What Anyone Even Thinking Of Starting A Company Should Know

On the category “Things worth knowing if you’re even considering starting a company.”

The trigger for writing this has been building quietly for a while now.

In my line of work, more and more people come to me for business and technical advice.

When my audience is a large company, I’m fine with my advice and war stories landing as a “nice bit of stimulation” — the way you’d watch some rare beast and think “huh, so this kind of wild, untamed thinking exists too.” For most people, that’s exactly how I want it to land.

A corporation is something like a symbol of capitalist society, and inside one, the effects of large numbers work as “deterrence,” “adjustment,” and sometimes “reading the room,” keeping things in a “sane state.” There’s no such thing as an extremely rational society, or an extremely skewed one. Thankfully.

Given that, I can say openly that people who get possessed by unusual ideas, who become extreme believers in some individual’s doctrine, who leap off a thousand-fathom cliff at full speed, who push the world forward with something close to obsession — such people should remain a minority. All’s well that ends well.

But there exists a “space” where the circumstances differ.

That might be a startup, or a mid-sized company in its second founding phase, or a small or medium-sized business aiming for a dramatic turnaround. The name or the position doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s a corporate body sharing an “abnormal atmosphere.”

In the startup space especially, sharing my experience and giving advice tends to land well and genuinely resonate. Especially at the early stage. I’m grateful for that. So I make it a habit to allocate my work so I can devote real time to such people, who usually have neither money nor time.

But anyone engaged in similar activities has probably felt this, more than once or twice.

There are moments when this line is about to spill out.

“You should study that much before coming to me.”

And anyone “engaged in similar activities” probably swallows that line back down every time.

Because that itself is the important piece of advice, for them.

You rarely meet, in the startup world, the type of person who studies thoroughly before moving forward. Nearly everyone is burning a mixed fuel of reckless self-affirmation blended with a sense of mission and exhilaration, and pushing forward on that. To a veteran, it looks reckless; to a romantic who admires Don Quixote, it’s the very thing to aspire to. But I think entrepreneurs are, more often than not, acting in a way that is, to them, entirely rational.

Because “difficulty and failure are boosters that speed everything up.”

So rather than trying to plant systematic knowledge through tedious repetition, I want to build something here that functions as exactly that kind of booster — a way to quickly pick up the knowledge you need.

Basically, what I’ll lay out here I want to draw practically from case studies — things I’ve run into while giving whatever advice or support I could offer, moments where I muttered (or didn’t mutter) “whoa, wait, that’s how it ended up? That’s not good.”

If this bit of prose helps someone out there, somewhere, I’ll be glad.

Author Profile

	Yuichiro “kuz” Kuzuryu Engineer / Executive
	Has fallen into a wide variety of thousand-fathom valleys, from launching new businesses at major Japanese corporations to Silicon Valley startups.
CEO, Founder, ClayTech Inc.
Director, EYS-STYLE Inc.
Director, 144Lab Inc.
Visiting Professor, Tohoku University
Serves as technical advisor to several other companies
https://twitter.com/qzuryu https://www.facebook.com/qzuryu https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuichiro-kuzuryu-kuz-27b92838/

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2019/09/162/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.