{"id":18131,"date":"2022-03-04T10:20:10","date_gmt":"2022-03-04T01:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovation-osaka.jp\/oih2026\/?post_type=library&p=18131"},"modified":"2026-09-27T17:41:57","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T08:41:57","slug":"library-10733","status":"publish","type":"library","link":"https:\/\/www.innovation-osaka.jp\/en\/library\/library-10733\/","title":{"rendered":"Eiji Someya"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Taking on a pitch event with a meeting minutes support service and winning an award in the student division<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Meetings are held not only in business but in all kinds of settings. They are essential for organizational decision-making, yet many people have probably felt frustrated, thinking \u201cnothing gets decided\u201d or \u201cit takes too long for nothing.\u201d The minutes that come with meetings can also be a source of frustration: they take time to write, and even when written, sometimes no one uses them. The meeting minutes support service proposed by RonTen (now Hutzpah), led by Eiji Someya, aims to break through such problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe service first collects and analyzes past meeting data. Then it extracts the meeting\u2019s \u2018key issues,\u2019 such as \u2018what should be discussed in the meeting\u2019 and \u2018what should be decided for the next action.\u2019 Going into the meeting with this information makes highly productive meetings possible,\u201d says Someya.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Mirainno Pitch 2021, a pitch event organized by Osaka Innovation Hub where the business plan was presented, the team won an award in the student division. Someya set out toward commercialization in high spirits, but reality was harsh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"hutzpah\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we did market research, we got a lot of responses like, \u2018It looks convenient, but I wouldn\u2019t pay for it.\u2019 Meetings are certainly inefficient, and writing minutes is hard work. But if you ask whether people are desperately troubled by it, not necessarily. In other words, our service was judged unable to provide benefits worth the cost.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facing reality, Someya\u2019s team gave up on commercializing the service at that point. But not stopping there is what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What they are now working on is an online education business called \u201ccohort-based.\u201d Cohort-based education is a style in which several students in different places take online classes at the same time, work on assignments together, and learn while spurring one another on. It can be said to be closer to learning in a real classroom than conventional online education, in which students take classes streamed over the internet alone, whenever they like.
\u201cThe environment for online education has improved; you can take classes from famous instructors, for example. But student dropout rates are very high. Put simply, people keep studying precisely because there is some kind of binding force, such as time, place, or classmates. In fact, data in the United States already shows that cohort-based education has overwhelmingly higher continuation rates. From my own experience tutoring online, I also feel the usefulness of the cohort-based approach,\u201d says Someya.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cohort-based education has hardly been introduced in Japan yet. The immediate goal is for Hutzpah, including Someya, to become a team of instructors providing cohort-based education. As the next step, the company aims to become a platform provider that supplies systems and know-how to educational institutions and education businesses that \u201cwant to offer cohort-based education.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

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From aspiring researcher to entrepreneur: recruiting peers by taking part in pitch events<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Someya is a current student at Kyoto University\u2019s Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, in the third year but currently on leave. The field of study is brain informatics, which researches technology for reading people\u2019s thoughts from brain waves and the like, and Someya aimed to become a researcher when entering university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, Someya came to question two things peculiar to Japan: that technologies created through research rarely lead to business, and the culture of \u201cfinally becoming fully fledged at 50.\u201d As a result, Someya shifted the future goal to business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe first thing I did after switching to business was work at a company in Israel. Israel is packed with startups, so much so that it is called \u2018the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.\u2019 Wanting to make use of the experience I gained there, I job-hunted in Japan aiming for companies that invest in startups and the like.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Someya aimed for work supporting entrepreneurs through investment, but even then had the thought, \u201cSomeday I want to start my own business.\u201d And thinking back on the backgrounds of the entrepreneurs met in Israel, Someya realized that \u201cthe CEO\u2019s previous job was CEO\u201d; in other words, none of them had started a business after belonging to an organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a completely different way of thinking from Japan, right? But the way people in Israel think felt right to me. So I decided to stop job hunting and start a business.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point, Someya already had the idea that would lead to the meeting minutes support service, and set out to gather peers. The focus was especially on taking part in pitch events. By presenting the business plan in public, Someya recruited people who shared the vision and wanted to realize it together. In fact, that was when Someya met co-founder Shunsuke Fujii. This is how the group that led to today\u2019s Hutzpah came together, and Someya the entrepreneur was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"hutzpah\"\/<\/figure>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n
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The challenge is people. Also focusing on building ties with educational institutions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In rolling out cohort-based education services, Someya says the biggest immediate challenge is people. Hutzpah currently aims to become a team of instructors that can provide high-quality education itself. So the key is instructors who understand the characteristics of cohort-based education and can achieve results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On funding, which many startups name as a challenge, Someya has a distinctive view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cToday, a wide variety of fundraising methods are available, starting with venture capital. In an era like this, if we cannot get funding from anywhere, it means our business plan has no potential. I have made that clear-cut decision, so I do not regard funding as a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For now, providing services to individuals is the core of the business. While solidifying the B2C base, Someya believes that partnering with educational institutions such as schools and cram schools is also essential to accelerate the business. So expanding ties with educational institutions through public and private startup support organizations is another important task now.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

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A business plan that looks not only at Japan but at the world<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, more students have been aspiring to start businesses. How does Someya, one of them, see student entrepreneurship?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSomething senior entrepreneurs and supporters have advised me, and that I value very much myself, is that \u2018the ideas students come up with only see a tiny market.\u2019 Students may have the strengths of novelty, uniqueness, and boldness, but in the breadth of the world they have seen and heard, they cannot match their seniors. Isn\u2019t it important to leave the range of our own experience and daily lives and think about business with a much wider view?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This way of thinking is expressed in the company\u2019s watchword, \u201cLet\u2019s hit a home run.\u201d It carries the wish to create services that can sweep a big market, rather than steadily piling up hits in a small one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"hutzpah\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As with Japanese feature phones, because Japan has a reasonably large market, products and services evolve uniquely by looking only at the domestic market, and as a result are left behind by global trends. Instead, the company looks at the world from the start and aims to create services the global market wants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we discuss things in the company, the phrase \u2018Would that be accepted worldwide?\u2019 comes up often. Basing our judgment on the global market is one of our company\u2019s features.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

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Student days are a great time to start a business: enjoying life as a student entrepreneur by being yourself<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Someya analyzes their own personality as \u201csaying what I think without holding back.\u201d That could easily be taken as a lack of cooperativeness, and during job hunting Someya tried to hold back and hide it. But as an entrepreneur, \u201cbeing myself\u201d turned into a strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA startup is a place where you express what you think frankly and look for better answers through discussion. It is a world free of reading the room or holding back. It feels very comfortable. The reason I switched to starting a business after going as far as job hunting was that somewhere in my heart I wondered, \u2018Won\u2019t I regret just getting a job like this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBesides, as a student, even if you fail, you have plenty of time to start over. Even failure can be used as experience for the rest of your life. Thinking about it that way, there may be no better time to start a business than as a student.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe haven\u2019t achieved anything yet. But I\u2019m having what I could call the most fun time of my life. I can say with confidence that starting a business is fun,\u201d says Someya. Someya\u2019s challenges as an entrepreneur will continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interview date: January 31, 2022
(Interview and text: Morinaga Matsumoto)<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10755,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_locale":"en_US","_original_post":"https:\/\/www.innovation-osaka.jp\/oih2026\/?post_type=library&p=10733","catch_copy":"Establishing a new education service and aiming to become a platform provider","company":"Hutzpah Inc. (formerly RonTen)","sub_catch":""},"library-category":[97,128],"class_list":["post-18131","library","type-library","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","library-category-97","library-category-bangaihen","en-US"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.innovation-osaka.jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/library\/18131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.innovation-osaka.jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/library"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.innovation-osaka.jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/library"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.innovation-osaka.jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.innovation-osaka.jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"library-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.innovation-osaka.jp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/library-category?post=18131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}