Leading High Performing Remote Teams
How can leaders ensure that performance remains high in remote or hybrid-work environments?
Content Marketing
In this course, you’ll learn how compelling blogs, videos, podcasts, and other media can reach customers and drive sales. You’ll also learn steps for creating an effective content marketing plan, and some important ways to measure its impact and success.
Content marketing is a essential digital marketing strategy for companies looking to provide relevant and useful information to support your community and attract new customers.
Get started on your content marketing journey today.
Sustainable Innovation in Times of Disruption: Choices for a Better Society
There are opportunities for progress all around us. The key is to innovate on these opportunities sustainably.
To help identify most effective path forward, you'll need to gain a global perspective to these challenges in an open discussion. How can Japan and the world take action to create a more sustainable, innovative world? Where do you fit in?
It's time to find out.
Social Media & Digital Communications: Impact on Global Public Opinion
Social and digital media have dominated the communications industry for decades. But it's no secret that social media has the power to sway public opinion, and the way in which many companies use these platforms could be seen as manipulative.
What do companies need to be aware of when utilizing social and digital media? How can these mediums be used to better communicate strategically with the world?
Discover what top media and communications experts have to say.
CAGE Distance Framework
Want to expand overseas? The CAGE distance framework can help ensure you're constructing a solid global strategy in four areas: cultural, administrative, economic, and geographic. Learn how to leverage useful differences between countries, identify potential obstacles, and achieve global business success.
Servant Leadership
There's more to leadership than driving a team to profit. In fact, there's a word for looking beyond self-interest to prioritize individual growth: servant leadership. Try this course for a quick breakdown of what that is, how it works, and how it can lead to organizational success.
Strategy: Creating Value Inside Your Company
Have you ever wondered why certain companies are more successful than others? The answer is strategy: internal processes that control costs, allocate resources, and create value. This course from GLOBIS Unlimited can give you the tools you need for that strategic edge.
Strategy: Understanding the External Environment
To plan strategy on any level, you need to understand your company's external environment. In fact, your level of understanding can impact hiring, budgeting, marketing, or nearly any other part of the business world. Want to learn how to do all that? This course from GLOBIS Unlimited is the perfect first step!
Using Japanese Values to Thrive in Global Business
Japanese companies have unique cultural, communication, and operational challenges. But they also have values that have led to remarkable longevity. Check out this seminar to hear how these values help earn trust from overseas head offices and develop employees.
Marketing: Reaching Your Target
Every company works hard to get its products into the hands of customers. Are you doing everything you can to compete? In this course, you’ll find a winning formula to turn a product idea into real sales. Follow along through the fundamentals of the marketing mix and see how companies successfully bring products to market.
Basic Accounting: Financial Analysis
Want to compare your performance vs. a competitor? Or evaluate a potential vendor? Then you'll need to conduct a financial analysis. This course will teach you how to use three financial statements and evaluate financial performance in terms of profitability, efficiency, soundness, growth, and overall strength.
Career Anchors
What drives you to be good at your job?
Career anchors are based on your values, desires, motivations, and abilities. They are the immovable parts of your professional self-image that guide you throughout your career journey.
Try this short GLOBIS Unlimited course to identify which of the eight career anchors is yours!
Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi
The key ingredient to success? Passion.
Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.
Compared to powerhouse startup cultures like the US and China, Japan has some catching up to do. While the US invested 0.64% of its GDP into VC in 2019, and China 0.23%, Japan portioned off just 0.08%. Tokyo is still in the early stages of a creating supportive startup scene, with bureaucratic red tape and language barriers being huge obstacles for budding business ideas.
But recently, there have been signs of change in terms of government policy for fostering entrepreneurial endeavors. With the Kishida administration increasing the investment in startups by 10 times to ¥10 trillion (¥77.7 billion) over the next 5 years, new graduates may be more incentivized to choose entrepreneurship over lifetime company employment.
In October, Emre Yuasa, from GLOBIS Capital Partners met with Alex Crisses, Managing Director, Global Head of New Investment Sourcing & Co-Head of Emerging Growth to discuss General Atlantic’s venture capital philosophy and thoughts on the investment potential in Japan.
According to Crisses, the growing entrepreneurial scene has caught the attention of venture capital firms now that many new Japanese companies are open to expanding beyond the domestic market. Further fueling this change is the impact of COVID-19, which has facilitated virtual operations and helped to alleviate the logistical hurdles that previously held many entrepreneurs back. A perfect shift for General Atlantic, which specializes in helping companies go multi-market and bringing together CEOs across geographical borders.
Below is a partial transcript of the seminar, edited for clarity.
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Emre Yuasa: First of all, welcome to Japan. Second of all, if you could, please start by explaining what brought you here. And as I’m sure your team has given you a lot of information about Japanese startups, what’s your view on Japanese startups so far?
Alex Crisses: Great. Well, I’ll answer that. That’s a really loaded question. We really do believe, every year we look at what is a growth opportunity for us. We’ve uniquely identified Japan as an area, and a region, that we think could be particularly exciting. And we are excited about it, we’ve done a lot of research.
Obviously, the Japanese economy is enormous. The infrastructure is amazing. But, as a private equity investor, there’s sort of this notion that the Japanese entrepreneur doesn’t want to expand outside of Japan. That the ambition is to stay within the economy, which is large. We think that’s changing and we think it’s changing across three dimensions.
Number one: we think that there are more and more people who want to be entrepreneurs. I’m on the board of my business school, which is global.
They just did this study, which compares to when I graduated, which goes to show I’m old, 75% of the people wanted to do investment banking. And about 10% of the people wanted to identify themselves as entrepreneurs. This is all around the world. Recently, I had my 15-year reunion and it’s literally reversed. 75% of people want to be entrepreneurs. Nobody wants to do what I do in finance. Like my wife, a good percentage want to be in fashion. So nothing was cool when I did it. And that is clearly the case.
With that as a premise, we have to think: why now? Why is Japan unique? One really is. And I give GLOBIS all the credit. And I was really just so impressed with the network that’s been built over a long period of time, which is there really is an ecosystem of venture capital that has evolved to a point where we think growth equity is an appropriate player, meaning there’s a conduit between early stage venture, late-stage private equity, someone in the middle to keep companies private longer and to give them a greater chance of getting scale before they go public.
“The number one predictor of success, which people may or may not think is the case, is the longevity that the founding team knows each other. The reason for that, which is not surprising, is because being an entrepreneur is hard. Building a company is hard, and you have to have that trust and history in order to navigate the waters.”
Alex Crisses, General Atlantic
Number two: we’ve been super impressed with the people in this room, and the stories of the GLOBIS portfolio. Maybe it’s generational, but the ambition of Japanese entrepreneurs and companies is very, very impressive. We go all over the world, they’re saying, Emery, I give this talk in every sector and geography. And I’ve just been very impressed with the ambition to grow, not just within, but outside of Japan.
And that doesn’t mean you have to go to the United States tomorrow. But even within the region, the ambition is global.
Number three: We are actually going to have some government meetings this week and I think for the first time in a long time, the government is really stepping in to welcome foreign investment.
I think that’s a very powerful message and a powerful step in the sense that you have this confluence of factors that makes this an ecosystem that’s really ripe for innovation, ripe for disruption.
Now is a very unique time in the history of the country, relative to its economic development, and in particular, its private investment ecosystem.
“The focus of General Atlantic is, has, and always will be on thematic growth-oriented investing. So we consider ourselves the architects of what’s called growth equity. Growth equity is really that sweet spot between venture capital and private equity, where there’s product market fit and we have the ability to impact, on a global basis, a company’s trajectory. So one of the things that we find most valuable is our ability to take a company that is in whatever geography and extend them throughout the world.”
Alex Crisses, General Atlantic