3 startup tips from DeNA founder Tomoko Namba to young entrepreneurs

From left to right, Shun Usami, Tomoko Namba, Wako Ota, Doga Makiura

Everyone says Japan’s business leaders need to do more to foster innovation and entrepreneurship, especially among the youth of the country. Such exhortations typically fall on deaf ears, but Tomoko Namba, founder of DeNA, is listening.

Last Thursday she attended the simply but effectively named Startup Conference 2015 as a guest speaker. The twist was that instead of giving a speech about how to be an entrepreneur, she was going to be grilled by three young Japanese entrepreneurs. All three are between 21 and 22 years old – Shun Usami (founder of the English-language learning app Mikan), Wako Ota (founder of ecommerce site Kaumo), and Doga Makiura (a frequent TED speaker currently developing a personal data company). Makiura and Ota both dropped out of college to pursue their startup plans.

They were all chosen by Yoshihiko Kinoshita, founder of Skyland Ventures, a seed stage VC and co-organizer of the conference. “All of them were born in 1992 […] I chose them because they all decided to do something new and are now racing [towards their goals],” he explained to Tech in Asia.

Namba agreed. As the conversation was winding down she was asked to give a final comment to the audience. She looked at the sea of young twenty-somethings and said, “Think of these three as cool. That’s enough. The biggest problem in Japan is the values we have from a young age [when we are raised to not make mistakes]. Please question that and think about what these guys are doing and take action.”

The conversation was wide-ranging and offered up some nuggets of wisdom as well as humor. These are some of the best exchanges:

When you made DeNA, did you have a role model?

No. I respect everyone but I never think “I want to be like this person.” I have not had a role model. If I were to say who I think is the most impressive person in the world, it might be [Japanese professional tennis player] Kei Nishikori. (laughs)

If you were a student now, would you start a company?

Starting a company is just a formality, isn’t it? The more interesting point is about what do you want to do. But as a third-year in university you have not really seen much of the world so you might not have a strong sense of “I want to do this.” If I was a student, I would enter a company that would give me ownership of a business. Then I could improve my abilities and, once the thing I want to do appeared I would either start my own business, work on that idea at the present company, or take the idea and work at a different company. At any rate, until that point I would be dedicated to my job.

How big does your company have to scale before you need a HR chief?

140 people. Up until 140 people, I decided everything for HR, including salaries. Once it got to be around 140 people, I stopped because it was pointless to be hiring people before I could finish reviewing the employees who were already there. When the time came I did not feel like things were going to get worse because I was not watching everything. Instead, I felt that DeNA’s value system was getting stronger.