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

I joined Mitsui & Co. out of university and worked on managing the startups in its portfolio and on launching new businesses built on Mitsui's own assets. What stayed with me most was a secondment to Moon Creative Lab, then a newly established subsidiary, where I was given the chance to drive a new-business idea I had proposed myself.

What struck me there was how much of a venture lead's time goes to everything except the venture itself. Every three to six months a continuation review comes round, and you push the business forward while also preparing the deck to justify it. Using a large company's brand, capital and people to launch a business comes with an obligation to explain yourself, and I still think that is right and unavoidable. But because that work arises structurally, unless someone takes it on, the intrapreneur never gets to use their strengths in full.

After an early-stage IT startup and small-business consulting in Hokkaido, I returned to Okinawa, my wife's home. By chance I began supporting foreign founders based at the incubator of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), and saw them facing the same problem as the intrapreneurs inside large companies. Founders, too, have things they are not good at. To let them perform, someone has to take on that work so they can concentrate on what they do best. And for foreign founders, being able to hand that work over in English was essential.

That is where HAKKI came from, in June 2023. Our mission is to support founders who take on career risk and financial risk to build something new, and we have built the operational capabilities they need. More recently we have also begun investing in startups from our own balance sheet, extending our support to funding itself.

From the trading house: a global outlook and the ability to run operations in English. From the startup years and small-business consulting: hands-on skills and breadth of coverage. Combining these, we work behind the founders who take the risk, and keep supporting, from backstage, businesses that set out from their region to compete globally.