Hash Lyve co-founder Takashi Fuke.
Takashi Fuke was a diligent and hardworking student. He aced his first year exams at university and was looking forward to his next challenge – but was shocked when he saw no one was really studying in college.
“School in Japan was just drinking every day,” says Takashi. “No one was studying. People just took notes in class and then cheated on the test.”
On the traditional Japanese career path, just getting into university is often enough. Students work very hard to get accepted, but then they totally slack off until their third year when job hunting begins and people pretty much stop going to class.
Takashi wasn’t satisfied. He left the university and convinced his parents to let him complete school in the US. He wanted to go there to learn about entrepreneurship.
To his own surprise, he ended up in Kansas.
He admits he started to second guess his decision at some point. But with his parents covering tuition, he thought it was best to stick it out. While he did learn basic management theory, his education on startups would have to wait.
Living in America. Photo credit: Pixabay.
After graduating, Takashi was faced with a choice to move away from the center of the US. Did he go north to Chicago, east to New York, or west to Silicon Valley?
We’re not in Kansas anymore
Takashi found the diversity he was craving in San Francisco and took up an internship at cross-border marketing firm Btrax. He mainly focused on business development, but also had to write for the company blog as part of the program.
That’s how Takashi was bitten by the journalism bug.
San Francisco opened his eyes while he was doing background research and talking to people from all paths of life for the blog. “This is the birthplace of startups,” he thought.
Takashi’s internship ended but his passion for media didn’t. He stayed in the Bay Area and picked up jobs at Japanese media sites Tech Watch and The Bridge. He conducted hundreds of interviews and started another internship at a venture capital (VC) firm where he was in charge of building its new video media.
Photo credit: Pixabay.
Daily interaction with founders was infectious. “There are so many startup guys,” says Takashi. “You go to a cafe and more than half the people are doing a startup. You start to feel, maybe I can do a startup.”
He was particularly impressed with the VC he was interning with. The firm had already secured a partnership with a major Japanese publication, although it had no video editor and no operations in place. The entrepreneurial bug came a-biting.
Video news craze
Takashi spent the next few months learning to create and edit video, but his visa was running out. He returned to Japan and was itching to do his own thing and thought video would be the next big thing.
Takashi left his writing position and looked for a way to get back to the States. The VC he interned at was impressed with his work and offered to sponsor his visa – and it accepted Takashi’s company, Hash Lyve, as the first startup in its incubation program. A month later, Takashi was back in the Bay cranking away on video again, but this time as a founder.
People playing with the modern View-Master by Google and Mattel at Hash Lyve’s event in Tokyo last month. Photo credit: Hash Lyve
Hash Lyve brings Silicon Valley’s latest technology news back to Japan with videos on Facebook. The format is working well. In ten months the team has racked up over 125,000 likes on its Facebook page and even though the videos are in Japanese, 50 percent of the viewers are outside of Japan. The most popular video on a self-propelled baby stroller has received over 1.2 million views.
Video news is all the craze now. Sites like AJ+ frequently get over 500,000 views per video. Hash Lyve hopes its focus on technology and Japan can help it stick out from the crowd.
But monetizing media is difficult. If the videos were hosted on YouTube with the current average of 35,000 views, Hash Lyve might make US$120 per video off advertisements. Even though videos only need a handful of people to produce, you would need to see more crossing that 500,000-view mark to support a small team.
To further break it down, if we take Facebook’s main demographic of 18 to 54-year-olds and compare that to the roughly 60 million people in Japan of the same age, videos would need to frequently penetrate nearly 1 percent of the target population.
Takashi is aware of the difficulties and ready for the challenge. Right now the team is focusing on content. Engagement rates are already over 50 percent and they know they can produce viral hits. To monetize, Hash Lyve is exploring sponsorships, native advertisements, and events. During Takashi’s latest trip to Japan he brought back around 20 gadgets which fans swooned over.
Takashi is definitely not in Kansas anymore, but he’s excited for his lesson on entrepreneurship to finally begin, “The first word I learned about startups was ‘San Francisco.’”
Update on June 18 2016, 3:20pm JST: Article was updated to clarify Takashi’s schooling and internship at Btrax.
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