Episodes

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 Spaceee has already been in business for several years in Japan, and they are seeing strong traction and i...

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 market entry. Allen explains why Oracle needed a unique sales and marketing strategy for Japan, and ho...

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 inventory risk and doing some of the most labor intensive parts of the process in house. This is the kind o...

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 infrastructure and to collaborate globally by renting out unused satellite ground-sataion time, Airbnb styl...

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 included some of the top VC investors in Japan, which naturally led to an amazing discussion. - Shin...

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 bookstores in expensive locations with full-time staff. And there a good reason for this trend. There is some...

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 more easily and for far less money. Even the maker communities began to migrate online. Over the nex...

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 to the bathroom. At first this seems almost like a joke, a company solving a problem that does not ex...

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 powerhouse in Europe and, increasingly, in Asia. Their recent event in Tokyo had over 4,000 attendees...

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 very different in Japan than it does overseas. In today’s discussion, Ryota Matsuzaki, the CEO of Kib...

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 realize that rather than my usual chaotic way of deciding what I will be doing next, I should really ask ...

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 they they have a winner on their hands this time. Oscar also outlines what he sees as the critical bu...

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 look into what Softbank, one of Japan’s largest and most valuable companies. is doing to ensure that...

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 managed to get around them. The Molcure system greatly reduces the time and resources to develop ant...

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. However, Cinnamon has a core team of Japanese founders, with primarily Japanese backers, and they founde...

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 closed market, and it is harder than many, but if Paul and his two Western co-foudners can make this big ...

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 almost the only option for a small technology startup. We talk about Zest's products and plans, of c...

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 gathering place for Japan’s LGBT community, and they generate revenues not only by selling advertising to co...

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 it all out in a way that makes perfect sense. We talk about Bocco, Yukai’s new social robot, and we...

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-hundredth the cost of conventional hardware. Axelspace has already launched the world’s first commercial mic...

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 Japan, and as a result, most Japanese are exceptionally polite in day-to-day interactions. However, whe...

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 then to change the entire industry for the better. We also talk about why so many foreign startups ...