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.

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 ...

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.

Too many things that are labeled as "cultural differences" have much simpler explanations. There are perfectly rational (and even mathematical) reasons why we have not seen a lot of entrepreneurship in Japan over the last 50 years, why we are starting to see a lot more of if now, and why we are likely to see an explosion of Japanese startups in the coming decade. In this episode, we look what happens in Japan when the gatekeepers who stand between the creative people and the broader public are removed.

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 ...

The Internet of Things is becoming so commonplace that it is almost almost invisible. About a year ago, Moff launched an extremely clever IoT toy called the Moff-band that allows kids to add sound effects to their every-day play. They toy had been successful, but for Moff to take the next step they need to create a platform around the toy.

Disrupting Japan is one year old, and ready to party. To celebrate , we gathered some of the leaders of Tokyo's startup community together in front of a live audience, had a few drinks, and talked about the future of startups in Japan. Our panel included perspectives from software, IOT, and venture capital, which led to some interesting discussions.

Marketing automation is new in Japan, and it’s taking a lot of Japanese companies off guard. For decades, sales in Japan have been done by armies of salarymen in navy-blue suits visiting clients and marketing, well until recently, most Japanese companies didn’t make much of a distinction between marketing and advertising. This week, we get a chance to ...