Disrupting Japan

Blue Innovation attracted a lot of international attention last year when they announced the  T-Frend drone system.

This dystopian drone flies around offices after hours reminding staff not to work overtime, and taking pictures of those who violate overtime policy so that management can be alerted.

We’ll talk about this particular drone, of course, but Blue Innovation's technology is much broader and is making an impact an many more important, if perhaps less visible, areas. Founder and CEO Takayuki Kumada explains the early days of the company and why they decided to pivot into drones in the first place.

We also talk about the future of drones in Japan and globally, about what’s really holding the industry back, and why the Japanese government crackdown on drones might have actually forced the industry to focus on a very specialized and very lucrative niche.

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

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 can work best together at startups. As the event, I had a great discussion with three startup founders who are leading multi-cultural teams.  They candidly shared their stories and advice and even told us about some of their biggest mistakes.

It was a great discussion, the event was a huge success, and we’ll definitely be doing it again very soon. But in a way, the event was too successful. Way more people showed up than we expected and the place was packed. Everyone had a good time, but the room was so packed and noisy that only the people close to the front got a chance to hear some amazingly good advice and life experiences.

So I thought I would release the entire conversation as a special in-between episode of Disrupting Japan. There are no show notes for this one and it's not transcribed, but it is a great conversation with three experts on how startups can recruit, retain and get the very best out of multi-lingual, multi-cultural 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, Japanese campaign on Makuake.

But this success almost bankrupted them.

Kyohi and I discuss how this happened and how other startups can avoid falling into the same trap.

We also discuss Kyoto and the fledgeling startup ecosystem that is just starting to spread its wings there.

And we'll dive into detail about why, unlike most other startups, Atmoph has decided to remain a hardware startup rather than pivoting to software and licensing when presented with that option.

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

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 Awakens.  Awakens is opening up the genome to make it more accessible and understandable to you and me. They are designing a genetic marketplace that will serve both B2B and B2C clients, and they are working with other startups to develop applications that will leave some readers impressed and excited, and others appalled and concerned.

So it’s probably best to let Tomo tell you about it.

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 lunar rovers, and they plan on using the increasingly inexpensive commercial launch companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin to send them to the moon.

Ispace has secured a partnership with Japan’s space agency, and they have attracted more than $90 million in investment.

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

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 EdTech company he believes will change the way children learn.

Interestingly, Daisuke’s vision is not the standard EdTech dream of online classes and automated learning. It’s one where human instructors are still very much involved and critical to the success of both the students and the programs. Of course, their role will change and the overall structure will look quite different from what we know today.

It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll really enjoy it.

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 effective strategies for startups who need to compete against large incumbents, and that advice holds true for startups in Japan or anywhere else in the world.

Yohei also has some interesting observations on why Japan is a better place to start a company than the UK or Europe.

It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

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 you will. Today they have thousands of paying customers including some of the world's largest hotel chains, they are profitable, and they are expanding globally.

Yu and I talk aboutTableSolution's business model, of course, but you Yu also has some great advice and some counterintuitive insights about selling to mid-sized companies, expanding into new verticals and recruiting great staff.

It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

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 their own startup or as part of a larger organization.

Of course, we talk about Japan Travel, Terrie’s latest venture, but we also cover the state of Japanese startups in general, how to best raise money from Japanese VCs, and we go over a few real-world examples of how you can protect yourself when things go horribly, horribly wrong.

It’s an interesting discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

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 expansion, Facy’s chances for global domination in this niche, and the major differences between fashion retailing in Asia and in the West.

It’s a fascinating discussion and a great inside look at fashion retailing.