Disrupting Japan: How Anime and a Road Trip Lead to a Startup - Naoki Yamada - Conyac

A life-long love of anime, a cross-country road trip, and the suffocating frustration of working for a large Japanese firm all came together and resulted in the creation of one of the world’s first crowd-translation platforms.

Naoki Yamada started Conyac to take advantage of the significant price and market gap that exists between the low-quality machine translation offerings and professional quality human translation companies.  Naoki shares his insights and experience on two of the most challenging problems growing Japanese startups face; convincing large Japanese companies to trust your small startup, and the cultural challenges they face when they begin to expand overseas.

Naoki also talks about the challenging and unique nature of raising venture funding in Japan and we take a hard look at whether startup incubators provide lasting value to the companies they incubate.

Finally, although Japanese employees are known wold-wide for the number of overtime hours they put in, Japanese founders work even harder, and in this episode we  examine the ways in which Japanese founders try (and frequently fail) to achieve some kind of  work-life balance.

For more podcasts about the startup scene in Japan, check out [Disrupting Japan].

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