Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchWhy Gay Rights Are Good Business in Japan – Koki Hayashi
Season 1 Episode 40
Koki Hayashi of Letibee is walking a difficult path by combining a startup business with social activism, but he just might pull it off. Japan is ver…
10 years, 1 month ago
The Hard Truth Behind Japan’s Cute Robots – Shunsuke Aoki
Season 1 Episode 39
Japan has a long cultural fascination with human-like robots. Literature, cinema and anime are filled with them, and perhaps not surprisingly, a larg…
10 years, 1 month ago
Disrupting the Final Frontier – Yuya Nakamura
Season 1 Episode 38
There are not many industries more resistant to disruption than satellite and aerospace. The dominant firms thrive largely because of the massive cap…
10 years, 1 month ago
Creating Japan’s Open Internet – Kaneto Kanemoto
Season 1 Episode 37
More than ten years before Quora and ZenDesk became famous, there was OKWave. Kaneto Kanemoto founded OKWave to address a massive problem that was un…
10 years, 2 months ago
The Happiest Company in the World – Yuka Fujii
Season 1 Episode 36
Yuka considers Famarry to be the happiest company in the world, and looking at who her customers are, I think she just might be right. But behind th…
10 years, 2 months ago
How Startup Thinking is Changing the Japanese Government – William Saito
Season 1 Episode 35
It’s hard to imagine an organization more resistant to change and disruption than the government of Japan. But today’s guest, William Saito has made …
10 years, 3 months ago
The Myth of the Successful Startup Failure – Hiroshi Nagashima
Season 1 Episode 34
Startup culture has crazy and contradictory views about failure. As founders we are told to fail fast, but also to never give up. We are told to foll…
10 years, 3 months ago
How Japan Can Get Her Innovation Mojo Back – Sorato Ijichi
Season 1 Episode 33
Japan was once home to some of the most innovative companies on the planet, but those companies lost their innovate edge a long time ago. Today, many…
10 years, 4 months ago
Why Japanese VCs are Losing Out – James Riney of 500 Startups
Season 1 Episode 32
500 Startups has been one of the driving forces behind the utter disruption of how seed funding is done. That shift is one of the reasons we have se…
10 years, 4 months ago
Why Japan Will Thrive on Disruption
Season 1 Episode 31
Too many things that are labeled as "cultural differences" have much simpler explanations. There are perfectly rational (and even mathematical) reaso…
10 years, 5 months ago