GoGlobal Catalyst goes live!

Be Bold or italic, never regular in your life. #Episode 26

I hope everyone reading my newsletter has had a great start to 2025!

I am pleased to inform you that we have finally completed registration for GoGlobal Catalyst Pte. Ltd. Our founding anniversary is January 7th, 2025.

It physically started on June 9th (Fri), 2023, at a co-working space in Mitaka-city, Tokyo. The place's name is Musashino Valley, where I'm one of the investors.

The place is not for startups but for ordinary people with a vision or plan but "cold feet" about taking their Next steps.

On the day, we had the first meetup for the people who wanted to declare their next steps in front of the audience so they could put themselves in a corner from which they would never step back.

As you may think, I was one of them.

If you want to go back to the beginning, it was an event held by the Sunbridge Group in August 2011 at the Plug and Play Tech Center (now called Plug and Play) in Silicon Valley.

I was watching the presentations by the Japanese startups we brought from Japan and was impressed by their pitches in English, which is their second language.

But then I thought we were very fortunate. Compared to the hardships of Sony and Honda, etc. founders and early employees, who had entered the American market with a one-way ticket in the post-war era of 360 yen to the dollar, we were far too fortunate, and our efforts were nothing more than a speck of snot.

So, I thought about what I could do for the future of Japan.

Although it rose to become the world's third largest economy (at the time), it was also saddled with public debt twice the size of its GDP, and I thought that if I died without taking any action, it would be like leaving a bill for our children to pay for.

I'm not good at math, I can't write code, and I can't become a politician now (even if I could, I wouldn't be able to do anything significant). However, I have co-founded several startups. One has gone public; the other was sold to Yahoo! Japan and experienced a painful failure at DreamVision.

Even though I have never lived abroad, I speak a reasonable amount of English and have many foreign friends, so I decided to commit myself to globalizing the Japanese startup ecosystem for the rest of my life!

It’s been 13 years and 5 months now.

In July 2024, Dan Brassington and I were sitting on the sofa at our favorite lounge in Tokyo, and I consulted him about my thoughts for the rest of my life.

He said, “It’s not a problem. It’s your mindset. You should stop procrastinating. I’ll give you a month to decide whatever your conclusion is.”

I replied to him, “One month is too long. Why did you give me such a long time?”

Then, “I thought it’s not good to put you in the corner ;-),” he said.

And I said back to him, “OK. Give me two weeks.”

July 13th (Fri), one day before he returned to Singapore, we sat on the sofa again, and I said, “I made up my mind.”

When I said, “I’ll go with my plan,” he said, “ I’ll join you.”

That was the “mental start” of GoGlobal Catalyst.

As I teach students at the Entrepreneurship Department at Musashino University (So-called Musashino EMC = Entrepreneurship Musahino Campus), where I’m appointed as a professor, I create pitch decks and give presentations to potential investors and business partners every single day. (The EMC website is only in Japanese, so this is the extended activity of the EMC.)

I didn't have any concrete evidence, but I was confident that it would work out in the end. But at the same time, I thought that the current plan wouldn't work.

Only recently have we finally been able to understand the needs and awareness of our potential customers. We have come to know where the demand lies and how we should position ourselves.

Of course, there should be many hardships, but I think I can move on.

We can deliver a press release about what we will do sometime in March or April.

In the meantime, I will speak a bit about GoGlobal Catalyst at the event on Jan 31st (Fri), which is the eve of the festival of the EMC Global Summit.

I will also facilitate the panel talks at the EMC Global Summit on how to build the startup ecosystem in Asia, including Japan.

So come join us!