How to build a startup in Japan

If you have ever wondered what it really takes to start and grow a startup as a foreigner in Japan. Well, I have a treat for you today. Earlier this year, at the Japan FinTech Festival, I had the privilege of sitting down with four fantastic foreign FinTech founders and talking about what you need to succeed in Japan. There are some great insights here from Jeff Wentworth of Curvegrid, Paul Chapman of Moneytree, Sam Pemberton-Ahmed of SmartPay, and Samantha Ghiotti of Habitto. It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.

Transcript I think in every startup ecosystem, foreigners play an outsized role in promoting that ecosystem, whether it's in San Francisco, whether it's London. And the reasons for that might be a desire, a people who are willing to uproot themselves and move halfway across the world, maybe are just bigger risk takers. Maybe it's new perspective.

But today, we're gonna dig into what it takes to grow a startup, a Fintech startup in particular as a foreigner here in Japan. And to start out, we're gonna do really brief, really brief introductions. So I'm Tim Romero. I'm a partner at Jira Ventures. We invest in green tech energy, sustainability, next generation energy.

Before that, I founded 4 startups here in Japan. I ran Google for startups Japan for a number of years. I helped Tapco spin out their CVC, and I run a podcast called Disrupting Japan, which is interviews with Japanese founders about what it's like to be a founder in a culture that prizes conformity. Samantha? Hi, everyone.

My name is Sam, and I'm the cofounder of Habito. Habits is Japan's first connected financial experience helping people save, invest, and protect what they love the most. As my surname suggests, I'm Italian and I'm a mother of 2. And, I've been living and working across 4 different continents, London, New York, Dubai, Singapore, and now Tokyo. I spent about 20 years at the intersection of tech and finance, about 10 years as an operator, both in large financial institutions.

And I ran the Singlife franchise in Singapore prior to its exit in 2021. And I spent 10 years as an investor sitting on the other side, predominantly in venture and also private equity, with a company called Anthemis Group, which is pioneer fintech investors in Europe and North America. And, that's where I met a lot of people there today is in this room. So it's great to see you all again. Excellent.

Sam? Hi. My name's Sam. I'm from SmartPay. SmartPay is an embedded finance company.

What does that mean? We provide installment loans to consumers at the point of purchase to help merchants, to grow their revenue. And then as of today as well, we just announced insurance as well. So we've partnered with Chubb, and we're providing product insurance and travel insurance with Chubb, at the point of purchase as well. We've signed over 20 banks and 201 credit unions.

What does that mean? It means that you can pay directly from your bank account digitally. So we've connected with the 20 banks and 201 Credit Unions through APIs. So through our app, you can access your bank account. Me, personally, I've been working in Japan since 2010.

Very lucky I was with Starbucks, where we rolled out in app payment, and loyalty card and obviously grew Japan to to be the 2nd largest market at Starbucks, moved to Mastercard, worked with Japan, as well with the banks, and then I was at Facebook, and WhatsApp, and Instagram in Japan and learned a lot from Zuck about success in Japan and decided to to go on my own. Good morning, everyone. My name is Paul Chapman. I'm the, the founder and and CEO at Moneytree. We're a financial data platform, based in Tokyo.

We work with some of the largest banks such as SMBC, one of the sponsors, Mitsubishi OFJ, Japan Post Bank. We have some of the fastest growing, up and coming start ups in Japan using our data platform to get access to over 2,500 data sources. We we've been at this for a while, so I hope I can share some, longitudinal views on this not as long as Tim. But thanks for being here today, everyone. Hi, everyone.

My name is Jeff Wentworth. I'm the cofounder of Curve Grid. We're a blockchain infrastructure company based here in Japan. We've been around for 7 years. We've been profitable for the last 3.

We make it fast, easy, and cost effective for companies of all sizes, both Japanese and international, to build on blockchain versus doing so from scratch. I've lived in Japan for 18 years now, previously at Goldman Sachs and EMC, and, looking forward to sharing, thoughts with you today. Thank you. Fantastic. So there's a lot of talk and advice online about what it takes to grow a startup.

Some of it's more meaningful and useful than others, but I think one of the really unique opportunities we have here is that we've all been through this. So what I'd like to drill down with to start out with is from your own personal experience. What's been your biggest challenge as a foreign founder in Japan, and how did you manage to overcome that? Let's go the other way. So, Jeff, why don't you kick us off?

Yeah. Sure. So I had lived in Japan for 11 years when we started curve grid. And at that point, and even today, my Japanese is not, perfect. It's not I wouldn't even say fluent.

I do business meetings in Japanese sometimes. I think maybe, it's more tolerated when we're talking about technical things because of my technical background. So I think one of the key, ways to overcome, let's say, not only a language barrier, but a business culture barrier, even though for someone like myself who had lived and worked in Japan for more than decade at that point, was finding the right partners. And by partners, I mean, you know, service companies, service partners, agents that can help us do things like start our company, deal with our accounting, accounting, deal with our our legal matters. And I think those service partners have also evolved over time as as we've, grown as well.

And I think, you know, some founders here successfully do everything on their own. But for us, like, having that network of partners was something that that really helped us overcome a lot of challenges, and and to this day as well. So were those partners mostly on the the administrative side, you know, outsourcing accounting and things, or did you rely on those kind of partners for sales and and execution as well? Yeah. It's it's a good question.

I think you have to always play to your strengths. Right? So we I come from an enterprise sales background in Japan, but also globally. And so I think we needed probably less support doing that and more support on legal, accounting, pension, payroll, HR, those those sorts of things. Excellent.

Paul, what's been your experience? Okay. So this might be a bit controversial. I love that. Alright.

Well, first of all, I I, I've been studying Japanese a long time. So I came here as a student originally, then I was a local hire at a company here about 18 years ago. I haven't been here the whole time, but this stint is pretty long, about the same amount of time total as you. And I always thought, well, Japan kinda sucks at software except for games. So I think I can contribute something there.

What I found despite speaking accentless Japanese, although my wife tells me it's much better now than when we started Moneytree, I'm like, no. No. It was good then. But notwithstanding we could communicate at an equivalent level, our overseas experience and our overseas pedigree or achievements, anything that is sort of put on the scales of of how how, I guess, how how sparkly you are as as someone they could invest in. So fundraising was the big challenge for us.

I should have said that. Fundraising was the big challenge, and the and the the impediment was anything we did overseas was largely discounted because it wasn't in Japan. So I sold my my first company, I started when I was 23. I was the CTO. We sold it to Thomson Reuters.

But for some reason, in the early days when we were fundraising, that was somehow less important than an Ivy League NBA. It's like one guy's got a swim certificate. I've swam the English Channel, and that wasn't really put on the scales, and it didn't weigh very much. So we we had to we had to build credibility. So getting to the how do we how do we overcome this challenge, I used to talk about this as, as manufacturing credibility.

Now I don't mean like making things up and putting it on LinkedIn. Don't do that. What I'm talking about is finding people who would trust us, and they themselves were very trustworthy, and that gave us the ability, because I I didn't work in investment banking. I did study banking and finance and thought, I never wanna do that. I wanna start a start up.

In hindsight, working in investment banking is a really good way to, you know, to learn how to raise money. Working as a VC, Sam, that's going to help you a lot, obviously. Not trying to teach anyone how to suck eggs. But in Japan, you need to find people here who trust you, and then step by step, like climbing a ladder, you will build your own credibility. So today, when Moneytree and thanks thank you to all the people who work with us and all the people who work for us and who still do today, when I go somewhere, that's my pedigree.

Like, I'm from Moneytree. I'm one of the founders. We do these things. We're doing our best. In the early stages, they're like, who the heck are you guys?

And the first company to trust us in Japan was actually Apple. So we were a personal finance app. We were best of App Store 2013, best of App Store in 2014. We were a launch partner for the Apple Watch. That was the first rung on the ladder of credibility.

The second was our, our Jo Kyu Komond, our senior adviser, who worked for 30, 40 years at Sumitomo Bank and in the Mitsui Sumitomo Financial Group, and he vouched for us. And I'll I'll stop there.