Japan — The Land of the Rising Startups

A little about the entrepreneurial community in Tokyo, Japan, I’m sure not many of you know. I certainly didn’t before coming here.

This week I took part in organizing an event initiated by Workforce and Blink Community. Before the event I didn’t really know what to expect from an entrepreneurial event in Japan, but I was utterly surprised for the better!

Being an Israeli entrepreneur coming from a rich and diverse community of the best minds in the industry, and so supportive at that, I knew how important it is to have such a community with you when you are starting up a business against all odds in a new and unknown place, a place so different from everything I’m used to in the tech world, Tokyo Japan.

The event started with a short introduction by Jin Hitoshi Tanaka, the charismatic Japanese founder and CEO of Workforce, welcoming everyone to the beautiful upbeat premises provided by Blink Community.

The first talk by the amazing Yan Fan, co-founder and CTO of Code Chrysalis, was the most cut to the chase talk I’ve heard recently about what we as women need in the workplace, and how fellow men can actually help in a productive way! “Men are amazing” she said, “We need you with us!”.

She spoke about how Japan ranks #114 out of 144 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. A ranking that has gotten worse over the past few years. And she presented useful action items for male allies to help make the workplace more inclusive and fun for everyone.

Yan told us how she started her career in trading (one of only three women on the trading floor), but disliked the industry and dreamed of starting her own company. She started learning how to program on her own, and then quit her job to learn full-time in San-Francisco. After a few months, she got her first job at a software company to get some experience in the field.

A few startups ahead, Yan joined her current co-founder Kani Munidasa, and together they founded Code Chrysalis, an advanced software engineering school in Tokyo. Where candidates can learn a wide range of skills (including English proficiency) that will give them the tools and confidence to become autonomous full-stack engineers with a Silicon Valley mindset.

The second speaker, Maiko Kojima, founder and CEO of ChatBook shared her career path that led to starting her venture. Starting as a political science student at Waseda University she realized she can do much more in the tech world and got into programming to found her successful startup, ChatBook.

Through ChatBook she is solving one of the biggest problems businesses are facing in the digital scene: low conversion rates on their landing pages. By encouraging customers to talk to a bot and get useful information about the business, she is changing the rules of the game for many companies in Japan.

Maiko told us she even uses ChatBook herself to talk to potential customers who are interested in the product. Indeed, a very innovative marketing method.

Last but certainly not least, we’ve heard about the fascinating life story of Satomi Fuluya, the founder and CEO of Clarity. Satomi told us how she went from being a daughter of a well-off, high society Japanese family, who studies at a private girl-school, with a so-seemed secured career path, to having her family’s business go bankrupt, causing her family to lose everything in one day.

The private school Satomi went to had a promised course from kindergarten to an uncompetitive women-only university. The girls are often not encouraged to study so hard, and most of the graduates work in administrative positions only to get married soon after.

Satomi had to rethink everything she knew about the world at a very young age, and navigate towards a successful career, this time on her own. She chose to study at Seijo University, that had a one year exchange program in San Diego State University, USA. She plowed her way since then while interning at Google, working at a global brands agency and being a freelance.

After gaining experience working in Japan, and coming from the strict traditional Japanese society, Satomi wanted to solve the huge factor threatening Japan’s demography and economy these days: inflexible and traditional work-arrangements. Such work environment leads to lack of women in the workforce, high stress on men to provide for their family, and lower child-rearing participation by fathers.

And so, with a seed investment from former Rakuten’s vice president, Toru Shimada, Satomi founded Clarity, a platform providing company reviews and statistics (e.g. benefits, gender ratios) for job-seekers, and provides job posting, employer branding, and recruitment services to almost 4,000 companies, interested in changing the way people work in Japan. Clarity’s vision is to create a diverse work environment in Japan, inclusive for women, foreigners and seniors.

Inspired and amazed we started our networking session meeting and chatting to everyone in the room. I have to say I was so happy to meet top-notch people who are starting their own startup in Tokyo or doing other super interesting thing in the high-tech industry, sharing information, connecting each other to relevant places and functioning like any supportive entrepreneurial community in the world. Worforce and Blink Community managed to squeeze in a lot of talent in one place, it felt amazing!

The startup community in Tokyo is quite small at the moment, compared to other big cities in the world, but it definitely exists, and it’s growing rapidly! I’m curious to see how it will look like a year from now, and the good news is I’ll be here all this time to tell you all about it, so please subscribe and take this journey with me.