Koichiro Yoshida took CrowdWorks from idea to IPO in less than three years, and today both CrowdWorks and crowd-sourcing in general are seen as essential to Japan’s future economy.  Just 10 years ago,  Japanese politicians pointed to freelancers and part-times as part of the cause of Japan's economic woes. Fortunately, Japan's leadership is now beginning to realizing that having a flexible and skilled workforce is actually a tremendous economic advantage.

Of course, since so much of modern business culture in Japan is based on the idea of belonging to a specific company, the move to large-scale freelancing will lead to large  social changes as well. Both good and bad.

Koichiro and I talk about the impact those coming changes will have, and about his own journey and how there were many years of preparation, hard work and painful failures hidden behind the "overnight success" of CrowdWorks.

Show Notes for Startups

Why Japan needs crowd sourcing to survive in the 21st century
How to build a flat company in a country where hierarchy is prized
How to foster a sense of community and loyalty among freelancers
Getting large Japanese companies onboard with crowd sourcing
What Koichiro learned from the disaster that followed the IPO of his first company.
The secret of CrowdWorks incredibly high(even for Japan) employee retention
The importance of burning your bridges and focusing your attention
Japan’s slowly changing attitude towards failure, and what will change it

Links from the Founder

Sign up to be a freelancer or employ one
Koichiro's Blog
Follow Koichiro on twitter @yoshidacw
CrowdWorks Facebook Page

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Transcript from Japan
[INTRO]

Disrupting Japan – Episode 17

Welcome to Disrupting Japan. Straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs.

I am Tim Romero, and thanks for listening.

Today, we sit down and talk with Koichiro Yoshida of CrowdWorks. Now, this is one of Japan's largest Crowd Source and platforms, and Koichiro built it up from nothing to IPO in less than 3 years.

He has received awards from people like Prime Minister Abe for the potential for this Crowd Sourcing movement to reshape the Japanese economy. He has got some fascinating insights on that very subject.

Now,CrowdWorks was not Koichiro's first company. He has been involved in more than a dozen different projects over the years. Including one to build an entire new city just like Henry Ford did.

Now, most people in the software world are very glib when talking about failure. When you ask them about it they will say oh yeah you know fail fast, fail forward. Well, yeah okay, but what about you? You personally. Oh me. No, me I am crushing it. I am not failing at anything.

There is something rather amusing about people who simultaneously emphatically proclaim that failure is good while being terrified as actually being seen as failing.

Well, near the end of this interview I realized that a perfect demonstration of lack of concern about failure was in this interview itself.

Let me explain. This is Koichiro's first audio interview in English. He still struggles with English. The 30-minute interview that you are about to hear is an edited down version of our almost 90-minute conversation.

During that time we were breaking in and out of Japanese. You can hear his assistants in the background trying to cobble together correct English phrases, or put up PowerPoint slides for reference. You can hear Koichiro reaching back into his memory of college English classes to find the right words to answer a question with.

Two things we discuss in this interview that listeners outside of Japan might not know. First, Son-San is the CEO of SoftBank. He is one of the few truly successful and disruptive Japanese entrepreneurs. SoftBank is one of the very few start-ups that succeeded by taking on the powerful domestic incumbents head on.

Second,