During this summer and winter, I was volunteering at Venture Cafe as an Ambassador. I am going to share how Venture Cafe works and why it is significant to Japan. I would also explain what I got out of it.
Venture Cafe locates at the center of Tokyo, where there are many offices. Venture Cafe's mission is to connect innovators and creates the environment to help produce and accelerate future businesses. So, every Thursday, Venture Cafe hosts events called "Thursday Gathering." There are two main areas, which are social space and event space, where speakers from many backgrounds make speeches. Each time, there are 5 to 6 speeches, and the room fills up typically. In the social space, everybody from different backgrounds is encouraged to talk to strangers. There are also some volunteers with entrepreneurial backgrounds and advise new entrepreneurs.
So, why is it helpful? Compared with the U.S., Japanese people tend to have less entrepreneurship mindset. For instance, it is widespread that somebody who joined a company continued to work at the same company until he/she gets retired. Besides, it is not favored to switch companies in Japan, contradicting the U.S., where people change their careers very often. Since people are staying at the same company, to get to higher positions, people tend to focus on growing the skillsets that are useful to his/her company instead of growing skillset that is necessary to have a business on their own. While not always the Western way of business is perfect, the Japanese business should adopt the idea. Japanese companies need to know how they compete against foreign companies due to globalization. Venture Cafe tries to bring such new ideas and circumstances to Japanese business communities. We often went to other gatherings and invited people to the Venture Cafe events.
There are many differences between American companies and Japanese companies or even American businesses and Japanese ones. In the U.S., when one idea came out, people first try it and brush it up along the way. American people likely take more risks. While starting businesses or projects in an early stage involves more risks, it is more likely to be successful in starting earlier than others for the American companies. However, it is the opposite of Japan. In Japan, people refine their business model a lot before launching it. Japanese customers and other cooperating companies trust this more. Since more prominent companies have been successful in making this refining and building trust between their customers, the businesses usually start from larger companies, while it is opposite in the U.S. This creates one of the Japanese cultures that following the majority is the key to be successful. For this reason, Japan has a culture that people need to obey their bosses and follow as much as they can to be successful in the company. They think it is better to follow that instead of starting from scratch because starting from scratch would be riskier. While this idea was successful before, it is no more a standard after globalization, and many international companies are threading Japanese ones. In order to adapt to the global business mindset in Japan, people from more significant companies need to accept it. Since most of the attendees of "Thursday Gathering" are from those big ones, Venture Cafe has a substantial effect on the Japanese future.
Changing people's mindset is very challenging. While it is still challenging to affect to the executives and managers, positively impacting the younger generation is more challenging. Current Japanese education doesn't put stress on being different from others and changing the world. Instead, the schools teach students to be better team players, and students assume following what the majority of people do is the best way to achieve that. I was one of them and always followed what other people say to me. Being a good team player is not supporting what other people do. Instead, we need to know how to use other people's skillset to maximize the probability of winning and speed the process up. Students don't get the chance to learn it because having projects is not encouraged. In the end of high school, I couldn't find what I liked to do and how I could impact the world. I had a dream to help many people, and I thought to become a medical doctor was the only way to achieve that. Since many people admire medical doctors, I ignore other ways of helping people and narrow down the path before even knowing what I am good at. Almost all the high school students, especially top high school students, focus on just cramming knowledge to pass the Japanese entrance exam to get into universities. Since it is the highest priority for students and schools, schools don't prepare anything about after graduation from colleges. Many of my Japanese friends are like that. Since I didn't like the culture, I decided to come to the U.S. to find what I want and what my value is to impact the world. Recently, I realize what they are. From my perspective, Venture Cafe gives excellent opportunities for interns to learn about it.
When I was an Ambassador, I was able to join many meetings and had a lot of opportunities to speak up my ideas and think about how to run the idea to have a better impact on Venture Cafe. I sometimes attended lunch meetings with my manager to learn about casual business talk. I have often got a chance to talk to many people from a variety of companies at the "Thursday Gathering." I often share what I learned and how the new idea could impact others. I got a lot of experience in learning from doing not learning from books. Thanks to that, I gained how to think flexibly in the different conditions with different people and how I can talk and listen more constructively. Currently, I am working on building software that checks who comes to the gathering event and what he/she drinks in order to help speed up the social space. It is based on my observation of what the current problem is and how I can impact Venture Cafe by using my unique skill set as an Engineer. Along the way, I often talk with other members to know what they are looking for. It is imperative to update what I have been creating and what issues I am encountering because I had an experience that I made something different because of the lack of communication in my school project. People in Venture Cafe don't hesitate to have meetings. Other interns also find what they can impact by using their unique skillset. They believe building the community that people can try and discover how they affect others is their mission. It is still an unusual movement in Japan recently. That's why I respect them. It is challenging to start things differently in Japan.
If there are companies that want to start their business or bring existing ones to Japan, I recommend understanding how Japanese industries function. I have talked to many companies to help that process and found that the Japanese market expects completely different things. Because of that, some of the global business is not prominent in Japan, even though the original business is very successful. For instance, Uber is not typical at all in Japan, even though it is very successful in other countries. In Japan, the laws regarding such services are complex, and people are trying to help taxi companies from the business such as Uber. Instead, Uber Eats is very common because it is not competing against the existing Japanese companies; instead, it is helping restaurants to get more customers.
If you have some ideas but don't know how to enter the Japanese market, I could give some advice or connect you to the other people who know more about it. Also, I would love to answer questions regarding Venture Cafe, Japanese education, business, and so on. Thank you for reading my post!