For the benefit of UK license payers(!) can someone copy that article so we can see it?
Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
41–50 of 59 posts
Re: Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
#42As a founder of a Japan based startup catering to businesses in Japan (MakeLeaps) and also as a co-organiser of the Hacker News Tokyo Meetups with my co-founder Paul, I found this article to be full of defeatism, inaccurate and generally disappointing. A few points: “this is accompanied by a very envious, critical and vocal audience. They underline every possible reason that the product will fail and keep doing so in…
Kudos guys. I have been following MakeLeaps for the past year and half and it's impressive to see how fast and wisely you have been building up the product. What I really like is that you understand the business needs very well, which is not such a common trait here were too many are trying to "disrupt" industries they barely know or understand. I always wanted to ask: are you guys looking at expanding in other areas…
Thanks! Its always great to hear that kind of thing. :-)
I think I can speak for Jason when I say that we're always looking to expand our offering but we want to do it smartly and in a customer-driven way. You can certainly use our service to make english-language documents but for us a big part of 'localization' is really sweating the details and understanding customer needs. So far, that has meant a focused product for Japanese businesses. The Japanese business consumer is somewhat conservative in adopting new process and has high expectations for services so it's important for us to do things right.
But yeah, like most startups we're always working on new things... :-)
Re: Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
#43I've been in love with Japan since I was a anime-obsessed kid, and visiting Tokyo in high school was the best travel experience I've ever had. Yet at the same time, I've heard it said that the software landscape in Japan is pretty rough -- bureaucratic, aged, and inefficient. I've found that really upsetting, because Japan has, of course, a reputation for being a technological wonderland. People living in Japan -- na…
I heard that a startup which I don't know hired Chinese when I was working in a startup in Tokyo. I also found some non-Japanese speaking people were working in OpenSource cafe.
http://www.osscafe.net/en/
I'm going to give you some links that would be useful.
Tokyo based Seed Accelerator: http://onlab.jp/
Social Hiring platform: https://www.wantedly.com/
Japanese AngelList-like service: http://creww.me/
Re: Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
#44Related, although not adding too much new: "Wake up Japan!" says Dave McClure
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5274049
http://fumijp.blogspot.jp/2013/02/wake-up-japan-says-dave-mc...
Re: Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
#45As a founder of a Japan based startup catering to businesses in Japan (MakeLeaps) and also as a co-organiser of the Hacker News Tokyo Meetups with my co-founder Paul, I found this article to be full of defeatism, inaccurate and generally disappointing. A few points: “this is accompanied by a very envious, critical and vocal audience. They underline every possible reason that the product will fail and keep doing so in…
Regarding startup life in Tokyo, these are the guys to listen to (jason_tko and po). They are actually here and doing it and really hustle hard for it. Their success is truly deserved.
Also Jason briefly mentioned the HN Tokyo meetups they also organise. There is one next month ( http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/events/5489?utm_campaign=event_... ) on the 11th. If you are in any way tech inclined and in the area, it is a great event with lots of cool people.
Re: Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
#46As a founder of a Japan based startup catering to businesses in Japan (MakeLeaps) and also as a co-organiser of the Hacker News Tokyo Meetups with my co-founder Paul, I found this article to be full of defeatism, inaccurate and generally disappointing. A few points: “this is accompanied by a very envious, critical and vocal audience. They underline every possible reason that the product will fail and keep doing so in…
Kudos guys. I have been following MakeLeaps for the past year and half and it's impressive to see how fast and wisely you have been building up the product. What I really like is that you understand the business needs very well, which is not such a common trait here were too many are trying to "disrupt" industries they barely know or understand. I always wanted to ask: are you guys looking at expanding in other areas…
Many thanks - really appreciate the kind words.
I agree with Paul. We're pretty ambitious on the spaces we want to go after, and we have a lot of room to grow inside Japan first. As Paul mentions, Japanese businesses have very high expectations for service quality, so we want to nail each new feature we put out.
After Japan, we're keen to go after Asia, and then the world.
Re: Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
#47As a founder of a Japan based startup catering to businesses in Japan (MakeLeaps) and also as a co-organiser of the Hacker News Tokyo Meetups with my co-founder Paul, I found this article to be full of defeatism, inaccurate and generally disappointing. A few points: “this is accompanied by a very envious, critical and vocal audience. They underline every possible reason that the product will fail and keep doing so in…
Regarding startup life in Tokyo, these are the guys to listen to (jason_tko and po). They are actually here and doing it and really hustle hard for it. Their success is truly deserved. Also Jason briefly mentioned the HN Tokyo meetups they also organise. There is one next month ( http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/events/5489?utm_campaign=event_... ) on the 11th. If you are in any way tech inclined and in the area, it is a…
Thanks mate, appreciate it. Hope you can make it to the next HN Tokyo event too!!
Re: Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
#48As a founder of a Japan based startup catering to businesses in Japan (MakeLeaps) and also as a co-organiser of the Hacker News Tokyo Meetups with my co-founder Paul, I found this article to be full of defeatism, inaccurate and generally disappointing. A few points: “this is accompanied by a very envious, critical and vocal audience. They underline every possible reason that the product will fail and keep doing so in…
Can you forward some of those VC's to us. We're building something pretty awesome here in Tokyo // inkr.com
Re: Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
#49As a founder of a Japan based startup catering to businesses in Japan (MakeLeaps) and also as a co-organiser of the Hacker News Tokyo Meetups with my co-founder Paul, I found this article to be full of defeatism, inaccurate and generally disappointing. A few points: “this is accompanied by a very envious, critical and vocal audience. They underline every possible reason that the product will fail and keep doing so in…
Can you forward some of those VC's to us. We're building something pretty awesome here in Tokyo // inkr.com
Come to the HN Tokyo meetups we organise. We often get VCs dropping by.
Here are the details for the next one:
Re: Can Japan reboot its startup culture?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to pile on: It's hard to overstate how large the language barrier is in Japan. For all intents and purposes, nobody speaks English and therefore you cannot speak, listen, write, or read anything during your interactions with the people around you. I don't want to scare kmf off from coming here; you should, it's a wonderful country. Just need to manage your expectations...
Is Google Translate totally useless? I've found it does a great job of providing audio in and out, as well as romanization so you can do a hack job from zero. Google Translate even seems to offer a limited IME so you can type roman or kana and it'll guess the kanji. Shopping in Korean, I can just set it to OCR mode and sorta read labels I don't understand. (Of course, Hangul's probably a lot easier to OCR than kana+k…
No, Google Translate is not totally useless for an amusing conversation about cats at say, a cafe.
For a job interview or a more formal business environment though, you're going to start at a considerable disadvantage if you don't speak Japanese in Japan. It's possible (I did it), but it's really, really hard.