CoFounder Weekly is a weekly dose of musings about startups…and life.
🤔Thought Starters
👩💻 Founder & Investor Corner
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🌏 Musings from abroad (Japan edition)
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🤔 Thought Starters
👩💻 Founder & Investor Corner
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🏆 “Tweet of the Week” from last issue:
🌏 Musings from abroad (Japan edition)
Wisam’s company got acquired and he’s currently celebrating in Japan. Greg is living his best life traveling abroad and is currently in Berlin.
Wisam’s random musings from Japan:
🦖 Didn’t realize the scale of Japan: Tokyo is largest city in the world! Osaka is #10. Japan is the world’s third largest economy. Tokyo is truly endless like no other city I’ve ever experienced. Even Manhattan feels kinda small in comparison.
🤔 Extreme manners (no eating while walking, no blowing your nose in public, no eating grapes in knife shop — found out all these the hard way 🤪) contrasted against men in suits passed out drunk in the streets every night.
🥴 Extreme hospitality (our translator from a workshop insisted on driving us 30 minutes back to the train station and then to our surprise ran in and bought us lunch) contrasted against aggressive xenophobia (felt very unwelcome a number of times).
🏆 Japanese do everything (most things) better. Incredible transportation infrastructure (bullet trains and well-designed subway with Apple Pay at every turnstile (NYC has just started piloting this)), very clean taxis with very polite taxi drivers, public bathrooms are everywhere and sparkling clean, incredible culture of pride and craftsmanship in all the work they do, one of the safest countries in the world, everything is open late, everything is orderly (people queue nicely to get into subways and go up escalators) and just feels smooth.
🤤 Incredible food & drink culture. Everything is so fucking good. Had two of my top five dining experiences of my life (Sushi Yu and Shirakaba) and probably best cocktail bar I’ve even been to as well. I want to eat it all. Most things are surprisingly cheap too. We had fancy ramen at fancy place in Ginza for ~$9 with ~$5 beers (~$2 craft beers at any 7-11).
👴🏼 I’m a bit of a curmudgeon sometimes and the excessive politeness can be a bit annoying — expect to hear “arigatou gozaimasu” (thank you very much) at least 50,000 times per day. Missing a bit of the NYC brashness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
☠️ With all the cleanness and orderliness, it’s weird that smoking is still pervasive and they use an insane amount of plastic packing for everything.
What am I missing?
Greg’s random musing from Berlin:
📵 No phones
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Sayonara ✌️,