Disrupting Japan

Miwa Tanaka, CEO of Waris, is working to make things better for working women in Japan. Although things are slowly changing, most Japanese women still must leave the workforce when they have children. The Waris platform helps them get back on track, either as a freelancer or by restarting their career. We talk about her startup, of course, but we also talk about the difficulties women still face, the kinds of roles they are traditionally placed into, and the traditional employment structures and roles are changing. It’s a optimistic interview and Miwa explains why she believes that corporate Japan truly wants to change things for the better. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why Japanese women leave the workforce when they have children The problem Japanese women face during negotiations How the Tohuku Earthquake changed Miwa's life path Why the Japanese government changed its opinion on freelancers What "diversity training" actually means in Japan and why it's important The importance of startups selling to each other and bootstrapping  the ecosyste Why Japanese women are attracted to entrepreneurship and  freelancing Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Waris Friend Waris on Facebook Follow Waris on Twitter @info_Waris The Waris community blog Cue for working women in Japan. Friend Miwa on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Welcome to Disrupting Japan, -- straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. I am Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. Miwa Tanaka, the CEO of Waris is working hard to make things better for women in Japan. The changing roles of Japanese Women in both start-ups and large enterprises is something we talked about quite a bit on disrupting Japan and Miwa has a unique perspective on this subject. Waris is a platform that is helping Japanese women who've quit their jobs to have children, rejoined the work force. Now, of course, we talk about the social and business conventions that results in Japanese women having to quit their jobs to have children in the first place. But often the best solutions to these kind of social problems are small steady improvements, and that's what Miwa is trying to do. In fact, hearing Miwa explained what Waris is shows us some microcosm of women in Japanese business, --- the difficulties women face, the kind of roles they've traditionally been placed into and also how those roles and the traditional employment structure are changing but more important, perhaps, how Japanese women themselves are choosing to adapt, to work around, occasionally, walk away from those restrictions. And as Miwa explains, another sign that things are getting better here in Japan is that Waris has a steady stream of corporate customers who are asking for diversity training. I think that this is a sign, much like it was with previous guest who discussed the demand for open innovation and LGBT sensitivity training that corporate Japan wants to change. I think much of corporate Japan and the government as well, are sincere on their efforts to make things better. But as Miwa explains, sometimes those changes can painfully slowly, but Miwa tells that story much better than I can. So, let's hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey"  ] [Interview] Tim:                     So, I'm sitting here with Miwa Tanaka, the co-founder and the CEO of Waris. So, thanks for sitting down with us. Miwa:                  Thank you so much for inviting me. Tim:                     Now, Waris is an online job matching service to help women continue their career after they've had children. I'm sure you can explain it much better than I  can. So, why don't you tell us about what Waris does? Miwa:                  Okay. Thank you. Waris is a job matching company for women who have professional skill sets and we connect their skill sets with Japanese companies through a flexible work schedule, like a 3 days’ work a week or working remotely. Tim:                     Is it telecommuting? Is it part time? What's the usual situation? Miwa:                  Oh well, sometimes they work at the clients and they also work at their home. Tim:                     Okay. So, it's both situations? Miwa:                  It's both situations. Tim:                     And is it usually part time work or there's some fulltime? Miwa:                  Mostly they are part time worker. As you know, almost 60% of women quit their jobs after giving birth in Japan because in most Japanese companies, we have to work so long hours and it makes women very difficult to keep working. Tim:                     Actually, a little later on, I want to get back into exploring details about this dynamic of women having to leave the workplace and trying to come back in, but for now, are these jobs permanent jobs or they're jobs that last for a few months? Miwa:                  The average is 7 months. So, it's a kind of project work by contract. They're independent contractor or people who want to be independent contractor. Tim:                     I see. So, it's kind of half way between a crowd sourcing platform and a job site. It's sort of in the middle there. Miwa:                  Yeah. That's right. We are not crowd sourcing, we're agent for such women who would like to work by contract. Tim:                     Are most of the people using Waris using it as a stepping stone to get back into the job market? Or, they're using it as a way to get part time work? Miwa:                  30% of our registrants are searching jobs and they would like to go back to workforce. Tim:                     So, does that mean that they're using Waris just a temporary step before going back fulltime? Miwa:                  Yes, that's right. Tim:                     I see. Miwa:                  And also, 20% of them are freelancers. Tim:                     And they're just using the Waris platform to get more jobs?? Miwa:                  To get more jobs and to get new client. Tim:                     Okay. Miwa:                  But then in Japan, independent contractors is still rare and it's a little bit challenging for them to work with their clients. They tend to be weaker than clients. Tim:                     They don't negotiate for as higher fees as they could? Miwa:                  Yes. That's right. Tim:                     I see. Miwa:                  Many Japanese women are not so good at negotiating. Tim:                     This is something that is very true in the United States as well. Miwa:                  Oh, really? Tim:                     Women in general tend to be weaker negotiators than men. I think it's a global phenomenon, but it probably is more extreme in Japan just because those social pressures are so much stronger here. Miwa:                  Yes. Tim:                     Let's take a step back for a minute, let me ask you a little about you. Miwa:                  Okay. Tim:                     You work in a magazine publishing before starting Waris. So, what made you leave publishing and want to start your own company? Miwa:                  Before starting Waris, I worked as a writer and editor over ten years and I belonged to magazine named Nikkei Women. This is a magazine for Japanese working women. I interviewed a lot of Japanese working women and I found how difficult for them to keep on working in Japan. Tim:                     What made it difficult for them to continue working? Miwa:                  The working long hours. It's a Japanese traditional working way. In many companies, we have to work not only 8 hours but also maybe 10 hours. Tim:                     Yes, crazy over time. Miwa:                  Yes, 12 hours. It's really common in Japan. Women have their children, they have limited hours in taking care of their children, it makes them very difficult for working as usual. Tim:                     It's a big jump from noticing a trend to leaving your job and starting up an new company. So, what made you decide to make that jump? Miwa:                  The biggest incident was earthquake of 3.11. Can can you say in English? Tim:                     The March 2011, The Fukushima earthquake. Miwa:                  It was a kind of incident to me to decide this kind of life change because at the earthquake, I stayed at Tokyo but as you know, Tokyo is not the center of the earthquake but it was a really big event. Because of the earthquake, I thought about my career, or my future and I realized that life is not everlasting. I mean, suddenly, it would be stopped by such a kind of earthquake. Life is only once, so I would like to do what I really like to. Tim:                     So, was starting a company  something you wanted to do for a long time ago? Miwa:                  No, when I was working in a publishing company, we worked with a lot of freelancers. I would have liked to be a freelancer but I didn't think about starting our business as a company. Tim:                     Okay. And why did you decide on a company to help working moms get back into the work force? Miwa:                  I thought I'd like to support women to keep on working. They thought exactly the same, we started to talk about how can we do that. Tim:                     Are any of you working mothers yourselves? Miwa:                  One of us. Her name is Fumika San. She is a mother. Tim:                     Okay. It was a problem that was really right in front of you and we understood. Miwa:                  Aha.

From the transistor radio to the Walkman to the Gameboy and the Playstation, Japan has always been both a leading force in hardware technology and a Mecca for gadget geeks. Over the past ten years, however, Japanese dominance in consumer hardware has been slipping away. The falling price of not just computing, but of manufacturing and prototyping has resulted in some amazing connected devices appearing all over the world. But while Japan’s large corporations have been falling behind, Japan’s startups have been rushing ahead. Today we sit down with Ichiro Amimori of Xenoma to talk about why he left a successful 20-year career in materials science at FujiFilm to found a company that makes a low-cost, washable motion capture shirt they call e-skin. It’s a order of magnitude cheaper than existing technology and opens up the possibility of applications in gaming, sports technology and heath and medicine. We also talk about the challenges Japanese enterprises and universities have turning fundamental research into salable products, and a few trends that might just turn that situation around. It’s a great interview and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups What is e-skin and why is it important? Why leave a 20-year career to start a risky startup How FujiFilm managed to innovate and survive How to attract developers to a new hardware platform Why most early adopters are outside Japan How Japan lost it's lead in the gaming industry How motion capture can help the elderly Why Japanese companies have trouble in new markets The future of open innovation in Japan Links from the Founder Everything you ever wanted to know about Xenoma A deeper dive on e-skin Ichiro's personal blog (in Japanese) Follow Ichiro on twitter @ichiroamimori Friend him on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Welcome to Disrupting Japan- straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. You know, Japan has always been the land of cool hardware, from the Zoom recorder I’m talking into to the Gameboy, to the Play Station, to the Walkman, to the transistor radio. Japan has always been a mecca to gadget geeks. Of course, things have changed in recent years, the falling price of not just computing, but of manufacturing and prototyping has resulted in some amazing connected devices appearing all over the world. And Japan, if we’re being honest with ourselves here, is falling a bit behind. Ichiro Amimori is a small part of the solution to this. He left a 20-year career in material science to found a company that produces what they call e-skin. It’s a tight fitting shirt that can sense the movements of its wearer and act as an inexpensive, accurate, motion capture device. It’s price and durability is something you might find a little bit surprising. Of course, with a cool hardware available now, attracting developers to your new platform, no matter how cool, is something of a challenge these days. Even Google is having problems in this area. Ichiro and I dive into some detail about how Xenoma is solving this. We also talk about the challenges that Japanese enterprises and universities have turning fundamental research into real products. And the steps that they’re taking to solve them. But you know, Ichiro tells that story much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview.     [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Ichiro Amimori of Xenoma. You guys make e-skin. It’s like clothing, it’s motion capture, it’s just a shirt, really, but thanks for sitting down with us. Ichiro: Nice meeting you. Tim: Tell us more about what Xenoma is, and what this shirt really does. Ichiro: So we are a startup company from the University of Tokyo, and we established a company November 2015. What we are making is the e-skin, which is a smart apparel. We are not saying it is wearable, because shirts are obviously wearable. As you can see here, this is just a shirt. Stretchable shirt. Tim: Right, and it’s an audio podcast, so it’s kind of hard to explain. But it just looks like normal, stretchable, workout wear with kind of a Tron design to it. Ichiro: Right, everybody says that. Actually, so this Tron design, you see the silver stuff, is the electric circuit, which is stretchable. So in here, there is wiring and sensors, you can touch. Tim: We’ll put pictures on the website, so everyone can know what it looks like. But, the circuits don’t seem to be wires. They’re printed on here and, are they printed? Stitched? Ichiro: We are not saying the manufacturing process in detail, but we are using many kinds of manufacturing process which is conventional. The point is that… you see this silver stuff, so many people say, “Is this conductive?” Actually, the silver stuff is not conductive. All the conductive part is in the silver stuff, because when you sweat, you may have an electric shock due to the water. Then all the electronics is well-insulated on both sides. This silver stuff is one insulation layer. Tim: So the silver stuff is really just to make it look like Tron. Ichiro: Yes, it is just a design. We could make it black, but why don’t we make it like Tron? Tim: So the sensors really work by the stretching of the fabric. Ichiro: Yes. We are saying that this is a motion capture shirt, without using camera. What we are doing is not just capturing motion, but we are measuring the deformation of the shirt caused by motion. For instance, when we bend our elbow, the elbow part is stretched. Then we see that the shirt, the elbow is bent. So that is the principle that we are doing. Tim: That makes sense. Is it washable as well? Ichiro: Yes of course. Right now, you are not seeing this part, we call it hub, which is a controller. And when we are using it, we need to attach on the shirt like this. Tim: For the listeners, this is a small barbell shaped device that you attach across the chest of the shirt. Ichiro: Yeah and this part is not machine washable. But we can take it off and then all the rest of the shirt is machine washable. Tim: By the way, how do you determine machine washable? Is there a standard for this? Ichiro: That is a very good question. I did not know that, but there is an ISO standard that is for machine washable. ISO A, and ISO B, and ISO C. Tim: So three levels of machine washable. Ichiro: They also have ASTM, American style test. What we chose was ISO C, which is closer to ASTM. What we did was, we washed in 40 degree hot water for a hundred times. Tim: A hundred times? They have got standards for everything. That must have taken a while. Ichiro: That actually took two and a half months. Why we stopped at 100 times is not from breaking, but just the time. Tim: Traditional motion capture equipment has wires connecting the user back to the computer. But obviously, there are no wires, it’s all wireless. So the snap on controller obviously has a wireless transmitter in the device. Are there other sensors in there? Ichiro: Actually in this controller, we named it the hub, there is an accelerometer and gyro in here to measure the moving of the center of the body. Tim: Things that wouldn’t stretch this shirt. Ichiro: Also, in here, there is a battery and a [UNCLEAR] (8:06) computer and Bluetooth as their transmitter. This is kind of the CPU of this system, and once we take it off, we can wash everything. This is the most important part of that. Tim: Looking at it, can this also be used to monitor breathing or heart rate? Ichiro: We can measure breathing, respiration. Because when we are breathing, our chest is moving and then we can measure respiration. Unfortunately, we cannot measure heart rate. I can say that, at this year’s [UNCLEAR] (8:48) in Las Vegas in January, we demonstrated the baby monitoring system. We named it the e-skin cool, which contains the temperature sensor, which is a digital sensor. Once we can plug in the digital sensor on the shirts, we can change to anything. For example, heart rate sensor, SPO2 pulse sensor, or even motion sensor can be embedded in our shirts. Tim: So the baby device, it’s just a little wearable shirt to let parents know their baby is still moving around. I want to drill down into the different uses of this later. But right now, let’s back up a bit. I want to ask a couple questions about you. You seem like a pretty non-typical startup founder. You got a degree from Todai, you got a PhD in material science from Brown, you were at Fujifilm for 20 years. What made you decide to leave a successful career at Fujifilm and start this crazy startup? Ichiro: It might be crazy, I agree. Actually, when I was in Fujifilm, I had been working on making new businesses for 18 years. When I joined Fujifilm and started my career, the photography film business was nearly gone. I had a chance to start a new business in Fujifilm. So for me, making new businesses in big company or making new businesses in a startup is almost the same. What I felt when I left Fujifilm was, since I had been working for a long, long time. I was too tired of using a long, long time for decision making by someone else. I thought that I could make it by myself. I think it was a good time for me to start by my own power. Then I left Fujifilm. Tim: So Fujifilm is not involved in this startup at all. It’s completely… [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1653" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey” ] Ichiro: Recently, actually, they’re a good company for innovation. They’re starting pharmaceutical businesses and healthcare businesses. Tim: Actually, Fujifilm is a very interesting company in terms of innovation. If we back up 20 years,

There are no shortage of startup accelerators, innovation spaces and startup community hubs, and sometimes it can be difficult to put your finger on what makes one a success and another a failure. Today, Tim Rowe the CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center walks us through what he believes will make or break a startup community. The CIC started as a small co-working space for a handful of startups, and now is the biggest facility of its kind on the world. They’ve expanded to several locations and are now int he process of setting up their Tokyo facility. Tim lived in Japan for a few years in the 1990’s and he understands that Japan is different, and that’s a good thing. It’s an interesting interview and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups What makes one startup space succeed and others fail When you need to turn down the money to support the  mission How NGOs and governments can sponsor innovation A blueprint for a successful innovation space What approaches to innovation might be particularly effective in Japan What three things all innovation communities need to succeed What Japanese universities can do to foster innovation Links from the Founder The Cambridge Innovation Center Follow Tim on twitter @rowe WCVB-TV's video on Kendall Square and CIC [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Welcome to Disrupting Japan- straight talk from the CEO’s breaking into Japan. You know, I’ve always been a bit skeptical about co-working spaces, innovation centers, and startup community hubs. Some of them are well intended, but too often, the organizations that put these facilities together have a bit of a field of dreams mindset, where, if they just build the office space, the innovative entrepreneurs will come, and then the organizers will find themselves at the center of a thriving ecosystem. Sometimes that actually happens, but usually not. But when it works, when all the pieces really do come together, amazing things happen. And a community develops that is far greater than the sum of its parts. So what’s the real difference between the innovation spaces that flourish compared to those that stagnate? Well, today we get a chance to sit down and talk to Tim Rowe, CEO of Cambridge Innovation Center, or CIC, the largest innovation center in the world. And we have a conversation about what’s really involved in building an entrepreneurial community, and the CIC's progress on building a very large-scale innovation center right here in Tokyo. It’s a truly insightful conversation, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to our interview.     [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey"  ] [Interview] Romero: So I’m sitting here with Tim Rowe, CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center. This is a pretty incredible space that you have been running for 15 years now. So rather than having me explain it, can you tell us a bit about what CIC is and how it came to be? Rowe: Sure. CIC is the world’s largest space for startups, that is our Cambridge Space, specifically. We’re also in Boston, Miami, St. Louis, Rotterdam Netherlands, at the moment and we’ve got some more in the works. We call ourselves a community of startups. So we’re not an accelerator where we’re telling people how to build their business or investing in them. We have brought 15 venture capital funds into our location in Cambridge and some of our other locations, so there is access to money, but it’s more of an open platform. Romero: So the VCs actually have offices there? Rowe: Their entire firm is there. Romero: In terms of business, though, it’s a real estate business. You’re renting office space. You don’t make money by making investments or… Rowe: Yea. So we don’t think about it that way. You could argue that a university is mostly made up of real estate, but that’s not its purpose. It makes it’s money by charging people to live there and go to classes, but, it’s in the same way our mission is to make the world better through innovation. The space that we curate is like a little city of innovation. Yes, people have to pay to use space in that city. A lot of things we do are free and open to the public. A lot of things we do are non-profit. Our wet laboratories and our robotics laboratories are actually non-profits. So we’re a mission driven business that happens to use real estate as a means of getting innovators together. Romero: Let’s dig down on that, because, certainly over the last ten years or so, there has been an explosion of co-working spaces and non-financial accelerators, that are frankly, often run by real estate businesses. You have got over 500 companies in this space now. Rowe: Over 1400 companies in total now. In several different buildings. Romero: I guess I’m saying, what are you doing different? What do companies see in the Cambridge innovation Center that they don’t see in these dozens of other accelerators? Rowe: So there’s a lot of ways to answer that. First of all, there is a spectrum between mission-driven and money-driven spaces just as there is a spectrum between, on the one hand you have something like a university, on the other hand you have something like a hotel. They both have space, places people sleep, but they have different purposes for that. Even within the hotel business, you have everything from sort of non-profit youth hostels up to premium four seasons kind of experiences. This world is growing, obviously, quickly. There are a lot of different models that people are presenting to the world. Just as in those other industries, you have everything from community college to MIT. Even in universities there is a wide range. That range will continue. I think, where we sit, is just our own little space. We are a warm, mission-driven community of serious entrepreneurs trying to change the world. We do it at a scale that nobody else does. So we’re more city like than a space. We call ourselves an innovation campus. When you visit one, you’ll feel more like you’re at a university and the scale of that than that you’re in somebody’s shared space. Romero: Just to contrast the mission driven approach to the real-estate or landlord driven approach. Can you think of a time where you made a decision a certain way because you were mission driven rather than… Rowe: A good example is wet laboratories. The people in Boston were telling us, you guys really need to have the wet laboratory infrastructure that we need to build our companies. We said, sure. We did the math, and we found that it loses money. But we could not make that math work for a number of reasons. Romero: So wet labs are for life sciences? Rowe: Wet labs are for wet life sciences. So you have everything from petri dishes to electron microscopes and DNA sequencing devices. And those things cost tens of millions of dollars. And startups aren’t necessarily able to pay for them. Although they need them, they just don’t have the kind of capital that would support it. So we looked at that and said, this is still needed. So we went and turned it into a non-profit. We have worked on this for years. We built it. It’s very successful. Haven’t made a dime on it. Romero: Did the non-profits have corporate sponsors? Or are they just structured as a non-profit… Rowe: No typically governmental sponsors. We also have some corporate sponsors, but for the most part, these initiatives are underwritten by the public sector as an economic development initiative. So we try to think, what do innovators need? What should the world look like? Then we figure out the way to make that happen, regardless of whether that makes us money or doesn’t make us money. Romero: I’ve noticed that the community doesn’t usually happen for co-working spaces. This is something that has interested me, when we were speaking earlier today, you mentioned the importance of proximity. What is it that you think is missing from most co-working spaces or what do you think that they could do better to increase collaboration or to build that community around them. Rowe: I’m sorry about the space that you’re referring to that don’t have much community. I think good shared spaces always have community, so it may be that those places need to make their mistakes and learn how to build their community. Certainly, it’s taken us a long time for us to figure that out. It’s not easy. There are a number of factors that go into building any strong community. You need a shared purpose. You need to have ground rules for behavior and respect. You need to have leadership, so you can’t just say here you are. Somebody needs to say, this is where we’re going. You need to have access to the right kinds of ongoing nurturing resources. Whether it’s more bright people, more startups, more technologies and so forth. You need to feed them. You need to feed them economically with investment so they grow. You need to take all those things that you would think about to what makes a healthy city and apply that to one of these. You’d find the same kinds of answers. Romero: It sounds like it’s very much not a passive endeavor. It’s not a matter of just getting the right components in the same place. It’s a lot of hands on, active management to create that. Rowe: Yea. A friend of mine is a city counselor in the City of Cambridge. And I think a lot of the things that he focuses on and that we focus on are very similar. Romero: Excellent. Let’s talk about your plans for Japan, and CIC in Japan. It’s actually astounding how far Japan has come in the last 15 years in terms of being startup friendly. So when I started my first company here, it was next to impossible to rent an office. Landlords would require twelve-months of security deposit, personal guarantees on leases.

Hiking, back-country skiing and mountain climbing are not usually the first things associated with Japan. Japan, however, has some stunning natural beauty and Yoshihio Haruyama of Yamap is trying to get more and more people to appreciate that. Yamap is a mobile app that allows hikers, back-country skiers and other outdoorsmen to know exactly where they are even when they are well outside of areas cell-phone reception, and the platform is also providing Japan’s outdoor enthusiasts with a way of connecting to each other. Yoshi also explains how relatively young Yamap managed to negotiate OEM deals with both Casio and Kyosera, and give practical advice for other startups hoping to partner up with large Japanese firms. It’s a great discussion and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why add gamification to a hiking app Why Yamap had to pursue multiple monitazation strategies What a startup needs to know to work with a large Japanese brand Why going global might require a business model pivot There are important differences between hikers in the US and Japan The importance of inbound tourism for outdoor activities in Japan How the Fukuoka startup scene is different from Tokyo Links from the Founder Everything you wanted to know about Yamap See a demo video of Yamap in English Check out Yoshi on Tumbler Follow him on twitter @haruyamayoshi Friend him on Facebook [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan   Disrupting Japan episode 75.   Welcome to Disrupting Japan- straight talk from japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. Ah, the great outdoors, it is something that nerds like me do not get enough of, especially living here in Tokyo. Yoshi Haruyama of Yamap is starting to change that. Yamap is a mobile app that allows hikers, back country skiers, mountain climbers and other outdoors men to know exactly where they are. Even where they are far, far away from anywhere with cell phone reception, and to share this experience with others and to learn from them. If you are one of our overseas listeners, you might be surprised at how much natural beauty Japan has to offer, and if you are of our listeners in Japan you might be surprised at the average age of Japanese outdoors men. Yamap has also done some OEM deals with Japans largest brands. Yoshi gave us some practical advice on how startups can sell to and work with large Japanese companies on joint projects. Oh and during the interview we talk about a wireless transmission technology called Lora. Just so you know, it is a low power wide coverage network that is useful for transmitting large numbers of very small messages. So, now you will know it when you hear it. Let us hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview.     [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I am sitting here with Yoshi Haruyama of Yamap, it is an application for hikers and mountaineers and other outdoors men in Japan but Yoshi I’m sure you can explain it a lot better than I can, so, tell us abet about a Yamap, what is it? Yoshi: Yamap is a social GPRS tracking application. You install the Yamap application. You can find where you are without mobile reception, such as mountain or foreign countries. Tim: Who are the main users, is it hikers, is it back country skiers, mountain climbers? Who uses it? Yoshi: The most of our uses are hikers and back country skiers. Tim: Okay let us see, you started the company in 2011 and you launched like two years later, right? You were working on this project for a long time and you digitized a lot of these maps by hand and were like marking the trails yourself earlier on. Was there problem that there just is not digitized information on hiking trails in Japan? Why did you spend so much time having to do it by yourself? Yoshi: The most difficult point, we made this application Yamap, so Yamap can work without mobile reception. So most applications are based online. We had to adapt our application online environment and offline environment. Tim: Mobile reception is good in Japan, but if you are in the mountains there is no cell reception. Yoshi: No, no no. Now we have a full set of aerial maps in Japan and about 100 areas in foreign countries like New Zealand, United States, Switzerland, and so on. We need enough time to make maps. Tim: Are you and the Yamap team still creating and entering the maps or are your users now doing that for you? Yoshi: Both. We take advantage of the information from users, but, we made a map which is based on our information. Tim: What kind of information? I mean it is easy to understand why a hiking map application that works with no cell connection is valuable, but what is the social aspect of it?\ Yoshi: We add information such as, hiking time to where the toilet is, where the parking lot is, to the map, so that is why we need to customize our map. Then, when our users used our maps, we can take the advantage of these users’ data. They make our maps better. Like Wikipedia. Tim: Right, exactly. Let us talk about your customers. Tell me about your users, so, right now, how many monthly users do you have? Yoshi: We have 380,000 users per month. Tim: Are they mostly hikers, or skiers or what kind of activities are the most common? Yoshi: Most of our users are hikers. Tim: Before, you mentioned gamification was very important in this, but I am curious, to me it seems like a very interesting concept. Is the idea simply that if this person climbs this mountain he gets a badge? Do hikers and outdoors people, do they need that kind of motivation? Yoshi: I think that developed countries like, United States or Japan, there is a big problem, so many human beings do not use their own body. There is no chance to connect our body to nature. Tim: I can see that. Most Japanese do live in cities and most people are working at office jobs, programming computers or making podcasts, but does an application such as Yamap actually motivate people to go out and hike or do you think it is the existing hikers who are adopting Yamap because it provides a very convenient way for them to get maps? Yoshi: Yea in Japan, there are 7,400,000 people who are doing outdoor activities, so, I think they are few. Tim: Does that include things like going to the beach? Or is that only hiking and skiing? Yoshi: Hiking and skiing and picking the mushrooms in the forest. Tim: How does the gamification work? Yoshi : We want to give the people who are not doing outdoor activities the chance. Tim: The hope is that it will attract new hikers and new snowboarders. Let us talk about the business model itself, it has been very interesting watching Yamap over the last three years now. You launched in 2013, so, over the last three years both grow the size of your business, but also find the right revenue model. Tell us a bit about how Yampa actually makes money? Yoshi: Our monitization point; one is the freemium model, two is outdoor insurance for hikers and skiers, and three is the affiliate model for outdoor equipment. Tim: Alright, now those  are three very different ways of monetizing ,so let us take them one at a time. In the freemium model, the basic application is free, and in-app purchases are used to buy a what, different maps or? Yoshi: It is like an airplane, the people who pay more, sit business class. The person who pays for Yamap can use the good maps. Tim: Practically what is the good difference? Is it just that there are more maps, more detail? Yoshi: Pay users can get a premium maps which is color map. Tim: So it is not like the free version they will tell you how to hike in, but you need to pay for... Yoshi: No, no we are very honest. Tim: That is good to hear. I think the affiliate program, where you are running like an affiliate for outdoors goods and the insurance program, it is very interesting. They are both a way of monetizing your community. It is a very different model from a freemium, from a pure freemium model. Which has been more profitable for Yamap? Yoshi: That is a very good question. I think it is easier to sell goods to our users. It is very difficult for our users to buy premium. I think human beings don’t used to get digital contents. Tim: I see what you expect .It is hard to get a pure digital purchase. Every one that is running freemium  model, the overwhelming majority are free and free is often good enough. So what percentage of your users are paying users, and which are free users? Yoshi: Just one percent. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1653" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey” ] Tim: Okay, that is pretty standard, I think for a lot of apps, but I can see why it makes it very difficult to run business, when you only have 380,000 users. Yoshi: That is why we want to emphasize on that, such as goods, insurance. Tim: it is changing the company from being a company focused on the application to a company that is focused on the community. You have also just recently done some really interesting deals with Casio,  and Kyocera. You integrated with Casio’s outdoor smartwatch. How did that project happen did you pitch to Casio or did Casio find you,? Yoshi: Casio found us, maybe two years ago. First, Casio was interested in Yamap. One year later, Casio, wanted to develop smart watch for outdoor people so Yamap has a big community for outdoor people. That is why we can help with Casio. Tim: What is the arrangement? Are they just pre-installing your app on the smart watches, did they pay a onetime license fee, are you getting a percentage of every watch sold? How did the deal work out? Yoshi: It is a license fee.

More than a few people dream of coming to Japan, starting an online business that gives you financial freedom and leaves you with enough free time to study the language travel and just enjoy Japan. I know that sounds like the opening to some terrible multi-level marketing pitch, but today we site down and talk with someone who has done exactly that — twice. Patrick McKenzie came to Japan more than 15 years ago and after enduring the soul-crushing boredom that is the life of a Japanese programer, he took maters into his own hands, left his job and began developing software products that he sold and supported all over the world the world from his home in the Japanese countryside. It turns our that life was not as idillic or as simple as it seems, but there are some important lessons learned and a great story to be told. I think you’ll enjoy this one. Show Notes for Startups What it's like working as a developer at a Japanese company The 30-year career plan Japanese companies have for their employees Why Japanese developers don’t start side businesses Why it's smart to focus on the foreign market when selling software from Japan  What's the wrong way to generate a startup idea  Why running a micro-startup can be more rewarding than getting investment What made Patrick give it all up and get a day job Why you need to develop the ability to do arbitrary hard things How to make failure a part of life in Japan, and why that would be a good thing Links from the Founder Patrick runs the Kalzumeus blog Check out some of Patrick's (aka patio11) prolific writing at Hacker News Stripe's Atlas Program Check out the Kalzumeus podcast, and tell Patrick to make more of them [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 74. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me. One of the things I enjoyed most about making Disrupting Japan, is not only do I get a chance to sit down and talk with some of the most innovative people in Japan, but I hear from people all over the world who are thinking about bringing their company to Japan, or who are deeply involved in the startup scene in their own country, or who just have a love of Japan and enjoy hearing about startups and how things are changing here. I also get a pretty steady stream of inquiries from listeners with a very specific Japan-focused dream. There are a lot of developers all over the world who want to move to Japan, maybe move to a Japanese company, study the language, and then start some kind of internet business that would give them the financial independence and the freedom to just live your life in Japan. Well, if that sounds appealing, I’ve got a treat for you today. Today, we’re going to sit down and talk with my friend, Patrick McKenzie, and we’re basically going to give you a blueprint for doing exactly that. I’ll warn you in advance, it might not be as easy as you think it is, or as rewarding as you imagine it might be, and in fact, in the end, Patrick left that life behind. Before he did that, however, he created not just one, but two successful online businesses, that he ran from the comfort of the Japanese countryside. Now, you’ve probably never heard of either of Patrick’s companies, but he’s a more important part of the Tokyo startup ecosystem than he likes to let on. He’s an advisor, a connector, and someone whose name just keeps popping up in Tokyo’s startup scene, and he has a really amazing story to tell. So let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview.     [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey"  ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Patrick McKenzie of Stripe and of Kalzumeus software, and the illustrious Kalzumeus podcast, as a matter of fact. You’re really a unique figure in the startup ecosystem in Japan and you’ve done something that I think a lot of our listeners dream about doing, which is running two companies on your own here. Your ideas, your marketing, your coding, and bringing them to fruition, and so thanks for sitting down and talking with us today. Patrick: Thanks so much for having me, Tim. Hidey-ho, everybody, I’m Patrick McKenzie, better known as Patio11 on the internets. Micro tip for everybody: memorize a self-intro that is one sentence long and then you can just play it on every podcast, from now to eternity. I don’t know if I’m a very important person, but I have a less than common life story, so people apparently like hearing it. Tim: Well something that I think should be more common. You did what a lot of people want to do. You became a micro-startup. You went from idea, to code, to product, not once, but twice, in Japan. In fact, you were living in the countryside while doing it, so literally, doing your own business from anywhere. Before we really dig into the mechanics of those companies, let’s back up and talk about you for a bit. Why Japan? Patrick: I have an odd answer to this question. I grew up with my father and every day, as our father-son bonding activity, we would read the Wall Street Journal together. And when I was studying engineering in school, the Wall Street Journal was very insistent—this was back in the early 2000s. All of the engineering jobs were going to India and China, so I was getting a lot of parental pressure, “Go get a W-2 job at a nice, big megacorp, something which is safe and stable, with healthcare,” and my inaccurate assessment of the world, from my perch in St. Louis at the time, was that basically only existed in the United States at Microsoft, so I wanted to get a job at Microsoft, but I didn’t think I was the sharpest knife in the coding drawer, so I thought, “If I could combine a language that was commercially reasonable for software development, with the actual skill of doing software development, then Microsoft would have to give me a job, as like the product manager of X country Excel. And if I did that, I would be only competing against not 100,000 people who were graduating in India and China every year, but only the small subsection who had mastered the same language and were also fluent in English. So I asked my university, “Can you give me a list of every language the university teaches?” I went down the list on how many billions of dollars of software does this country make and how many billions of dollars of software do they buy? And Japan was number one on this by a longshot. So I immediately signed up for Japanese 101 and I think about one hour into learning the Japanese language, I was like, “Yep, this is clicking with me. I’m totally going to major in this.” So I majored in that and in engineering and then when I graduated, I was like, “Can I, in good conscience, go to Microsoft right now, and say, ‘You should make me the product manager of MS Excel Japanese version.’” I thought, “Well, I know nothing about anything and my Japanese is good enough to have a conversation, but probably not good enough to lead a project management meeting.” Tim: Actually, the idea of combining engineering with another skill is a really good one for anyone, whatever that other skill or other passion happens to be. Did you try to market yourself? Did you try to get a job combining those two skills straight out of college? Or were you really kind of headed for Japan at this point. Patrick: I was terrible at this. I was actually—randomly met someone who it would be professionally advantageous to know if that was the career past plan, and when he heard engineering degree plus some level of Japanese conversational fluency, he asked me to apply to his company on the understanding that he would immediately be able to say yes to the application. And I heard that and did not take action on it because I was worried about it being too much. Meanwhile, I could just send him an e-mail saying, “Hey, I graduated now. Can I have that job you promised me?” When I graduated, I thought my Japanese not sufficient to run an engineering meeting in Japan right now, so I will go over to Japan after graduation, work as a translator for a few years to firm up my business Japanese, and them come back and get a job with Microsoft, was the plan. Tim: Okay, it seems like being in St. Louis, it would actually be harder to get a job as a translator in Japan than it would be to get a job as a product manager at a software company in America. Patrick: Yeah, you would think that, right? I think this is one of the many times in life where people don’t have a great idea for what is easy and what is hard. They just have an idea for what is like the well-trodden path and what is not the well-trodden path, at Washington University, which was where I was going to school. One well-trodden path was applying to the JET program. There is an A4 sheet of paper that you just put your name on and boom, that takes off— Tim: A clear path from A to B. Patrick: Yeah, a clear path from A to B. I’m like, “Oh, I will apply to the clear path from A to B,” and applied to the JET program. They assigned me as a coordinator for international relations, prefecturally sponsored technology incubator and Gifu prefecture. If you’re not too familiar with the JET program, they do 3 things: the big one is they send people without much Japan experience or knowledge of the Japanese language to be ALTs, Assistant Language Teachers at Japanese schools, to have a foreigner with native pronunciation of English teaching there. And then their much smaller thing is they place translators and interpreters at a variety of governmental and quasi-governmental organizations. Tim: But at this point, your Japanese wasn’t good enough to be a translator, right? So you were going in to be an English teacher? Patrick: No,

Gaming is very different in Japan than it is in America, but PowerCore is introducing technology that could lead to major changes in both of them. Toys to Life technology blurs the distinction between the analog and digital worlds by having digital gameplay react to the presence of physical toys. For example, after buying a figuring, that character would appear in the game. The first generation of this technology is already being used by powerhouses such as Disney and Nintendo, but the real change is yet to come. Today Jia Shen explains what the future holds for Toys to Life, and why he decided to start his company in Japan. It seems that the boundary between analog and digital is about to become a lot less clear. It’s a great conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why large companies have trouble crossing the toy-game barrier Why it made sense to build a distributed team from Tokyo The special appeal of physical goods in our digital life How Disney just made a big mistake Why children don't play with some toys Why Japan gaming might be the future model for the rest of the world Links from the Founder Learn more about Powercore Check out their Online Store Some cool toy pics on Instagram Follow Jia on twitter @mekatek Friend him on Facebook Jia on Instragram You really need to see the toys in action to appreciate them check out This video or this one this is cool too or this video [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan  Disrupting Japan, episode 73. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. You know, gaming has always pushed the limits of both computer hardware and the interfaces we use to interact with computers. Jia Shen, of PowerCore, is blurring the distinction between the online and offline interaction. Powercore enables video games to react to the presence of physical object. For example, if you owned a figurine of a superhero, that hero could appear in the game. It’s a simple interaction that radically changes the way we view the digital-analog divide. Of course, as with all technologies, adoption is never smooth, and Jia explains some of the mistakes that burned Disney, and some of the major market players. It seems that, as is so often the case, the secret to introducing innovative technology, is to do only as much as you absolutely have to, and then watch how your users react. It’s a simple idea in principle but there are surprising reasons why some of the most influential companies in the industry have trouble following it. But Jia tells that story much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview.     [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Jia Shen of PowerCore. Now, PowerCore does toys to life or sometimes it’s called offline-online business, but why don’t you explain basically what it is and who uses it. Jia: Sure. The toys to life is a model, that from our perspective, Japan has done a lot of pioneering, but the United States, in maybe the last 5 or 6 years, have made a very large business out of it. So we point to, in the US, Skylanders from Activision, Disney had a big one called Infinity, featuring a lot of the great Disney characters. Nintendo, LEGO, they all have some forays into this. And specifically it’s toys that are collectible, that have a strong interaction with video games. So the guys that do it on a large scale, they usually have console games, and you have different characters, which you can stick into the game, they have different power-ups, they have different game mechanics. Tim: For example, there would be a figurine, or a trophy, or a sticker of some kind that would activate a character in the game or would activate new levels in the game? Jia: Skylanders, I think, is the best game design. They really accentuate the collection of individual characters. So imagine a Super Mario game but different levels have different mechanics. For instance, certain ones require you to be able to have wheels as feet, to be able to run faster. Other ones require you to have big hands to be able to crawl up walls. Tim: So what is the physical tie-in there? Jia: As a player, you literally have your character in front of it when you’re walking through, and say there’s a specific enemy that you want to defeat that requires a specific characters, you immediately swap the character right on the pedestal, and that person immediately appears out of the game. Tim: Okay, so you’re swapping physical characters in the real world and that’s impacting the game in real-time, as you play it? Cool. Are most customers taking existing IP and making toys, like Star Wars or Frozen or Angry Birds? Or are they companies that have like a popular game and want to add a layer of physical activity to it? Jia: We have 3 categories of customers. The big customers are large toy companies that are trying to unify kind of a merchandising strategy. In Japan, let’s use Naruto as an example. Naruto is kind of licensed out from Shoeisha and they take that and a bunch of other companies do the merchandise, and a bunch of other companies do the games. None of them are the same. So typically, with an IP company, there’s a lot of business units, a lot of companies associated to it, and none of them are really interacting with one another. And that’s really kind of a sweet spot for us, IPs that are doing large launches, that are existing in a lot of different places, but they really should be creating experiences that really unify everything. Marvel’s a good example of doing a good job of that. Marvel and Disney, what they do is they’re creating universes that everything interacts with the TV shows, work with their movies, the movies work with their games, everything kind of feeds into individual aspects to it. But if you look at everybody else outside of Disney, they’re definitely not doing that. A movie launches, it has nothing to do with a TV show. The toys themselves have their own campaigns and whatnot. Our job is to actually create universes among all these different mediums and the users are free to participate. Tim: Okay. Listen, before we dig down deeper into the market as a whole, let’s talk about you for a minute. So this isn’t your first startup. You actually started up a pretty successful company called RockYou in San Francisco 8 years ago now? Jia: I officially started 10 years ago. Tim: 10 years ago. It was a company that was a platform for developing apps on Facebook and social media. What made you decide it was time to move on from that industry and move into toys to life? Jia: I think one of the other big things was I moved to Japan. Around 2010, I came here because we did a joint venture with SoftBank, so that was a catalyst for me to move here. But I personally always wanted to be in Japan. The reason for me to move on was kind of more of a personal reflection point. RockYou as a company became very, very large. It’s definitely not the sweet spot in which I enjoy operating at. When I left, we were like 350 people or something in the United States office alone. I wanted to come here to basically try and do new stuff. I wanted to focus on becoming somebody that actually created strong content. Tim: What was your attraction to Japan? Was the industry itself attractive or was just the country attractive? Jia: The country attracted me. I’ve been coming to Japan since 2003, every year. For me it was like a very strong personal decision. I definitely wanted to live here. Tim: Okay. Well, gaming in Japan, it’s certainly different than it is in the US. So is Powercore doing most of its current business in Japan, or the US, or do you have customers in both places? Jia: We’re pretty much evenly split, as far as customers and the team. As far as core game businesses, Japan and Korea is actually the leader for that kind of business. The US, it more interestingly is coming more from the toy side, as well as the IP rights holders. United States’ IPs are more movie driven, so we’re doing a lot more business from kind of the movie IP and marketing launch sides. It’s the same goal that we’re trying to achieve, but because of how businesses and companies are setup, the US and Japan are actually very different. Tim: With everything being digital these days, more and more of our life is digital. Do you think there’s some special appeal to having a physical object? Do people identify with that somehow more strongly than they do just the digital game or the digital character themselves? Jia: Absolutely. And there is a difference based on individual IPs and that’s something that we’ve learned a lot about in the last year. Tim: Like how? Jia: The original thesis was you take any game that has a large audience with it, and we should be able to merchandise it. That’s absolutely not true because the two ways to look at our business: one is a very practical one, from business—I’ll get to that in a second—and first is actually universe-building. It works for adults and it works for kids, but it’s a lot more easy to see when a child takes a toy, scans it in. When they get it, it completes a fantasy, “Oh my goodness. My Pokémon is a stuffed animal and now it’s in the game.” Once you make that connection, it’s very nice. So the universe-building part is actually a nice part. Tim: I could actually see how children would pick that up more quickly than adults would. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1653" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey” ] Jia: Yeah, they super love it. Every time you show a kid our scanning stuff,

Selling services in Japan is very different than selling products or software. Everyone knows that relationships are important in Japan, but not many people understand why they are so important, and how you can use that understanding to build a successful business here. Today Sriram Venkataraman explains how he grew InfoSys Japan from a one man operation to over 1,000 employees and how understanding why Japanese enterprises must trust their vendors far more than companies in other developed countries. We talk about hiring strategies and techniques he used to get his initial customers and some of the most common mistakes that western companies make with their senior leadership in Japan. It’s basically a blueprint for how to grow a services company from nothing to thousands of people in Japan, and I think you’ll enjoy it. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Links & Resources Follow Sriram on Twitter @japansriram Connect with him on LinkedIn Transcript Disrupting Japan, episode 72. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan. Today we’ve got some amazingly good advice for anyone who wants to sell services in Japan. Selling products or software is challenging enough, but selling services where relationships mean everything and where the quality expectations for service is perhaps the highest in the world, that provides a host of very special challenges. Today we sit down with Sriram Venkataraman, as he explains how me manages to scale Infosys, which provides outsourced Indian development services, from 2 people, to over 1,000 people in Japan. In a very real sense, he did it with a strategy that is pretty much the opposite of what you would expect from an Indian software services company. This is a real insight into the mind and the buying decisions of Japanese enterprise customers and Sriram has a different, very compelling perspective, on why so many foreign companies have trouble gaining real trust in the Japanese market. We talk a lot about finding the right people here in Japan, and how to avoid the hiring traps that western firms commonly fall into. Really, this interview is basically a blueprint of how to grow from nothing to 1,000 people in Japan. But, you know, Sriram Venkataraman explains that much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview.     [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey"  ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Sriram Venkataraman, of Infosys, and you have been with Infosys from the very beginning in Japan, and you’ve seen it grow from a tiny team to over 10,000 employees here now, haven’t you? Sriram: Not 10,000. Tim: No? That was on the website. Sriram: Our total Japan business is probably about 1,000 people today. But given the business model, not all of them are here. Roughly 65 to 70% of the teams are in India and the balance are here. Tim: Okay, let’s actually back up a bit to 20 years ago. The Japanese market is obviously a very big one but system integration is always a very local game, so what attracted both you and Infosys to the Japanese market in the first place? Sriram: So Infosys was founded by 7 people. The senior founder, I think he’s a true visionary . So one of the important dimensions for Infosys was, “How do we move away from a large dependence on the market of the United States?” Because our business is quite dependent heavily on the mobility of people’s ideas. If you are dependent only on one market, if there is a regulatory change, or if there is something else that happens, then you are not going to be able to sustain the productions that you make. Tim: And back then, what percentage of the revenues were coming from the US? Sriram: The year I joined, this company had a global revenue of $26 million. I was I think sales employee number 10. Tim: But that was—so this was ’96? Sriram: And ’97. Tim: So this was at the very start of this global outsourcing— Sriram: Absolutely. And at that time, we were at what, 78% of our revenues, or something like that, was from the US. We had just started Europe a couple of years ago, and we had just started some stuff, and the next extension was to figure out Asia. Japan, obviously, was of interested, just given the GDP size. And the company tried to do some experimentation through some remote sales, if you will. People came, then they realized it was simpler to have somebody here. And that was in ’96. Through a strange set of circumstances, I got introduced to this company. Tim: How strange? Is this something you want to talk about? Sriram: Yeah, I can discuss. So I was doing very well in another Indian company, and I had been there for almost 6 years, and I was responsible for new product development and new businesses. We were developing the computer peripheral business in India and India deregulated in ’91, and then the economy really started picking up. I think IT is the only industry where India has always kept pace with the global level. Every other industry, we started from behind. I think it was just perfect timing that when India started to open up, computing was also getting democratized thanks to the PC and stuff like that. So my job was to manage our technical partner, who was over in Japan. And I visited Japan a couple of times, and when I came to Japan, one of the things that really struck me was how is it that a country, which lost everything in two wars, come up like this in 50 years? It is not that Indians, on an average lack an intellect—also, they work very hard. What is it that makes this county so successful that we are not able to duplicate in India? Tim: I’ve got to ask, did you manage to figure that out? Sriram: Yes and no.  lot of it has to do with how well they work with the cultural context that they have. And the notion of common good being more important than a private good, I think drives this place pretty well. Economically speaking, I think METI did a brilliant job of figuring out what this country identity is going to be from from an economic sense. They went from ship building, steel, automobiles, electronics, semiconductors, and so on. But all of it I think was a very carefully planned, orchestrated resources allocation, managing the industry in such a way that there is limited competition, which is incentive enough for everybody to stay competitive, but at the same time, not so unlimited that nobody is making money. Tim: And they were highly competitive in the global markets. Sriram: And they would go together as Japan Inc. Tim: It worked incredibly well until about 1990 or so. Sriram: When I was doing this printer business, obviously we had a relationship with one of the Japanese companies and there was this other Japanese company that had something very interesting. And it is almost sacrilegious to even think that you would even talk to the other company, but I did, just to explore because the technology was changing, and the other company was a little ahead in the new stuff. But before I knew, the other guys knew that I had met these guys. And it goes on from our side. Tim: The relationships in Japan are so important. And actually, let’s dig into this because I think what Infosys was selling, these relationships and services—it’s fundamentally different from coming into Japan and trying to sell hardware or consumer brands, or enterprise software. When you first came to Japan, how big was the team and what did your first deal look like? Sriram: Before that, let me just finish the moving story. I was doing very well and because India had deregulated a whole bunch of multi-nationals who were coming in, one of my customers actually left his job and started a headhunting firm. And this guy was calling me every day, saying this company wants somebody, that company wants somebody. And I kept telling no to this guy and one day he called me and he said, “What do you want to do?” And I thought I would get him off my back by saying, “The next thing I want to do is I want to work overseas, and in Japan only, thinking that this guy would never call me. The next morning, at 6:30, he calls me. He said, “Infosys was looking to do something in Japan, you promised me, so you will go and meet these people.” I said, “Yeah, a promise is a promise; I will go and meet these people.” And usually people say you should never change your job, your home, and city all at the same time, and I did all of that. And I also changed industries. I had no idea about what the software business was. But I just had this foolish energy in me that said, “How bad can it be? How hard can it be?” Tim: I think in some ways, coming to Japan with no preconceived notions at all might be an advantage. Sriram: Yeah. Then I joined the company and I was told that, “Could you please learn Japanese in India before you go?” Then I started learning and I had two tutors—one in the morning and one in the evening. Intense classroom for 3 months and then somehow I managed to convince these guys to call my boss and say, “This guy is okay. Beyond this, he won’t improve in India. Send him to Japan.” Then I came here, I landed at Noreda, heard the train announcements, and I couldn’t understand anything. But then, by then, I had already come with one suitcase and a bag, so I had to make it work. We had one more guy here and that goes back to how we tried to enter the market. So I was running the independent influences operation, then they also said there was an opportunity created by the famous consultant, Kennedy. He wanted to bring India and Japan together, so he created a company with 4 Indian companies as investors and some Japanese investors called Jastic Park. Tim: So is this consortium of— Sriram: Yeah, but they created an entity, they hired people,

Today we are going low-tech. Sledgehammers and paint brushes low tech. Keigo Fukugaki has started his own hotel brand, BnA, which stands for Bed & Art. It’s not a platform. It’s not an online marketplace. There isn’t (yet) even a meaningful e-commerce component. BnA is a new kind of hotel that places travelers not only in hotel rooms with interesting decor, but plugs them into the local artistic community. It’s an incredibly ambitious project, but Keigo and his team have three small prototype hotels up and running, and they are in the process of building a full scale facility in Japan and already in talks about international expansion. With SaaS companies and digital marketplaces  dominating the news, sometimes it's nice to know that some startups are running businesses based on concrete and lumber. It’s a fascinating interview, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why old office buildings make ideal art spaces The dangers of standardization in Japan and global the hotel industry Why Bed&Art is the anti-Airbnb Why crowdfunding should never be about the money any more Why Keigo left San Francisco to start his startup in Japan The very real danger of stretching yourself too thin Why the differences between Japanese and American programmers are real and important Links from the Founder Learn more about Bed and Art Follow Keigo on twitter @makeshiftjp Friend him on Facebook Checkout Keigo's design firm Makeshift Honey Wedding The BnA prototype as Airbnb in Ikebukuro Their successful crowdfunding campaign [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 71. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. You know, more than anything else, Disrupting Japan is about introducing you to the people who are changing business in Japan. I mean, really introducing you to them. Not the banal book tour interviews you hear everywhere else, but to let you get to know the real people starting things up in Japan. People you would love to sit down and have a beer with and with whom I’m lucky enough to do just that. It’s letting you know the people behind the startups. And although Disrupting Japan is a business podcast, business is personal. Hiding behind every great startup with impressive numbers, there is an interesting story about how it got started. And hiding behind that interesting story is the story of what really happened and the real goals, and the real successes, and real disappointments. And what I love about podcasting is that it makes it so easy for you to hear when someone is telling a PR approved origin story and when someone is really speaking from the heart, when they are telling you about something that really matters to them. Well, I’ve got a great story for you today and listeners have commented that I’ve been a bit tech heavy recently, so today, we’re going to meet someone who is decidedly low tech, as in paint brushes and hammers low tech. Keigo Fukugaki has started his own hotel brand, Bed & Art, in which he tries to merge travel with supporting the local artistic community. It’s an ambitious project to be sure and as the interview progressed, I went from thinking, “This won’t work,” to, “Nah, this is way too much of a long shot to really work,” to “You know, this is just crazy and quirky enough that is just might work.” In this age of SAS, Airbnb, and middleware, sometimes it’s refreshing to find a startup that deals in concrete. But, you know, Keigo tell that story much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview.     [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404"  info_text="Sponsored by"  font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: So cheers. We’re sitting here with Keigo Fukugaki of Bed & Art, which is sort of a distributed hotel art space, but you’re going to be able to explain it much better than me, so what is Bed & Art? Keigo: Basically, we’re a hotel startup and we’re trying to find a new way to start a hotel brand, not a real estate mogul. We’re just four guys with a little bit of cash. We also work with a lot of artists and we’re mixing the hotel business with art to create a new kind of travel experience. Tim: Okay. Concretely, what are you doing? Keigo: We’re creating one of a kind rooms with artists and every time someone stays in those rooms, part of the revenue goes back to the artist. It’s bringing together a lot of unique travellers and the local artists together. Tim: Are these apartments that you own? Are they apartments that other people are letting you renovate? How does it work? Keigo: We’re actually a hotel, registered as a hotel. So we’re taking over old buildings and we’re renovating those, creating lobby, bar, hotel rooms. And in Tokyo, there’s a lot of these office buildings that we’re able to convert into a hotel. And I think that’s new. Usually when you think about a hotel, it’s about where it is and how beautiful the exterior is. Tim: Sure. The hotel industry has really become standardized. And that’s good and bad. You know what to expect. But every room is completely different and some of them are really crazy. We’ll put links to the site so everyone can see it. Always hard to describe art in an audio podcast. You’ve got a couple of hotels now, right? One in Koenji, one in Kyoto. Keigo: And then we have a pilot room that started off as an Airbnb room in Ikebukuro. Tim: So how many rooms are in each of these hotels? Keigo: Very small. The one in Koenji has 2 rooms, and Ikebukuro has one room, and Kyoto has 3 rooms. Tim: All right. Is your marketing primarily via Airbnb, or do you use Expedia, or word of mouth? How do you get your bookings? Keigo: Most of our bookings come through Expedia and Booking.com. Tim: Really? I would have figured it would have been Airbnb. Keigo: We’re actually at a separate price range than what an Airbnb customer might be looking for. So we’re priced at the same level as a hotel, so you’re looking at $160-200 something per night. Usually, in Tokyo at least, Airbnb costs are much lower than that. So even though we have some of our rooms listed on Airbnb, most of our customers don’t come through there. Our target market is actually slightly separate from an Airbnb customer base. We believe we’re target towards young professionals who are looking for great service, but also a unique experience as well. Tim: Interesting. I guess in some ways, you’re kind of the anti-Airbnb. Because when you rent an Airbnb pretty much anywhere in the world these days, you’re going to go into the same type of room with the same IKEA furniture, and that’s all fine, but it’s getting sort of standardized like the hotel experience. Keigo: Exactly. It’s interesting that you say this because this is exactly why we started BnA. And I mentioned that we started the Ikebukuro project as a pilot because two of our partners, or co-founders, they used to run a lot of Airbnbs in Tokyo and they were actually Airbnb moguls. They had something like 40 Airbnbs in Tokyo, and they were one of the first ones to really start making that into a pseudo business. And they were killing it but I came in and I actually made fun of them, said, “Basically, you guys are actually making this cookie cutter room with IKEA furniture, and all you’re doing is making money.” Tim: There’s nothing wrong with that. Keigo: There’s definitely nothing wrong with that but these guys, at the time, they were like 27—brilliant guys. And that’s why I’m working with them. But I realized, at 27, I think if you have a higher goal, you can achieve much, much more interesting things. And that’s where I came in and kind of poked around, and they agreed. They wanted to do something more interesting. Tim: Now, Airbnb rates in the last year or so have really been coming down in Japan. Are they still in that Airbnb business or did they sort of pare that back? Keigo: They’re in it, but they have definitely pulled back. They realized the competition is really high, in terms of how many listing there are. So even if you are doing a great job, the price will come down. Tim: It’s kind of a race to the bottom now, now that everyone expects the IKEA furniture. All right. So tell me about your customers. Who stays here and who goes to the bar? Keigo: We call them like-minded people. To us, our focus is really to try and find who would be our best friends in the rest of the world. And these people are young, hip, they know what they want. When they travel, they’re well-travelled, so they expect a certain amount of an unknown. And they feel that they can handle certain amounts of differences. Tim: Are your guests mostly foreign or Japanese? Keigo: They’re mostly foreign and they’re actually all from Europe, or the US, or Australia. So western countries are our main customer base. Tim: Are they people from, let’s call it an artist community, that are usually using it, or is it more of just regular travellers looking for something a little different? Keigo: They’re definitely the creative types. They’re TV producers, they might be writers, they might be musicians, web designers. So they tend to be more in that creative field. But they’re all young professionals. They make a certain amount of income that they can actually stay in the hotel and kind of have a decent amount of spending. I’m not saying they’re luxurious in any way, but they have done the Airbnb and they’re over it because they know they can afford a little bit more service. But that middle ground is missing right now. Tim: That middle ground between the standardized Airbnb experience and the standardized hotel experience. But from a business point of view, if you’re operating property that only has two rooms,

Sales is different in Japan. When Fastly entered the Japanese market, they quickly discovered that they had change their technology-driven bottom up sales approach to fit Japan’s top-down enterprise market. Today we sit down with Doug Chuchro, the Japan head of Fastly who explains how he had to chance both the sales strategy and the corporate culture from that of the US, which a highly knowledgeable user base who understood the workings of their technology as well as the sales team to Japan, where they frequently found themselves educating potential customers about what a content deliver network is and how they are used. We also explore the importance of partners in the Japanese market, and how those relationships can be very much a two-edged sword. It’s a fascinating conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it. [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Links & Resources Learn more about Fastly here Connect with Doug on LinkedIn Follow Doug and Fastly Japan on Twitter @FastlyJapan (Japanese) or @fastly (English) Contact  doug@fastly.com or the Tokyo team  japan@fastly.com (English or Japanese) Read about Fastly’s partnership with Nifty Cloud (Japanese) Read about Fastly’s partnership with SoftBank (Japanese) Learn about Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator with Google Cloud Platform (English) Sign up for a free Fastly trial account Find out how to do stuff on Fastly from posts on Qiita (Japanese) Transcript   Disrupting Japan, episode 70. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening. Today we’re going to talk about content delivery networks or CDMs, those services that cache your website locally around the world so that users can access it extremely quickly. Or more accurately, we’re going to talk about how Fastly has managed to sell them in Japan. We sit down today with Doug Chuchro, the Japan head of Fastly to talk, not so much about the company, but how you sell innovative technology to large Japanese enterprises. We’ll explore why partners are all but essential in entering the Japanese market, but how those relationships can be very much a two-edged sword, you need to know what to expect going in and to try to manage the expectations of everyone involved. When you’re trying to convert a proven, bottom-up, technical sales process into one that is Japanese style top-down, and governed by long-term relationships and unseen alliances. Even when done perfectly, your Japanese partner won’t always do what you want, but sometimes they’ll do what you need. But, you know, Doug tells this story much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1411" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Doug Chuchro, the representative director of Fastly KK and thanks for sitting down with me. Doug: It’s my pleasure. Tim: Before we get into all the details of how you brought the company into Japan and how you grew it here, I want to take a step back. Can you explain what Fastly does? Doug: Sure. We are a content delivery network. There are a number of content delivery networks out there. Many of them have been around for years and years. In fact, the space is close to 2 decades old. We are, essentially a content delivery network brings content closer to end users and increases the performance for those end users, and decreases the amount of workload that the customer’s origin has to do. So it essentially is a global caching network that the two major benefits are increasing the end user performance and decreasing the origin offload. Tim: So just every individual around the world would, instead of accessing the original source homepage, they would be accessing the cache that is closest to them and having the fastest experience possible. Doug: Exactly. For example, for a news media site, I go to the New York Times webpage every morning to see what’s going on. And rather than connecting to the New York Times origin infrastructure on the east coast of the United States, which would be a terrible experience for me here in Tokyo, I can actually connect with the local pop server of Fastly, here in Shinagawa, where most of that content is cached. I get a very quick response. That page loads almost instantly, and likewise, the operations team for New York Times in New York, they don’t even see a hit against their infrastructure. It essentially offloads that. Tim: Unless customers scale out much further and much faster as well. Doug: Exactly. Yes. Tim: Okay, so this sounds almost by nature like a global business. Doug: It is. In fact, before we started our business in Japan, we had one PoP operating in Tokyo and several others in Asia. Tim: And a PoP is a— Doug: A Point of Presence. Tim: What was headquarters’ main motivation of setting up in Japan? Doug: There were a number of factors. Fastly was growing quickly in North America, our headquarters was in San Francisco, we had started an office in London. So we were beginning that process of growth in Europe, and like you mentioned, we had to build a global network to serve all of our audience. Global expansion from an infrastructure point of view is pretty easy because we’ve already built out quite a bit of our infrastructure globally just to serve our North American customers well. So going into a new market is just a matter of hiring the salespeople and standing up the business. It’s not a trivial thing at all, it’s not a trivial matter at all, but the infrastructure was largely there. Tim: Was there a particular trigger event? Were you getting either demand from your US customers to have more PoPs in Japan, or were you having Japanese customers who wanted to use your network globally that kind of pulled you into Japan, or was this just a natural progression? Doug: It was a number of different things. We were interested in international expansion, we were pushing into Europe, we were looking at places in Asia to expand, and looked at Japan. In fact, one of our customers in the United States is a subsidiary of a large retailer here in Japan. So they made a connection for us and started those conversations for us. We got some executives to come over here and talk to some people and kind of feel it out. That coupled with a healthy fascination of our CEO of Japanese culture— Tim: This happens a lot actually. I’m not sure why exactly, but there are so many, particularly from San Francisco, in the startup community, they are fascinated with Japan in general. Doug: It’s interesting. You come over here, it’s the third largest economy, you look at the CDM market space here and it’s fairly mature and continues to grow. So unlike setting up in either Singapore or Hong Kong—they’re global hubs, but their domestic markets are relatively small. The other one is China. China’s massive but it is a completely different ball of wax, one which we are still very cautious about, so Japan really made sense for us. Tim: So Fastly and CDM in general, it’s a niche market so was there a perception of the Fastly brand in the Japanese market before you came in? What was the competitive landscape like? Were there strong competitors in the market? Doug: Yes, there are very strong competitors in the market, and to answer your first question, the Fastly brand, we realized that it was next to unknown. There were pockets of knowledge about Fastly, but we hadn’t done anything to promote our brand here. So we knew that was going to be one of our major challenges. The dominant player in CDM globally and in Japan specifically is Akamai. They’re the 800-pound gorilla and they’ve kind of defined the space over the last 2 decades. We knew that we didn’t have much of a brand. We had to spend a lot of effort—and still need to spend a lot of effort—to build our brand here, and that’s a multi-pronged effort. One of the things that we thought would be really good for us would be to get somebody to vouch for us because having a local partner to vouch for you means quite a bit. Early on, our executive team made some connections with SoftBank. They have been, and continue to be, very generous with their time and their energy in promoting Fastly. So they are a reseller of Fastly today and have been for 18 months. And I would venture to say that if it weren’t for their generosity and their willingness to partner with a relatively unknown in Japan company, that we may not have even opened the office here. Tim: I want to talk about that relationship. But before we do that, your significant competition was foreign companies—are there domestic companies in this space as well? Doug: There are very few domestic CDMs. The big ones that we run into, as I said, are Akamai, the other one is AWS has their own CDM offering. And AWS, I think, is remarkable with the work that they’ve done here in Japan, a foreign company coming into Japan and establishing. Themselves the way that they have, I think is quite commendable. Tim: They’ve been a steamroller in this market. Doug: Yeah and something that I inspire to, to be honest with you. Those are our two major competitors, or our other competitors, but none of them really domestic. Tim: That’s a really interesting situation to be in. Doug: It is. But if we go back to the notion of a content delivery network really has to be a global network to be an effective thing, there really hasn’t been a Japanese domestic CDN that has been able to build out. Tim: It’s very interesting in a go-to-market perspective, in that you are free to make partnerships, and you are not entrenched in decades-old alliances in the market. Doug: Very much so, yeah. Tim: So let’s talk about the partnerships that you did make. You worked very closely with SoftBank.

More and more Japanese founders are moving their startups to San Francisco. It’s easy to see why. There is more venture capital, more startup know-how, and more startup energy in that city than anywhere else in the world. In fact, there is a small, close knit Japanese startup community in San Francisco, with Japanese startups, mentors and investors all supporting each other and trying to grow their business there. On my last trip to San Francisco, I had a chance to sit down with one of these startup founders, Keisuke Kajitani, co-founder of Ramen Hero. He moved to Silicon Valley from Japan to start his company because he thought the US market was a better fit. Ramen Hero sells home delivered ramen meal kits. Interestingly, the popularity and ubiquity or ramen in Japan works against them, while the novelty and price of ramen in the US has enabled them to get attention from both VCs and customers there. It’s a fascinating discussion, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Show Notes for Startups Why ramen gives them a competitive advantage in the US Previous failures in the ramen business and why it's different this time Why Ramen Hero had to pivot from B2B to home delivery What's great about the Japanese startup scene in San Francisco How many companies can the market sustain? When Japanese companies should move to Japan   Links from the Founder Learn more about Ramen Hero at their home page Follow Ramen Hero on Instagram [shareaholic app="share_buttons" id="7994466"] Leave a comment Transcript from Japan Disrupting Japan, episode 69. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for joining me. More and more, Japanese startup founders are looking at, or even moving to Silicon Valley. It’s easy to see the appeal. San Francisco is home to the largest and most competitive startup ecosystem in the world. In fact, there’s a small Japanese startup community in San Francisco, with Japanese startups, mentors, and investors all supporting each other and trying to make it work. Of course, the founders that come from Japan—well, it’s a mixed group. Some successful companies view San Francisco as their logical first step towards global expansion; some are new founders that have an idea they feel is more suited to the American market than the Japanese market; and some, well, some are kind of startup tourists, visiting the offices of famous startups and going through the motions, as if they were in some sort of startup role playing game. On my last trip to San Francisco, I had a chance to sit down and talk with Keisuke Kajitani, co-founder of Ramen Hero. He and his co-founder moved to San Francisco from Japan because they thought the US would be a better market for their product, oddly, because ramen is already too popular in Japan. Now, Ramen Hero sells home delivery ramen meal kits and it’s a business that makes much more sense to launch in the US than it does in Japan. But, you know, Keisuke explains all that much better than I can. So let’s hear from our sponsor and get right to the interview. [pro_ad_display_adzone id="1404" info_text="Sponsored by" font_color="grey" ] [Interview] Tim: I’m sitting here with Keisuke Kajitani of Ramen Hero and we’re sitting here in beautiful San Francisco. So thanks for sitting down with us. Keisuke: Thanks for having me. Tim: I’ve got to say, San Francisco is not so beautiful today. Keisuke: Yeah, it’s raining hard. Tim: I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much rain in San Francisco. Keisuke: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. Tim: But we’re inside and dry, so that’s good. Listen, to get things started, why don’t you tell me a bit about Ramen Hero? Keisuke: Sure. So Ramen Hero is a meal kit service specifically focused on delivering authentic ramen to your house. So what we deliver inside of the meal kit is fresh noodles, and soup, and toppings, and of course the recipe cards. So you can become a ramen chef at your house. Tim: Okay. The food industry in general is hard. It’s incredibly competitive, it’s hard to build up a loyal user base because trends come and go so fast. Why did you choose this particular startup? Keisuke: I’ve seen a lot of Japanese entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to make a big company in Silicon Valley, but I often find that the Japanese entrepreneurs are not having strengths in their expertise. There is tons of good engineers, there is tons of good entrepreneurs, but ramen is something Japanese can be expertise about, so that’s why we chose ramen as the first entrance for food business. Tim: Okay, so it was something that would make you unique and play on your Japanese-ness here in Silicon Valley. How did you pull it together? Tell me a bit about your partners and co-founders. Tell me about the team. Keisuke: Sure. So I’m the COO of Ramen Hero and I have a co-founder whose name is Hiro, who is the CEO/the chef of this company. Hiro graduated Tokyo University but while he was in university, he decided to open his own ramen restaurant by himself with his friend. But he totally screwed up. He had the wrong recipe, he tried to have the squid intestine in the soup to have uniqueness, but it smelled horrible. He was unique for sure but he wasn’t a good chef. So after that, he founded online farmers market service, which restaurants in Tokyo can purchase fruits and vegetables directly from the farms. He was doing that business but he couldn’t actually erase the passion of the ramen by himself, so he decided to come to Silicon Valley and start a ramen business. But he cannot turn himself into a ramen chef instantly, so what he did was he entered a ramen university. Tim: There’s an actual ramen school to learn how to— Keisuke: Yes, for sure. Tim: This is Japan. This should not surprise me. Keisuke: Exactly. So he went through like a couple weeks of training, it was a couple thousand dollars; it was expensive, but it surely was very fruitful. So he got the basic understanding of ramen there and then he was serving ramen in the United States for maybe 40 to 50 times, getting the local taste, sometimes serving like 100 ramen in 2 hours. Tim: And how did you two end up getting together? Keisuke: We met through the mutual mentor, his name is Kiyo Kobayashi. Very famous guy in Japanese startup industry. We had the same mentor and I always wanted to start a business in Silicon Valley, that was like the holy place for entrepreneurs, but I didn’t have a chance to do it by myself. I was seeking for an opportunity and that’s how Kiyo introduced me to Hiro. Tim: All right. It makes sense as an objective but usually people who are passionate about food—whether it’s ramen or any other particular type of food—their goal is to open a restaurant. You guys have taken the home delivery approach, so it’s similar to like Blue Apron but for ramen. How big do you think this market is? How many customers could potentially be realistically interested in home-delivered ramen? Keisuke: The market research is estimated as 1.5 billion US dollars for the meal kit market right now, but it’s not as big as you think. It’s going to be growing to around maybe 4 to 5 billion US dollars in maybe the next 10 years—that’s what the research is saying. But what’s more interesting is I think the meal kit business, or the restaurant without the physical restaurant model, is much more scalable than the other restaurant business types because you can basically own a restaurant without paying lots of rent. So we think, starting from San Francisco, where the rent is most expensive, we believe the business model of the meal kits is more fitable than actually opening a ramen restaurant. Tim: But of the currently 1.4 billion—it could be up to 4 billion in a few years—meal kit market, what percentage of that do you think could be filled by ramen? Or do you plan to expand beyond ramen? Keisuke: I think you multiply that 1.4 or 5 meal kit business times the ramen ratio is going to be very small, but you can also look at the number of the servings of the instant noodle, which is I think over billions—only in the United States. So the ramen is the foundation of the people’s way of eating, and we definitely want to improve rather than just eating the Top Ramen. So you can look at the market in two different—maybe three different—perspectives. One is the meal kit service that I mentioned. Two is the instant noodles I just mentioned. And the third one is a ramen shop. It is estimated that we have 12,000 ramen shops in the United States and it’s growing by 17.5% every year. If we grow at the same growth rate, the number of ramen shops will double in 5 years. So in the food industry, doubling the number of restaurants is a huge change. So we think that’s the trend that we are chasing for. Tim: So are you always going to be marketing these meal kits to consumers or are you also going to be marketing to restaurants and pop up restaurants as well? What’s the plan? Keisuke: Very good point. Actually, when we started this company in the beginning, we were aiming for the B2B market, serving the ramen soup to the restaurants, like Chinese restaurants or ramen shops. There is one Japanese company called Ariake Japan, IPO’d company who sells the manufactured ramen soup to the restaurants. Very profitable and very good business, so we decided to do something similar to that, but the feedback we got from the chefs all around the bay area was like, “You need proof. I know this soup tastes good, but you need proof that this soup sells—not just tastes good.” So just because we can make a good ramen doesn’t mean it sells right. It has to have a brand or it has to have a proof from the customers, good feedbacks. So what we decided to do is— Tim: Let’s dig down on this because I find that surprising.