Disrupting Japan

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 coming into Japan fail and why sometimes a Japanese market that looks ripe for easy disruption turns out to be far more resistant to change than you would ever imagine. Even when that change would benefit almost all players in the market.

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

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.

It’s hard to imagine an organization more resistant to change and disruption than the government of Japan. But today’s guest, William Saito has made it his mission to bring innovation to the way the Japanese bureaucracy operates. And more astoundingly, he’s actually having an effect.

William is in a unique situation as a special advisor to the Japanese cabinet, and brings the perspective of a successful startup founder to solving beuqacratic problems. We talk about both the challenges and the strategic advantages that Japan has in the coming decades and discuss a few areas where new Japanese technology has a real change of soon becoming the global standard.

Our discussion gives me hope that innovative change in Japan is is possible not only bottom-up from the startups but top-down from the government. And if the goals are aligned, Japanese innovation will be a truly unstoppable force.

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

It’s hard to imagine an organization more resistant to change and disruption than the government of Japan. But today’s guest, William Saito has made it his mission to bring innovation to the way the Japanese bureaucracy operates. And more astoundingly, he’s actually having an effect.

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.

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 ...

Japan was once home to some of the most innovative companies on the planet, but those companies lost their innovate edge a long time ago. Today, many are betting on startups to change the course of the Japanese economy and to some extent, that’s already starting to happen. Ijichi Sorato of Creww, however, is betting on a different approach to win out, that of Open Innovation.

The future Ijichi envisions, involves not large, old companies being pushed aside and replaced by newer, more innovative firms, but that of innovative smaller firms being co-opted and absorbed into larger firms, either via M&A or via exclusive partnerships and supply chain integration.

We talk a lot about the challenges large Japanese companies face in working with startups and why hackathons rarely produce value for either sponsor or participant in Japan, and the one thing that needs to change before Japanese enterprises can work conformable with startups.

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

Japan was once home to some of the most innovative companies on the planet, but those companies lost their innovate edge a long time ago. Today, many are betting on startups to change the course of the Japanese economy and to some extent, that’s already starting to happen. Ijichi Sorato of Creww, however, is betting on a different approach to win out, that of Open Innovation.

500 Startups has been one of the driving forces behind the utter disruption of how seed funding is done.  That shift is one of the reasons we have seen such large and diverse startup ecosystems emerging around the world.  Japan, however, often changes more slowly than other nations.

Today we sit down and talk with James Riney, the new head of 500 Startups Japan, about why Japanese venture capitalists have been so slow to change, and exactly what James and 500 Startups plans on doing about it.

Things are already changing for the better in Japan -- at least as far as startups are concerned -- but if Japan's traditional venture capitalists don't change their ways, they are going to find themselves locked out of the most important deals. Seed stage investment is increasingly a sellers market, where quality startups pick between competing investment firms. It's a new dynamic that many VCs here are struggling with.

We talk about the most important things a VC can offer its portfolio companies, and I'll leave it to you to decide if Japanese investors are ready for it.

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

500 Startups has been one of the driving forces behind the utter disruption of how seed funding is done. That shift is one of the reasons we have seen such large and diverse startup ecosystems emerging around the world. Japan, however, often changes more slowly than other nations.