That tension was at the heart of a panel hosted by Antler Japan Senior Director Florian Geier at YOKOHAMA CONNÉCT, where Fuminori Gunji, Head of GTM at ZooKeep, and Paul McMahon, Representative Director of TokyoDev, joined a room of founders and operators to unpack what it really takes to build global teams from Japan. The conversation was grounded in something rare in startup discourse: actual data.

The numbers that set the scene

Antler Japan runs its Inception programs twice a year — six to ten week, in-person programs for founders at the earliest possible stage. Of the roughly one thousand applications received each cycle, over 90% come from non-Japanese founders. The program itself typically ends up with a 70/30 split: seven in ten participants are non-Japanese.

For Florian and the Antler Japan team, this creates a recurring challenge. The moment a non-Japanese founding team targets Japanese enterprise customers, the most important question becomes one they often haven't fully answered: who on your team is going to do the B2B sales?

B2B in Japan: multiply everything by three

Fuminori has lived this challenge from both sides — as a bilingual operator working inside Japanese companies, and now building ZooKeep with a deliberately distributed international team. His advice to foreign startups entering Japan is blunt: whatever sales cycle and revenue timeline you've planned, multiply it by three.

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The reason isn't simply language. It's the structure of Japanese corporate decision-making. In most Japanese companies, the person you meet in a sales meeting — the one with the director title — typically isn't the person who makes the call. Japan's traditional career path rotates managers across departments to create generalists with company-wide networks, not domain specialists. The result is that buying decisions require consensus from people who often weren't in the room, and who may not have the technical depth to evaluate the product on its merits. You're not selling to a decision-maker. You're selling to an intermediary who has to sell it internally for you.

Paul's experience as a foreign founder in Japan reflects a similar dynamic. Before TokyoDev — which helps Japanese companies hire international software engineers — he built DoorKeeper, an event registration platform used predominantly by Japanese customers.

"That was actually quite a hard thing for me," he said, "because I'm not a native Japanese speaker and stuff like marketing gets a lot harder when you have to rely on someone else's judgment as the founder."

The lesson he draws: international founders in Japan tend to have more success when their product's value proposition is itself international. TokyoDev works because the Japanese companies Paul engages with already want to be more international — making him, as an international founder, the right person for the job. When your foreignness is an asset to the customer, the cultural gap shrinks considerably.

What ZooKeep's team actually looks like

Rather than waiting for the hypothetical, Fuminori walked through how ZooKeep has structured its team in practice. The head of engineering is American but based in Japan. Most of the engineering team is in Malaysia and the Philippines. A handful of engineers are in Japan, some based in Okinawa and Hokkaido where cost of living is lower. The product manager has lived in Japan for years, understands spoken Japanese even if he doesn't speak it fluently, and can follow a customer meeting closely enough to catch nuance. Fuminori himself handles the translation layer where needed.

"There's a lot of internal meetings just to get the better understanding of what the customer is really asking for," he said. "But if you have someone who can manage an international team, you can build that kind of hybrid team in terms of language. That works."

The model isn't simple, but it's deliberate. The key isn't that every team member speaks Japanese — it's that someone in the chain does, and that internal documentation discipline makes asynchronous communication possible across time zones and languages.

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GenAI and the language barrier: Japan may benefit most

One of the more striking claims of the evening came from Fuminori: Japan may be the country in the world that benefits most from the drop in translation costs driven by generative AI. The language barrier has historically been the single biggest obstacle for both foreign companies entering Japan and Japanese companies going global. The cost and friction of that barrier are falling fast.

He gave a concrete example of instructing an AI tool to rewrite Silicon Valley-style marketing copy to sound like Nikkei — serious, structured, credible to a 50-year-old Japanese executive. The output was usable. A few years ago that required a specialist.

But both Paul and Florian were quick to add friction. "You have to know Nikkei is a thing," Paul noted. The tools amplify existing knowledge of the market; they don't substitute for it. Someone on the team still needs enough context to know when the output has gone off in the wrong direction. And for sales — real sales, built on relationship and trust — no one in the room believed an AI was stepping in for a skilled human anytime soon.

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The more immediate and practical application, everyone agreed, is internal. Japanese team members who don't speak English are already using ChatGPT and Claude to write Slack messages to their international colleagues. Engineers documenting product specs in Japanese can now pass those documents to a distributed team in minutes. "It just takes five seconds more," Fuminori said. "Put it into GenAI, get it in English, and give very detailed information of what the customer is saying." That's not transformative. But it compounds quietly, and it's already happening across teams right now.

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The leapfrog question

An audience member raised the question that was in many people's minds: Japan consistently ranks at the bottom of digital transformation indices. Could GenAI be its leapfrog moment?

The panel's answer was cautiously optimistic and structurally honest. Japan's cultural relationship with technology — shaped by decades of Doraemon and Astro Boy — is genuinely positive. There isn't the deep-seated philosophical anxiety about AI that exists in parts of Europe. That's an asset.

But the obstacle to digital transformation in Japan was never a distrust of technology. It was the conflation of "system" with "IT system." In Western contexts, the word system can mean an organization, a decision-making process, a way of working. In Japan, Fuminori observed, the word lands as IT — something you implement, not something you redesign. The harder change — restructuring workflows, shifting consensus-making processes, granting individuals authority to move faster — doesn't come from an API. It requires champions inside organizations who understand that the technology is the easy part.

"The key question," Florian summarized, "is whether decision-makers get that in time."

About the panelists

Fuminori Gunji is Head of GTM at ZooKeep, an HR tech startup that helps companies hire better, faster, and more cost-effectively across Asia. He previously worked in fintech and HR tech, including a stint at Deel, and has over 18 years of experience in the Japanese market as a bilingual operator.

Paul McMahon is the Representative Director of TokyoDev, a leading community and job board for international developers building careers in Japan. What started as a personal blog in 2006 has grown into a business that helped 93 engineers find roles at Japanese companies in its most recent year.

Florian Geier is Senior Director at Antler Japan, where he leads the Inception program and investment activities. He has been based in Japan for 13 years, with prior roles at Fujifilm and Playco.

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Antler Japan runs Inception programs twice a year for founders at the earliest stage of company building. Applications are open at antler.co/residency/japan.