The journey from a Japanese company to an international company
Introduction
Hello, I’m Keito, the CTO at Zeals.
Our vision is to start the next industrial revolution through communication AI.
The goal is to create a ‘Will Society’ that’s full of people’s dreams, ambitions, and wills, and at the end of the day, we want to create a new era of partnership with people through the science of communication. As a step towards realizing this bigger picture, we’re now focusing more on sales and the hospitality industry.
As an end-user, when you make large purchases (e.g. cars, houses) or make contracts (e.g. insurances, telecommunication), in most cases you talk with salespeople to resolve your questions, concerns, and anxieties. This is just one potential type of communication that is constantly happening all over the world.
Meanwhile, here in Japan, we have the Japanese word ‘Omotenashi’, which conveys the idea of hospitality. You might have heard in the speech to the International Olympic Committee for host city selection in 2016.
We believe Japanese people’s hospitality skill is one of the best one in the world, and we’re proud of the quality of sales and hospitality-based communication in Japan.
Hence we believe can develop one of the best online user experiences in the hospitality industry with the idea of ‘Omotenashi’ from Japan, and we will be looking to expand this user experience into the global market.
In this article, I’ll explain a little bit about how our organization has changed in order to achieve this.
Summary
While many startups in Japan have not been able to build a global organization, I would like to share my opinion on why Zeals has been able to do just that.
First of all, of course, empathy for the company vision is important.
This is one of the reasons why Zeals is able to be more flexible and agile in the face of frequent changes. It is important for us to expand our team without compromising on this criterion in our hiring.
Secondly, Zeals doesn’t have a typically Japanese culture.
In general, Japanese companies have an image of a hierarchical system and an uncompromising working style.
I’ve never worked in a startup in another country, so it’s interesting to hear an engineer on my team tell me that the culture is the same as other startups across the world.
To be more specific:
- I am the CTO, and I’m just 21 years old. We have a culture of expecting more from members who are motivated as opposed to simply older.
- Flexible hours and work-from-home (though this has become the norm because of COVID-19).
- We are actively working to incorporate new technologies, and are running MicroServices using Kubernetes and Go in a production environment.
At the end of the day, we got lucky, and that luck itself is a talent.
I’ve learned a great many things, but the biggest lesson is that although there might be a language barrier, people can share similar values.
In other words, Japanese people and foreigners aren’t so different. This may seem obvious, but for a Japanese person who hasn’t had much contact with many other nationalities living on this island country of Japan, it’s a very pleasant thing.
I believe that globalization will become more important in the future as Zeals continues to grow in terms of business, product, and team.
Details of each phase
1. I join Zeals - there are no English speakers
August 2016
When I joined Zeals, there were only five full-time employees, and we were developing products with the help of interns. Our product was initially built with Django python and JQuery.
At that time, only Japanese members were involved in development.
2. The first foreign members join
July 2017
Javen and Aaron joined Zeals as the first foreign engineers.
Javen really empathized with our vision and joined as a new graduate from Hawaii. Thinking about it now, his decision-making was pretty crazy: even though he couldn’t speak the language, he joined a Japanese company that had just around 10 people at the time.
Even if we were chatting 1-on-1 we used Google Translate, and the results would sometimes end up being super weird. But it’s a nice memory. The photo above is from when the two of us went to Tokyo Sky Tree together.
Aaron joined after we decided to hire Javen. That was also when we chose to use technologies such as React and Vue in order to make it a SPA application. Writing this now I’m feeling really nostalgic.
Aaron is still active on the team. As you’d expect, a lot has happened in these last 3 and a half years, but he’s a really reliable teammate and friend.
Around this point, the company had grown to have about 15 full-time employees.
3. Increasing numbers through referrals
May 2018
By this time, the size of the company hit about 30 full-time employees — a number of engineers had joined through Aaron’s referral.
The Japanese members couldn’t speak English that well, so we used to communicate mainly in English and have the bilingual members provide a lot of interpretation.
Even though the Japanese members also actively tried to communicate, the language barrier was so big that there was a tendency for foreign members to consolidate with each other.
At that time the company was still in the 0-to-1 phase, so things would change from week to week, and it was difficult to properly convey the situation to the whole team.
4. Expansion with the Vietnam team
August 2019
The company size grew to about 40 full-time employees and, with a growing business and product, we needed to increase our development capability.
The company size grew to about 40 full-time employees
We continued to hire mainly Japanese members but decided that it would be difficult to communicate with each other in this phase of the business if we only used English, so we started offshore development with a bridge SE person.
Some Japanese members actually went to Vietnam, had lunch with the new team, and deepened our relationship with them.
They are still active and have become indispensable members of our team.
5. Number of multi-lingual members increases
June~November 2019
Kim (Korea), Igai (China), Nguyen (Vietnam), Joe (Laos), and Mike (Taiwan) joined Zeals, already able to speak English, their own mother tongues, and Japanese. It was a conscious decision to hire bilingual members because it made it easier to communicate and develop the product in Japanese.
Forbes UNDER 30 India’s Vish joins Zeals as Global Head of Product — Ledge.ai
When I first met Masa-san of Zeals, I immediately resonated with his vision of communication technology’s role in Japan and in the world. The company’s mission, “日本をぶち上げる” (Next Industrial Revolution), is the spark behind the passion and motivation of every single member in this rapidly-growing company, building an environment that breeds creativity. I’m joining the company during an exciting and important stage, in which it is looking to transform from a startup into an organization that can scale with speed and stability. I’m incredibly excited to bring my international startup experience to help Zeals’ Global Business team extend the company’s value across the world.
Vish actually joined with English-only skills at the time, and I’m surprised how much Japanese he can speak now. In fact, he helped me translate this article into English! (Vish: Konnichiwa!)
6. We start bringing in English-only speakers again
October 2019~January 2020
Due to the shift in the phase we were in as a company, as well as Vish’s successful onboarding, we also started to involve Sagar (another English-only member), who joined from one of our member’s referrals.
Most conversations were still in Japanese, making it difficult for members like Sagar, who could only speak English, to catch up. (Of course, there were a lot of members who were bilingual, so we were able to support them, but still…)
The company size grew to about 55 full-time employees.
7. Coronavirus and struggles with recruiting Japanese members
June 2020~
It was very difficult to hire excellent Japanese people. The quality of Japanese engineers is not bad, it’s actually pretty high, but there are many domestic ventures and most of them are focused on hiring Japanese, so the competition is very high. We actually had several people in a row decline job offers. (There’s a limit to how much startups can offer.)
As the company became more remote-work oriented and people like Sagar were able to be active even after returning to India, we started to focus on hiring globally with the goal of creating a global and remote company in the future.
As a result, we’ve actually been able to bring a lot of members in using this new structure
8. The situation today
In terms of the dev team: firstly, the only person to leave Zeals in the past year was a Japanese graduate who went on to start his own business, and secondly, we’ve been working hard to make English the official language for all members—old and new, foreign and Japanese.
Meetings through the entire development process are held in English, and everyone participates in discussions on Github issues.
The company as a whole is in the process of making improvements. Some examples are as follows:
- Sending out company-wide messages (#general, internal newsletter) in both English and Japanese
- Creating a #languageexchange channel on Slack, where questions about English and Japanese are passed back and forth
- We have a big company-wide monthly meeting called “Gesshokai” (which literally means “first meeting of the month”), where we ask for help from professional interpreters to aid communication.
- We have a guidebook for members coming to Japan, in which we gather knowledge about solving some of the problems that foreigners face in the relocation process.
One of my teammates, Ryota Araki (a.k.a. Akky), has a wide range of responsibilities, from hiring to team-building, and I’d like to share one of his articles that might also be interesting:
The Progress Report in 2020: How Zeals Becomes a Global Team｜Akky｜note
Conclusion
That should paint a picture of how the Zeals organization of Zeals has changed over the years.
I feel that we’ve been able to expand our team because we all want to continue to deliver value to more people through our current business and products, as well as to create new technologies that will help us realize our vision.
I think these are the main positives to working at Zeals that a lot of candidates find appealing:
- It’s not a typically Japanese company
- But it’s not yet a truly global company (it still retains a distinctly Japanese flavor to it)
- We never stop challenging new technologies
- A great team culture (members become really good friends and are often help each other)
- There are a lot of interesting issues that still need to be solved (e.g. with product quality, dev processes, etc.)
Outlook
We would like to share our current quantitative figures.
Current recruitment figures
- Document screenings: 498
- The acceptance rate of job offers: about 2.5%
- Percentage of Japanese member in zeals: 44%
- Referral rate: 25%
Current issues that still need work
- Team culture
- Time difference
- Development speed
- Hiring
Summary
If you share our vision of “creating the next industrial revolution”, please contact us.
Zeals is currently looking for people who can solve the above problems and build products and teams together!
If you’re interested, please click on the link below or apply, so we can share more details about Zeals!
