Over the holidays, I went to my hometown, Tokyo, for vacation to see my family and friends. Also, I wanted to learn the ecosystem and trends for tech companies in Tokyo.   From hundreds of tech events in Tokyo, I chose the Venture Day Tokyo 2014 because:

1. I wanted to be inspired by the passion of entrepreneurs and see their creative ideas
2. I wanted to go an international event (it is really rare in Japan
3. I wanted to see how a startup event is organized outside of WTIA, which just had its last event, First Look Forum, this past November

The event was filled with the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs. Venture Day Tokyo 2014 is a business contest where ten start-ups made presentations in front of judges who were VCs and business experts. There were also panel discussion and speeches.

According to the brochure, “Venture Days are our way of celebrating entrepreneurship, bringing together the world’s leading startups with local investors. Venture Day is organized by IE business school in Spain. They hold events in several cities such as Madrid, London and Berlin.

International collaboration in the startup space

I believed there were 200 – 300 people at the event. More than a half of people there, presenters, panels, judges and other attendees, came from outside of Japan. You could hear attendees speaking in various languages. I saw so much international collaboration at this event.

The attendees were active participants. In the break time, many people talked to the presenters to see demos and more details of their service.

People from large VCs and other business experts joined as judges and panels, and their background was diverse. VCs included those from university labs such as IE university and University of Tokyo, the top school in Japan, as well as major financial institutions such as Fidelity and major tech companies such as Salesforce and DeNA, one of the biggest online gaming company in Japan. The partially government owned fund Cool Japan Fund was also present.

Startups’ pitch presentations

Each participant had only 5 minutes and that is never easy. Every presenter had brilliant ideas and presentation slides but some of them had to rush themselves and they skipped slides. Then, unfortunately, their ideas did not come through clearly. After the contest, one of the panelists advised you need to be able to explain your business ideas in 15 seconds.

These were my favorite startups who presented:

Make Leaps

Make Leaps makes online invoicing software for freelancers and small business. They were the Venture Day Tokyo winners. As an accountant at WTIA, I was captivated by this invoicing software. Although the founders were from other countries, they understood the Japanese local market and that small business owners were still manually billing their customers. This software solved their accounting problems with simple and user friendly application. Since they started in 2011, they have 15,000 users. One of the greatest points was that their service could connect with Yaoi Kaikei, the accounting software dominating the Japanese small business market. Their service is not original—we can find similar services such as Paypal. However, they understood the needs of their the local customers and delivered the value appropriately. Also, their presentation was well organized and easy to understand. They did a good job presenting their the business model and how the service worked while some of other presenters struggled to explain their business model in such a short time.

Wovn

WOVN.io provides multilingual support for your website or blog, bringing your content to the world. Their business has huge potential and can impact our world. You can make your website multilingual with only one line of Java Script code and the service has more than ten languages.

Reflecting on Japanese Business Culture

Besides the business plan presentations, there were a couple of speeches. The one by Danny Cho was very impressive in three aspects. First, his business concept was unique in representing culture in Japan (He himself is not Japanese).   His business had contents and products with “Otaku” culture, that is, Japanese pop culture of comics, games and animation. Second, he showed all steps of his challenges such as expanding office, staff, resources for products (figures), and shared how his character Mirai Suenaga became popular and how her fan community was built in Asia (Mirai is a female character). Lastly, he was a very passionate presenter. I would say he knew customers because he typified his customers. He had so much love for his character and the things he was doing. That was the very thing that I wanted to see at this kind of event.

Toyko (Japanese) vs. Seattle (American) startups

From my knowledge of American startups in Seattle, I noticed three major differences between American and Japanese startups:

Business Ideas

This is a point that Japanese start-ups should learn from the state of Washington and other parts of the U.S. During a panel discussion, panelists mentioned Japanese try to be “smart / realistic” for success and copy ideas from other successful business like companies in Silicon Valley. In this context, “smart” had a negative meaning. Start-ups in the U.S. have more crazy ideas and they even think they can change the world. As a result, we can find a lot of unique ideas in WA.

Opportunity of International Success

Start-ups in WA seem to be more local oriented. Although it is my favorite point, they could pursue more international markets. After some success in Japan, Japanese start-ups tend to go to China or Southeast Asia, where the markets are growing rapidly.

Different Business Trends

In Washington State, we can find more cloud services or online apps growing. On the other hand, someone from e27, a Singapore based IT media, told me that e-commerce related business is a trend in Asia, not just in Japan and that Alibaba.com is a good example.  He also told me that in some of the Asian counties, cloud services and online apps were not so popular because of infrastructure requirements. Cloud services require having fast and stable internet and electricity.

It was so exciting to feel start-up vibration in my hometown. Not only learning circumstances in Tokyo, but also I could compare Washington’s ecosystem with one in Tokyo. Tokyo is awesome so is Washington. I will keep my eyes wide open to check the trends in both of the areas.