Disrupting Japan

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. Unfortunately, Japan defenses have been rather poor.

Today we sit down and talk with someone who is fixing that.  Satoko Ohtsuki is the founder and CEO of Phybbit, Japan's largest ad-fraud prevention network, and she's going to explain the biggest scam you've probably never heard of.

Of course, we talk about the different kinds of ad-fraud and what is being done to combat them, but we also talk about how she was pushed into entrepreneurship, and the challenges of raising money (and raising children) as a female founder in Japan.

It's a great discussion with one of the most interesting founders in Japan,  and I think you will really enjoy it.

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 Robotics, and we talk about how robots are being adopted in the restaurant industry here in Japan.

Connected Robotics already has two lines of consumer-visible robots being used in restaurants in Japan, and the reaction from the owners, the employees, and the customers has been overwhelmingly positive and quite a bit different than similar experiments run in America.

We talk about the strong economic and social pressures affecting the adoption of robots in restaurants and discuss the changes he had to make before chefs and robots can really work side by side.

It's a great conversation, and I think you will really enjoy it.

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 the same ideas and opinions.  The startup bubble, however, is particularly strong and particularly opaque. 

We founders have a bad habit of believing our own bullshit. 

Well today, we step outside our bubble and sit down with Mone Kamishiraishi, the star of the new film Startup Girls. We talk about what she learned as an outsider interviewing startup founders to get ready for her role, what most Japanese find surprising about founders and startup culture, and what Japan can do to to make starting a company more mainstream and accepted. 

It's a great conversation, and I think you will really enjoy it.

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 and innovation.

We talk about a surprising source of innovation in Japan, discuss why there are not more Japanese unicorns, and peer into our crystal balls to predict what Japan’s startup ecosystem will look like in three to five years.

It’s was a great discussion, so I packaged it up for you as is, with no editing or commentary.

I think you’ll really enjoy it.

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 exist, proof that anyone can raise funding these days. But its not.

There are millions of people all over the world who because of disability or disease, cannot regulate their bowels, and a device like D-Free would, quite literally, be life-changing for them.

Atsushi and I talk about his rather unique inspiration for the company and the team’s hight;y unusual path in testing and development.

It’s a fascinating product and a great story, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

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 started out as a couple of university faculty members funding operations out of their own pockets. 

PeptiDream succeeded by using a very different model than that used by either the current generation of university spin-outs or biotech startups in the West. It's an interesting blueprint that other biotech firms might want to copy, but only if they are really sure that their technology will actually work.

It's a great conversation, and I think you will really enjoy 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. We talk about some of the most significant changes that Japanese venture capital has seen over the past five years, and we look at how things are going to develop going forward.

James and I also break down the business model behind venture capital funds themselves. It's something that all serious startup founders should understand, but few do.

It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.

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’s effects.

The truth is that failure sucks. Failure is painful. Failure ends friendships and marriages. I suspect that most who trivialize it are eager deeply afraid of failure or have never really failed at anything important.

Today Hiroshi Nagashima tells a story of a startup gone very wrong. You’ll hear the red-flags start to appear as the story unfolds. There are important lessons to be learned here, but not just strategic ones.

Hiro’s honest story about what it really feels like to have the company you love fall apart and what t’s like to try to put your life back together in failure-phobic Japan is something all startup founders need to understand.

It’s a great story with no cliches, no feel-good rationalizations and no bullshit.

I think you’ll get a lot out of this one.

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 Sawanobori of Connected Robotics

    Jordan Fisher of Zehitomo

    Takanori Sato of Shippio

    Tatsuo Kinoshita of Mercari

This is a bonus episode, so the recording is straight off the board. There is no editing, no transcription, and no witty summary at the end alluding to the larger significance of the discussion. 

But a lot of good ideas were shared on stage, so I really wanted to share it with you. 

If you’ve ever thought about working for a Japanese startup, I think you’ll really enjoy this.

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 audio data, and its initial use in call-centers has shown a significant increase in sales. But as Hazumu explains, the potential effects are much larger. 

It's an enlightening conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.