Disrupting Japan
Latest Episodes
Japan’s Business Card Giant Explains Why Business Cards Are Disappearing
If you've ever done business in Japan, someone probably walked you through the intricacies of Japanese business card culture. - Chika Terada, the founder of Sansan, created one of Japan's most successful startups around the business card protocol.
How to Solve Japan’s Innovation Bottleneck in Healthcare
Startups are changing how business is done in Japan, but medicine remains stubbornly resistant to innovation. - In some ways, that's good. We are literally experimenting with peoples lives, so caution is definitely warranted.
120: This Startup Just Built Japan’s Most Powerful Supercomputer
Preferred Networks is making changes in Japan. - Over the past few years, this AI startup has raised more than $130M in venture funding and grown to more than 130 people. - If you live outside of Japan, you might not have heard of this team,
A Japanese MBA Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
Education is very hard to disrupt. - That’s both good and bad. Education is so important to both individuals and society, it should not be changed on a whim, but over time it seems that our institutions of higher education have drifted away from meeti...
118: This Japanese Startup Is Using Your Phone to Make Insurance Social
The insurance industry has proven very resistant to innovation. In fact, it has not really changed much in the past 200 years. The way insurance is sold and managed has changed, of course, but from the point of view of the consumer,
117: Japan’s Secret Strategy for Global Drone Domination
Blue Innovation attracted a lot of international attention last year when they announced the T-Frend drone system. - This dystopian drone flies around offices after hours reminding staff not to work overtime,
116: How Startups Can Attract, Retain, and Develop Staff in Japan
Have you ever been at a crowded and noisy party and heard a conversation across the room? - You catch pieces of it, and you know it is interesting, but you can’t quite make it out and you can quite push your way over to that side of the room to be a p...
115: A Successful Kickstarter Campaign Almost Bankrupted This Startup
Hardware is hard. - In fact, sometimes the simplest and most straightforward ideas turn out to be the hardest to implement. - Today I’d like you to meet Kyohi Kang the founder and CEO of Atmoph. Atmoph is a programmable window which can display the s...
114: This Japanese Startup Is Bringing The Human Genome to The Mass Market
Right now, it looks like the most profitable business models that are emerging from the mapping of the human genome are not in the field of medicine, but in a variety of B2C business models focused on consumer marketing. -
113: Japan Announces Plans to Land on The Moon by 2020
We startup founders and investors like to talk about “moonshots”. It points out startups that have huge dreams, those that are solving hard problems, and those that will actually change the world if they succeed. - Usually,





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