Disrupting Japan: Startups and Venture Capital in Japan

Disrupting Japan: Startups and Venture Capital in Japan


Latest Episodes

How Japan’s forgotten past can stop IoT’s dystopian future
December 23, 2019

Technology is global, but ideas are local. - The same IoT technology is being deployed all over the world, but a small Japanese startup might be who helps us make sense of it all. - There is amazing work being done in user experience design,

Japan leads the world in this one important branch of AI
December 09, 2019

Technology develops differently in Japan. - While US tech giants have been grabbing artificial intelligence headlines, a business AI sector has been quietly maturing in Japan, and it is now making inroads into America. -

DJ Selects: Why Men Need Women Founders
November 26, 2019

Ari Horie has always had a different approach to supporting women entrepreneurs. She doesn't talk about "empowering" women and ...

The big reason Japanese companies can’t innovate
November 12, 2019

Japanese enterprises are their own worst enemy when it comes to innovation. - In this live panel discussion, I talk about my experience driving innovation at TEPCO, and Ion and Jensen share their experiences running innovation labs.

The hardest thing about hardware startups : Live from CEATEC
October 29, 2019

This year at CEATEC, I worked with Plug & Play Japan to bring on stage founders from two very different hardware startups. - We talk in-depth about what it takes to be a hardware startup in a world where venture capital seems fixated on SaaS companies...

Artificial Intelligence’s broken promise and its secret truth
October 15, 2019

The promise of AI is easily understood by anyone with an imagination, and for 40 years, venture capitalists have been enthusiastically investing in that promise. - However, it's been significantly harder for founders to turn that investment into susta...

DJ Selects: A Japanese MBA Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
September 30, 2019

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...

How scammers are using your devices to steal money
September 16, 2019

Ad-fraud is one of the most profitable activities for organized crime today. The scammers are sophisticated, disciplined, and numerous, and they might be using your IoT devices to rip people off. - Over the past decade,

These robots are changing cooking forever. But one thing will never change
September 02, 2019

The robotics ecosystem in Japan is amazing. And confusing. - It's a collection of crazy ideas, odd creations, and true breakthroughs. And despite the combination of fawning prise and snide skepticism that Japanese robotics evoke in the international p...

Outside of the Bubble with Japan’s Startup Girls: Mone Kamishiraishi
August 19, 2019

Those of us who spend our lives working with startups live in a bubble. Whether you spend your days programming at a startup or investing in new ventures, you and I see things differently than “normal” people. - It happens to everyone to some extent.