The forgotten mistake that killed Japan’s software industry
This is our 200th episode, so I wanted to do something special. Everyone loves to complain about...
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Category: Japanese Culture
The secret of humble food from expensive tech
The way we get our food is changing. Many are discussing how to make modern farming more...
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Will Japan’s Manga industry ever really change?
Manga is one of Japan’s best known exports, but it’s surprisingly hard to make money...
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What you can learn from Japan’s seven-minute miracle
Today we are going to look at a different kind of innovation. It’s not technology....
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Why startups should be better than charities at solving social problems
Startups exist to develop new solutions to problems. But many of society’s biggest problems...
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Selects: Why Japan’s Geisha are disappearing in the social media age
You don’t usually think of Japan’s geisha as being an industry, but it is. In fact, strictly...
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Your Japanese textbooks are lying to you
They probably mean well. They are telling you something that is easy to understand and that seems...
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How Japan’s forgotten past can stop IoT’s dystopian future
Technology is global, but ideas are local. The same IoT technology is being deployed all over the...
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DJ Selects: Why Men Need Women Founders
Ari Horie has always had a different approach to supporting women entrepreneurs. She doesn’t talk about “empowering” women and …
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Outside of the Bubble with Japan’s Startup Girls: Mone Kamishiraishi
Those of us who spend our lives working with startups live in a bubble. Whether you spend your...
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DJ Selects: The Myth of the Successful Startup Failure
Startup culture has crazy and contradictory views about failure. As founders we are told to fail fast, but also to never give up. We are told to follow our vision, but be ready to pivot. Somehow this macho-bullshit culture of “I never really fail and ‘m not afraid of failure.” has become dominant amount founders. But it’s the result of denial. Trivializing failure is a way of not thinking about it’s effects.
The truth is that failure sucks. Failure is painful. Failure …
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DJ Selects: The Real Reason Uber is Failing in Japan
Uber and Airbnb represent a new very kind of startup, one that could not have existed twenty years ago, and the very thing that make these companies so transformative in the United States ensures they will never succeed in Japan. You see…
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