Disrupting Japan

Technology develops differently in Japan. While US tech giants have been grabbing artificial intelligence headlines, a business AI sector has been quietly maturing in Japan, and it is now making inroads into America.  Today we sit down again with Miku Hirano, CEO of Cinnamon, and we talk about how exactly this happened.  Interestingly, Cinnamon did not start out as an AI company. In fact, when Mik...

Ari Horie has always had a different approach to supporting women entrepreneurs. She doesn't talk about "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 social...

Japanese enterprises are their own worst enemy when it comes to innovation. In this live panel discussion, I talk about my experience driving innovation at TEPCO, and Ion and Jenson share their experiences running innovation labs. This panel was part of the btrax Design for Innovation event in Tokyo last week. We talk about the specific challenges that Japanese companies are facing and the strateg...

This year at CEATEC, I was on stage with founders from two very different hardware startups. We talk in-depth about what it takes to be a hardware startup in a world where venture capital seems fixated on SaaS companies and software platforms.  Although their startups seem very different, Tomo Hagiwara and Keith Tan had very similar core experiences. Tomo and Keith share some great advice about ra...

The promise of AI is easily understood by anyone with an imagination, and for 40 years, venture capitalists have been enthusiastically investing in that promise. However, it's been significantly harder for founders to turn that investment into sustainable business models.  Today we are going to look at why that is, and go over what might be a blueprint for startups to create business models around...

Education is very hard to disrupt. That’s both good and bad. Education is so important to both individuals and society, it should not be changed on a whim, but over time it seems that our institutions of higher education have drifted away from meeting students real needs. Yoshito Hori, founder and CEO of Globis, is making radical changes. He turned a small training school into Japan's first indepe...

Ad-fraud is one of the most profitable activities for organized crime today. The scammers are sophisticated, disciplined, and numerous, and they might be using your IoT devices to rip people off. Over the past decade, there has been relatively little of this kind of cybercrime in Japan, but that's changing as the ad-fraud crime networks go global. Japan has to catch up and catch up fast. Unfortuna...

The robotics ecosystem in Japan is amazing. And confusing. It's a collection of crazy ideas, odd creations, and true breakthroughs. And despite the combination of fawning prise and snide skepticism that Japanese robotics evoke in the international press, only time can really separate the true breakthroughs from the dead ends. Today, we sit down with Tez Sawanobori, the founder of Connected Robotic...

Those of us who spend our lives working with startups live in a bubble. Whether you spend your days programming at a startup or investing in new ventures, you and I see things differently than “normal” people. It happens to everyone to some extent. We all tend to interact with people who are like us, who care about similar things and who work in similar industries, so of course, we frequently hear...

Last month I was part of a panel discussion hosted by Stanford University and the Japan Society of Northern California. It was part of this year’s Japan-US Innovation Awards, and it was a great conversation, so I thought I would share it with you. The panel was moderated by Dr. Richard Dasher and was a discussion between me and Allison Baum who is an investor and a prolific writer about startups a...

Startup founders claiming their company is going to “change the world” has become a cliche. But rarely do we see a product that could clearly and significantly make someone’s life better. D-Free is one of those products. Atsushi Nakanishi and his team have developed a wearable device that monitors your bowels and bladder, pairs with your phone and notifies you a few minutes before you need to go t...

Japanese university and government venture funds play a much larger role in Japan than in the West.  I've always considered this difference to be, on balance, neutral, today's guest makes a convincing case that these funds are actually hurting the startup ecosystem here.  Today we sit down and talk with Hiroaki Suga, co-founder of PeptiDream.  PeptiDream is now a $7 billion biotech company, but it...

Startups and venture capital work differently in Japan. The rounds are smaller, the priorities distinct, and while the same terms are used, people quickly discover that the definitions are often subtly different. The game is played differently in Japan. Today we get a chance to clear up a lot of the confusion as we sit down with James Riney, founder of Coral Capital and head of 500 startups Japan....

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...

Last month, I moderated a panel discussion at Coral Capital’s “Bilingual’s and Gaijin in Startups” event.  Our panel focused on what foreigners should expect when working at Japanese startups and what Japanese startups should start doing to better support their international employees.  It was a great conversation with four amazing people from four of Japan’s most interesting startups.     Tetsuya...

The idea of computers capable of reading our emotions and responding to them is both fascinating and terrifying. Will this technology serve us or manipulate us?  Well, the speculation is ending because the technology not only exists, but it is being rolled out commercially.  Today I'd like you to meet Hazumu Yamazaki, co-founder of Empath. Empath is a web-based API that detects human emotion from...

It turns out that we are not willing to pay very much for simple convenience, so the technology is coming into our homes bundled with different agendas.  We've seen this happen with the success of Alexa and Google Home, and we are now seeing it here in Japan with Nature Remo.  Today we sit down and talk with Haruumi Shiode, the founder and CEO of Nature, and we discuss not only what the future of...

Selling SaaS in Japan is very different than selling products or traditional 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 und...

New listeners might not know that for about one year, Disrupting Japan was sponsored and was my primary source of income.  So today, I thought I would share the history of Disrupting Japan, about my decision to go pro (and then go amateur), my visions of a podcast empire, and how it all came crashing down.   

The promise of renewable energy has always been alluring. Now that the technology has caught up to the promise, record amounts of wind and solar are coming onto the grid both in Japan and throughout the world.  But so far startups, especially Japanese startups, have been playing a very limited role in this transformation. But that's starting to change. Today we sit down with Ken Isono, founder and...

It's a great time to be a programmer in Japan. Everyone is hiring and there simply is not enough talent available. But why is that? The truth is that until about 10 years ago, programming was considered kind of a blue-collar, low-skill job. It was OK to start your career as a programmer, but if you had not moved into management by the time you were 30, clearly you weren't that bright. The startup...

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...

A few years ago, shiny new startups were using their marketing dollars to tell the world that chatbots were going to change everything. Those marketing dollars have now been spent and most of those startups are no more. But for the past few years, one company has been quietly making chatbots useful, and they are now starting to make some noise. Today we sit down with Akemi Tsunagawa, founder of Be...

Everything about employment in Japan is changing.  Lifetime employment is gone.  Skilled workers are discovering that they have job mobility and large Japanese companies are increasingly confused by the fact that many new graduates don't want to work for them.  Wantedly has been one of the companies that has changed the way corporate recruiting works in Japan, and today we sit down and talk with t...

Uber and Airbnb represent a new very kind of startup, one that could not have existed twenty years ago, and the very thing that make these companies so transformative in the United States ensures they will never succeed in Japan. You see...