Nearby Devils Beat Big Company Devils You Don't Know

This article is a reprint of an earlier post.

I don’t know whether this is a culture unique to Silicon Valley, or whether I just happen to keep running into cases like this. “The devil you know nearby beats some big company’s devil you don’t.” That’s roughly the policy I see at work here. This is mainly about how partners get chosen. Various infrastructure-type startups out of Silicon Valley have found success, and their first customers are almost always Silicon Valley companies. For infrastructure businesses, everything comes down to whether you can land a certain number of customers early on. In that sense, Silicon Valley is a very easy place to try that kind of business.

Let’s start with Japan’s current situation. It’s undeniable that in Japan, “starting a company” or “being a venture” still carries a negative image. This sentiment built up over a long history: legal and institutional factors, and the way media coverage has mocked, extracted, and exaggerated the fortunes of people who actually “started a company” and “went and did the venture thing” — some of it groundless, some of it true to the letter, with the people around them either cheering or hurling abuse, all woven together over a very long process. Naturally, something like “common sense” doesn’t shift overnight. Pointing to any one specific cause only makes the problem harder to see clearly. Better to think of this as “Japan” as a whole collectively pushing these negative feelings forward.

So why did it end up this way? The root cause that comes to mind most readily is “leaning on the big tree.” You could also call it a farming-culture aversion to overturning things. This idea is easy enough to grasp that it probably doesn’t need much more explanation. It’s the mindset of: if you’re not sure what to buy, go with a brand name; if you’re not sure where to drink, go with a chain restaurant; if you’re job hunting, go with a big company. In a sense, this is thoroughly rational. When you’re unsure or in trouble, leaning on the big tree obviously maximizes your output. But here I want to pull out a slightly different pair of keywords.

“Cheering” and “overestimation.”

Americans tend to get fired up easily, while Japanese people, by contrast, tend to stay calm and keep one step back. That’s why in Japan, something as leisurely as baseball’s cheering style — drinking beer while singing cheer songs — has comfortably suited people for a long time. “I won’t stake my life on cheering.” “If I accidentally get too worked up, that’s a bit embarrassing.” As a reaction, this is thoroughly understandable for a Japanese person. Now, the other keyword.

Japanese people dislike overestimation — of themselves and of others.

Part of this comes from being a country that has internalized Confucian humility, but it’s also an expression of a conservative stance: “It would be embarrassing if I turned out to be wrong.” In America, on the other hand, people casually say things like “He is a kind of genius.” In Japan, saying “Yeah, he’s a genius” would definitely come across as flattery or as having an ulterior motive. America has all sorts of other overestimations too — the “he-can-do-everything theory,” the “mysterious professional theory” (know a little and you’re a professional). In the worst cases, people even say this about themselves. I think this comes from a culture that gets swept up in “cheering.” They’re not afraid of the team they’re cheering for losing miserably and pathetically, and they’re not afraid of someone they overestimated turning out to have lackluster results. It’s an utterly refreshing kind of culture. “Better to try and regret it than not try and regret it” — people often say this about their own choices, but Japanese people seem to lack the generosity of spirit to apply that same idea to cheering on others. It’s fine to be wrong. Trying hard is a wonderful thing in itself, and of course that makes you want to cheer for someone. Americans are an irrational people who carry this somewhat simplistic, emotion-soaked spirit even into their work. They’d rather “cheer for” the person right in front of them, someone they’ve known for a while and who’s working hard, than for some unclear person with no personal connection at some big company. If you share the risk, you can share the return too. No matter how much you cooperate, sometimes you still lose, but the damage after a failure can be made smaller. Someone who fell into a pitfall isn’t a loser — they’re the one credited with discovering where the pitfall is.

Partly worldwide, partly a village society. That’s the temperament of Silicon Valley.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2013/10/403/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.