

Startup Culture Divide: United States and Japan - wslh
http://blogs.parc.com/blog/2014/01/startup-culture-divide-united-states-and-japan/

======
sanxiyn
I am a Korean.

I don't think describing one as risk-averse is fair when risk is different.
When A and B are given the same risk, and A takes the risk and B doesn't, it
is fair to describe B as more risk-averse than A. When A and B are given the
different risk, and A takes the risk and B doesn't, it doesn't tell much about
B's risk-averseness.

I think it is not that Japanese culture is risk-averse, but that doing startup
in Japan is actually more risky. These two are not the same statement.

I also call bullshit on "lack of disruptive ideas". How can one even imagine
such thing is true is beyond me.

~~~
onion2k
What makes it more risky to do a start-up in Japan?

~~~
patio11
Pretend you live in an alternate universe America where the following is true:

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and substantially every other
company you want to work for has an elite class of employees. They get a
salary and they're mostly men, so let's call them salarymen. Salarymen are
hired right out of undergraduate, almost exclusively. In fact, it is so rare
to have someone hired mid-career that an e.g. product manager who managed that
would probably rate an article in TechCrunch.

There is a large culture built around salarymanhood, but distilling it to the
essence, it is loyalty above and below. Above, your company affords you job
security comparable to that enjoyed by tenured academics or career civil
servants. Below, there is only one thing you must never, ever, ever do: quit.
If you stab a company in the back by quitting after they've given you the
brass ring of salarymanhood, that is a worse black mark on your future
employment prospects than being convicted of embezzlement.

Americans don't worry about credit reports. The only FICO score in our
alternate universe is the name on your business card: if you belong to the
elite fraternity of first-class corporations -- much like first-class
colleges, there are wonks who keep lists but realistically you could ask any
twelve year old and they'd know -- you have sufficient credit to receive loans
or to rent apartments. If you don't, you will need to have someone who does
cosign for you if you want to e.g. live in an apartment. There exist companies
which will basically sell you "I am not a salaryman but I have a surety bond
so please let me stay in your building" insurance. This costs several hundred
dollars a year.

People in the United States love the institution of marriage, and having a
good match is considered to be crucial to life happiness, particularly for
women. Women largely prefer to marry salarymen, because salarymen mean
material stability. Their parents, whose advice women frequently listen to,
are virtually universal in preferring this. This is not simply an aesthetic
preference like "women prefer men who are tall." Women do prefer men who are
tall, but you will not be asked to provide a copy of your last physical
attesting to your height when meeting your bride-to-be's parents to discuss
your intention to marry her. You should, however, pack your resume [+].

America has a very low bankruptcy rate, principally because it is treated as a
social sin somewhere between notoriously cheating on one's spouse or doing
something really dastardly like backstabbing a company by quitting it. If you
go bankrupt, you will lose friends, and your employment opportunities will be
circumscribed in a manner similar to being on a blacklist. (Someone from a
foreign country might wonder what happens to a salaryman who goes bankrupt.
What a silly question. Americans of proper breeding and with the educational
attainment and moral worth to become salarymen would simply never go bankrupt.
And if, through some strange combination of unavoidable circumstances, they
were threatened with financial ruin, the company would certainly take care of
that.)

You presided over a corporate bankruptcy? Oh dear. That's even worse than a
personal bankruptcy. Not only did you fail personally, you ruined the lives of
people to whom you owed society's highest form of loyalty. Hopefully your
children will be able to pay off your accumulated debts, you disgraceful
excuse for an American.

Foreigners, like those plucky Japanese, occasionally describe Americans as
plodding clock-punchers without a risk taking bone in their bodies. They just
don't get it. Americans love successful entrepreneurs like they love miracles
-- sure, most of them happened in ages past, and you'd be absolutely insane to
stake your life on one in the present day, but people still tell stories about
them.

[+] I am very rarely believed when I say this, but it is literally accurate
that I had my resume and a stamped copy of my most recent tax return the first
time I met Ruriko's mother. I'll elide the specifics of the conversation,
because after all she is my mother-in-law, but suffice it to say I was able to
bring her around regarding my proposal despite my uncertain employment
prospects.

~~~
dxbydt
Wow, I had no idea its that bad. I have never worked in India, but my Indian
friends describe a similar environment in the Indian public sector - jobs for
life, generally no job-hopping, no worries about money, company homes, company
schools, company hospital, servants provided for, essentially just punch the
clock, pretend to do some work & go home.

I wonder how the salaryman culture gels with the Japanese being so innovative.
In Rising Sun (both the bad movie & worse book by same name), Michael Crichton
make the claim that the Japanese are light years ahead of the US viz-a-viz
computing/tech/optics/physics. There's a scene where Sean Connery walks into a
physics lecture hall in ucla & points out that all the students are Asian
while Americans are missing because they avoid hard subjects. If they are all
boring homogenous salarymen, what's the impetus for being so innovative ? Any
innovation by definition rocks the boat, so why do that ?

~~~
lkrubner
You ask:

"I wonder how the salaryman culture gels with the Japanese being so
innovative."

But that was answered above:

"You presided over a corporate bankruptcy? Oh dear. That's even worse than a
personal bankruptcy. Not only did you fail personally, you ruined the lives of
people to whom you owed society's highest form of loyalty."

They are highly motivated to engage in enough innovation so as to stave off
bankruptcy.

------
hkmurakami
This was one of the better articles on the subject of the entrepreneurship
problem in Japan, probably because it is one of the rare cases where the piece
was written by someone who personally wet his feet in the scene there (as
opposed to journalists or bloggers, who are complete outsiders).

That being said, the discussion is largely a repetition of what we've heard
many times before (Though the parts about long sales cycles and the non-
entrepreneurial VC was interesting, since these are the only two parts that
came from the author's own personal experiences). There's a limit to how much
astute insight can be drawn from Japanese Americans (which he must be) like
the author or myself, because in the end, we are outsiders and will never be
completely immersed or invested in understanding the intricacies of the socio-
cultural issues that pervade the scene there.

I've of course thought about these issues in Japan myself, and my current
assessment is that the best talent in the country have so much to lose and so
little to gain by leaving their larger company posts and creating their own
thing. The incentives and rewards are completely different than just 40 years
ago, where there was very little to lose by being brash and taking outsized
risks, both inside and outside large companies.

~~~
epaladin
I imagine it was much different before (and during?) the bubble. There are
amazing stories of entrepreneurship from that time- with things like the
founding and fantastic growth of 7-11 Japan, and Softbank. These companies are
huge now, but getting them off the ground involved a large amount of risk and
a group of people that accepted that. Masayoshi Son (of Softbank) is still
seen as a maverick even now despite his well-established success; if he was
just starting out now I imagine he would have a harder time than he did in
1981.

~~~
hkmurakami
Softbank's success is a bit of a red herring. They have basically never been
profitable, but have made _enormous_ gains in their investments in things like
Yahoo! Japan and Chinese internet businesses. By the time the real estate
bubble was truly underway, people were by in large comfortable with the huge
companies throwing money at their feet to join their firm (stories of college
recruiting are downright ridiculous -- they go way beyond the wining and
dining of new grads by consulting and finance firms in the states).

The truly ridiculous wave of entrepreneurship was in the post-war era, where
the country had very little in its possession and everything to gain by trying
very new things.

------
gregt590
Japan isn't the only country where developing a startup culture is difficult.
Many Asian countries have a much more heirarchical culture where simply
following what your boss or political leader says to do without question is
strongly ingrained. I was part of a team under John Roese at Huawei that was
trying to help Huawei learn how to be innovative. Their executive leaders
understood the need, but there turned out to be too big a cultural divide
across the bulk of the company to get the support and engagement needed, so
the effort collapsed after a couple of years and most of us moved on to more
productive efforts. It was however a very insightful period in my career since
I learned a lot about where China (in general) has advantages over the US and
where the US (in particular Silicon Valley) has advantages over China. The
willingness to openly share and "give before you get" is definitely some much
more common in the US and leads to much more effective collective efforts
here. On the other hand I have never seen more effective "manufacturing-like
engineering" at scale than I saw at Huawei. In an ironic way we are often able
to leverage the power of numbers (i.e crowd sourcing, open source, cross-
collaboration, etc) more effectively than the country that has the numbers but
not yet the understanding of how to best leverage them.

------
jimbokun
An outstanding anime on the topic of overcoming the culture of risk aversion
in Japan is Whisper of the Heart. (耳をすませば is the Japanese title.)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_of_the_Heart](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_of_the_Heart)

A teenage girl spends much of her time reading books that interest her and is
drawn toward writing fantasy fiction on her own. This runs against the grain
of the cultural norm of devoting herself to studying for university entrance
exams.

She is inspired by a boy her age devoted to making and playing violins, who
goes to Italy for a year to pursue this dream. His family supports and
encourages him in this endeavor.

Her parents are understandably worried about her choice to pursue this risky
dream, but decide to support her choice in the end.

The movie really drew me in emotionally to what it must be like to choose a
more creative path in a society with a strong norm of conformity. It made me
think of how the animators must have felt telling this story, as it must have
mirrored their own past.

It also makes me wonder how so many creative people have managed to flourish
in Japan, and what path they took to arrive there. There is so much creativity
in manga, anime, video games, and all the other cultural artifacts of Japan so
popular throughout the world.

And what about the Japanese who do manage to successfully start new
businesses? How do they manage it?

------
avighnay
One thing that perhaps Americans always miss out or under rate in their own
startup culture is the support ecosystem, especially the media

I see that in US, there is a media circle that continually builds itself
around entrepreneurs and celebrates local innovation (like how TC began as
such an idea), as the old ones grow bigger, younger ones come in and keep even
the fringe entrepreneur in the lime light

In addition to the Tech industry you can also see this in the US sports
industry. No other country perhaps has made sports such a successful business
endeavor as in US. A great part of credit goes to its media.

Another big plus for US startups is 'local adoption', I consider this a huge
advantage for all of them. Perhaps you have never felt it as you have never
seen the other side of it. For e.g. you can never take it for granted in
India, in fact being local startup has a good chance to work against you with
customers. The positive news is that there is a sea of change in enterprises
here, I have had recently a large corporation go for our product vs that of
IBM/SAP. This alone can be a start of good times for Indian startups.

------
ilamont
I agree with sanxiyn's take, especially regarding disruptive ideas. There have
been some incredible Japanese inventors, and groups that are willing to take
huge risks. The multiple innovations in both the Prius and Wii are two high-
profile examples.

Three other points I would like to share come from discussions with Japanese
friends over the years:

\- For men in certain industries, there is a strong social encouragement of
working for large companies for decades, and the expectation at many (but not
all) corporations is that once you are hired, you are in for life. The
companies make it easy to do so -- I have a friend at a large electronics
company who said they took care of housing, relocation, even a company
hospital ("hospital" was the term he used, although I suppose it could have
been a clinic).

\- Entrepreneurs are seen as somehow tricky or ethically lacking. This was
expressed to me by middle-aged salarymen at giant multinationals a few years
ago, so I don't know if the attitude has changed.

\- Large companies have extensive and deep supplier relationships that
discourage taking a chance on an upstart.

I'd like to hear the observations of other HNers who are Japanese or have long
experience in the country.

~~~
jimbokun
"The multiple innovations in both the Prius and Wii are two high-profile
examples."

Those examples reinforce the point that big innovations in Japan happen at
big, established companies, not start ups.

------
tiemand
Interesting.. I didn't know that the Palo Alto Research Centre still existed!

