Making Silicon Valley in Japan?

   We were joined by Taizo Son, brother of Masayoshi Son of Softbank, at the “IT Policy Roundtable”, a collaboration with Stanford University. Investment of 0.2% of the annual GDP = venture investments will make up 21% of the GDP in 10 years. Japan has the third largest numbers of IPOs after China and America. He said Japan had a chance too.

Taizo Son’s talk about thinking ahead 10 years and designing a “flagship town” for deregulations was very inspiring. He was talking about creating a town packed with various deregulations.

If you order green soybeans, Amazon will bring it to your house with a drone.

Print organic EL on walls and roads.

Drones are constantly flying.

These can all be accomplished in terms of technology, but in Japan regulations block the path.

Let’s make it all happen. Let’s do it with CiP, the special digital district.

If we really try it, people will criticize us. But if Son-san and I are willing to get stabbed to death to make it happen, it’s not much of a problem!

How to make Silicon Valley in Japan. Son-san said “Create a forest from small ecosystems”. True. CiP wants to create a system that runs, even if it’s small. A system that cycles through research -> education -> incubation -> research.　

But for that, time axis is necessary too, so that a person can start a business, go through exits like IPO, and start another business or become an investor, and things go round and round. We need commitment to see things through to such stages.

To make it possible to do California things in Tokyo, how about getting “The State of California” to rent out a part of Takeshiba and give it extraterritorial rights?

We asked professor Kenji Kushida from Stanford as well.

He talked about his friend who worked at Oracle starting a business. After his success, Oracle bought his company and he joined the company again. Then he started another business, Oracle bought it, and so on. That’s Oracle’s strategy, making employees start a business and acquiring it if it succeeds. Perhaps this kind of support will work better in Japan rather than trying to find new entrepreneurs.

Kushida-san mentioned that Silicon Valley has a weakness of “not being able to manufacture”. Due to lack of hardware engineers, they have no choice but to depend on outsourcing. As IT shifts to IoT and the importance of craftsmanship increases, opportunity will spread in Japan too.

Recently, Kushida-san is saying “Japan is coming back” at Silicon Valley.