Disrupting Japan

Japan has a long cultural fascination with human-like robots. Literature, cinema and anime are filled with them, and perhaps not surprisingly, a large number of Japanese startups are focused on making anthropomorphic robots. I have to admit that this fascination never really made sense to me until Shunsuke explained it during this interview. Our guest today, Shunsuke Aoki of Yukai Engineering lays...

There are not many industries more resistant to disruption than satellite and aerospace. The dominant firms thrive largely because of the massive capital requirements and strong government connections. Yuya Nakamura of Axelspace is confident he can change that. Axelspace’s micro-satellites are a complete redesign of what a satellite can be, and they come in at one-tenth the weight and one-hundredt...

More than ten years before Quora and ZenDesk became famous, there was OKWave. Kaneto Kanemoto founded OKWave to address a massive problem that was unique to the Japanese internet in the mid-1990’s. Most of the country felt the situation was inevitable, even natural, but Kaneto knew it had to change. You see, a strict code of conduct governs almost all aspects of business and social behavior in Jap...

Yuka considers Famarry to be the happiest company in the world, and looking at who her customers are, I think she just might be right. But behind this happy company is an aggressive plan to disrupt a cartel of photo studios that have dominated the market for decades. Changes in technology and demographics has opened up a small crack in the wall, and Famarry plans on using it to gain a foothold and...

It’s hard to imagine an organization more resistant to change and disruption than the government of Japan. But today’s guest, William Saito has made it his mission to bring innovation to the way the Japanese bureaucracy operates. And more astoundingly, he’s actually having an effect. William is in a unique situation as a special advisor to the Japanese cabinet, and brings the perspective of a succ...

Startup culture has crazy and contradictory views about failure. As founders we are told to fail fast, but also to never give up. We are told to follow our vision, but be ready to pivot. Somehow this macho-bullshit culture of “I never really fail and ‘m not afraid of failure.” has become dominant amount founders. But it’s the result of denial. Trivializing failure is a way of not thinking about it...

Japan was once home to some of the most innovative companies on the planet, but those companies lost their innovate edge a long time ago. Today, many are betting on startups to change the course of the Japanese economy and to some extent, that’s already starting to happen. Ijichi Sorato of Creww, however, is betting on a different approach to win out, that of Open Innovation. The future Ijichi env...

500 Startups has been one of the driving forces behind the utter disruption of how seed funding is done.  That shift is one of the reasons we have seen such large and diverse startup ecosystems emerging around the world.  Japan, however, often changes more slowly than other nations. Today we sit down and talk with James Riney, the new head of 500 Startups Japan, about why Japanese venture capitali...

Too many things that are labeled as "cultural differences" have much simpler explanations. There are perfectly rational (and even mathematical) reasons why we have not seen a lot of entrepreneurship in Japan over the last 50 years, why we are starting to see a lot more of if now, and why we are likely to see an explosion of Japanese startups in the coming decade. In this episode, we look what happ...

Corporate accounting is not usually the first thing the comes to mind when you think of disruptive technology, and for the most part, that’s a good thing. Daisuke Sasaki of Freee, however, is changing the way accounting is done in Japan from the bottom up. Bringing change to a conservative industry, however, is not easy. The fact is that in the accounting industry almost all users and stakeholders...

The Internet of Things is becoming so commonplace that it is almost almost invisible. About a year ago, Moff launched an extremely clever IoT toy called the Moff-band that allows kids to add sound effects to their every-day play. They toy had been successful, but for Moff to take the next step they need to create a platform around the toy. Akinori Takahagi explains how he bootstrapped up Moff whil...

Disrupting Japan is one year old, and ready to party. To celebrate , we gathered some of the leaders of Tokyo's startup community together in front of a live audience, had a few drinks, and talked about the future of startups in Japan. Our panel included perspectives from software, IOT, and venture capital, which led to some interesting discussions.

Marketing automation is new in Japan, and it’s taking a lot of Japanese companies off guard. For decades, sales in Japan have been done by armies of salarymen in navy-blue suits visiting clients and marketing, well until recently, most Japanese companies didn’t make much of a distinction between marketing and advertising. This week, we get a chance to sit down and talk with Sunao Munakata, the fou...

Everything we thing we know about design is changing. This transformation is further advanced in America, but the seeds have already been planted in Japan and the changes are now starting to take root. Brandon Hill explains how design, rather than more traditional analytical methods, is the ideal prism from which to view potential solutions to business problems. Not just the best approach to impro...

Almost all startup accelerators are going bankrupt and going away. Hiro Maeda, the founder of two of Japan's most successful, and most different startup incubators explains both the brief past and precarious future of startup incubators and accelerators. We talk not only about the mechanics and challenges of what it takes to make an incubator successful, but Hiro has some practical advice on when ...

Every 15 years, like clockwork, the Japanese gaming industry is disrupted by a new technology.  The console giants were crippled by the first generation of mobile games published by companies like DeNA and Gree. Now those companies are now losing business to smaller publishers selling through the Apple Store and Google Play. Rintaro Oyaizu used to run his own game development company and now runs ...

I love low-tech solutions. They are more likely to be solving real problems, and if we are being honest with ourselves, a true a minimum viable product (or business) usually does not involve cool new technology. Hiroki Kudo of MerryBiz has rolled out a minimal solution to address their client’s bookkeeping needs, and he is now in the process of trying to gently walk his customers from this small,...

Ari Horie has no interest "empowering" women and sensitivity training is not in her toolkit. Ari is showing the startup world that incorporating some of the problem-solving skills and leadership techniques favored by women improves their chance of success. Women having a leading role in entrepreneurship is not the socially responsible thing to do. It is the most profitable thing to do. Ari's been...

So many things that are labeled as "cultural differences" have much simpler explanations. There are perfectly rational (and even mathematical) reasons why we have not seen a lot of entrepreneurship in Japan over the last 50 years, why we are starting to see a lot more of if now, and why we are likely to see an explosion of Japanese startups in the coming decade.

Gengo understands the need for small-batch translation. Global communication takes place exponentially faster than the project management cycle, and understanding is way too important to be left to machines. And with even the smallest and most early stage startups understand the importance of going global, Gengo seems to have found their niche. Matt and I talk about the growth of the company, the...

Makuake is one of Japan's largest crowdfunding platforms. It was spun out of CyberAgent in 2013 with Ryotaro Nakayama (or Naka as his foreign friends call him) as CEO. Crowdfunding has taken off more slowly in Japan than it has in the US, and it has followed a different growth path. It started out primarily as a way to raise money for charitable causes and at the moment crowdfunding  seems to be h...

Yuta Inoue and Quantum have developed a model to help large Japanese companies both work with innovative startups and to remember how to innovate internally. Many find it hard to believe today, but Japanese companies used to be some of the most innovative firms on the planet, and Yuta explains how a few of them are now starting to return to their creative roots. His approach is a combination of ch...

Koichiro Yoshida took CrowdWorks from idea to IPO in less than three years, and today both CrowdWorks and crowd-sourcing in general are seen as essential to Japan’s future economy.  Just 10 years ago,  Japanese politicians pointed to freelancers and part-times as part of the cause of Japan's economic woes. Fortunately, Japan's leadership is now beginning to realizing that having a flexible and ski...

Startup founders know that going from zero to one means not only making mistakes, but also asking for help. Unfortunately, in Japan asking for help has traditionally been seen as a sign of weakness.  In both professional and personal life you are expected to be either a confident leader or an obedient follower. Such attitudes tend to crush innovation and entrepreneurship. One startup founder think...

Investors were skeptical that combining traditional face-to-face learning with a P2P web platform would work. Over the past three years, startup founder Takashi Fujimoto of StreetAcademy has been proving them wrong. Takashi is showing Japan that the new does not have to replace the old. Sometimes the new just makes the old things even better. StreetAcademy matches those who want to teach with thos...