So that the people who take the risk can spend their time on their strengths.

I joined Mitsui & Co. out of university and worked in its ICT business unit, managing investments in North American and Japanese startups and launching new businesses built on Mitsui's own assets. For the latter I was seconded to Moon Creative Lab, Mitsui's venture studio, as an entrepreneur in residence, working alongside consultancies such as IDEO on design-thinking-led venture building.

What struck me there was how much of a venture lead's time goes to everything except the venture. Core members with only business-development backgrounds hunting through their own networks for engineers and designers to build a team. A continuation review every three to six months, and the scramble before each one to show visible progress and prepare the review deck. People who wanted to move a business forward, consumed by preparing to be allowed to continue. I later saw the same picture at an early-stage IT startup and in small-business consulting in Hokkaido.

I moved to Okinawa, my wife's home, and by chance started helping a foreign founder based at the OIST incubator. He had world-class research and was stuck in front of a loan application and a set of accounting and labor procedures that only exist in Japanese. He was not the only one; several founders in the same building were in the same position. This place needed a company that could take that work on in English. HAKKI began in June 2023.

Whether you are a founder or someone handed a new venture inside a large company, if you are taking the risk of building something new, your time should go to your strengths. We want to put the right capability in a venture lead's hands at the moment it is needed, and to take on the operational work that makes that possible. Our first engagement was one person, me, joining a new business at Brother Industries as its sales manager. Since then, each capability HAKKI has added there came out of a discussion with the venture lead about what the business needed next. Today we are four staff and ten professional members, working with corporate ventures and research-driven startups.

Okinawa has a way of backing people who try. In ten years I want it to be a place where people say: if you are going to start a company, do it in Okinawa. We will keep building the back end of the companies that set out from here for the world.