Episodes

Have you ever been at a crowded and noisy party and heard a conversation across the room? You catch pieces of it, and you know it is interesting, but you can’t quite make it out and you can quite push your way over to that side of the room to be a part of it. Well, that was the situation a lot of our guests found themselves in a few weeks ago, so today we are going to set things right. Last month 500 Startups and Disrupting Japan held a joint event that focused on how Japanese and foreign staff ...

Hardware is hard. In fact, sometimes the simplest and most straightforward ideas turn out to be the hardest to implement. Today I’d like you to meet Kyohi Kang the founder and CEO of Atmoph. Atmoph is a programmable window which can display the sights and sounds of hundreds of scenic places from all over the world. It's an exciting project, and the team attracted a great deal of early interest. They even ran one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns and a smaller, but still successful, Ja...

Right now, it looks like the most profitable business models that are emerging from the mapping of the human genome are not in the field of medicine, but in a variety of B2C business models focused on consumer marketing. That may be a surprising claim, but if the past 40 years of life sciences have taught us anything, it's that our genetic information will be both more valuable and harder to understand than we expect it to be. Today, I’d like you to meet Tomohiro Takano, CEO and founder of Awake...

We startup founders and investors like to talk about “moonshots”. It points out startups that have huge dreams, those that are solving hard problems, and those that will actually change the world if they succeed. Usually, the term moonshot is used metaphorically, but today I’d like to introduce you to a literal moonshot. Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, plans on landing commercial payloads on the moon in the next two years. Ispace is in the process of developing lunar landers and lun...

Using artificial intelligence to change the way the education system works seems like a fool’s errand. When you combine the fluid and opaque nature of AI technology with the slow, bureaucratic decision making of education, you usually wind up with the perfect storm of stagnation, frustration, and rapidly burning through investor capital. Out guest today, however, thinks he’s found a way to make it work. Daisuke Inada, founder and CEO of Atama+, left a promising career at Mitsui to start an EdTec...

The global energy markets are transforming themselves right before our eyes. Very little fundamental change has occurred over the past 70 years, but 10 years from today the Japanese and global markets are going to look completely different. Today we sit down with Yohei Kiguchi CEO in Enechange, Japan’s largest retail energy switching platforms, and we dive into detail about how these markets are changing. We talk about Enechange’s business model, of course, but we also discuss the most effecti...

Having a free product tier is a time-proven way for startups to get a foot in the door by giving potential customers a low-risk way of evaluating your product. However, there are times when it's easier and much more profitable to simply make the sale. Yu Taniguchi s CEO of Vesper and creator of TableSolution.TableSolution is a SaaS product similar to OpenTable. It helps restaurant owners manage their reservations and better understand their customers. You might not have heard of them yet, but yo...

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 the...

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 ...

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 wors...

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 consu...

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 stag...

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 everyth...

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, ...

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 - CEO, Soracom - Takuma Iwasa - CEO, Cerevo - Shin Sakane - CEO, Seven Dreamers We talk about strategies for global growth, how to b...

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 ...

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.

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. Anyti...

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 s...

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 ...

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 Ja...

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.

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 p...

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 foo...