Almost all startup accelerators are going bankrupt and going away.

Hiro Maeda, the founder of two of Japan's most successful, and most different startup incubators explains both the brief past and precarious future of startup incubators and accelerators. We talk not only about the mechanics and challenges of what it takes to make an incubator successful, but Hiro has some practical advice on when founders should consider joining an accelerator and how they can avoid the 99% of them that provide no real value.

Hiro also explains why so many Japanese VCs today find investing in South East Asia more attractive than Japan, the forces behind Japan's startup boom, and what the next ten years holds for Japanese startups.

Show Notes for Startups

The motivation behind the founding of Open Network Labs Incubator
How to measure the success of an incubator
How Japanese VCs will be deploying capital in the next few years
The success of Beenos's Inception Program and why they had to shut it down
Why public companies have trouble with startups
How to tell a good incubator from a bad one
Why most incubators provide no value
The coming shakeout in the incubator industry
What’s driving Japan’s startup boom
The future of Japanese entrepreneurship

Links from the Founder

Beenos
Hiro's Blog
Follow Hiro on Twitter @djtokyo
Friend him on Facebook
The SGE Facebook Page

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Transcript from Japan
Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs.

I am Tim Romero. Thanks for listening.

Today, we sit down with Hiro Maeda and talk about Start-Up Accelerators. Now, Hiro is the creator of both Digital Garages, Open Network Lab and the Beenos Inception Program. These are two of Japan's best known Start-Up Acceleration Programs.

Their approaches are very, very different. Naturally, we talk about both the past and the future of Start-Up Acceleration in Japan, and the critical differences between the good ones and the bad ones.

What impressed me most about our conversation was Hiro's commitment to running his Accelerators just like Start-Ups.

Now, we dive into the fundamental reasons behind the attraction that Japanese VCs now have for Southeast Asian Markets. As well as the reasons behind what we both see as the coming hard times for Start-Up Accelerators, and the coming good time for Japanese Start-Ups.

I will let Hiro explain all of that in his own words. Let's get right to the interview.

[INTERVIEW]

Tim: I am sitting here with Hiro Maeda of Beenos formally. The man who found the Open Network Lab with Digital Garage. Today, we are going to talk a lot about Accelerators. Because you are a man that knows.

Hiro: [laugh]. Thank you.

Tim: Thanks for sitting down with us.

Hiro: Thank you for having me.

Tim: Let's get right into it. I am really interested in your experience and setting up and running the Digital Garage Open Network Lab Accelerator. Why don't you tell us a bit about it, and what your goals were in starting that Accelerator?

Hiro: Yeah, so this was back in 2010. It was right after the Lehman Crisis. It happened in 2007, 2008, 2009 was no one was investing in start-ups in Japan. It was basically myself, Joey Ito, who is currently the Director of a MIT Media Labs, and also the Founder of Beenos, or the former Founder of Beenos Taru and then the CEO of Digital Garage.

We all kind of got together, and were discussing what can we do, right? Yeah.

Tim: Okay, let's back up here for a second. How did all of these people end up in the room getting together?