DNX

Interview

• Someone Whose Life Was Changed by a Startup — Now on the Other Side, Supporting the People Who Build Them
• How MoneyForward Changed the Way I See Work — and What Work Can Be It’s not an overstatement to say that my time at MoneyForward changed my life. I was close enough to the center of things that I had genuine opportunities to be part of major decisions as they were being made. The environment moved at a pace that was almost disorienting — but I could feel, clearly, that what I was doing each day was directly connected to the company’s growth. Most days brought more friction than success. And yet, looking back, it was the period in my career where I grew the most. Watching the company go public and become known to a much wider world left two things permanently etched in me: a deep appreciation for how hard it is to actually realize what a company is trying to become, and a genuine sense of why working at a startup matters. As I started receiving more requests from outside the company for advice on people and organizational challenges, a feeling began to take shape — that there was more I could contribute to startups, and I hadn’t found the right way to do it yet.
• Not Just One Company — More Startups Growing the Way MoneyForward Did Working later as a career consultant across many different companies, I kept encountering the same pattern: problems that were hard for insiders to see clearly, situations where a small shift in perspective was all it took to move forward. That experience gradually shifted something in me. The desire to grow a single company gave way to something bigger — a want to help create more startups that could grow the way Money Forward did. At the same time, I felt a persistent gap in pure advisory work: I was never quite fully a stakeholder. I hadn’t entirely lost my appetite for the particular tension and responsibility that comes from being inside a startup, and I didn’t want to. That’s when venture capital started to come into focus for me. I began to imagine a kind of involvement that went beyond passing on what I’d learned from my own startup experience — something where I could share the specific walls each phase brings before a founder hits them, and work through them together. That felt like a different quality of contribution.
• Building a Form of HR Support That Feels Like DNX — and Contributing to the Ecosystem The main reason I decided to join DNX was a genuine alignment with its values. What stayed with me from the hiring process was that almost every team member, independently, said something close to the same thing: “Akira is the one who embodies the values most.” That consistency made a strong impression. Having spent years at a startup where mission, vision, and values were at the center of how we hired and built culture, the fact that the whole team shared a common set of values was, to me, the most reliable signal of all. HR support within Japanese venture capital doesn’t yet have an established model. That’s exactly why I want to engage with the hard, open-ended questions alongside our portfolio companies — and turn what we learn together into new knowledge. By continuing to evolve myself in the process, I hope to shape a form of support that feels distinctly DNX, and to contribute meaningfully to the growth of the startup ecosystem as a whole.