[Podcast］How to build a successful startup community ー Interview with Tim Rowe at Cambridge Innovation Center (Part4)

This content is provided in partnership with Tokyo-based startup podcast Disrupting Japan. Please enjoy the podcast and the full transcript of this interview on Disrupting Japan's website!

Today we are going to sit down with an old friend.

It was over seven years ago when I first had Tim Rowe on the podcast, and we mapped out what we saw as the future of startup innovation in Japan. In today’s short episode, we talk about what we got right, what surprised us, and what we think is next for Japanese startup innovation.

It’s a great conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it. 

Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most innovative founders and VCs.

I’m Tim Romero, and thanks for joining me.

I’d like to share a special short in between episode with you.

Last month I had a fireside chat with Tim Rowe, the founder and CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center at the Global Venture Cafe’s anniversary celebration in Tokyo. And I thought I would share it with you just as it happened. I first had Tim on the show about eight years ago, just before CIC opened their Big Tokyo collaboration space.

This time Tim and I talk about the changes to the Japanese startup ecosystem since then, what we are likely to see in the future, and we also discuss what might be a new model for startup ecosystems. As startups have become more and more accepted and more and more common. The old community playbook may not be as effective as it once was.

But Tim tells that story much better than I can. So, let’s get right to the interview.

(Part 4 of 6. Continuing from Part 3)

(Continuation of the previous article)

Romero: Well, I’m going to push back on that a little bit because at a high level, that’s the same thing that all co-working spaces and all initiatives say. And it’s definitely true that mixing, that exchange of ideas being able to bounce things off of qualified people is necessary. It’s the key to the whole system, but it seems that it’s very hard to actually make work. And you guys have made it work on multiple cities and multiple countries. So, is it something that can be designed from the ground up? Say, we’ve got a university that’s focusing on agriculture or high technology, and we’re going to introduce our scientists to our MBA class, or is it something that you just have to wait till it emerges organically and then try to guide it? What’s the secret sauce here?

Rowe: So, I think there are many ways to do this, and I encourage everyone to do it their own way and they’ll discover kind of what works for them or in their community. You could think about innovation as a bit of a sort of a team sport. It’s like playing together on a football team, you each have your position. You might be CEO, you might be scientist, you might be investor, what have you. And you’re learning to kind of work together. So, some teams go on to win the national title or an international, the World Cup or something like that. And some teams don’t ever win a game. So, it is how you play. That matters a lot. And so I’m very grateful and impressed by the Venture Cafe team. Ryu, for instance here, who was up on stage earlier, he’s modest. He played the role as sort of moderator and introducer, but Ryu is one of the most impactful people in Japan in entrepreneurship. He’s getting people to connect. And that’s like being a great athlete. So, I think you can train great athletes you can have an approach to it. But I also think it’s okay to have lots of different approaches and see what’s what works best. And I think we’ve been fortunate that our particular approach has been, as you say, very successful in a number of places around the world.

Romero: One other component that I noticed you didn’t mention at least explicitly, is customers. Is there a need to bring them into the ecosystem or to have their presence in the community? Or are we expecting that entrepreneurs being these scrappy people they are, will go out and find them and bring them in themselves?

Rowe: I’m glad you mentioned that because I think actually activating the customers is probably the single most impactful thing you can do. And I should have mentioned it earlier. So, I’m going to give you an example of where I think that this sort of thing can work. Let’s say that you have a new field and you’re a city and you want to be successful in this new field. And we’re doing a lot of work right now in Riyadh and in Saudi Arabia. And this is a real example of conversations we’re having, but not something that’s happened yet. There’s nothing confidential about it. They’re looking for sectors where they can be successful and lead the world in innovation. Most of us think of Saudi Arabia as a lot of desert. It’s not a place that’s on many of our sort of regular travel circuits. By the way you should go it’s really changed an immense amount in the last five years. One of our presenters today, a British woman who’s doing a game startup in Berlin, was telling me that she went to a game developer conference for women in Riyadh. There were a thousand female game developers, and it was incredibly impressive. One of our team members, an American woman from St. Louis said that it’s her favorite city that she’s ever lived in, and she’s lived in New York and other places.

So anyway, a little plug for Riyadh, but I said, look, let’s take an industry that you could activate through your customer power. Let’s look at something like low cost housing and modular housing, which is an important new developing area. A lot of countries, a lot of cities need more housing. What if the government were to agree to buy, say a hundred thousand low cost homes from startups and you built a hub around that. What, what percentage of the world’s players in that space would be willing to go set up a branch in Riyadh? I think it would be 95%. Because if somebody said, hey, I’ll buy a thousand of your startup homes, you’re going to go. So, I think that this is a great lever for government policy. If you can marshal the power of being the customer, you can very quickly accelerate a startup ecosystem.

Romero: This is really innovative. I want to call it out because you’re kind of flipping the script from traditional startup ideation, which is you have a handful of brilliant founders who come up with an idea, go figure out how to market it, and then go out and get the customers to identifying a top-down problem area. Collecting the customers who could potentially use that and then letting all of these creative people know that, hey, there’s problems to be solved and money to be made in this area.

In Part 5, we will discuss the importance of local ecosystems and how small cities can become hubs for innovation.

Top photo: Envato

Click here for the Japanese version of the article