How we built Asia’s largest Demo Day - in Japan

Tak Lo

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6 min readMar 22, 2019

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Thanks @jonjonjapon for great pic 1 of Hajime Hotta of our Japanese team

We achieved several firsts on March 18 — and it was awesome on three dimensions. Let me briefly review.

28 startups:

28 tweets on each:

BestShot: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107468983244984320

Clocksmith: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107459067226710016

Cotobox: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107455755987251200

Dapp: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107464506999894016

Deepsight Labs: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107503690435289094

Deepsync: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107503825399644161

Deeptrace: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107466555191750656

DT42 with Numbers Protocol: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107514358924488704

Easychat: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107462697229008896

Finhay: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107453408481427456

frm.ai: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107517429142425600

Generalized Intelligence: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107460571585077250

Graychain: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107465504724115456

Kvinna: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107505704837869571

Laboratik: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107510230659878912

Matar stars: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107451076641325057

OliveX: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107516106963603456

Roboken: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107451614648913920

Rosetta.ai: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107449779129221120

Sapiens: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107456843507326976

Scry: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107510718193119233

SmartPeep: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107511963326791680

Spoonshot: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107513368603168770

Strint: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107468260864196609

Unreal: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107504893105856512

Utu: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107518249732853760

Vizzbee: https://twitter.com/zeroth_ai/status/1107508070744100865

We hosted over 600 registered attendees with 28 startups demoing and over 40K people followed the event on social media. This level of scale in terms of startups has never been done before on this side of the planet. What this means that throughout the day, our startups received constant exposure from potential investors and partners.

The 28 companies showing off their products at their booths on the 8th floor. PC @jonjonjapon

We had Nikkei cover us in the press. This is absolutely spectacular as a startup and just to give some reference: the Nikkei is the world’s largest financial newspaper, with greater circulation than the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal combined (the next two most circulated papers).

We had Japanese investors come up to us and say we’ve never heard this type of pitch quality and startups ever in Japan. That made us proud.

Even more tangibly, this is what we did for our new LP Japanese public company Silver Egg’s share price — a whopping 25% increase right after CEO Tom Foley’s announcement at the event:

How did we do this?

Practice makes perfect

The previous two Demo Days in Hong Kong and Bengaluru helped in coordinating the startup pitches and internal operations together. We had feedback for the pitches and what worked and didn’t, and the same goes for the operational part. That feedback was critical for the final stretch.

Actively shape people’s perceptions

Our venue was definitely not traditional by normal standards. But our Japanese partners made the decision to try to shape people’s perceptions by doing things differently and in a different place. I think it was the right decision as it sets the bar to think differently and push the scope — but not in an extreme way.

Our venue is where underground idol group Kamen Joshi is hosted. Little did I know, this was going to be critical

Execute the ambition to scale

During my Japanese speech, I shared my personal story of pitching to Masayoshi Son, and the response to not settle on 10x, but to go 100x. So when we had this insane idea to scale our demo days, we never imagined the effects — but we rose to the challenge and it has changed us positively.

My Japanese speech — and I made some ears bleed. Thank you @masaruikeda for your article and support always, as he flew from Austin just to attend this

Unleash a vision

We believe that our vision of building an ecosystem in Asia is the future. We set our strategy from day one to build upon that thesis, and the Tokyo demo day was a clear manifestation of that strategy. Our choices of Bengaluru, Tokyo, and Hong Kong as locations are the cornerstones of how that strategy is to be built. We unleashed our vision of how we see the world, and the public responded enthusiastically.

Hajime Hotta’s slide was a very clear articulation of our vision — and his subsequent article here

Of the entire Demo Day Series, we hosted 1350 attendees and 55 startup demos. Again, that type of scale is unprecedented in this part of the world.

This was supreme coordination from the entire team — and the product reflected a little bit of everyone. We developed a product that combined each individual team member’s strength in design, social media, operations, hustle, intellectual debate, and local knowledge. This was truly a team of misfits coming together for one goal.

Getting a cultural experience in the onsen

And that goal is to our Zeroth startups. You are the lifeblood of what we do and why we do what we do. In particular, thanks Jason Eisen from Utu for being a part-time volunteer.

Thanks @jonjonjapon for a pic of Z04 founders

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to the volunteers. Cali Matsunaga, Emily Clearwater, John Matthews, Kanna Sato, Liana Huang, Lisa Hasegawa, Lisa Renee Williams, Mai Otsuka, Melvin Charles Dy, Miho Tanaka, Tomoya Ishizaki, and Vinod Vijay. This event would not have run as smoothly without you, and I hope we work with you soon in the future. Shin Chen, Gen Kenai, and Tatsuya Nagata also made huge contributions from their day jobs to support us.

Next - our speakers, many of whom came from out of town. Thank you Katsumasa Niki from Deepcore, Ken Inoue from all Turtles, Mikihiro Yasuda from Hike Ventures, Takashi Hongo from Fringe Ventures, Jung-hee Ryu from Future Play, Yoshitake Ishimoto from DBJ, and Junichi Nakajima from Digital Garage.

Next, a thank you to our investors and partners for your contribution. They are, in alphabetical order, Amazon Web Services, AngelHub, our main investor Animoca Brands, Artesian, Blink Smart Workspace, Cowrks, Cyberport, Deepcore, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, HK Uptown, IBM Blue Hub, Kernel, Microsoft Explorium, Sendgrid, Stripe, Teamz, Tencent WeStart, and Whub.

Last and most significantly, our wives and partners for tolerating and supporting us. We all know who the real leaders are here.

We’d love to hear from you if you’re an ambitious team solving problems. Ping us below!

https://www.zeroth.ai/program.html