Global AI industry fusion

I am a Japanese AI technologist living in Southeast Asia, aspiring global AI industry fusion and aiming to build a $100B size of AI startup ecosystem by 2030.

I am firmly against the centralization of innovation components to only several cities in the AI world. I don't want some limited number of places to monopolize everything just like the internet world. Talents should be everywhere, data must be everywhere, and money is supposed to be everywhere. 

That's why I am enforcing myself towards the global AI industry fusion. I am to build the third pillar of AI ecosystem following Silicon Valley and Beijing, and it must be impactful enough as an economy. $100B total valuation is one of the benchmarks that I have so far. 

Conviction to AI

At the age of 25, I proudly made a presentation about my doctoral thesis in front of 4 professors. The theme was about a type of neural network and focused on how to apply the techniques when almost nobody talked about neural networks. It was 2008. 

I couldn't imagine at all how valuable the Ph.D. was to me. It was not about the title or self-branding, but the experiences I have run through. The process was not an easy one at all, especially when I decided to take the route of skipping a couple of years. I even got hospitalized once when I was the busiest and over-concentrated on the research. I have learned so many things, such as grit, the true meaning of presenting new concepts to the world, self-management and high level of independence to get things done. Now I can proudly say that the Ph.D. experience is the root of my entrepreneurship. 

The biggest things I acquired was my conviction to AI. Prof. Andrew Ng also mentioned the recent AI trends as the eternal spring, and I also feel in the same way. Real AI adoption has already been occurring in many verticals. Now deep learning has passed its hype, and many people started to seek for practical applications, and some have already been successfully integrated with the current society. Because of my background, luckily I am at the position to understand the limitation and possibility of AI technologies in a precise way, and I can always be very confident to foresee what will happen next in the technology world related to AI and machine learning. 

Love to the Asian world

After my research life, I worked for two startups in Japan. First one was Cirius Technologies, which was acquired by Yahoo Japan. The second was Naked Technology, also sold to Mixi. In both companies, my title was "chief" of technology and was inventing some technology, and I was proud of myself being a technician to make a commercial value. 

The total valuation at the moment of acquisitions was double-digit million, but my passion was always to go abroad because I was thinking that continuing the business activity domestically in Japan may limit my possibility. 

In 2013, I finally moved to Singapore. I didn't have any plan, except for the hope of enormous startup ecosystem growth and intention to learn English intensively. Indeed, The investment to SEA has been tremendously growing, and my English skill could finally be proficient enough to do business (it used to be awful). 

Singapore is such a small country; small enough to let us think of going out to other countries; Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam. I traveled like crazy, and I found that this life was one of my dreams because I can enjoy a broad spectrum of different cultures with a single small backpack. Unlike Japan, I don't need to live with any jam-packed trains, pollen allergy, and social pressure to drinking parties. Moreover, most of the friends in SEA are very optimistic about their future, and indeed the GDP was crazily growing continuously (again comparing to Japan). 

One exciting place I found was Vietnam, where the number of computer science talents exist. Singapore has an excellent financial environment; Thailand has a creative entertainment culture, but as a technologist, Vietnam was the most exciting place. I decided to have an office there starting in July 2013, and this is the first office of Cinnamon, now being regarded as Cinnamon AI Lab. 

Non-centralized ecosystems

Although I am so much into Vietnam, it is never a perfect place for everybody to do innovation. Although talents are there, not much investment money didn't flow into the market, GDP is not big enough, B2B business is not active and fast enough, and so on. Therefore from my eyes, the waste of talents happens here. A massive pool of talented engineers can't be well leveraged whereas, in Japan, everybody feels that they lack engineering forces. Not a small number of people know that, but it's not easy to make a match. 

I then started to generalize this idea to the global scale, and I found that the components for the innovative venture ecosystem are so many; market, money, engineering talents, product talents, marketing/Sales talents, market readiness to innovation. They're all critical, and we can't miss any single item to foster a great innovation from the place with a certain level of reproducibility. 

There're only two places which have every element centralized in the city; Silicon Valley and Beijing. The rest of the world doesn't have all but only a part; engineers in Vietnam, money in Singapore, big B2B markets in Japan, excellent FinTech technical base in London. 

I have seen many genius people struggle with the local market only because of the fragmentation of resources in this non-centralized world, and this fact has brought me the rough idea connecting the world to make innovation possible. Even just a basic business knowledge in Japan is often precious in other countries. 

Personal mission

As written above, I come from two different aspects of experiences; AI entrepreneur and the startup community guy in East/Southeast Asia. Now I feel it's the time to combine my two backbones, and defined that my mission is the Global AI industry fusion. All I know in the business world is a startup; hence I have decided to create substantial value in the AI startup ecosystem. 

$100B is the fund size of Softbank Vision Fund and close to the valuation of Goldman Sachs group (as of 2018). I must make it because I think that's the minimum level outcome for the global citizens to believe that innovation can come from everywhere. The reality in Asia (except China) is that almost all the people in the market think that "Real innovation always comes from the U.S. or China, but I can do the smaller version of it in my local area." What I must do is to change this perception, in the area of AI and beyond. 

I am very small yet. What I have achieved is almost nothing compared to what I am supposed to have done. Also, I haven't figured out the concrete methods to accomplish this goal. It could be an investment, or it could be through my ventures. It could be education of talents. My gut feeling is the combination of all of those. Nonetheless, I must achieve it.