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Ride sharing works differently in Japan. Hailo lost the global market-share war to Uber and Lyft, but Hailo won the battle in Japan. Today, Ryo Umezawa details Hailo’s Japan market entry strategy and explains how they were able to succeed  where Uber has failed. While Uber vowed to disrupt transportation by taking on both government and industry, Hailo […]

The post 68: Why Ride-Sharing is Different in Japan – Ryo Umezawa – Hailo appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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Cerevo wants to be a “global niche” player. That makes sense for this Internet of Things company. The IoT has become so pervasive and so successful that the terms ha become almost meaningless. Today we simply except and accept that almost everything should naturally be connected to the internet. Of course, it wasn’t always that […]

The post 67: The Global Niche Startup Strategy – Cerevo – Iwasa Takuma appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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Stripe’s Japan market entry did not go according to plan. Things worked out worked out well in the end, but they did not go according to plan. Stripe is one of the world’s largest payment processing companies, but they remained flexible and agile enough to take advantage of some of the surprises they faced in […]

The post 66: How U.S. FinTech Stripe Broke into Low-Tech Japan – Daniel Heffernan appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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Startup M&A is changing in Japan. In August, Naoki Yamada sold his startup Conyac to Rozetta for $14 million. It was an unusual journey of alternating cycles of rapid growth and near bankruptcy, and today Naoki explains how he managed to make the deal happen and also how M&A is changing in Japan, and it seems that change […]

The post 65: How to Make Startup M&A Work in Japan – Naoki Yamada appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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Expida had a hard road to travel when they decided to come into Japan. The Japanese market turned out to be nothing like they had ever experienced before. Not only were consumer attitudes and behaviors towards travel booking completely different than it was in their home market, but they were up against some very powerful […]

The post 64: Dealing with the Bad Things First – Expedia Japan – Hidemaru Sato appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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This is a rather personal episode. We have no guests this time. It’s just you and me. From the outside, it looks like Airbnb is crushing it in Japan. Listings and rentals are both increasing at an unbelievable rate, and Japan is loosening her room-sharing (or minpaku) laws. The future looks bright for Airbnb here, […]

The post 63: What Your Startup Can Learn From Airbnb’s Japan Problem appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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GitHub entered the Japanese market under enviable conditions. They already had a strong corporate user base, solid brand awareness and product evangelists throughout Japan. They did not so much push their way into the Japanese market, so much as they were pulled into it. Even under the best conditions, however, Japan market entry is not […]

The post 62: How to Build a Market in Japan Without Localization – Derek Sorkin – GitHub appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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You don’t usually think of Japan’s geisha as being an industry, but it is. In fact, strictly speaking, it’s a cartel. A cartel that is now being disrupted by internet-based booking agencies and low-cost substitutes. It seems that even geisha are not immune to internet-based disintermediation. In this special interview Sayuki, Japan’s only geisha that […]

The post 61: Will Japan’s Geisha Survive the Digital Age? – Disrupting Japan appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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FinTech is one of the hottest startup sectors right now, but if you’ve been in the industry for a while, you know that FinTech is always one of the hottest startup sectors. And yet FinTech companies seem strangely local. Very few succeed outside their home markets. A complex web of regulations and local sensibilities almost […]

The post 60: How to Win Over Japanese Regulators – Jonathan Epstein – PayPal appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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Spacee has staked out an interesting position in the sharing economy. Spacee enables companies and individuals to rent out unused meeting room space to people who need to hold a meeting. It’s an interesting take on applying a sharing economy model to business. I’m generally very skeptical of startups who define themselves as “Uber for […]

The post 59: How the Lack of Space in Japan Became an Advantage – Spacee appeared first on Disrupting Japan.

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