This entrepreneur ditched Japan’s stodgy salaryman culture for India’s wild west – and he’s never going back

Most people like to run away from problems. Not Sho Nakanose. This Japanese entrepreneur likes to run into problems. And he finds plenty of them in India.

That’s why he has made Bangalore his home. From here, he runs CloudLancer, a startup attempts to pave the road for Japanese companies itching to enter India.

Japan and India, Nakanose believes, are poles apart. “In Japan, everything is perfect, infrastructure is great, and things work smoothly. But as an entrepreneur, I find the chaos in India full of opportunities. There are so many problems to solve that it is just a matter of choosing which one is the most exciting one to tackle,” he chuckles. He bubbles with excitement as he tells Tech in Asia why he moved away Osaka, his home town in Japan.

Nakanose believes there’s an opportunity to connect Japan with India. While so many American tech companies operate in India, there are hardly any Japanese companies. “Especially in the startup space, Japanese presence is next to nil. So far, I have only come across one other Japanese entrepreneur in Bangalore which is teeming with expat entrepreneurs,” he says.

In purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, India is now the world’s third largest economy – surpassing Japan, the World Bank reports. In Nakanose’s eyes, it’s is a huge, rapidly growing market that Japan is missing out on. Also, a developing India could do with more of Japanese tech mettle. This is a gap Nakanose wants to narrow.

Order in the chaos

What’s really stopping Japanese companies from venturing into India? Culturally, points out Nakanose, the Japanese like things very organized. They like order. “Without solid on-the-ground research, Japanese companies will not enter a new market. In a market like India, which is growing so fast and in different directions all at the same time, things are chaotic. That’s tough to negotiate,” he says.

Before starting up on his own, Nakanose worked as an IT consultant in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore for IBM Japan and Pasona Inc. He believes that he understands what Japanese companies require in emerging markets. “I can help them test Indian waters, start their businesses in India, and figure out how to enter local partnerships.” That’s the idea behind CloudLancer. He founded it in May 2013 in Gurgaon near Delhi, and currently runs it with a team of five in India. About six months back, he moved to Bangalore, where the climate is friendlier.

CloudLancer offers web and social media marketing in India for Japanese companies. Early next year, CloudLancer plans to launch a mobile rewards platform in India for Japanese companies. On it, Indian users can earn mobile recharge credit by completing simple tasks like filling up questionnaires, downloading apps, and watching promotional movie clips.

Nakanose has seen how Indian startups like Freecharge have built their business models around the huge demand for mobile recharge offers from vast multitudes of users who find internet charges prohibitive. CloudLancer wants to use this route for Japanese companies to get vital usage data for their products and services. This may be more reliable than market surveys which are often skewed by inadequate sampling or querying.

The market in India is very different from that of Japan, where many consumers would not bat an eyelid to pay top dollar for a quality brand. In India, people are constantly weighing value for money, and Japanese companies are not used to catering to such consumers.

How do you provide Japanese quality at prices attractive to Indians? Where can you cut corners, and how can you tweak design to appeal to an Indian audience? These are a few of the questions CloudLancer hopes to answer. It has already partnered with a few Japanese companies for this.

Nakanose also runs India IT School, a study abroad agent in Bangalore for college students and youngsters from Japan seeking information technology education. What better place to learn the practical side of tech than in a booming market like India?

Booming market, unique solutions