Disrupting Japan

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 th...

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 fa...

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 behin...

FinTech is one of the hottest startup sectors right now, but if you've been in the industry for a while, you know that FinTech is always one of the hottest startup sectors. And yet FinTech companies seem strangely local. Very few succeed outside their home markets. A complex web of regulations and local sensibilities almost always results in these firms struggling in overseas markets. PayPal wante...

Spacee has staked out an interesting position in the sharing economy. Spacee enables companies and individuals to rent out unused meeting room space to people who need to hold a meeting. It's an interesting take on applying a sharing economy model to business. I’m generally very skeptical of startups who define themselves as “Uber for X” or “Airbnb for Y”, particularly in the B2B space, but Spacee...

Today is the first episode off our new expanded format. From today, we’ll be covering both disruptive Japanese startups and detailed market entry case studies of global companies that are disrupting Japan from the outside. Oracle first came into Japan more than 25 years ago, but the challenges they faced and overcame then are exactly the same ones firms are facing today in executing their Japan ma...

Material Wrld has found a way to innovate in online fashion commerce, and that’s no easy task. It’s a crowded market, with tight margins. Rie Yano and her team, however, have found success by going against common wisdom. While their competitors were focused on building platforms and reducing the amount of work required by their staff, Material Wrld went the other way. They began to take on invento...

The aerospace industry has been particularly resistant to disrupting in Japan. In the rest of the world, launch vehicle and spacecraft technology has made incredible gains over the past decade, but here in Japan its still mostly the same government contracts going to the same major contractors. Naomi Kurahara of InfoStellar, has come up with an innovative way to leverage existing aerospace infrast...

Disrupting Japan is two years old and ready to party.  To celebrate, we gathered the leaders of Tokyo's venture capital community together in front of a live audience of made up of the thought leaders of Japan's startup community. We all had a few drinks and talked about fundraising in Japan, the future of venture capital here, and how startups can best get in touch with and impress VCs. Our panel...

Ten years ago, everyone know that e-commence would drive most retail stores, especially specially stores out of business, and with the Amazon juggernaut plowing ahead, there were very few dissenters. But something very interesting is going on right now. Many e-commerce companies are opening physical stores. Even Amazon, going against all economies of scale, is opening up brick and mortar bookstore...

Fashion is a tough business, and fashion subscription boxes are even tougher. From the top down, this seems like a great business model. Subscribers are sent a new, hand-picked box of clothes or accessories each and every month. As you’ll see ...

Long before the maker movement existed, Akihabara was world famous as a destination for hardware geeks, robotics nerds, and audiophiles and tinkerers of all kinds. Hundreds of tiny specialty shops lined the areas back streets and did a surprising brisk business in items you could not find anywhere else. The internet changed all that. The specialty electronics and computer goods could be found far...

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...

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...

A key component to making a startup a success is knowing who your true customers are. Today, Antti Sonninen, the Japan CEO for Slush, one of the largest startup events in the world lays out the business model for us, and the facts will probably surprise you. Many of our American listeners will not have heard of Slush since they have not yet expanded to North America, but they are a startup event p...

Crowdfunding is at a crossroads. The inherent conflict of interest in the business model is forcing US firms to either limit their growth or become the online equivalent of late-night infomercials. In Japan, however, crowdfunding has grown more slowly than in the US, and Japanese companies have had the chance to learn from their  successes and failures. As a result crowdfunding may end up looking...

Last week I published a article on Medium about why I was shutting down my current startup. If you haven't read it yet, you can find out  Why I turned down $500K, Pissed off my investors, and Shut down my startup . The post went viral and I've received several thousand emails in the last few days.  The outpouring of support, questions, advice and random thoughts I received from readers made me rea...

Pocket Supernova has pivoted through three countries and three completely different products before they hit their stride with their current video editing platform for mobile, and they now seem ready to move a generation of video content creators out from behind their desktops and onto their mobile phones. We talk about the market forces that lead to the past pivots and why the team is confident t...

We are about to start seeing more cars but fewer drivers on the road. Self-driving vehicles are already moving out of the labs and onto the roads world-wide, and Yuki Saji thinks Japan has a unique competitive advantage in the space. Yuki is CEO of SB Drive, Softbank’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary which was recently spun out. We talk a lot about the future of driverless cars, of course, but also...

Japan could be, and perhaps should be, a BioTech startup powerhouse. The size of the market, the aging population and the depth and quality of the fundamental research being done here should make Japan a global player. But something is holding her back. Today we talk to Yutaro Kyono and Yoichiro Hara, two of the co-founders of Molcure about the challenges facing BioTech in Japan and how they have...

Everyone talks about the importance of international markets and how startups need to think globally from day one. Few companies, however, build that goal into their DNA as completely as Miku Hirano’s Cinnamon. Cinnamon’s core product, Tuya is a micro-video sharing platform where users share four-second clips about their daily lives. The visual nature gives Tuya obvious international appeal. Howev...

Japanese banking is one of the most conservative industries in one of the most conservative countries in the world. That’s what makes it both so difficult and so profitable to disrupt. Today, Paul Chapman talks to us about the founding and growth of Moneytree, a personal finance app that is quickly growing into something much bigger and more important. Japan still has a reputation as being a close...

Over the last 25 years, both Zest and Yuki Ito have been through several different incarnations. Interestingly, these incarnations perfectly mirror the changes we have seen in Japan’s startup scene in that time. Today Zest makes cloud-based, field-service software, which is used to dispatch expensive resources for complex jobs, but they started out years ago as a software outsourcer when that was...

Overall trends are going pretty well for startups in Japan, but things could be a lot better. One strange thing seems to be that almost everyone asking how to improve things for startup in Japan are either government officials, academics or venture capitalists. It's fantastic that they are interested, and their interest in sincere, but there is only so much they can do. What needs to happen ...

Koki Hayashi of Letibee is walking a difficult path by combining a startup business with social activism, but he just might pull it off. Japan is very rapidly becoming more accepting of those who are openly gay, and 2015 was a year of extremely rapid progress for gay rights. Letibee has plans to capitalize on this movement, and to hopefully do some good along the way. Letibee is an online gatherin...