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Disrupting Japan: Startups Use Business Cards Differently in Asia - Chika Terada - Sansan

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Western businesspeople coming to Japan often confess that they find the importance placed on business cards here and the complex rules of etiquette and protocol surround their use utterly baffling. In Japan business cards are considered as an extension of the people and companies who’s names they bear, and they are treated with the corresponding respect and deference.

In fact, the protocols are so important that most business conversations cannot even begin until all participants have exchanged cards and everyone knows exactly who they are dealing with.

One startup founder looked at this complex, tradition-bound web of protocol and saw opportunity. Chika Terada created SanSan, a SaaS CRM and business networking platform with a uniquely Asian approach — by placing the business card, rather than the individual it represents, at the center of the system.

And it’s clear that they are on the right track. While LinkedIn, based on the Western notion of business networking, has been slow gaining traction in Japan, Sansan has been growing at an amazing pace here, and they are now expanding into the US and southeast Asia.

Chika and I sit down for a frank talk about Asian business card culture and the challenges of moving into overseas markets.

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

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But what happens to the majority of old business cards? I have to think they're not always "treated with the corresponding respect and deference."

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Western businesspeople coming to Japan often confess that they find the importance placed on business cards here and the complex rules of etiquette and protocol surround their use utterly baffling.

Is this really true, or is this just a young journalist's attempt to have an opening sentence that 'grabs' the reader's attention by using a word like 'baffling'? If a western businessperson is so thick that s/he's baffled by the complex protocol then the company that sent them should take a bit closer look at their training programme.

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Is this really true

In the 80's and 90's, yes, there was a big fashion of exchanging meishi (business cards). And of exchanging cards with anime characters, sportsmen... Then it became old like the fax, but you still see it.

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"Asian business card culture"! Ha! Yes, the exotic and "baffling" "culture." Call in the anthropologists!!!

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