Today we are going to break down some startup stereotypes.

I sit down with Kunio Hara, co-founder and CEO of Beatrust and break apart the stereotypes of the uncreative Japanese enterprise and the young startup founder, and Kunio explains how Beatrust is already teaching old dogs new tricks.

It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.


Show Notes


How Japanese enterprises are different from their US large counterparts
Things to know when starting a company in your late 50s
Why older founders lead to more successful outcomes
Challenges in breaking the age-hierarchy in Japan
Can software actually make people collaborate?
What it takes to get Japanese firms to innovate and collaborate freely
Does Japan's management style have to change or can innovation happen within it?
Why American companies will also soon have to change their work styles
What new founders need to keep their eyes on when starting a startup


Links from our Guest

Everything you ever wanted to know about Beatrust

Follow Beatrust on X @jp_beatrust
Beatrust on Note
Get in touch with Beatrust


Connect with Kunio on LinkedIn
Friend him on Facebook

Leave a comment
Transcript
Welcome to Disrupting Japan, Straight Talk from Japan's most innovative founders and VCs.
I'm Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me.
I didn't really realize what this episode was about until I finished the editing. Oh, don't worry. I'll be introducing you to an innovative founder in just a minute, and we'll dive deep into their business and their market.
But this episode is really about stereotypes, how much truth they really have and why they stay with us, and what we can do to change both the perceptions and the realities that underlie them.
Today we sit down with Kunio Hara, co-founder and CEO of Beatrust, a startup that's focused on getting Japanese enterprises to break from their hierarchical structures and let their employees collaborate. Listeners who have spent time in Japan know that this is not an easy task, but as we explore this subject, it becomes clear that both the reality and the solutions are not as straightforward as the stereotype suggest.
We also explore the stereotype of the young Rebel startup founder, and man that is a pervasive one. In 2007, a 22-year-old, Mark Zuckerberg famously declared that quote, young people are just smarter. Paul Graham explained in 2013 that investors tend to be skeptical of any founder who is over 32 years old.
However, if you take the time to look at the real world results, the data actually show that older founders are much more likely to have a large value exit than younger founders. Kunio started Beatrust in his late fifties, and we talk about the positives and the negatives associated with that.
But, you know, Kunio tells that story much better than I can. So let's get right to the interview.

Interview
Tim: So, I'm sitting here with Kunio Hara, the co-founder and CEO of Beatrust, who is modernizing corporate collaboration and culture in Japan. So, thanks for sitting down with me.
Kunio: Yeah, thank you, Tim. Long time no see.
Tim: Yeah, it has been a while since you're at Google. So Beatrust is focused on helping employees collaborate. This is important. Everyone agrees it's important. But it's hard. So what is Beatrust doing differently in this space?
Kunio: We call our service talent collaboration tools because we try to define the new space and compare with other HR tech, especially talent management. What we do is mainly to help large organizations drive and facilitate more autonomous collaboration like cross functions.
Tim: Okay. Yeah, that's challenging and in a bit, I want to dive deep into exactly how you do that. But before that, tell me about your customers. So, who's using Beatrust?
Kunio: Obviously, large enterprise customers. They want to transform the culture to more innovative oriented, but our uniqueness about the product is we don't always go to one specific divisions. We go to a lot of different organizations such as R&D, Sales or maybe even new business development, because they really need to facilitate those autonomous collaboration across different functions.
Tim: Okay. Yeah. Now this is something you and I have talked about before. I mean, we first met back when we were at Google, and you and Masato Kume left Google to start Beatrust in 2020. So why? What was your vision?
Kunio: So, when I was at Google, I led a couple interesting projects. One is Olympics and the other one is startups. And the last one is more like DX support for Japanese enterprise. And for the last project, we had a lot of meetings with Japanese executives. And the main theme of those meetings, how they can make more innovations simply. So, Japan lost 30 years for making innovations. And they go far behind US companies such as Google and Microsoft and Amazon, and they want to understand why they were not able to make innovation like those big US IT companies. I realized a couple things because Japanese organization they have a lot of good employees. Many good employees. And sometimes management vision is very good, but why other organization, they cannot make innovation. At that time I was reading Google so I try to understand what's the difference between US IT company like Google and Japanese traditional large enterprise. And then I found maybe two main causes. One is culture, because culture is the essence of the innovation. When I was Google we had about 120 thousand employees. But usually with that size organization become very structured. So, it's very hard to make collaboration those different functions. But Google has preserved good culture, very open communication style.
Tim: So, is your goal kind of to bring a Google vibe or Google structure to corporate Japan?
Kunio: Of course not. It's not easy to import that kind of culture from a US company to Japanese company, because Japanese company has also good culture. Hundred years, three years, very good culture. But for innovation perspective, maybe they're not so good fit anymore. So, that's why they have to adapt but not easy to transform.
Tim: Well, actually that's one thing that's always fascinated me. Because I agree. What you're saying is almost common sense among people who study innovation. But when you look at Japanese companies in the sixties and seventies, they had the same hierarchy. The same rigid structure, but they were incredibly innovative. So, is it just the structure? Is there something else missing?
Kunio: I think what the market demands really changing, maybe Japan is good at focusing one thing. So, they want to create some product in a very efficient way, good quality. That's the strength of our Japanese business used to be. But now they need to have more consolidated, more hybrid type business or hybrid type of product and services with technology. So in that case, they have to collaborate more and more across different function because they really need different expertise and skillset.
Tim: That's really interesting. And I guess you're right, if you're looking back into like the sixties and seventies, it was definitely innovative, but the product cycles were much longer. These were products that were marketed and the fundamental product would continue for years or decades. And now, especially in the software age, life cycles are a couple of years at most.
Kunio: You can imagine three years ago there was no generative AI in the market. So that speed at the Japanese organization was not able to adapt.
Tim: Okay. Another thing I think that's very unique about the Beatrust story and your story in particular is that the image we have of founders is always some 20 something new college graduate. But that's not really true. And in your case, especially, I mean, you were a Google exec for about seven years, and you worked at Microsoft for three or four years before that. And you were in your late fifties when you started Beatrust, right?
Kunio: Exactly, yes.
Tim: So, what were some of the tradeoffs you considered when you were starting?
Kunio: Yeah, I think the starting company doesn't matter any ages. And the seniority provides a lot of good things. Because you have no house, you have experience, you have connections. So, we should leverage those assets. But at the same time, senior people don't have more updated sense of the market. And I think I have energy, but of course, younger people have more energy they can really work for 24 hours. But it's kind of a combination. I was able to set up a company because I had a partner Kume San, he's much younger than me, it then can be good synergy. I think more and more Japanese senior people should aim at founding the new business because they have those expertise and background and relationship and young people don't have. So, that could be a good synergy.
Tim: I think that's especially true when selling enterprise software. It's incredibly important to understand the problem you're trying to solve, and the people without those experiences won't be able to understand the customer's real problems. I think that kind of interaction is incredibly important for innovation, being able to communicate as peers despite age differences which is hard in Japan. Even back at Google for startups, one of the most common problems was we'd have a 35-year-old founder who had just hired a 55-year-old head of sales. And both sides really had trouble with the management structure, even when they really wanted it to work it was just so much against Japanese culture. And we set up kind of protocols and I worked with them to get them through it, and it worked out great in the end, but it's really challenging in Japan to get past these types of cultural box.
Kunio: Yeah. So of course you know that depends on the personality. For senior people, usually they have their own idea, very structured, very solid.