Welcoming Shuhei Nitta as an Investment VP at DNX Ventures
We welcome our newest member to the DNX family, Shuhei Nitta. He joined us as the Investment VP in the Tokyo Office.
Shuhei was an M&A advisor at a leading securities firm in Japan. He reached out to DNX prior to heading to business school, and that was our first encounter.
In his interview, Shuhei talked about his career, his background, and what ultimately led him to DNX Ventures.
Prior to joining DNX, I worked as an M&A advisor at the Nomura investment banking division. I was engaged in a wide variety of M&A deals, including large-scale industry restructurings, cross-border deals, and business successions of regional companies. In addition, I was also in charge of recruiting new graduates, where I planned and managed recruiting events and conducted many interviews. As to my educational background, I graduated from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with honors in 2021.
The first time I heard about DNX was when I saw a post about the company on Facebook. I didn’t know anything about venture capital at that time, but it somehow caught my attention; I was intrigued and it was intuitive. So I went and met with a DNX member to learn and understand about venture capital, what it’s like to be one, and he generously introduced me to the world of VC and DNX; it was absolutely fascinating.
During my undergraduate years, I mainly studied financial engineering and accounting. I started my career at the Nomura investment banking division, one of Japan’s biggest investment banks. I engaged in M&A advisory, creating financial models with hundreds and thousands of lines in Excel day after day while having to deal with many senior clients, which was at times, mentally and physically overwhelming, but I was able to turn those difficult moments into a learning experience with the help and support of my colleagues.
However, an advisor is, at the end of the day, just an advisor; M&A advisors do not take any risks in clients’ corporate decisions and are not much involved in the decision-making process. I wanted to be a principal rather than an external advisor. During my MBA days, a professor said something that has stayed with me to this day: “What created and developed the United States has been the passion of entrepreneurs and the risk money from venture capitalists.” Interpretation of this phrase may vary, but it made me think about my future career. From a macro perspective, it is often said that innovation by startups is necessary for Japan for further growth. I strongly believe that entrepreneurs’ passion and venture capitalists’ risk money can make Japan’s growth happen. That is how I have decided to be a venture capitalist, leveraging my expertise, with a desire to support leaders who have the passion to change the world.
I think the startup ecosystem in Japan is still in the early days, especially compared with the one in the U.S. I believe VCs in Japan need to raise and keep updating the standard by analyzing the market so that the startup ecosystem will work well, just as Bessemer Venture Partners did for the SaaS sector in the U.S. To that end, I would like to do the same: deliver various analyses and insights on the public SaaS companies in the Japanese market. The number of SaaS companies and the number of years they have been listed are increasing in the Japanese market, leading me to believe that insightful and meaningful analyses of public SaaS companies in the Japanese market is possible now. Moreover, the boundary between the public and private market is getting blurry; this will be even more so in the foreseeable future, which may redefine the role of IPO, and it will continue to transform the VC business model. My aim is to always keep an open mind, be flexible, and be ready to update the business model in accordance with the change of the world.
