Start-Up Spirit Emerges in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Start-Up Spirit Emerges in Japan

nytimes.com

55 points001sky30 comments

A few of the big things that are dampening the startup scene in Japan are as follows:

* Weak ecosystem - Very few angels available to fund and support early stage startups, although accelerators are popping up that are starting to fill this gap.

* Less exits - Japanese companies tend to be less acquisitive than their western counterparts. IPO seems to be a far more common liquidity event. Even 2-3 years into MakeLeaps, we started getting offers to help us IPO(wtf).

* Less entrepreneurs - A typical "FUCK! THIS SUCKS AND MUST CHANGE!" attitude found in many entrepreneurs is a pretty rare commodity in Japan. The educational system has been designed to generate workers who are effective at carrying out orders rather than taking independent initiative.

* Still not accepted in society - Japanese who set out to do their own companies are still generally looked down upon, and struggle in general. If someone from a western culture starts a company, the typical attitude is "Great! Good luck!" but in Japan it's more "What's wrong? You couldn't get a job at a proper company?" This is however starting to slowly change.

* Less community - There is a much smaller community in Japan, which means less support. We're doing our best to help by organising the Tokyo Hacker News community meetups. Again, this is changing, and there is a marked increase in events now compared to say, 1-2 years ago. (shameless plug - come along if you're in Tokyo - http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp - next event is 16th of January)

* Less early adopters/more risk adverse - Until we being reasonably well known, getting initial signups and customers was intensely painful. On the flip side, once a customer signs up with you, they tend to be very loyal and stay with you for a long time.

Having said all that, Japan is working through these issues and we are definitely in a mini startup boom in Japan. Exciting times to be doing a startup here.

Big thing helping the start-up scene

*A lot of people don't have work.

Can anyone with knowledge of both countries compare and contrast this with India? It seems like there are quite a few similarities.

as a 外人 item #4 works to my advantage ?

I'm a bit skeptical of this new trend, since I get the vibe that most of these young founders are in the game "because it's cool" to do so. I wonder what fraction of them will survive the first downturn [1].

That being said, smart new grads having options other than BigCo / Western Consulting&Finance / Shosha / Govt would be a very positive thing. [2]

[1] Though the same thing could be said of many of the teams/endeavors on this side of the pond.

[2] Interestingly, the best technical minds in web programming seem to be employed by LINE/Gree/DeNA/Cookpad still rather than venturing out on their own.

I feel like doing a startup in Japan is not yet cool, from a general society perspective.

I think that almost every one of these new founders are having regular arguments with their parents, who would be trying to convince the founders to get a "real" job at a "safe" company.

Having said all that, I agree that inexperienced people often give up at the first speed bump. As Steve Jobs said:

“The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it.”

That's a good point about the older generation. I have a few friends who feuded with their parents when they quit a very very good engineering job at a big company to do their own thing instead.

That being said I do think that doing a startup is perceived as being cool by their peers. I've met at least a handful of people who I'd cautiously call "fangirls".

(Perhaps an overflow from their perceived coolness of working in SV/SF -- which honestly doesn't make much sense to me since their motivations to cross the pond is often profoundly lacking in substance)

Working in SV/SF and doing own startup is surely sounds different things to me, as an Japanese grad student

Sorry, to clarify: many young people seem to see the whole SV/SF thing to be cool and seem to almost idolize the prospect of working in the promised land. By association startups as a whole (regardless of location) are cool to them. As a result startup founders in Japan get additional social support from their peers for their endeavors (which as you know is a huge psychological benefit in Japanese society).

Almost doesn't matter. If any significant number survive to reach success then it'll change everything, eventually. It's very difficult to argue against success, e.g. millions in the bank accounts and products that people are talking about. And once people see their friends and former coworkers succeed they start to get the idea they can do the same.

I'm a Swedish Javascript dev moving to Tokyo tomorrow (!!!). If anyone around is interested in coding together, let me know :).

Just don't expect any "disruptive innovations" is all I'm saying.

Spot on. The creative/disruptive spirit is next to non-existent in this country. Conformism and herd behavior seem to be the national past time.

I'm actually not even sure if individuals with such a spirit can even do much in the environment (funding, exit options, corruption, backdoor dealing, etc.) they are in. Piggybacking on trends abroad (like how Coiny is cloning Square) might actually be a wise strategy given their context.

Germany's Rocket Internet is doing pretty well on piggy backing. It would probably work in Japan, too.

Still Japan is the country where companies such as Sony and Nintendo originate from and the people over there certainly can be creative/disruptive.

One such company that can truly change the world as opposed to creating another chat app is euglena: http://www.euglena.jp/en/

Sony and Nintendo is now stagnating. So I'm not sure what innovation is anymore in Japan.

The conformism, herd and inflexibility of generations helped the downward spiral of Japan. Which is really such a shame from such a beautiful country.

Maybe now but they have innovated in the past, and Nintendo still does to a certain degree.

It's not like their society became more conformist all of a sudden. In fact it was probably even more so a couple of years/decades earlier.

Look at the manga industry: there are mangas that touch on virtually any genre. That is a testament to the creativity of some of the people in this land.

I am not saying they will become as creative as the people in SV but I believe they definitely have the potential to bring innovative concepts to life.

Or look at board gaming in recent year. Japan is certainly capable of disruptive innovation.

I lived in Japan for 6 years and found that there is no more innovation there. It's because of the way they are a self preserving economy. Things that are available in Japan can't be used overseas. Which is the main reason why they are falling behind.

TVs, mobile phones (before the iPhone came out in Japan), voltage aren't available to be used overseas.

View my comments here from a previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6717211

No, no. The animal spirits are still there. But the structure of the economy is locked down tight. New business models that threaten to disrupt the established oligopolies are routinely killed off through the simple mechanism of outlawing them.

Still, there is room for innovation in new product categories. And technology is changing fast enough that new categories appear every few years. Take mobile gaming, for instance. And it comes as no surprise to me that the Number 1 Bitcoin exchange is Japanese. They have to deal in Bitcoins because the rest of the financial sector is locked down so tight that even Paypal can barely operate here.

> And it comes as no surprise to me that the Number 1 Bitcoin exchange is Japanese.

MtGox's not Japanese, really. It was founded by Jed McCaleb (American) who may have been living in NYC when he started it, and was bought out by, I think, some Europeans. It may now be located in Japan and have some Japanese employees, but in a way, it is an exception that proves the rule.

That's kind of disappointing.

Why is Mt. Gox in Japan at all, then? Is it simply because of the popularity of trading card games in Japan?

I have no idea. Japan doesn't seem like a great place to be doing something like MtGox (and AFAIK, _Magic: The Gathering_ is not popular in Japan).

I really hope that this is true, but I'll believe it when I see some more IPOs. I'm a very big cultural fan of Japan, but they seem to struggle with technology entrepreneurship. There is a tradition of small business owners and apprenticeships, but relative to their size, they have very few breakout enterprise software firms. Perhaps it's because the large firms prefer to deal in their own networks?

A lot of factors. An education system designed to produce worker-bees rather than independent thinkers. A stagnate economy (although this is improving) leading to high unemployment for young workers and people taking whatever job they can get. Social pressure to get into a prestigious university and eventually a well-established, large company. And for females, the pressure to get married before age 30.

Mind you--people in Japan are very smart. Science/math education is way better than in the US. But in the end, emphasis is on conformity and "not standing out too much" or "being different". This kills the spirit of innovation. I grew up in Japan but went to college in the US and work in NYC. Every time I go home, I feel like an outsider even though I spent 18 years of my life there.

And for females, the pressure to get married before age 30.

My understanding is the issue here isn't that women are supposed to get married, rather that they're supposed to drop out of the workforce immediately thereafter. With a country short of young workers, this is problematic.

Again I love the culture of Japan, but much of the inter-dependence that makes it fascinating also promotes working for large companies rather doing ones own thing.

Mirror: http://pastebin.com/DXCSZxMs

I feel like one of these articles comes around every few months or so. I guess the storyline of "daring entrepreneurs fight against rigid societal norms" is just too appealing…

But in my opinion it remains to be seen if it's actually a trend, or just a few isolated examples.

As a Japanese native who went to college in America and moved to NYC to escape the societal pressure back home, I'm glad to see this. Maybe I'll move back someday.

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