Why a Japanese engineer ended up attending classes of a startup accelerator in New York that specializes in the retail & consumer goods (Part 2)
(Continued from the post yesterday “Why a Japanese engineer ended up attending classes of a startup accelerator in New York that specializes in the retail & consumer goods”)
Return to Tokyo in 2002
I came back to Tokyo in Summer 2002 after the graduation from Carnegie Mellon. The multiplayer mobile role-playing location-based game platform I was working on required massive adoption of the mobile data phone, so if I continued on the business plan, returning to Tokyo was the only option.
Back in 2001, I started talking to investors in Tokyo when I had an internship job at McKinsey’s Tokyo office in August 2001. I met several investors including Neoteny, a Tokyo-based investing firm. Neoteny was founded by Joi Ito, so I chose Neoteny was the first investor to visit. He was interested in the idea and connected me to Kazuya Minami, an investment manager.
When I came to Tokyo in 2002, the climate of the VC investment was incredibly bad. Neoteny no longer made investment in Japanese startups, and no investors were interested in investing in us.
Before I came to Tokyo, I also talked with Yuukou Kawamura, CEO of Nikkei Business Publications, which I had worked for before I went to the business school. According to him, even though investment in the game platform was not feasible in summer 2002, it was possible to put me in the R&D team and I could work on the business plan as a project of the company.
I had not realized, but CEO Kawamura’s hidden agenda was to get me involved in his project to launch the Japanese Edition of MIT Technology Review. I realized his intention a few months after I came back to Tokyo.
Anyway, it was not a bad deal, especially in such a deep depression of the world economy. I agreed to go back to Nikkei.
In June 2002, I joined the R&D team at Nikkei. Coincidently, one of the members of the team was Kotaro Yamagishi, Co-founder of GREE, one of the world’s largest online game platform today. He co-founded GREE in 2004 , but pivoted to the mobile game platform in 2006 and went public in 2008.
Working with MIT and Technology Review
Although I was working on several projects including my own game platform, there were some projects assigned to me. The biggest project was regarding Technology Review Japanese Edition.
Started in 1899, Technology Review (TR) had been publication to MIT’s alumni for almost a century. However, $2.5M donation in 1998 led by Bob Metcalfe, Co-inventor of Ethernet and Co-founder of 3Com, overhauled TR as a magazine on new technologies to get commercialized. TR was interested in expanding its readership internationally.
The biggest hurdle in the Japanese market was the size of the entrepreneurial market — it was too small. Local investors hesitated to bet on new new technologies and instead invested in upstart companies overseas. To market TR Japanese Edition, we needed to build and foster the startup community for new technologies locally.
I started working on the community building, in addition to building the workflow and managing the editorial operations. We were only a team of three people, including Editor-in-chief Hidehiko Koguchi, who had been founding Editor-in-chief of Nikkei E-Biz Newsletter started in Santa Clara, CA, in 1999, which I had contributed to.
Connected to MIT influencers
To build the startup community in Tokyo, I decided to take full advantage of MIT’s entrepreneurial network.
First, I met Bob Metcalfe and asked to know of his vision on TR expansion, especially in Asian countries. We had several one-on-one meetings, including a breakfast overlooking the building of TR in Cambridge from a restaurant on the other side of Charles River. He introduced some people, but the most interesting story was when he tried to sell personal computers to Sears at The Sears Tower, the world’s tallest building then, with Bill Gates, Co-founder of Microsoft and Kazuhiko Nishi, Co-founder of ASCII, a Japanese startup in charge of Microsoft’s far eastern operations then. Bob was more impressed by Kazuhiko‘s’ eccentric behavior than Bill’s. Anyway, Bob was a nice guy and he connected me to some MIT people.
Next, I visited Ken Morse, Managing Director of MIT Entrepreneurship Center. He had strong relationship with NTT, Japan’s largest telecom conglomerate, especially its mobile company, NTT Docomo. NTT Docomo was clearly the global leader of the mobile in 2002, with their “i-mode” mobile Internet functions for the feature phone. The i-mode service was widely used in a total of 17 countries. Ken was clearly interested in Japanese startup community in the mobile technology, and connected me to the people who led MIT Enterprise Forum of Japan.
MIT Enterprise Forum of Japan (MITEF-J) was a local chapter of MIT Enterprise Forum led by MIT Alumni, but open to non-MIT people. I proposed Nikkei to join MITEF-J and I started actively engaging myself in the community like co-organizing events and participating in their business plan competitions as a mentor.
Building the Startup Community & the blog
Also, I connected myself to the community of investors. Shinichi Uetadani, one of my friends at college, co-organized the meetup for Tokyo-based VC & PE investors, so I co-hosted and participated in meetups to ask for support on raising awareness and interest of new technology startups.
In 2002, building a website for a community was not an option, because it was not easy to create a website. Maintaining a community website was too difficult for most people.
But the blog was introduced in the market and silently growing its presence. In the beginning, the blog was a way for individuals to express their own opinion as the mass media was biased (or manipulated) by the government as the U.S. was “under the war”.
True, the blog was great alternative to the traditional media. But some people like me expected the blog to become a website for communities, or more commonly called today the “social media”.
Joi introduced me to a blogging tool called “Movable Type” in summer 2002, and I started hosting Movable Type and giving multiple blogs to entrepreneurs, influencing people and communities, in addition to connecting offline communities and people.
As I started blogs, many entrepreneurs were networked loosely through blogs, especially entrepreneurs who were interested in social media. These people started web services as individual projects, networked to each other, organized meetups, and some of them started companies.
Interestingly, the offline entrepreneurial community was slightly disconnected from the online one. Those networked via the offline community were “established” people while those online were “grass-roots”.
I belonged to the both communities, and what I was able to contribute was, I thought, to bridge these two communities to make the startup community in Tokyo work better and more widely.
First business activities in New York
My boss Hidehiko planned to build a new editorial workflow system to make the original TR’s articles translated in Japanese effectively, as the team was only of three people. Hidehiko was based in New York in mid 1990s and knew of some people who were able to build a system for us. We decided to work with Ebpass, a New York-based company founded by Kenjiro Mori, so I dropped by in New York each time when I went to Boston for meetings with TR people. (Kenjiro suddenly passed away in 2008 and Ebpass was dismissed. He was a great talent and a really funny guy. We miss him a lot.)
Ebpass’s office was located at 55 Broad Street in Lower Manhattan. One and a half years already passed since the September 11 attacks, but the climate there was low. I stayed at a hotel near the ground zero and happened to take some photos, including one below.
New York was not a place for tech startups, so even though I had some opportunities in New York to extend my entrepreneurial network in New York, I did not do anything. I wish I could have foresight…
Discontinuing the TR project and joining Six Apart
The team for TR Japan at last published the pilot edition of Technology Review Japanese Edition and distributed to a few thousand people in the startup community (mostly investors).
Since the project was led by CEO and the economic climate world-wide required some lead time to take off, I did not expect the project was discontinued, which was decided by the board of directors.
I observed in an ad-hoc management meeting to discuss if the project was continued, and honestly speaking, I was shocked CEO’s project was denied. Other management people made a decision based upon the short-term expected return while CEO did in the long-run.
After this company’s decision, the cancellation letter to TR was written and ready to be sent, but I asked the management for me to go to all the involved people overseas to explain the company’s decision and maintain relationships before the cancellation letter was delivered. At first, the company thought of it as waste of money, but was finally convinced and sent me to Boston and New York. (But the company sent the cancellation letter before I left and it was delivered before I arrived at TR office, so Bruce Journey, CEO and Publisher of TR, at first was angry and mad when I met him at his office. But it was another story to tell…)
In fact, shortly before the decision was made, I received an email from Joi for recruiting to Six Apart, but I once declined his offer due to continuous support for the TR project and relationships with the U.S. counterpart.
But the project was discontinued and I had nothing to do at Nikkei for a couple of months. So I started thinking about my future career in a flight on the way to the U.S…
