Re:Start-Up Spirit Emerges in Japan
by hkmurakami on Thursday December 26, 2013 @02:17AM
(#6965515)
That's a good point about the older generation. I have a few friends who feuded with their parents when they quit a very very good engineering job at a big company to do their own thing instead.
That being said I do think that doing a startup is perceived as being cool by their peers. I've met at least a handful of people who I'd cautiously call "fangirls".
(Perhaps an overflow from their perceived coolness of working in SV/SF -- which honestly doesn't make much sense to me since their motivations to cross the pond is often profoundly lacking in substance)
Working in SV/SF and doing own startup is surely sounds different things to me, as an Japanese grad student
Re:Start-Up Spirit Emerges in Japan
by hkmurakami on Thursday December 26, 2013 @02:34AM
(#6965544)
Sorry, to clarify: many young people seem to see the whole SV/SF thing to be cool and seem to almost idolize the prospect of working in the promised land. By association startups as a whole (regardless of location) are cool to them. As a result startup founders in Japan get additional social support from their peers for their endeavors (which as you know is a huge psychological benefit in Japanese society).
I think that almost every one of these new founders are having regular arguments with their parents, who would be trying to convince the founders to get a "real" job at a "safe" company.
Having said all that, I agree that inexperienced people often give up at the first speed bump. As Steve Jobs said:
“The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it.”