Japan Must Let Zombie Companies Die
<i>Meanwhile, you manage to secure venture-capital funding and even a bank loan. The interest rate is high, but with your rapid growth, you should be able to pay it back.</i><p>Meanwhile, in the Japan some of us actually live in:<p>1)  Very few 26 year olds will be successfully able to convince their 26 year old co-workers to leave Sharp, because that is a once-in-a-lifetime mistake.  I am literally related to a $ANONYMOUS_FOR_SAKE_OF_RELATIVE employee who is presently miserable and cannot leave because that means an end of economic stability for his family <i>forever</i> and his family makes no secret of how unhappy they would be in that situation.<p>2)  If you are a 26 year old startup founder and you ask for a bank loan ^H^H^H^H <i>business checking account</i>, be prepared to get told &quot;Oh hell no.&quot;, but very politely.  The first variant of &quot;Oh hell no&quot; is &quot;Hmm, well theoretically speaking we do have business checking accounts available as a product.  Can we see your articles of incorporation, business plans, office rental contract, orders from customers, etc etc?&quot;  Upon which you say &quot;Well we&#x27;re making LCDs so we don&#x27;t have orders yet because we need a bank account to e.g. purchase machinery&quot; at which point &quot;We regret to inform you that we cannot accept your business.&quot;<p>Not a theoretical concern: I&#x27;m presently 2 weeks into the fun with a large Japanese bank trying to get an account issued, which <i>shakes fist at a personal bugbear</i> is not exactly the easiest thing to accomplish for a Western tech entrepreneur in Tokyo at the moment.  (I&#x27;ve been asked about Bitcoin three times already.)  If I manage to get the account, it will because I rounded up 123 pages of documentation (not an exaggeration, that&#x27;s a count) from previous work to convince the bank that I was not a ML nor fraud nor credit risk.<p>3)  Venture capital: you will not successfully receive sufficient-to-create-a-physical-product venture capital as a 26 year old in Japan.  It&#x27;s difficult to raise what would be &quot;trivial by Valley standards&quot; just to build software products: prepare for 6 months of All The Fundraising Fun You Can Imagine to get an A round sized like a modest seed round in St. Louis.  You need substantial industry connections here to convince a corporate VC to give you the corporation&#x27;s money.  The high-percentage way to &quot;compete&quot; with Sharp is to spend 30 years in it, get recognized internally as a very competent performer who is not management track, &quot;quit&quot; to &quot;run a startup&quot; which makes a product that Sharp definitely needs but would have difficulty making without you, receive money from Sharp&#x27;s affiliated VC vehicles, and &quot;exit&quot; by taking the buyout order from your single customer, which will naturally be Sharp.<p>(&quot;What would incentivize Sharp to do that?&quot;  Because all salarymen at Sharp of a given age are equal but some are more equal than others.  M&amp;A is allowed to make decisions regarding compensation that HR is not.  This incentivizes folks who are internally indispensable but not managers who show up in the Nikkei&#x2F;WSJ by name to do a bit of revolving-door.  Think like Google but amped to 11.)