Show notes
This is a rather personal episode. There is no guest this time. It’s just you and me.
Uber and, to a lesser extent, Airbnb are failing horribly in Japan. There have been quite a few articles that have tried to explain what this is, and most of those articles have focused on why the market conditions in Japan make it hard for those companies.
These is certainly some truth to those articles, but they miss a larger and much more important factor about why these companies are struggling in Japan and in Asia in general.
You see, Uber and Airbnb represent a new very kind of startup, one that could not have existed twenty years ago, and the reason has nothing to do with smartphones or cloud computing or anything related to technology at all.
In fact, the very thing that make these companies powerful and transformative in the United States is what ensures they will never really succeed in Japan.
You may not agree with everything I have to say, but I think you’ll enjoy it.
Uber and, to a lesser extent, Airbnb are failing horribly in Japan. There have been quite a few articles that have tried to explain what this is, and most of those articles have focused on why the market conditions in Japan make it hard for those companies.
These is certainly some truth to those articles, but they miss a larger and much more important factor about why these companies are struggling in Japan and in Asia in general.
You see, Uber and Airbnb represent a new very kind of startup, one that could not have existed twenty years ago, and the reason has nothing to do with smartphones or cloud computing or anything related to technology at all.
In fact, the very thing that make these companies powerful and transformative in the United States is what ensures they will never really succeed in Japan.
You may not agree with everything I have to say, but I think you’ll enjoy it.