Phil Libin, the Russian-born tech entrepreneur raised in the US, left Evernote which he nurtured into one of the most successful startups to commence his career in startup investment and entrepreneur support last year. He recently founded a AI startup studio called All Turtles this year.
At the debut event of All Turtles held in Tokyo in late July, Libin stated the reason for the establishment of All Turtles:
I think the innovation model centered upon Silicon Valley is not enough. The ideas that can raise billions of dollars are only required there, and creators are needed to be CEO in addition to creating ideas and products. A person with writing ability is never required to found a publisher, or a person who loves music is never required to found a music label, and yet a creator is required to possess so many abilities beside making an excellent product and popularizing it in the world of startups.
Most of startups’ failure can be due to work outside of making the product such as management or fundraising. The AI startups studio which supports and allows startups to concentrate on their products leading to success – is All Turtles.
Eight projects shown below have already joined All Turtles which got started in San Francisco.
Growbot……chatbot for improvement of employees’ incentive
Replika……personal AI friend, learns through text conversations
In addition to the eight projects above, two stealth projects have been ongoing in San Francisco. LEADE.RS is a pivot of the new startup conference organized by Loic Le Meur who had formerly managed Le Web.
Regarding the Tokyo base, All Turtles is going to open its office this fall, and start accepting applications for the first batch which will start with five teams from April 1st of 2018. Japan’s Digital Garage (TSE:4819) having much experience in incubation support through Open Network Lab will support its operation. All Turtles will also start operations at the Paris base in the same program timeline with the Tokyo base.
Phil Libin shows a mug repaired by the Kintsugi technique.
All Turtle has fundraised more than $20 million in total, and the investors include Xavier Niel who recently completed the world’s biggest startup campus Station-F, Boston-based VC firm General Catalyst which Phil Libin serves as a Senior Advisor, Hiroshi Mikitani who is CEO of Japan’s Rakuten (TSE:4755) and Digital Garage. Since the full announcement of its operation is planned at a later date, the number of investors or supporters is expected to increase further.
In this event, Libin mentioned the chance to create new value from failure referring to “Kintsugi”… the Japanese art of restoring broken pottery… and said there are so many concepts applicable to startup policy in Japanese culture.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
From left: Phil Libin and Kaoru Hayashi (CEO of Digital Garage)
The article was authored by Jun Hasegawa, CEO of Bangkok-based FinTech startup Omise, and was first appeared on his own Medium feed. It has been reproduced by The Bridge with the approval of him. See also: Omise acquires dtac’s payment services provider Paysbuy to accelerate growth in SEA (e27) Omise Supplements VC Funding Through Abstemious Token Offering (ETHNews) Japan, Thai startups unite to support younger selves; Inaugural meeting held with ministers Omise secures $17.5M to become Southeast Asia’s largest online payments gateway While ICOs have been around for a number of years, only until 2016–2017 did we start to the a whole hosts of ICOs and ICO funded projects entering the mainstream world. I for one have made the decision to step into the center of the ICO activities with hopes that through this unprecedented experience I would challenge myself to learn and grow, while also contributing back to strengthen the blockchain ecosystem in the long run. How did I get here? In 2013 I founded Omise as an e-commerce platform based out of Thailand. Though the efforts to grow out this business I experienced first hand how outdated payment processors, gateways and financial institutions impeded e-commerce growth across the…
Omise CEO Jun Hasegawa
The article was authored by Jun Hasegawa, CEO of Bangkok-based FinTech startup Omise, and was first appeared on his own Medium feed. It has been reproduced by The Bridge with the approval of him.
While ICOs have been around for a number of years, only until 2016–2017 did we start to the a whole hosts of ICOs and ICO funded projects entering the mainstream world. I for one have made the decision to step into the center of the ICO activities with hopes that through this unprecedented experience I would challenge myself to learn and grow, while also contributing back to strengthen the blockchain ecosystem in the long run.
How did I get here?
The Omise team introduced their beta service at Echelon Thailand in 2014.
In 2013 I founded Omise as an e-commerce platform based out of Thailand. Though the efforts to grow out this business I experienced first hand how outdated payment processors, gateways and financial institutions impeded e-commerce growth across the Asia-Pacific region. In realizing this, my co-founder and I pivoted Omise to became a fully-devoted fintech company focused on providing the most reliable and secure online payments services.
About a year after we launched Omise payment I stumbled across this technology called blockchain, and more specifically Ethereum-based blockchain. This was back in early 2015 when ETH 1 was valued less than US$ 1. I immediately became fascinated by this technology and the promise it brings to scaling Omise’s business.
Since my introduction to the blockchain technology, Omise has committed itself to supporting and strengthening ways to bring this promising technology into mainstream business.
Blockchain community
There are several aspects of what makes blockchain technology so attractive to me personally. The first is, of course, the technological potential. However, there is also another very important aspect that often is glazed over by mainstream world but I feel deserves a greater spotlight: the blockchain community and its ecosystem.
Having submerged myself in the open source technology world both through OmiseGO blockchain and Omise payment, I am truly convinced the unique value of open source technology is its surrounding community. With this, I believe it is Omise and OmiseGO’s responsibility as a member of the wider community to help contribute to and grow it.
From the very beginning of OmiseGO (initially called Omise Blockchain Lab) Donnie and I took the approach of viewing community contribution, sustainability and scalability as a core part when benchmarking our “return on investment”. For instance, Omise provided funding to support the Ethereum’s DEVgrants as well as to DEVCON 1 and 2. Every time we decided to provide funding to support a community initiative,
I’m certain our board members were thinking to themselves “Crazy Jun, here we go again”. However, I fully believe in the community approach and I do believe our contribution, though modest, have provided us with the opportunity to build stronger network of relations amongst the blockchain and Ethereum community.
I would like to reaffirm that Omise and OmiseGO are committed to continuing it’s support to the blockchain and Ethereum community as we move forward into the future.
One example is our long-term supportee “Raiden network” which has been based on Ethereum (Git link). Heiko Hees, CEO at Raiden network, is a distinguished person who has been taking an approach, from an early stage, to the problem of transaction speed (known as “TPS”) that Ethereum will sooner or later be confronted with.
Subsequently, we continued to build more and more relationship with other members including founders of Ethereum and other leading roles in this community-crypto society.
Have you ever attempted to take apart the field of finance? Today’s society employs cash, credit cards, points and other units which both express and alternate primary values in a real form. Thanks to a variety of units, it enables us to make an exchange from one unit to another. Because barter trade was often difficult to apply a measure properly to every single value, people were willing to make a common system that we all agree on.
Accordingly, community was born and currency as a common system was invented. (You can imagine a situation like “This chocolate is worth $1. Do you agree on a price?”) The idea of currency began to widely spread and the society admitted the use of currency as a measuring tool for measuring thousands of values.
Nevertheless, the political (“centralized”) orientation favoring some particular belief by each nation led to produce separate currencies which are in need of some form of administration. As it turned out, the society found a value-alternative method in a temporary sense but ended up with more complicated societies and stood too far from the establishment as a united world.
Furthermore, a form of cash advance into credit cards and other convenient figures. If you are ought to take apart credit cards, they project the amount of money he or she could afford for in advance and gather used-values into one place. In spite of this, due to the spread of the internet across the world, our societies were in search of more convenient methods.
After all, that is where cryptocurrencies came in. The cryptocurrencies were epoch-making architecture which remedies a problem caused by the centralized authority that human history has been facing for a long time. Thanks to its architecture, they make a progress of decentralized system in the true sense.
The other side of the coin is that, this unique system requires greater coordination amongst multilateral participants since participants could influence on the system itself. To put it shortly, participants in the community are really important. It has to be designed to ensure that decision-making is based on whether a majority of participants in the community agree on.
The standard practice is that we can hardly claim a majority of the population becomes the thief in our society, in the same way, wholesome and right decisions are almost surely made for the community.
Yet it is no longer the case with ICO; ICO could potentially demolish the ecosystem in the society & in the community. You might come up with the question “Why OmiseGO is associated with ICO then? We consider ICO as a revolutionary method to raise funds in the next generation and it has an unbelievable potential unless we mistake the method of investment.
Therefore, OmiseGO conducts ICO. In the meanwhile, we are aware of some points.
Ensure many participants can participate.
Raise funds only we need.
“Giving without expectation in return” mindset.
Always stay close to the community (pre & post ICO as well)
Transparency.
We came to the conclusion with these elements in accordance with the active discussions in Slack, Twitter, Reddit, and so on. On the basis of the above, we have been updating our ICO, including a shift form Public ICO to Private ICO.
It is quite possible to raise xx M USD in 30 seconds from a viewpoint of a demand in the current market if we release the address to the public. Still, we cannot leave the theory “rich grow richer” in this manner. Therefore, we decided to take an opposite direction, departing from a conventional wisdom in terms of the ICO. Of course, we neither treat our approach as consensus -gaining among all, nor wish that will happen. However, after all things considered with a decent amount of time we spent on the discussion on how to wholesomely sustain the ecosystem, we arrived at such conclusion.
A method of ICO will keep progressing and come into common. It is not surprising that a government will engage into ICO one day. Yet until then, testifying whether ICO is a better solution over the conventional methods in terms of the fund raising will ultimately affect our society in the future. Moreover, it is essential for a new society of the cryptocurrencies too.
We don’t mean to mention their names, but if you are the member of the society, you should keep in mind that disruption only occurs in a state with “already-developed”, not with “under developed.” We are meant to raise the standard in order to develop an ecosystem by coexisting and less conflicting each other. Harmonization is the key success factor. Personally, I am not very pleased with the ICO that seemingly intends to raise a mint of money in one year or money with no upper limit because it might corrupt the ecosystem.
(I do not deny the projects. All projects seem interesting and splendid.)
Ecosystem by OmiseGO
OmiseGO has set a goal: Online payment for everyone. Throughout our experience as a business operator in the past two and a half years allows us to explore pain points of customers and infrastructure providers. In order to solve their problems, we kept running full speed. And then we realized that in order to achieve our goal in a true sense, we are in charge of building our ideal ecosystem. Some may say our proposals are quite unrealistic and other giant corporations with sufficient financial resource will eventually take actions instead.
But what is the most important is how fast to put it into practice. It is certainly possible that only we cannot achieve that. But as stated above, if we work together in the society in full harmony, our idea is more likely to become reality.
Omise boosts to our full speed ahead in a true sense. Omise payment continues to provide business and individual customers an acceptance that can receive values. OmiseGO constructs a network as it will serve as a useful venue for exchanging values.
And above all, we are looking forward to making a more exciting announcement in Q3/2017.
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology. A Venture Conference the Second, featuring a discussion among Software as a Service (SaaS) providers was held in Tokyo on August 2nd. This conference, sponsored by Salesforce.com and Japanese financial publisher Toyo Keizai (literally meaning ‘Oriental Economist’), focused on Knowledge Management, sales enablement and training of Millennial generation employees among other topics. Of keen interest to most attendees was the panel session which brought together FinTech-related startups Freee targeting the accountants market in Japan of late and Moneytree that has recently gained in profile due to its financial cloud service involvement. The FinTech duo was joined by a provider of easy-to-use manuals tutor service called Teachme Biz. Entitled “The Formula behind Rapid SaaS Venture Business Growth”, moderated by a Salesforce Ventures representative, some in-depth scrutiny took place among the three panelists, ranging from effective use of databases to strategies upon obtaining serial fund gathering. It was worth noting that Freee is ahead in such an endeavor as it is eyeing a Series E try. Many participants of the event, mainly comprising startups from Japan said it was extremely informative, not…
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology.
A Venture Conference the Second, featuring a discussion among Software as a Service (SaaS) providers was held in Tokyo on August 2nd. This conference, sponsored by Salesforce.com and Japanese financial publisher Toyo Keizai (literally meaning ‘Oriental Economist’), focused on Knowledge Management, sales enablement and training of Millennial generation employees among other topics.
Of keen interest to most attendees was the panel session which brought together FinTech-related startups Freee targeting the accountants market in Japan of late and Moneytree that has recently gained in profile due to its financial cloud service involvement. The FinTech duo was joined by a provider of easy-to-use manuals tutor service called Teachme Biz.
L to R: Shinji Asada (moderator, Japan Head of Salesforce Ventures), Daisuke Sasaki (CEO of Freee), Satoshi Suzuki (CEO of Studist, the company behind Teachme Biz), Paul Chapman (CEO of Moneytree)
Entitled “The Formula behind Rapid SaaS Venture Business Growth”, moderated by a Salesforce Ventures representative, some in-depth scrutiny took place among the three panelists, ranging from effective use of databases to strategies upon obtaining serial fund gathering. It was worth noting that Freee is ahead in such an endeavor as it is eyeing a Series E try.
Many participants of the event, mainly comprising startups from Japan said it was extremely informative, not only offering insights into the workings of the startup sector but also glimpses into fields like the Japanese accountants business and crossborder financing － the Moneytree representative being a jetset businessman in addition to being an Australian fluent in the Japanese language.
Japanese startup 3.0 has been offering a subscription-based unlimited pass to nightclubs and discotheques in central Tokyo, called Neon. The company announced on Thursday that it has started selling a 7-day unlimited plan of the pass for 2,900 yen (about $27) on JAPANiCAN.com, a multilingual online travel booking site for international visitors run by Japanese travel agency giant JTB. The plan was initially launched back in June this year and gives purchasers a 7-day unlimited access to 16 selected spots in Roppongi, Shibuya, Aoyama and other Tokyo nightlife districts. Since it’s said that there are 90 nightlife spots all around Tokyo, the pass can give you an unlimited access to almost 20% out of all these for a flat-rate pricing. Neon was launched back in June of 2016 under its previous name of Live3S, aiming to connecting club go-ers seeking good spots and events with venue owners seeking new visitors. The team expects to revitalize the Japanese nightlife economy by pushing forward a nightclub culture in Tokyo where there are estimated 20,000 club go-ers. Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
Japanese startup 3.0 has been offering a subscription-based unlimited pass to nightclubs and discotheques in central Tokyo, called Neon. The company announced on Thursday that it has started selling a 7-day unlimited plan of the pass for 2,900 yen (about $27) on JAPANiCAN.com, a multilingual online travel booking site for international visitors run by Japanese travel agency giant JTB.
The plan was initially launched back in June this year and gives purchasers a 7-day unlimited access to 16 selected spots in Roppongi, Shibuya, Aoyama and other Tokyo nightlife districts. Since it’s said that there are 90 nightlife spots all around Tokyo, the pass can give you an unlimited access to almost 20% out of all these for a flat-rate pricing.
Neon was launched back in June of 2016 under its previous name of Live3S, aiming to connecting club go-ers seeking good spots and events with venue owners seeking new visitors. The team expects to revitalize the Japanese nightlife economy by pushing forward a nightclub culture in Tokyo where there are estimated 20,000 club go-ers.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Wantedly, Japan’s social recruiting startup, announced today that its IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 14 September with plans to offer 50,000 shares for public subscription and to sell 19,500 shares in over-allotment options, for a total of 80,000 shares. Daiwa Securities will lead the underwriting. Its share price range will be released on 28 August with bookbuilding scheduled to start on 7 September and pricing on 6 September. According to the consolidated statement as of August 2016, they posted revenue of 840 million yen (about $7.6 million) with an ordinary profit of 120 million yen ($1.1 million) and a net profit of 77 million yen ($700,000). Wantedly, the company’s flagship service offering business-centric social networking opportunities, has about 800,000 individual users and 23,000 corporate users. About 1.5 million unique users visit the platform a month while 27% of these users visit it at least once a month. Led by the company’s CEO Akiko Naka (69.98%), its major shareholders include CyberAgent (TSE:4751, 11.1%), Shogo Kawada (co-founder and advisor of DeNA, 6.38%), Shinji Kumura (Founder of AnyPay /…
At the press conference introducing Wantedly’s new contact management service Wantedly People in July. L to R: Akito Sakasegawa (New Business Development, Wantedly), Akiko Naka (CEO, Wantedly), Naoyoshi Aikawa (Lead Engineer, Wantedly)
Tokyo-based Wantedly, Japan’s social recruiting startup, announced today that its IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 14 September with plans to offer 50,000 shares for public subscription and to sell 19,500 shares in over-allotment options, for a total of 80,000 shares. Daiwa Securities will lead the underwriting.
Its share price range will be released on 28 August with bookbuilding scheduled to start on 7 September and pricing on 6 September. According to the consolidated statement as of August 2016, they posted revenue of 840 million yen (about $7.6 million) with an ordinary profit of 120 million yen ($1.1 million) and a net profit of 77 million yen ($700,000). Wantedly, the company’s flagship service offering business-centric social networking opportunities, has about 800,000 individual users and 23,000 corporate users. About 1.5 million unique users visit the platform a month while 27% of these users visit it at least once a month.
Led by the company’s CEO Akiko Naka (69.98%), its major shareholders include CyberAgent (TSE:4751, 11.1%), Shogo Kawada (co-founder and advisor of DeNA, 6.38%), Shinji Kumura (Founder of AnyPay / Das Capital, 4.13%), Yoshinori Kawasaki (CTO of Wantedly, 3.26%), Archetype (2.02%), Nihon Keizai Shimbun or simply The Nikkei (1.17%), Naoyoshi Aikawa (Lead engineer of Wantedly, 0.59%), Masanori Sugiyama (Chairman and President of Zappalas, 0.42%) and Kosuke Matsumoto (Managing Director of Enish, 0.42%).
Wantedly was founded back in 2010 under its previous name of Fuel by Naka who previously participated in launching Japanese operations of Facebook. Focusing on the potential of referral recruitment business, she launched the Wantedly social recruiting platform.
Wantedly Visit Image credit: Wantedly Singapore
By stepping into beyond just a recruiting platform, Wantedly has been a taking the position of a LinkedIn-like business-centric social network platform. In order to expand its business by increasing touch-points for businesspersons, the company has launched additional services such as Wantedly Visit (interview scheduling assistant between hiring companies and employee candidates), Wantedly People (business card management) and Wantedly Chat (group chat app).
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Monstar Lab, the company providing crowdsourced offshore app development service Sekai Lab, announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Copenhagen-headquartered app agency Nodes ( English / Danish ) for Europe Expansion. This acquisition makes Monstar Lab secure three Nodes’ office locations: Copenhagen (Denmark), Aarhus (Denmark) and London (UK), meaning that the Tokyo company now has 17 locations worldwide for sales and app development efforts. Financial details of the deal such as the investment ratio and the payment date have not been disclosed. When Monstar Lab acquired Manila-based Ideyatech, the former rebranded the latter into Monstar Lab Manila. It is still unclear if the Tokyo company intends to unify its brand with Nodes because the Danish company has a certain level of strong brand presence in the European market where it has clients of globally renowned companies like Samsung, Unilever and GlaxoSmithKline. With the acquisition at this time around, Monstar Lab has their presence in three major economies: North America, Asia and Europe. The company claims that it will collect around half of all revenue from outside Japan in 2019. Node is a mobile app development agency founded back in 2008, employing 75 people…
Tokyo-based Monstar Lab, the company providing crowdsourced offshore app development service Sekai Lab, announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Copenhagen-headquartered app agency Nodes ( English / Danish ) for Europe Expansion. This acquisition makes Monstar Lab secure three Nodes’ office locations: Copenhagen (Denmark), Aarhus (Denmark) and London (UK), meaning that the Tokyo company now has 17 locations worldwide for sales and app development efforts. Financial details of the deal such as the investment ratio and the payment date have not been disclosed.
When Monstar Lab acquired Manila-based Ideyatech, the former rebranded the latter into Monstar Lab Manila. It is still unclear if the Tokyo company intends to unify its brand with Nodes because the Danish company has a certain level of strong brand presence in the European market where it has clients of globally renowned companies like Samsung, Unilever and GlaxoSmithKline. With the acquisition at this time around, Monstar Lab has their presence in three major economies: North America, Asia and Europe. The company claims that it will collect around half of all revenue from outside Japan in 2019.
Node is a mobile app development agency founded back in 2008, employing 75 people consisting of developers, designers and mobile consultants in three locations in Denmark and UK. Carnival.io, the mobile marketing-focused subsidiary of cloud-based customer relationship management platform developer Sailthru, has chosen Nodes as one of the top 12 European Mobile Agencies in 2017.
Regarding the reasons why Monstar Lab has chosen Nodes for acquisition, the Tokyo company answered that:
Nodes has established its brand in multiple countries in Europe
Nodes has talented engineers and designers
Nodes has a cultural background which may create synergy with Monstar Lab
Hiroki Inagawa, CEO of Monstar Lab, gave us a comment on the acquisition:
Nodes has excellent engineering skills and design capabilities, and is also one of the few companies that has successfully established a high position in the UK market. Our decisive factor was their young founders and management teams with high motivation for growth.
Going forward, we will aim to be Europe’s No.1 digital product developer with Nodes as our regional headquarters, and also aim to be the world’s No.1 digital product developer with all Monstar Lab group companies.
Masaru Ikeda
The Bridge
Takeshi Hirano
