DNX

Interview

• Through the Visions of Entrepreneurs — A Glimpse of Hope for Society’s Future
• From Supporting Artists to an Unexpected Arrival at Venture Capital My undergraduate thesis at art university was about “editing” — not editing in the conventional sense of working with text, but editing as concept-making: thinking about what context to place a creator’s work in so it reaches people with the right meaning. From my student years, I was absorbed in projects that put creators in the spotlight — exhibitions, independent magazines, competitions. After graduating I joined Mitsui & Co., but found myself wanting work with more tangible work, and moved to a venture I’d been close to since my student days. Almost immediately after that, family circumstances brought me to Chile for about four years. Living there, the gaps between rich and poor, environmental issues, and the daily realities of unequal access to education and healthcare became things I felt in my bones. Shortly after returning to Japan, I was approached by someone I knew who had just joined DNX, and that’s how I encountered the world of venture capital. What I found was a community of entrepreneurs engaging — with real heat, head-on — with the kinds of social problems I had witnessed and felt overwhelmed by. People my own age, taking these things seriously and doing something about them. That hope was what made me step into a new industry.
• Bringing Art Into Business, and Business Into Art Within roughly four months of joining, I took over and completed a rebranding project that involved teams on both sides of the Pacific. The creative background I carried turned out to matter in ways I hadn’t anticipated. From there, branding and communications became the axis of my work, and it gradually expanded to event planning, launch of SPROUND, and PR support for portfolio companies. Having SPROUND as a physical space means I naturally come to know the personalities of founders and the atmospheres of their teams over time. That accumulated sense of who people are feeds directly into how I approach media introductions and event design. The foundation of how I engage with entrepreneurs traces back to art production in my student years. The artist is the main character; I’m working in the background. I learned the hard way, by pushing a concept too far and upsetting the very person I was trying to support,what it actually means to draw out someone else’s talent. This lesson has carried over. My role is to help entrepreneurs articulate the vision and potential they’re already carrying, and to put it in the light where it can be seen. Looking back, I’ve found my place by being the person who brings art sensibility into business environments and a business perspective into creative ones — a different kind of presence in whichever world I’m in. One of DNX’s values is: “The Disciplined Pursuit of True Intuition.” It’s a value that speaks to combining the power of data-driven science with the power of art. On the intuition side, I hope to contribute a perspective that’s genuinely different from that of a venture capitalist, shaped by everything that came before.
• Where Many Visions Converge, the Future of Society Comes Into View In the eight years since joining DNX, I’ve continued to work from a vantage point of “building the space and entrusting what happens in it to the founders and investors,” aware of my own limited depth in the industry, and choosing to hold back my own subjective readings while attending carefully to what emerges through brand communication and community. But lately I’ve started to feel that it might be time to lean in more as an “editor,” actively re-articulating the vision and appeal of each company in my own voice. In PR support, for instance, I’ve started weaving in my own sense of what draws me to a company, and I’ve found it makes the story land more clearly with media. Being able to say “if I were the editor, here’s the angle I’d take.” This is a way for me to finally leverage the editorial perspective I’ve held close since university. Not committing to a single company’s vision, but being continually in contact with the visions of many entrepreneurs — that’s part of why VC turned out to be the right fit for me. The fractures in society haven’t gone away. Wars continue. Natural disasters are intensifying. The feeling of overwhelm I first felt in Chile has, if anything, deepened. And yet there are entrepreneurs who keep facing these things directly, without flinching. The deep respect I feel for entrepreneurs is what keeps me here. I want to stay close to their visions and their challenges and keep working toward a future worth looking forward to.