Disrupting Japan

It turns out that we are not willing to pay very much for simple convenience, so the technology is coming into our homes bundled with different agendas. 

We've seen this happen with the success of Alexa and Google Home, and we are now seeing it here in Japan with Nature Remo. 

Today we sit down and talk with Haruumi Shiode, the founder and CEO of Nature, and we discuss not only what the future of home automation will look like, but who will be paying for it. 

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

Selling SaaS in Japan is very different than selling products or traditional 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 countries.

We talk about hiring strategies and techniques he used to get his initial customers and some of the most common mistakes that western companies make with their senior leadership in Japan.

It’s basically a blueprint for how to grow a services company from nothing to thousands of people in Japan, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

New listeners might not know that for about one year, Disrupting Japan was sponsored and was my primary source of income.  So today, I thought I would share the history of Disrupting Japan, about my decision to go pro (and then go amateur), my visions of a podcast empire, and how it all came crashing down.

The promise of renewable energy has always been alluring. Now that the technology has caught up to the promise, record amounts of wind and solar are coming onto the grid both in Japan and throughout the world. 

But so far startups, especially Japanese startups, have been playing a very limited role in this transformation.

But that's starting to change.

Today we sit down with Ken Isono, founder and CEO of Shizen Energy, and we talk about what it takes to succeed as an energy startup in Japan, and since Shizen Energy is rapidly expanding globally, what it takes to succeed as a startup in the global energy markets.

We talk about which renewables are working in Japan and which are not, what the real bottlenecks are, and more important, how we can fix them.

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

It's a great time to be a programmer in Japan. Everyone is hiring and there simply is not enough talent available.

But why is that?

The truth is that until about 10 years ago, programming was considered kind of a blue-collar, low-skill job. It was OK to start your career as a programmer, but if you had not moved into management by the time you were 30, clearly you weren't that bright.

The startup boom has changed that, and developer salaries (and respect) has improved significantly. But the education system has not caught up, and far too few people know how to code.

Today we sit down with Masa Kato, founder of Progate, and discuss how Japan got herself into this situation, and what Progate is doing to fix it. The problems run deeper than expected.

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

Corporate accounting is not usually the first thing the comes to mind when you think of disruptive technology, and for the most part, that’s a good thing. Daisuke Sasaki of Freee, however, is changing the way accounting is done in Japan from the bottom up.

Bringing change to a conservative industry, however, is not easy. The fact is that in the accounting industry almost all users and stakeholders would rather muddle though with a painful system they know than try something new. Daisuke’s solution, of course, was to expand the market by growing the user-base. To go after new customers who have never used any of the existing accounting software products, and would be horrified by them if they tried.

Daisuke also took the radical (for Japan) step of relying almost entirely on inbound sales, focusing on marketing and social media to generate demand and often simply refusing requests for sales calls. That strategy is paying off. Freee’s user base is booming and the incumbents are now scrambling to catch up.

We also talk a lot about how Japanese industries are particularly susceptible to stagnation and technological dead ends, and what might be a huge change coming in the way Japanese companies run their HR department.

It’s a great interview and I think you’ll enjoy it.

A few years ago, shiny new startups were using their marketing dollars to tell the world that chatbots were going to change everything.

Those marketing dollars have now been spent and most of those startups are no more. But for the past few years, one company has been quietly making chatbots useful, and they are now starting to make some noise.

Today we sit down with Akemi Tsunagawa, founder of Bespoke and creator of the Bebot chatbot.In several important ways, Bespoke is one of the most successful chatbot companies in the world, and you'll be hearing a lot about them in the years to come.

Today, however, Akemi explains how she and the team managed to succeed where so many better-funded companies failed, and she gives some great advice about how to get consumers to try out new technologies. We also talk about why you should absolutely never build your business around Facebook or WeChat.

Everything about employment in Japan is changing. 

Lifetime employment is gone.  Skilled workers are discovering that they have job mobility and large Japanese companies are increasingly confused by the fact that many new graduates don't want to work for them. 

Wantedly has been one of the companies that has changed the way corporate recruiting works in Japan, and today we sit down and talk with the founder and CEO Akiko Naka. 

We first talked with Akiko a few years ago when Wantedly was starting to gain traction, but since then Wantedly has grown, IPOed and become of the most highly valued public companies in Japan.

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...

The developed world is facing a severe programmer shortage. Around the world, coding bootcamps have stepped into this gap to teach newcomers basic programming skills quickly. But in like so many other areas, Japan is different.

Coding bootcamps have been slow to take off here, and programmers are taught by a patchwork of academic degrees, on the job training, and informal meetups and study sessions. Kani Munidasa, the co-founder of Code Chrysalis, is changing that.