Most-Read Articles of 2024 (Build What the Future World Needs, The Beginning of the End for Startups, Contract Development, and More)
This article was machine-translated from Japanese by AI (Claude). It may contain errors. Read the original Japanese article.
2024 was a year in which I wrote a lot of articles. Counting those not mentioned in this article, I seem to have written about 20.
Here I look back on just a few representative ones.
- (1) Build What the Future World Needs
- (2) To Stop the "Beginning of the End" of Japan's Startup Boom
- (3) "Should I Do Contract Development Before Starting a Startup?" A Common Question and My Answer
- (4) The Branching Paths and Evolution of How Deep Tech Startups Are Launched
- (5) Company Creation by "Vargas," Which Produces Decacorns and Unicorns One After Another
- (6) Embedded Entrepreneurship Education
- Looking Ahead to Next Year and Beyond
(1) Build What the Future World Needs
With the changing times, Make Somethign People Want leads to partial optimization, so my proposal was that it would be better to think from a broader perspective: Make Something the Future World Needs. It was one of the most-read articles.
(2) To Stop the "Beginning of the End" of Japan's Startup Boom
It was widely read and even drew reactions from overseas. I think it helped that I published it at a time when many of you shared the same sense of the problem. I still have this sense of the problem today, and in October I held events such as the Home Run Event.
(3) "Should I Do Contract Development Before Starting a Startup?" A Common Question and My Answer
I was asked this question a great many times last year and this year. By leaving the answer in an article, I feel the number of times I have to explain it has gone down somewhat.
(4) The Branching Paths and Evolution of How Deep Tech Startups Are Launched
Japanese "deep tech startups" tend to aim at commercializing university technology and end up as small businesses with less than 100 million yen in revenue. That may be a "success" in its own right, since a business was launched, but startups aiming for a "big success" seem to need somewhat different thinking. I wrote several articles thinking about what could be done to help organize these concepts. For example, "Misconceptions About Deep Tech Startups" is one of them.
I also believe that what you take as the starting point for building a business greatly affects the probability of that business becoming a "big success." This article summarizes how that starting point has changed since around the 2000s. It is somewhat oversimplified, though...
(5) Company Creation by "Vargas," Which Produces Decacorns and Unicorns One After Another
It seems to me that this was a year in which "company creation" was often talked about as a new approach. At the same time, my impression is that what the term refers to differs quite a bit depending on the speaker.
This article uses Vargas as an example to summarize one company creation approach. There was the major event of Northvolt's collapse, but I still think this approach is effective. Related to this, I also wrote an article called Company Creation with Large Corporations.
(6) Embedded Entrepreneurship Education
For practitioners, I would also like you to read "5 Papers and Reports I Want Faculty and Staff Involved in Entrepreneurship Education to Read," but the article I chose for the education category is the one below.
For entrepreneurship education in primary and secondary schools, I think that ideally, rather than running a separate entrepreneurship class, an Embedded Entrepreneurship approach would be better.
Looking Ahead to Next Year and Beyond
Some of the articles ended up connecting to next year's activities in one way or another.
(7) Non-Profit Startups
I discuss how the potential of Non-Profit Startups, entities for rapidly growing social impact in the non-profit domain, seems to be increasing. In 2025, I hope to be able to do a bit of work in this area.
(8) To Start a Discussion on Sustainability for a New Era
As it becomes clear that many areas beyond the environment, such as labor supply and security, are not sustainable, I made the case that we should broaden the concept of sustainability. We also plan to discuss this theme at PEP Summit 2025.
(9) From "We Can't Because We Don't Have X" to "We Can If We Have X": Entrepreneurial Resourcefulness
This is about entrepreneurial resourcefulness, an active attitude and skill toward resources. So far I have talked about "resolution" and "hypotheses," and what I want to write next is a book about "resources." I wrote this article intending it as a precursor to that.
(10) Solve 1% of the Problems of Humanity or a Nation
How to judge the size of a problem or a business varies from person to person, but I think having quantitative benchmarks such as 1% or 10% makes it easier to understand. I think this kind of perspective is necessary, especially when building a large business such as a high-growth startup. Next year, I hope to design programs with this in mind.
Thank you for everything in 2024.
I look forward to working with you again in 2025.