Lifestyle factors: Tokyo is a wonderful place to live and work. (Much, much better than I had expected prior to moving there.)
Relevant to startup factors:
a) Unbelievably bad fundraising environment as compared to the Bay Area. The absolute amount of money available is pretty large, but for a variety of pipeline reasons, I would not assume it was easily accessible for a variety of firms that would have an easy time accessing Meaningful Amounts of Money in the Bay Area as of 2015 (or any time for the last 10 years, for that matter).
b) Talent market: with specific regards to foreign entrepreneurs hiring in Tokyo, I often find that they have... interesting expectations. "Hey I'd like to find a bilingual Japanese/English engineer who has startup-compatible risk tolerances, is comfortable working in a bicultural environment under a minimum amount of supervision, can solo-ship code in one or more modern programming stacks, and is willing to work for $2.5k per month." I think if you also have this expectation, you will not find the Tokyo labor market to be accommodating of your desires.
Assuming one is reasonably clueful with regards to looking for folks who actually exist... I think one would be a bit disappointed with regards to who actually exists and it what quantity. It's a minor miracle that one can reliably staff a team of 20 engineers to build a never-before-seen highly scalable application out of nothing to do something which is actually meaningful. You can accomplish this miracle in the Bay Area. It will be expensive, but it is doable, and you'll be one of hundreds of firms doing it at the same time. In Tokyo... you're going to find that individual pieces of that 20-strong team are very, very hard to find. A CTO who has done it before? An architecture lead who is both capable of making good choices and will also happily actually touch an AWS account with their own two hands? An intermediate Rails or Python developer who can both ship code and is willing to work for you? Times five? Every hire there is a fun adventure which might end in "And then despite everyone's best efforts there was no engineer available for hire and the company died ingloriously."
c) Ambient competence levels among Tokyo entrepreneurs and other people associated with the startup ecosystem are... how to be charitable here... lagging ambient competence levels in Silicon Valley. By at least a few cycles, if not more. Stuff which is way-the-heck-below table stakes for e.g. a YC startup which is N weeks old is treated here like PhD thesis level black magic. (Specific example: "Your cost of customer acquisition is actually highly sensitive to your conversion rate if you're using paid acquisition sources." "That doesn't sound right." "sigh Alright, let's go to the whiteboard for a minute." 15 minutes later "WHOA.")
As a "bilingual Japanese/English engineer who has startup-compatible risk tolerances, is comfortable working in a bicultural environment under a minimum amount of supervision, can solo-ship code in one or more modern programming stacks", I indeed have had to check on a few occasions whether the stated salary was monthly or daily. Generally a good sign that the talk is not going anywhere...
I highly agree that Tokyo is a great place to live and work. As long as you can fit in with the culture. I would also strongly agree with the other points.
We have a small slack channel with a few startup members here however its not very active. Join us there and also at tech crawl tokyo later this month to meet some more of us.
As a digital marketer that last example had my jaw on the ground. What do you think that knowledge gap can be attributed to? There is just so much info online these days that I find that pretty shocking.
On the flip side, I'm curious about any differences on the product development side for physical products. Japan has quite the reputation for obsessive (in a good way) attention to detail, quality, and elegance and I wonder if that trickles into any startups making physical products.
> Talent market: with specific regards to foreign entrepreneurs hiring in Tokyo, I often find that they have... interesting expectations. "Hey I'd like to find a bilingual Japanese/English engineer who has startup-compatible risk tolerances, is comfortable working in a bicultural environment under a minimum amount of supervision, can solo-ship code in one or more modern programming stacks, and is willing to work for $2.5k per month." I think if you also have this expectation, you will not find the Tokyo labor market to be accommodating of your desires.
Are you sure about this? Honest question.
I read a lot of posts, especially in threads like this one on HN and other places, by developers typically in their early twenties, who want to go to Japan and work for a few years and experience something different, before heading back home and getting a proper job. Some of them are going to be fine with pretty much any salary that pays the bills (and $2.5k can pay the bills for a twenty-something with no responsibilities in Tokyo - this is a typical salary for an English teacher here). I don't know how serious they are but surely some of them find their way over here.
Of course it sucks to compete with this if you're an engineer who wants to stay here long-term and earn an actual living - but from the perspective of an entrepreneur it's great. It's sort of like being a games developer, except you're not limited to making games.
Relevant to startup factors:
a) Unbelievably bad fundraising environment as compared to the Bay Area. The absolute amount of money available is pretty large, but for a variety of pipeline reasons, I would not assume it was easily accessible for a variety of firms that would have an easy time accessing Meaningful Amounts of Money in the Bay Area as of 2015 (or any time for the last 10 years, for that matter).
b) Talent market: with specific regards to foreign entrepreneurs hiring in Tokyo, I often find that they have... interesting expectations. "Hey I'd like to find a bilingual Japanese/English engineer who has startup-compatible risk tolerances, is comfortable working in a bicultural environment under a minimum amount of supervision, can solo-ship code in one or more modern programming stacks, and is willing to work for $2.5k per month." I think if you also have this expectation, you will not find the Tokyo labor market to be accommodating of your desires.
Assuming one is reasonably clueful with regards to looking for folks who actually exist... I think one would be a bit disappointed with regards to who actually exists and it what quantity. It's a minor miracle that one can reliably staff a team of 20 engineers to build a never-before-seen highly scalable application out of nothing to do something which is actually meaningful. You can accomplish this miracle in the Bay Area. It will be expensive, but it is doable, and you'll be one of hundreds of firms doing it at the same time. In Tokyo... you're going to find that individual pieces of that 20-strong team are very, very hard to find. A CTO who has done it before? An architecture lead who is both capable of making good choices and will also happily actually touch an AWS account with their own two hands? An intermediate Rails or Python developer who can both ship code and is willing to work for you? Times five? Every hire there is a fun adventure which might end in "And then despite everyone's best efforts there was no engineer available for hire and the company died ingloriously."
c) Ambient competence levels among Tokyo entrepreneurs and other people associated with the startup ecosystem are... how to be charitable here... lagging ambient competence levels in Silicon Valley. By at least a few cycles, if not more. Stuff which is way-the-heck-below table stakes for e.g. a YC startup which is N weeks old is treated here like PhD thesis level black magic. (Specific example: "Your cost of customer acquisition is actually highly sensitive to your conversion rate if you're using paid acquisition sources." "That doesn't sound right." "sigh Alright, let's go to the whiteboard for a minute." 15 minutes later "WHOA.")