Always be a Challenger

＊This article was originally written in Japanese by our CEO, Yoshihide Arai.

“I’ve heard that Atrae intends to be small but elect company…”
A question I always get in interviews.

Let’s be honest, we don’t intend to be small and elect.
We are always open for all kinds of position.

But I would say, we are particular about productivity.

I think the existence of companies is to make the people involved happy. When I say “people involved”, I mean employees, clients, stockholders in a narrow sense, and partner companies and society itself as a broad sense.

It’s never possible to raise salary, accomplish high profit rate, or invest without high productivity, which is easy to understand why we stick to productivity. In addition, when there is a economic turndown like the
Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, an organization that’s big and has a low productivity, if you’ve experienced that turndown, you probably understand how much pain this would be.

Some entrepreneurs make huge fundraises and give out high salary, luxury offices, and investment in marketing although they would be in deficit. I do see them as bold but at the same time, I still can’t get rid of the fear of the turndown.

If there is something like a body fat percentage for organizations, you’d probably can’t survive recession.Furthermore, the base of business is to be in black ink balance. And of course, it’s no problem to be in red for a short period of time or for a strategy, but to de in red and to be in red for strategy is different. I feel like some people do not care much of the difference there these days.

In my perspective, I think that the value of non-listed startups are too high as that in the future, it is not easy for many of those to accomplish to become that value. This is from my experience and my peers.

We opened our IR the other day.
To be honest, we are growing very steadily.
Although because we want to be very particular of who we welcome, the umber of employees do not grow so fast, but we hire more than 10 people every year becoming bigger little by little.

Our office is now pretty crowded due to the entering of new grads this April, so we’ve been discussing about moving out to a different place. However, there was no place that matched the image in our minds and also in early 2021, a place we’ve imagined would become available. So for now, we decided to stay and enlarge the spaces in our place now and endure for the next 2 years.

Looking from the performance and funding ability, to move to a different place for 2 years would’ve been one decision. However, even if we are listed in the first section, or we have a good sales performance, we will stick to being entrepreneurs and that we could never stop the feeling of being a challenger. Our vision is still far ahead, so our challenges will continue.

For those who joined recently might think that we are stingy.
But these decisions are what makes our high productivity in order to keep our body fat percentage where it should be, which would lead to the happiness of the people around us.

“To always be a company that we can be proud of.”

This is our value.

Even for a decision about moving our of the office, I’m vert proud that all members could make this decision with the value.In any generation, we will be an outstanding company that make the people around us happy!