Disrupting Japan: Startups and Venture Capital in Japan
Latest Episodes
Show 7: Taku Harada - Peatix
Taku walked away from the kind of a career that most people dream of. He had proven himself at Sony Music, Apple and in his late twenties he was quickly rising thought he ranks at Amazon Japan. He and his friends knew they had an amazing career ahead of t
Show 6: Tadashi Tanimoto - Realcom & Tenex
IPO of Realcom was just a milestone in a longer journey to change the way people work together and share information. Now, I realise, that sounds like a typical committee-written and board-approved mission statement from any number of enterprise software
Show 5: Jason Winder - MakeLeaps
Jason came to Japan from Australia to study martial arts, and his company MakeLeaps is now kicking ass in online invoicing. Jason bootstrapped MakeLeaps himself and he and his partner, Paul Oswald grew the company organically, acquired two of their domes
Show 4: Ikuo Hiraishi - Sunbridge & More
The startup ecosystems in America and Europe are built around people like Ikuo, but men like him are still quite rare in Japan. After founding a series of successful (and a few less than successful) startups, Ikuo moved to the other side of the table and
Show 3: Naoki Yamada - Conyac
It was a unique combination of Naoki's adventure driving through the US, his ongoing frustration in working for a large Japanese firm, and his love of an anime character from his childhood that inspired him to start his own venture and to try to change th
Show 2: Chika Terada - Sansan
Business cards are far more important in Asia than they are in the West. Business cards command the same level of respect and deference as the person they belong to. Here in Japan, there are many times when a business conversation cannot get underway unti
Show 1: Japan’s Coming Startup Boom
Far too many people, including many of the Japanese themselves, consider Japanese society as inflexible and unable to change. This is simply wrong. In this kickoff episode we look at what was behind the two disruptive, transformative really, changes tha