that was—so this was ’96? Sriram: And ’97. Tim: So this was at the very start of this global outsourcing— Sriram: Absolutely. And at that time, we were at what, 78% of our revenues, or something like that, was from the US. We had just started Europe a couple of years ago, and we had just started some stuff, and the next extension was to figure out Asia. Japan, obviously, was of interested, just given the GDP size. And the company tried to do some experimentation through some remote sales, if you will. People came, then they realized it was simpler to have somebody here. And that was in ’96. Through a strange set of circumstances, I got introduced to this company. Tim: How strange? Is this something you want to talk about? Sriram: Yeah, I can discuss. So I was doing very well in another Indian company, and I had been there for almost 6 years, and I was responsible for new product development and new businesses. We were developing the computer peripheral business in India and India deregulated in ’91, and then the economy really started picki

Today we are going low-tech. Sledgehammers and paint brushes low tech. Keigo Fukugaki has started his own hotel brand, BnA, which stands for Bed & Art. It’s not a platform. It’s not an online marketplace. There isn’t (yet) even a meaningful e-commerce component. BnA is a new kind of hotel that places travelers not only in hotel rooms with interesting decor, but plugs them into the local artistic community. It’s an incredibly ambitious project, but Keigo and his team have three small prototype hotels up and running, and they are in the process of building a full scale facility in Japan and already in talks about international expansion. With SaaS companies and digital marketplaces dominating the news, sometimes it's nice to know that some startups are running businesses based on concrete and lumber. It’s a fascinating interview, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why old office buildings make ideal art spaces The dangers of standardization in Japan and global the hotel industry Why Bed&Art is the anti-Airbnb Why crowdfunding should never be about the money any more Why Keigo left San Francisco to start his startup in Japan The very real danger of stretching yourself too thin Why the differences between Japanese and American programmers are real and important Links from the Founder Learn more about Bed and Art Follow Keigo on twitter @makeshiftjp Friend him on Facebook Checkout Keigo's design firm Makeshift Honey Wedding The BnA prototype as Airbnb in Ikebukuro Their successful crowdfunding campaign [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 71. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. You know, more than anything else, Disrupting Japan is about introducing you to the people who are changing business in Japan. I mean, really introducing you to them. Not the banal book tour interviews you hear everywhere else, but to let you get to know the real people starting things up in Japan. People you would love to sit down and have a beer with and with whom I’m lucky enough to do just that. It’s letting you know the people behind the startups. And although Disrupting Japan is a business podcast, business is personal. Hiding behind every great startup with impressive numbers, there is an interesting story about how it got started. And hiding behind that interesting story is the story of what really happened and the real goals, and the real successes, and real disappointments. And what I love about podcasting is that it makes it so easy for you to hear when someone is telling a PR approved origin story and when someone is really speaking from the heart, when they are telling you about something that really matters to them. Well, I’ve got a great story for you today and listeners have commented that I’ve been a bit tech heavy recently, so today, we’re going to meet someone who is decidedly low tech, as in paint brushes and hammers low tech. Keigo Fukugaki has started his own hotel brand, Bed & Art, in which he tries to merge travel with supporting the local artistic community. It’s an ambitious project to be sure and as the interview progressed, I went from thinking, “This won’t work,” to, “Nah, this is way too much of a long shot to really work,” to “You know, this is just crazy and quirky enough that is just might work.” In this age of SAS, Airbnb, and middleware, sometimes it’s refreshing to find a startup that deals in concrete. But, you know, Keigo tell that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So cheers. We’re sitting here with Keigo Fukugaki of Bed & Art, which is sort of a distributed hotel art space, but you’re going to be able to explain it much better than me, so what is Bed & Art? Keigo: Basically, we’re a hotel startup and we’re trying to find a new way to start a hotel brand, not a real estate mogul. We’re just four guys with a little bit of cash. We also work with a lot of artists and we’re mixing the hotel business with art to create a new kind of travel experience. Tim: Okay. Concretely, what are you doing? Keigo: We’re creating one of a kind rooms with artists and every time someone stays in those rooms, part of the revenue goes back to the artist. It’s bringing together a lot of unique travellers and the local artists together. Tim: Are these apartments that you own? Are they apartments that other people are letting you renovate? How does it work? Keigo: We’re actually a hotel, registered as a hotel. So we’re taking over old buildings and we’re renovating those, creating lobby, bar, hotel rooms. And in Tokyo, there’s a lot of these office buildings that we’re able to convert into a hotel. And I think

Sales is different in Japan. When Fastly entered the Japanese market, they quickly discovered that they had change their technology-driven bottom up sales approach to fit Japan’s top-down enterprise market. Today we sit down with Doug Chuchro, the Japan head of Fastly who explains how he had to chance both the sales strategy and the corporate culture from that of the US, which a highly knowledgeable user base who understood the workings of their technology as well as the sales team to Japan, where they frequently found themselves educating potential customers about what a content deliver network is and how they are used. We also explore the importance of partners in the Japanese market, and how those relationships can be very much a two-edged sword. It’s a fascinating conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Links & Resources Learn more about Fastly here Connect with Doug on LinkedIn Follow Doug and Fastly Japan on Twitter @FastlyJapan (Japanese) or @fastly (English) Contact [email protected] or the Tokyo team [email protected] (English or Japanese) Read about Fastly’s partnership with Nifty Cloud (Japanese) Read about Fastly’s partnership with SoftBank (Japanese) Learn about Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator with Google Cloud Platform (English) Sign up for a free Fastly trial account Find out how to do stuff on Fastly from posts on Qiita (Japanese) Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 70. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Today we’re going to talk about content delivery networks or CDMs, those services that cache your website locally around the world so that users can access it extremely quickly. Or more accurately, we’re going to talk about how Fastly has managed to sell them in Japan. We sit down today with Doug Chuchro, the Japan head of Fastly to talk, not so much about the company, but how you sell innovative technology to large Japanese enterprises. We’ll explore why partners are all but essential in entering the Japanese market, but how those relationships can be very much a two-edged sword, you need to know what to expect going in and to try to manage the expectations of everyone involved. When you’re trying to convert a proven, bottom-up, technical sales process into one that is Japanese style top-down, and governed by long-term relationships and unseen alliances. Even when done perfectly, your Japanese partner won’t always do what you want, but sometimes they’ll do what you need. But, you know, Doug tells this story much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Doug Chuchro, the representative director of Fastly KK and thanks for sitting down with me. Doug: It’s my pleasure. Tim: Before we get into all the details of how you brought the company into Japan and how you grew it here, I want to take a step back. Can you explain what Fastly does? Doug: Sure. We are a content delivery network. There are a number of content delivery networks out there. Many of them have been around for years and years. In fact, the space is close to 2 decades old. We are, essentially a content delivery network brings content closer to end users and increases the performance for those end users, and decreases the amount of workload that the customer’s origin has to do. So it essentially is a global caching network that the two major benefits are increasing the end user performance and decreasing the origin offload. Tim: So just every individual around the world would, instead of accessing the original source homepage, they would be accessing the cache that is closest to them and having the fastest experience possible. Doug: Exactly. For example, for a news media site, I go to the New York Times webpage every morning to see what’s going on. And rather than connecting to the New York Times origin infrastructure on the east coast of the United States, which would be a terrible experience for me here in Tokyo, I can actually connect with the local pop server of Fastly, here in Shinagawa, where most of that content is cached. I get a very quick response. That page loads almost instantly, and likewise, the operations team for New York Times in New York, they don’t even see a hit against their infrastructure. It essentially offloads that. Tim: Unless customers scale out much further and much faster as well. Doug: Exactly. Yes. Tim: Okay, so this sounds almost by nature like a global business. Doug: It is. In fact, before we started our business in Japan, we had one PoP operating in Tokyo and several others in Asia. Tim: And a PoP is a— Doug: A Point of Presence. Tim: What was headquarters’ main motivation of setting up in Japan? Doug: There were a number of factors. Fastly was

More and more Japanese founders are moving their startups to San Francisco. It’s easy to see why. There is more venture capital, more startup know-how, and more startup energy in that city than anywhere else in the world. In fact, there is a small, close knit Japanese startup community in San Francisco, with Japanese startups, mentors and investors all supporting each other and trying to grow their business there. On my last trip to San Francisco, I had a chance to sit down with one of these startup founders, Keisuke Kajitani, co-founder of Ramen Hero. He moved to Silicon Valley from Japan to start his company because he thought the US market was a better fit. Ramen Hero sells home delivered ramen meal kits. Interestingly, the popularity and ubiquity or ramen in Japan works against them, while the novelty and price of ramen in the US has enabled them to get attention from both VCs and customers there. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why ramen gives them a competitive advantage in the US Previous failures in the ramen business and why it's different this time Why Ramen Hero had to pivot from B2B to home delivery What's great about the Japanese startup scene in San Francisco How many companies can the market sustain? When Japanese companies should move to Japan Links from the Founder Learn more about Ramen Hero at their home page Follow Ramen Hero on Instagram [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 69. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. More and more, Japanese startup founders are looking at, or even moving to Silicon Valley. It’s easy to see the appeal. San Francisco is home to the largest and most competitive startup ecosystem in the world. In fact, there’s a small Japanese startup community in San Francisco, with Japanese startups, mentors, and investors all supporting each other and trying to make it work. Of course, the founders that come from Japan—well, it’s a mixed group. Some successful companies view San Francisco as their logical first step towards global expansion; some are new founders that have an idea they feel is more suited to the American market than the Japanese market; and some, well, some are kind of startup tourists, visiting the offices of famous startups and going through the motions, as if they were in some sort of startup role playing game. On my last trip to San Francisco, I had a chance to sit down and talk with Keisuke Kajitani, co-founder of Ramen Hero. He and his co-founder moved to San Francisco from Japan because they thought the US would be a better market for their product, oddly, because ramen is already too popular in Japan. Now, Ramen Hero sells home delivery ramen meal kits and it’s a business that makes much more sense to launch in the US than it does in Japan. But, you know, Keisuke explains all that much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Keisuke Kajitani of Ramen Hero and we’re sitting here in beautiful San Francisco. So thanks for sitting down with us. Keisuke: Thanks for having me. Tim: I’ve got to say, San Francisco is not so beautiful today. Keisuke: Yeah, it’s raining hard. Tim: I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much rain in San Francisco. Keisuke: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. Tim: But we’re inside and dry, so that’s good. Listen, to get things started, why don’t you tell me a bit about Ramen Hero? Keisuke: Sure. So Ramen Hero is a meal kit service specifically focused on delivering authentic ramen to your house. So what we deliver inside of the meal kit is fresh noodles, and soup, and toppings, and of course the recipe cards. So you can become a ramen chef at your house. Tim: Okay. The food industry in general is hard. It’s incredibly competitive, it’s hard to build up a loyal user base because trends come and go so fast. Why did you choose this particular startup? Keisuke: I’ve seen a lot of Japanese entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to make a big company in Silicon Valley, but I often find that the Japanese entrepreneurs are not having strengths in their expertise. There is tons of good engineers, there is tons of good entrepreneurs, but ramen is something Japanese can be expertise about, so that’s why we chose ramen as the first entrance for food business. Tim: Okay, so it was something that would make you unique and play on your Japanese-ness here in Silicon Valley. How did you pull it together? Tell me a bit about your partners and co-founders. Tell me about the team. Keisuke: Sure. So I’m the COO of Ramen Hero and I have a co-founder whose name is Hiro, who is the CEO/the chef of this company. Hiro graduated Toky

Ride sharing works differently in Japan. Hailo lost the global market-share war to Uber and Lyft, but Hailo won the battle in Japan. Today, Ryo Umezawa details Hailo’s Japan market entry strategy and explains how they were able to succeed where Uber has failed. While Uber vowed to disrupt transportation by taking on both government and industry, Hailo worked within the system. They designed and launched a platform that was completely legal and made life better for all major stakeholders, including the taxi companies. This was a battle between Uber’s disruptive innovation and Hailo’s sustaining innovation. On the global battlefield, Uber won. Uber is the world’s most valuable startup and is still growing fast, while Hailo had a cash crunch in 2016 and was acquired by Daimler. In Japan, however, Hailo won. Hailo’s sustaining innovation soundly trounced Uber’s disruptive innovation, and Hailo remains significantly larger than Uber in Japan. Of course, as you probably suspect, both companies had very different strategies in Japan than they did in the rest of the world, any Ryo explains it all in the interview. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Links & Resources Check out Ryo's blog Follow him on twitter @umemac Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 68. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Today we once again turn our attention to ride sharing, but surprisingly, we won’t be talking about Uber—at least not very much. No, today we get a chance to sit down and talk with my old friend Ryo Umezawa, who is responsible for Hailo’s market entry. Now, listeners not familiar with Hailo, let me explain. Hailo is, in a way, Uber’s quiet and somewhat neglected little brother. Hailo did not make the same impact as Uber worldwide, because they followed a very different strategy. While Uber vowed to disrupt transportation by taking on all-comers, both government and industry, Hailo had a different approach. Hailo wanted to work within the system. They wanted to design a platform that was completely legal and that would make life better for all stakeholders, including the governments and taxi cab companies. In fact, their model involved working with taxi companies directly. This was very much a batter between Uber’s disruptive innovation versus Hailo’s sustaining incremental innovation. And on the global battlefield, Uber won. Uber is the world’s most valuable startup and is still growing fast, while Hailo ran into a cash crunch in 2016 and was acquired—for quite a healthy sum, mind you—and it’s still an ongoing concern. In Japan, however, Hailo won. Hailo’s sustaining innovation soundly trounced Uber’s disruptive innovation and Hailo remains significantly larger than Uber in Japan. Of course, as you probably suspect, both companies had very different strategies in Japan than they did the rest of the world. But Ryo Umezawa tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Ryo, the former country manager of Hailo. You’ve since moved on from Hailo, but we’re going to back up a couple of years because I think your experience with Hailo is something that a lot of people who are coming into Japan now can learn a lot from. Thanks for sitting down with us. Ryo: Thanks for inviting me to speak. Tim: Hailo is very popular in Europe and it made a good run in Japan, but I think a lot of people in the U.S. aren’t familiar with it. So can you just give a brief overview of what it does? Ryo: Okay, sure. Hailo is a British company started up in 2012. It’s a smartphone hailing app. So we basically connect drivers and users who want to ride a taxi through the app and we also help drivers basically raise revenue by utilizing our unique algorithm to efficiently connect users to the driver. And then for the consumer side of the experience, we help them hail the taxis very easily. Tim: Okay, so it sounds very much like Uber but with one important difference. You guys were dealing with actual cab companies? Ryo: Yes. So we only work with licensed taxis. So for example, in London, it’s a black cab. There are 6 founders in the company. 3 of them are black cab London taxi drivers, so they wanted to create more revenue while driving around and create efficiency doing their job because their time is limited. Tim: So, back in 2013, I believe is when it came into Japan, right? What was Hailo’s main motivation for coming into Japan? What did they see in the market? Ryo: Actually, I’m the second person for Japan, so there was a predecessor before me. In Japan, yearly, there is about 1.8 trillion yen market size. This includes taxis and private vehicles. But in Japan, taxi companies own most of the private hired vehicles.

Cerevo wants to be a “global niche” player. That makes sense for this Internet of Things company. The IoT has become so pervasive and so successful that the terms ha become almost meaningless. Today we simply except and accept that almost everything should naturally be connected to the internet. Of course, it wasn’t always that way, and today Takuma Iwasa, founder and CEO of Cerevo tells us of how he started his career at one of Japan’s big consumer electronics companies trying to force the internet into devices where it really didn’t belong. And how that experience forced him to find a better way and to found his own company. Takuma also explains Cerevo’s innovative business model. In fact, the company is structured less like a hardware manufacturer and more like a hardware startup accelerator. He and Cerevo are aiming for a series of niche-market successes which will be acquired by large mass-market firms. And his strategy seems to be working. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you will really enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why Japan's first "smart devices" failed The foundations of the "global-niche" IoT strategy Why startups should build rather than license How to get media attention for cool, new IoT devices How IoT startups really should be using crowdfunding Will Japan ever regain the lead in robotics? Why Japanese companies were afraid of the Roomba Links from the Founder Learn more about Cerevo at their home page [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 67. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. The internet of things is unstoppable. It’s so broadly defined these days, connectivity is cheap, and they can be added to just about anything. Of course, whether it should be added or not is another matter entirely. That question is near and dear the heart of Takuma, founder and CEO of Cerevo, one of the most innovative and connected device makers in Japan. Takuma started his career at Panasonic and he had high hopes of creating all manner of consumer devices that could take advantage of internet connectivity. What he found, however, was that his job consisted mostly of finding ways of trying to force internet connectivity into existing products. Genuinely new products and innovations were being dismissed out of hand. Well, Takuma did what everyone should do, but very few people actually do in that situation, he quit his job, took some of the best engineers with him, and he started his own company. Now, there are a lot of gadgets and IOT devices being built in Japan, but Cerevo has a genuinely interesting and methodological approach to it. During the interview, you’ll hear Takuma try to downplay that strategy as just gut instinct, but as you listen, you’ll understand the very rational method of what, from the outside, might look like madness. We’ll talk about plenty of cool devices, but I think you’ll find the strategy that underlines Cerevo’s success to be at least as interesting. But, you know, Takuma tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [Interview] [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] Tim: So I’m hitting here with Takuma Iwasa of Cerevo. Now, Cerevo, I’m tempted to call it a gadget company, but that’s not really fair because you guys do a lot more than just make little gadgets. So can you tell us a little bit about what Cerevo does? Takuma: Okay, so my company’s name is Cerevo and we say Cerevo is a consumer electronics start up company, not gadget, right. We are really focusing to the connected consumer electronics devices—connected robot, or connected camera, or connected, of course, gadgets. Sometimes we try connected toys, connected sports equipment. Tim: You guys make so many different kinds of internet of things products, we could spend the whole podcast just listing them all. There’s a huge variety of them. You make everything from tools for IOT developers, to connected sports equipment, to video streaming equipment, but first, let’s back up a little bit. You started— Takuma: From 2008. So my past background is a spent time Ritsugaku Kyoto University studying computer science, but I’m not good with the software programs. Tim: So you studied software development, but you just weren’t very good at it? Takuma: Yes, but I’m working into the very small startup company and in the college student generation, I spend a long time to make a website and I received a job from the boss and I managed many of my friends. I received the job from the client and broke it up. Tim: So kind of project management? Takuma: Yeah. I’m also a programmer and manager. In that time, I spent a long time to make a computer programming, that my friend started to from 1 to 100

Stripe’s Japan market entry did not go according to plan. Things worked out worked out well in the end, but they did not go according to plan. Stripe is one of the world’s largest payment processing companies, but they remained flexible and agile enough to take advantage of some of the surprises they faced in Japan. Today we sit down with Daniel Heffernan, the Japan head of Stripe, and he walks us through what happens when a technically sophisticated and streamlined FinTech company comes face-to-face with the very low-tech and slow-moving processes that make up FinTech in Japan, and how they made it all work. They faced complex, lengthy technical specifications delivered in three-ring binders and un-copyable, printed documents, and they dealt with the Japanese aversion to integrating directly with banks and financial institutions. They even planned to support some of Japan’s more unique payment methods until surprises during development made them change course. Stripe’s entry into the Japanese market is both an essential case study for any FinTech company considering coming into Japan and an entertaining story for those of us with an interest in business in Japan. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Links & Resources Check out Daniel's blog Follow him on twitter @danielshi Find out more about Stripe Transcript Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan’s. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Stripe is one of the largest credit card payment processing companies in the world and their Japan market entry did not go according to plan. It went well, mind you, but it just did not go according to plan. Stripe was agile enough to take the changes and surprises in stride. Today, we sit down with Daniel Heffernan, the Japan head of Stripe, and he walks us through the process where one of the most technically sophisticated and streamlined fintech companies in the world came face-to-face with a very low tech and manual nature of fintech in Japan, and he explains how they made it all work. From detailed, extensive technical specifications that were delivered as uncopiable, printed documents in three-ring binders, to the Japanese aversion to interacting directly with banks and financial institutions, to trying to support some of Japan’s more unique payments, and some of the surprised they discovered once they began work. Stripe’s entry into the Japanese market is both an essential case study, for any fintech company looking at Japan, and an entertaining story for those of us with an interest in business in Japan. But you know, Daniel tells that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from out sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Daniel Heffernan of Stripe and we’re going to talk about Stripe’s market entry into Japan. And you guys have just officially launched officially but let’s back it up and talk about when you first came in. What was Stripe’s main motivation of coming into Japan in the first place? Daniel: Well, when we started looking at Japan, we looked at it kind of like we do every other market that we considered. There are a few things we look at when we’re trying to decide whether to go into a market. One of them is the size of the e-commerce economy. Japan is pretty big. Last year it was about $130 billion, which is significant. That’s actually number 4 in the world. So you have China and U.S., are giants at the top, then it’s kind of a big jump down, and you have the U.K., and Japan is actually just behind the U.K. If you think about it from a population point of view, it’s really weird because the population of U.K. is like half of Japan. Tim: Yeah, I find that surprising from both a population and an economy point of view. Daniel: Right. If you think about why that is, it’s because of the number of online transactions that are happening online, or aren’t. So in Japan, I think it was 4.7% of all transactions are online, which is really small. As someone who uses the internet 4.7% feels tiny. Tim: Yeah, so what is a comparable number in the U.S. for example? Daniel: The U.S. is actually pretty much in line, but if you look at the U.K., it’s jumping over 10% and it’s up around 14%. So in the U.K., lots of transactions are happening online, even though the absolute value of commerce is smaller. So there’s this sort of gap between Japan and the U.K. in how much is happening online. And there’s an even bigger gap within this generation of our expectation how of much transactions should be happening online and what it actually is. Tim: So Japan is still very much a cash-based society? Daniel: Yeah, it’s cash-based, it’s offline. People aren’t buying things on the internet. These numbers include cash on delivery

Startup M&A is changing in Japan. In August, Naoki Yamada sold his startup Conyac to Rozetta for $14 million. It was an unusual journey of alternating cycles of rapid growth and near bankruptcy, and today Naoki explains how he managed to make the deal happen and also how M&A is changing in Japan, and it seems that change might come much sooner than anyone had been expecting. Naoki talks very openly about some of the mistakes he made and give solid advice on how you can avoid making the same ones. And of course, he explains how he handled the negotiations for the acquisition, and why he decided the exit now rather than continue to grow the company. It’s a great story, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups How two quick pivots saved Naoki's company The risks for startups hiring (and firing) too quickly The temptation and danger of focusing on investors at the expense of the team Why M&A made more sense than another round of fundraising What Japanese acquiring companies are most worried and most excited about The struggles of post-M&A integration Advice for large companies who want to acquire startups Links from the Founder Learn more about Conyac at their home page Rozetta's Home page Read Naoki’s thoughts on Nakoki’s personal blog Follow him on Twitter @naokey Friend him on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 65. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Today, Naoki Yamada, founder of Conyac, joins us for a second time. Long-term listeners may remember that he first came on the show a little over 2 years ago and he’s been very busy since then. In August, 2016, Naoki sold his company to Rozeta for about 12 million dollars. But that deal almost didn’t happen and today Naoki joins us again to tell us the story of massive growth, followed by near bankruptcy, followed by massive growth, followed by near bankruptcy, followed by recovery, followed by M&A. So you already know the ending but it’s the story that’s important. Naoki talks very openly about some of the mistakes he made and gives solid advice on how you can avoid making the same ones. And of course, he explains how he handled the negotiations of the acquisition and why he decided to exit now, rather than continue to grow the company. But, you know, Naoki tells that story much better than I do, so let’s hear form our sponsor and then get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] Tim: Cheers. It’s great to see you again. I’m sitting here with Naoki Yamada and we’re going to talk about Conyac. And it’s an exciting story of starting up and growing, and almost going bankrupt, and growing, and almost going bankrupt again, and having a happy ending. So thanks for sitting down with us. Naoki: Thank you. Tim: So let’s back up a bit—let’s back up a lot. Tell us about what Conyac is. Naoki: When was the last time we talked? Tim: A little over two years ago. Naoki: Okay. It’s been a while and we’ve changed a lot. We started Conyac as a social translation and we slightly changed our service from customer service to business service in 2013. Tim: So let’s start from the beginning. In 2009, you started it. What is consumer translation? Was it like peer-to-peer translation? Naoki: It was more like a community-based translation service. At that time, there were only two options for the translations. One is traditional translation entities and the other one is Google. We wanted to make our service in between those two options, so we asked people who could do the translations outside of the community. We added many translators in our platform and we did translation through those people. Tim: So was it just very small batch translations of 10 words, or a tweet, or that kind of thing? Naoki: Most of the translations are for 3,000 small sentences, like letters and stuff. It worked for pleasure but it didn’t work for business? Tim: Just not enough demand? Naoki: Right. And it was hard to find people who pay for that. Tim: Okay. So once you learned that, you’re saying you pivoted to more of a B2B model? Naoki: Right. It was 4 years after it started, so it took a long time. Tim: It took a long time to realize that. Naoki: Yeah, and since 2013, we supported that B2B service and the sales increased 20 from that point. Tim: At that point, as you were pivoting to B2B, how big was your company? How much revenue? How much staff? Naoki: The revenue was like about $50,000 a month. And the staff at the time was like 10 people. Tim: Okay, so that’s back in 2013. Well, it sounds like you’re on your way. Naoki: In that year, we got investment from several venture capitals and we used a lot of money for the people we hired. Tim: That’s what start-ups are supposed to d

Expedia had a hard road to travel when they decided to come into Japan. The Japanese market turned out to be nothing like they had ever experienced before. Not only were consumer attitudes and behaviors towards travel booking completely different than it was in their home market, but they were up against some very powerful and well entrenched companies, including both online giants Rakuten and Yahoo and traditional powerhouses like JTB. Today Hidemaru Sato, or “Maru" as his friends call him, will explain to us how Expedia managed to overcome the odds on a ridiculously tight deadline and how a few tweaks to the core product turned out to be key to their success. Maru also shares some great advice for both western companies looking to hire a Japan country manager and for people who are Japan country managers and want to do their jobs more effectively. It’s a great discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Friend Maru on Facebook Connect with him on LinkedIn Maru's advice on successful market entry Maru's advice on how to hire a country manager Partial Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 64. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Travel giant Expedia has their work cut out for them coming into the Japanese market. Not only was the online travel game played very differently in Japan, but they were up against some very strong, very entrenched competition in Japan, both from the major online players like Rakuten Travel and Yahoo Travel, and from traditional players like JTB as well. Today we sit with down with Hidemaru Sato, or Maru, as his friends call him, and he explains how he had to change both Expedia’s marketing message and he product itself to make it attractive to Japanese consumers. In both cases, you’ll see why less is actually sometimes more. Maru also provides framework for both western companies looking to higher a Japanese country manager and for people who are Japanese country managers and want to do their jobs more effectively. Once you get to know Maru, you won’t be surprised to see that he has a very personality-driven approach on both counts. But you know, Maru can explain that much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsor and then get right to our interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So, we’re sitting down with Maru Sato, and you’ve brought a number of companies into Japan, but today we’re going to talk about Expedia. It was a while ago but let’s go back to when Expedia was first thinking of coming into Japan. What did they see that was important about the Japanese market? Why did they want to be here? Maru: Okay, I think back to maybe the early 2000s, and basically it’s kind of the boom. It’s a lot of successful U.S. companies who enter the Japan market because Japan was still strong. Tim: Well, it still is. The Japan market is still pretty big. Maru: Then also, the Japanese market is something like new IT technology or internet-related business just starting. The first company I just helped come into Japan market is America Online, AOL. This is 1999, so this is when AOL was the world’s biggest internet service at that time. So they expand to Europe first, U.K., Germany, France, and also the Asia Pacific. Tim: In both AOL’s case and Expedia’s case, it was just part of the natural global expansion. Maru: And then U.S. companies, or global companies, they expect the Japanese market is big. So now it’s the same thing. Basically the Japanese market is big but usually they do not understand the cultural difference, and also business difference, and also user difference. So a lot of our conflict— Tim: I want to talk about that a lot. Before we get to that, though, how did Expedia pick you? How did you end up running this organization? Maru: My experience, AOL launching experience here, and also more than 10 years experience in Japanese companies and U.S. business. Tim: You had a track record here in Japan, and also you had had operational experience in America as well? Maru: Because a U.S. company, or a global company, tries to find a person who understands western style business and Japanese style business both. Tim: Actually, let’s talk about this because this is such an important point. What do you think makes a really good country manager or local Japan CEO? Because so many foreign companies fail here. Maru: From my experience, and also from my friends’ experience, the reason why it’s not easy to find a right person for GM or country manager. It’s not so easy to find the person who knows both cultures. Tim: Well, it makes sense. Almost everyone’s incoming from one culture or another and there has to be a bridge. Maru: It’s many, many people who speaks much better English than be, but how long does a person u

This is a rather personal episode. We have no guests this time. It’s just you and me. From the outside, it looks like Airbnb is crushing it in Japan. Listings and rentals are both increasing at an unbelievable rate, and Japan is loosening her room-sharing (or minpaku) laws. The future looks bright for Airbnb here, but behind the scenes a resistance is secretly growing. You see, Airbnb has a real problem in Japan. At first glance many of the issues look familiar. They seem to be the same kinds of challenges Airbnb is facing all over the world, but things are different in Japan, and today we're going to take a look at how important these differences can be. It's worth noting that so far, Airbnb has not taken steps to address their Japan problem, or even publicly acknowledged that it exists. But it's a situation they will be forced to deal with over the next 18 months, and it's something that we can learn a lot from. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan Episode 63 Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Once again, I’ve got a special show for you today. There will be no guests, no beer, no playful banter with someone speaking English as a second language. Today it’s just you and me. For the next 20 minutes I’ll be whispering in your ear about something I consider very important, but that not enough people are talking about. Airbnb has a serious problem in Japan. They may or may not have recognized it yet, but there has been something massing behind the scenes, getting stronger and stronger. And it’s something that will become very visible over the next 18 months. Now, to the casual observer, and lets face it, most journalists and bloggers are casual observers. To the causal observer, it seems ridiculous to even claim that Airbnb has a problem in Japan. In fact, if you rely on what’s written in the English-language press, any rational person would conclude that Airbnb is crushing it in Japan. Let's look at the facts. Japan is Airbnb’s second largest and their fastest growing market. In fact, listings are up over 500% from last year. Furthermore, Airbnb are way out in front of their local competition. They have far more listings, and using publicly available data, it looks like Airbnb’s Japan site is getting more than 15x more traffic as the most popular local competitor. In fact, I’ve had several different investors speculate that the Japanese companies providing cleaning services to Airbnb hosts are probably making more money than the Japanese companies competing with Airbnb. And yet, Airbnb is dancing through a minefield in Japan. Whether they are doing it blindfolded or with their eyes wide open, well that’s anyone’s guess. But if you read Japanese and you care about such things you can see that there are powerful forces lining up against Airbnb in Japan, and next year we are going to see the start of a real public backlash. Now, I know what you are saying. This is nothing unique to Japan. Airbnb is fighting this backlash all over the world. I mean New York and Berlin just passed strong anti-Airbnb legislation, and Airbnb’s lawyers are suing and pushing back hard. San Francisco recently added new restrictions to Airbnb rentals and Airbnb is suing the city, of course. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] Airbnb is used to handing that kind of backlash and legal challenges. They are good at it. It’s in their DNA. No, what is happening in Japan is different. It’s quieter. More secret, and in some ways far more dangerous than the challenges they’ve faced in other markets. But i’m getting a bit ahead of my story. We will get to all of that. First let me set the stage and explain what is actually playing out on the ground here in Japan. So lets walk though what is happening around Airbnb in Japan and the drama that will be unfolding — whether they want it to or not — over the next 18 months. We’ll talk about what Airbnb has going for them in Japan, then we’ll take a look at the strange coalition of powers that are quietly aligning against them, and then finally, we’ll take a look at what Airbnb can do to counteract it and examine the three most likely ways this story will play out over the next few years. OK. To be sure, Airbnb actually has a lot of things going right for them here in Japan. Most important of all, Japan needs Airbnb — or something very much like them — to handle the inbound tourist traffic that will be coming to Japan over the next few years. Last year, a record 19.7 million foreign visitors came to Japan. That’s up 47 percent from the previous year, and quite frankly Tokyo’s existing hotel infrastructure simply can’t handle the load. Both occupancy rates and the cost of a stay are both extremely high right now. [pro_ad_display_adzon

GitHub entered the Japanese market under enviable conditions. They already had a strong corporate user base, solid brand awareness and product evangelists throughout Japan. They did not so much push their way into the Japanese market, so much as they were pulled into it. Even under the best conditions, however, Japan market entry is not easy and Derek Sorkin explains some of the challenges they faced with their distribution plans and the original go-to-market strategies. Managing to salvage a great ongoing relationship from what could have been a very ugly incident. Derek also explains why even in this age of Skype and go-to-meeting it’s absolutely essential to spend the time and money on airfare in managing international offices and to maintain trust and credibility. It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Links & Resources The GitHub homepage Connect with Derek on GitHub @dsorkin Follow him on twitter @thesorkin Connect with him on LinkedIn Partial Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 62. Welcome to Disrupting Japan - straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. GitHub entered the Japanese market under enviable conditions. They already had a strong corporate user base, solid brand awareness, and product evangelists throughout Japan. They did not so much push their way into the Japanese market so much as they were pulled into it. Even under the best conditions, however, Japan market entry is not easy, and Derek Sorkin explains some of the challenges they faced with their distribution plans and their original go-to-market strategies. And how they managed to salvage a great ongoing relationship from what could have been a very ugly incident. Derek also explains, even in this age of Skype and GoToMeeting, it’s absolutely essential to spend the time and money in airfare in managing international offices and to maintain trust and credibility. But Derek explains all of that much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsor and then get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So I’m sitting here with Derek Sorkin, the Asia Pacific for GitHub, who spearheaded GitHub’s entry into Japan and that’s what we’re going to talk about today, so thanks for sitting down with me. Derek: No problem, Tim. Good to talk to you again. Tim: Excellent. So listen, you guys have been here a while and you’re doing really well. Let’s step it back a couple of years. What did GitHub see in Japan? What was the motivation for coming here? Derek: We had quite an interesting background with Japan. Our co-founders had been coming here for some time for different conferences; working with companies like Digital Garage back in the day, talking to them; and open source has always had a strong foothold in Japan, things like many of the contributors to the Ruby Project, which GitHub is obviously built on to a certain extent. In Japan and Japanese. Tim: Ruby is from Japan. Derek: Right. So we always had a good core base of those Ruby developers that were interested in open source, that were using GitHub since very early days of GitHub, back in 2009 and 2010. So when we started in the B2B space and working with enterprises—and I think we’ll get into this a little more later, around how decisions are made in Japan—but that really helped us here. There were lots of the forward thinking internet companies. I say “internet companies” broadly, but internet gaming companies like that, that immediately took a hold with organizations on GitHub.com Tim: Okay, so even before you guys were here, you had brand awareness and you had users here in Japan. That’s a huge leg up in the market. Derek: Yeah. It makes it very interesting, especially at that time, a little more than three years or so, we didn’t have any staff in Japan. So all of our efforts in Japan to continue to raise that awareness and give back to the community were us coming over from San Francisco, from the U.S., or from wherever we happened to be around the world, for about a week at a time. Tim: You had one guy out here, Daisuke. Derek: Yeah, so that’s why I said three-and-a-half years ago. Three-and-a-half years ago, we hired Daisuke—Dice as we affectionately call him—and he was great. And still is great for GitHub. Tim: So let me ask you, you had brand awareness, you had a user base here from the very beginning, which is fantastic—so what was the trigger that finally made headquarters say now it’s finally time to set up headquarters in Japan for real? Derek: I think if I can point to one specific event, I was here back in early 2014, with one of the co-founders. We were going around and meeting with some of our existing customers here, and we were also invited to an event that one of the larger trading compani

You don’t usually think of Japan’s geisha as being an industry, but it is. In fact, strictly speaking, it’s a cartel. A cartel that is now being disrupted by internet-based booking agencies and low-cost substitutes. It seems that even geisha are not immune to internet-based disintermediation. In this special interview Sayuki, Japan’s only geisha that holds an MBA, explains the business model behind geisha. We talk about the way things used to be, the current threats that have many geisha concerned that the traditional art form and the lifestyle will not survive, and how some geisha houses are trying to adapt. This is a rare, behind the scenes look at the business of being a geisha and a chance to see how Japan’s geisha might survive and even thrive in the coming digital age. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups How Sayuki broke 100 years of tradition to become a geisha How geisha are being challenged by both the entertainment and tourism industries Changing geisha from a private art to a public one Why geisha might not survive the modern era of tourism The geisha cartel is being challenged, any why that's not good for anyone The challenge modern geisha face on social media The changes in training for the next generation of Japan's geisha Links from the Founder Sayuki's home page Follow her on twitter @sayukiofasakusa Become her patron on Patreon Follow her on Facebook Book a geisha experience Geisha Banquet in Tokyo Private Custom Shopping Tour with a Geisha Private Lunch with Sayuki Kimono Shopping Tokyo Tour [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 61. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Today I’ve got something really special for you. We are going to talk about the kind of business that you’ve probably never heard any details about. Today we’re going to sit down and interview Sayuki, a Geisha. And since this is Disrupting Japan, we’ll be talking about the business side of being a Geisha. We’ll look at the Geisha business model and examine how it’s being disrupted by modern technology. And believe me, it really is. Now, listeners outside Japan might not understand how special this opportunity is. Traditionally, Geisha are not really supposed to talk about their business. Geisha create the illusion of comfort, beauty, and elegance, that is unsoiled by such base things as money. But make no mistake about it; it’s an illusion. Geisha is a very serious business and Sayuki, who also has an MBA from Oxford, has agreed to sit down and walk us through it. In fact, from a business point of view, Geisha are an established cartel that are being disrupted by new technology, the internet, and tourism websites in particular, and by low-cost substitutes. And there’s a very good chance that Geisha will not survive in their traditional form. In fact, many Geisha houses are proactively trying to adapt to this new market environment. But Sayuki tells this story much better than I do, so let’s hear from our sponsor and then get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So today we’re sitting down with Sayuki, who is a bonafide Geisha here in Japan and we’re going to talk about the business of being a Geisha, so thanks so much for sitting down with me today. Sayuki: Thank you. Tim: First and foremost, a lot of our audience is either in Japan or knows a lot about Japan, but a lot of people don’t, so before I get started for the business can you clear up exactly what a Geisha is, what they do now, what they used to do? Sayuki: A Geisha means arts person, literally. So Geisha are traditional dancers or musicians, and most of the entertainment that we do is private entertainment. So we go to dinners and parties, which are usually in private rooms, and not large-scale public performances, although we also do those occasionally. Tim: Okay. You’ve been a Geisha now for about 10 years? Sayuki: Nearly. Getting there. Tim: Wow. Okay, so since this is an audio podcast, I should explain that you are Caucasian—you are not Japanese, which makes you very unique and I’m sure appealing in the world of Geisha. But can you back up a bit and tell us a story of why on Earth you decided to become a Geisha and how you managed to do it? Sayuki: Sure. I’m an anthropologist. I got my doctorate from the University of Oxford, and graduating, I started to lecture in Japanese studies, and also to make documentary programs for television for broadcasters like BBC or National Geographic Channel. And I took a slate of ideas one day to National Geographic Channel, including ideas about infiltrating the mafia and all of those kinds of things. And one of those ideas was to make a program about Geisha. Tim: