Building a Startup Ecosystem in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Building a Startup Ecosystem in Japan

hiromaeda.com

17 pointsheromaeda7 comments

In the last month since quitting my job I've traveled almost all around Honshu (Tokyo to Osaka and back again, huzzah) talking to entrepreneurs, and I'm very optimistic for the future here. Japan has a lot of things going for it: dissatisfaction with salarymanhood as a career and life plan is at an all time high, the talent pool for engineering and visual design is deep and cheap (approximate salary of engineering employees in Nagoya: age times $1,000), and outside of some parts of Tokyo bootstrapping is a very appealing option.

The cultural issues are tractable, especially after we get a few exemplars of success in local communities. In my town we have a little iPhone development subculture because a handful of guys struck it rich on the App Store lottery, and folks tell me about it everywhere I go. When I went to file the tax papers for my business they assumed I was in iPhone development because, hey, young guy with a software business, clearly he is one of those new App Store millionaires. That beats the previous image of a young guy with a software business: homeless vagrant.

There are now about twenty-ish firms doing iPhone stuff within two miles of my apartment. This is in Gifu. (Americans can pretend I just said Kansas, which is our spiritual counterpart in the US.)

What about business structure options? I may be wrong, but I've always thought of Japan as being a non-ideal start-up location as far as the onerous business regulatory environment and the high rate of corporate taxation. Is any progress being made on these fronts?

There are many tax, fees, and legal barriers that make Japan not very friendly for startups. Unfortunately, there is no progress there (as far as I know).

Not to mention all the start-up related events in Tokyo.

I don't enjoy the hard-sell BS, and some of the projects are awful (the Todai professor who shocked us at Tokyo 2.0 once with "Pop in" advertisements in 2009), but there are always interesting characters trying new things.

That's awesome! Yes, I think having just one successful role model in the local community will make a huge impact.

Is there anything like an HN community for Japanese startups?

I think http://www.hatena.ne.jp/ is the closest to an equivalent to Hacker News. Maybe 2chan?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com