Episodes

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 comme...

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 build...

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 av...

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...

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. ...

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...

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 sta...

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...

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 c...

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,...

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 chan...

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 coun...

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 ho...

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, whe...

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 sta...

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, includi...

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 inte...

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...

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...

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, wil...

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, a...

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 gr...

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 concern...

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 wanted to make sure that did not happen to them in Japan. In this podcast, Jonathan Epstein explains how ...