For Sansan, IPO is always an option, but not the focus

This article is from an episode on Disrupting Japan. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full interview, go here.

Chika Terada built Sansan, one of Japan’s most successful startups, around business cards. The startup has grown into a corporate relationship management company in Japan, where LinkedIn has failed.

Terada and I talked about how he manages a growing company, why it’s important for his startup to expand into international markets, and how he’s facing the pressure from investors to do an IPO.

Chika Terada, co-founder and CEO of Sansan

Could you explain what Sansan is?

It’s true that our company deals with business cards, but it’s really all about business encounters. People meet for business every day, and in Japan and other Asian countries, people usually exchange business cards.

So we provide two services: One is Sansan, which is for companies, and the other is Eight, which is for business professionals. Sansan is more like a customer relationship management solution based on business cards. The idea is to let companies have a database where they can store, manage, and search business card details. The database can also be exported to other systems like Salesforce.

Eight is our business-to-consumer service where individual professionals can use it for free to build their network. They can connect with others by scanning business cards. Recently, we released a new feature where you can scan business cards on the spot and send your digital business card via email.

We also released a new product called Custom Intelligence or CI, which is a data integration platform in the corporate system. So we have been digitizing business cards. The number of business cards we have digitized so far is about 500 million.

Over the past four or five years, your team has grown to around 400 people. What did you have to change about your company or culture as you scale?

Of course, there were challenges when scaling. But to be honest, I didn’t do anything special.

I used to have one-on-one lunches with new employees or team dinners, but it’s not possible now as we hire more people.

But one small effective idea is creating yearbooks that feature new staff and some of our activities. We also have corporate meetings every Monday where I speak to all employees. So these are the things that have helped us maintain the momentum in the organization as one. But it’s nothing special. Many companies can do that.

For the purpose of having a solid mission shared by all people in the company, we organize a corporate-wide discussion every two years to reevaluate the mission. Almost everyone is required to participate, and the process takes about half a year. It’s a little bit of an investment. But the purpose of the meeting is not just to discuss but also to keep people engaged. I think looking at the mission in this way is important to scale a company.