DNX Capital

Interview

• Bringing Global Perspective and Enterprise Insight to Japan’s Next World-Class Companies
• How My Time Abroad — in Ways I Never Expected — Became One of My Greatest Assets At Mitsui & Co., I worked on LNG investment projects worth trillions of yen, through deals in Qatar and Russia. Project finance negotiations, a secondment to a local operating company, working through complex issues with foreign shareholders — it was an enormous experience. But at some point I started to feel that spending an entire career at a single company, when you only get one life, was leaving something on the table. That’s what set me looking. And as I explored, what caught my attention was the startup world. I felt strongly that if I was going to try something new, this was the industry to do it in. That conviction brought me to DNX — a leap into the entirely unfamiliar world of venture capital. Evaluating startups through an investor’s lens, navigating deals, building relationships with founders — everything was a restart from zero. There were moments of real disorientation, but I kept my eyes on a goal: to become someone who could genuinely shape the startup ecosystem. That’s what kept me going. Three and a half years in, I feel like I’m finally beginning to see the outlines of the kind of founder I want to champion — and to sense, more concretely, how I can add real value. For founders without much enterprise sales experience, I can offer grounded advice: “here’s how large corporations actually think,” “here’s the kind of approach that tends to land.” I’ve also traveled internationally with founders who hadn’t done that before, providing English-language support on the ground. The years at Mitsui show up in unexpected ways.
• Building Trust One Interaction at a Time — Showing Up for the Moments That Matter The biggest shift since joining DNX has been my awareness of how much weight my words carry. Especially when I’m working with seed-stage founders, I can feel — viscerally — that what I say is taken seriously and can genuinely affect the direction they go. The tension I feel before saying something hasn’t gone away, but I’ve come to see that pressure as the texture of real responsibility — a sign that the work matters. When one portfolio company’s CEO took a leave of absence, I was there throughout — involved almost as if I were on the team myself. It may seem like a small thing, but that founder still expresses gratitude for it today. I believe it’s these accumulated moments — individual, sometimes quiet acts of support — that form the foundation of real trust with the entrepreneurs we work with. When I’m engaging with founders, what I try to do is create space for their own thinking to deepen, rather than steering them toward a conclusion. Instead of saying “here’s what you should do,” I’ll share something like “here’s an approach others have tried” — offering information, not direction — and trust the founder to find their own best path from there. Because we’re outside the company, we can offer a perspective that founders, deep in execution mode, rarely have access to. When a founder says “I hadn’t thought of that” — that’s the moment I feel most confident that I’m doing something genuinely useful.
• From Japan to the World — Alongside Founders Who Have Given Their Lives to a Problem At one point, I had the chance to spend time with a number of Korean startups. What struck me immediately was how differently they think: global expansion isn’t a future ambition for them, it’s the premise from which the business is designed. Staying within a small domestic market simply isn’t part of the plan. I found it genuinely energizing, and it deepened my hope that more startups from Japan would begin approaching the world with that same boldness. I believe that when Japanese startups are ready to step onto the global stage, I can be a real asset to that moment. I want to be someone who shows up for those founders with everything I’ve built — the global experience, the enterprise perspective, and everything I’ve learned as an investor — holding nothing back. When it comes to choosing who to invest in, the question I keep coming back to is: are they truly serious about the problem? You can feel the difference, listening to a pitch, between someone pursuing an idea out of passing curiosity and someone who has made it their life’s work. A problem solved means someone gets help — means the world gets a little better. I want to keep supporting the founders who carry that larger hope inside them, and who are burning their lives in service of it.