Hiroko's Hitokoto

We had a group of students from France in the office other day. It was part of their MBA course to come visit real companies in Japan. They went to some big Japanese outfits such as NTT Docomo, but commented that they liked visiting us best, because they could ask lots of questions to "real" people doing "real" work. The other companies tended to show off their beautiful office space, expressing how great they are. On the other hand, our office has used office furniture's almost everywhere since cost-effectiveness is key to making profits. The students were excited about how we run our own servers and make websites, programs, magazines -- in fact, we do pretty much everything by ourselves. They are so young, and don't know what kind of challenges they'll face in future, but I hope that we could stimulate their interest in being entrepreneurs in the future.

As you might can see/hear I "scream" quite often these days. Yes, I'm working on yet another company incorporation: Layer-8. This time the process is much easier than last time with daijob.com, because now I know how it works. Time flies. The anniversary of daijob.com's incorporation is just around the corner, on Jan 21st. I won't forget the days and nights we spent on the daijob incorporation/funding last year.... Now that DJ is doing so well, and I can happily let them leave the nest soon. I'm thinking now how to get others to help me work on this stuff, particularly how to set up new companies. Of course, we could just use a consulting or law firm to take care of all the procedures, but the thing is that once the job is done they leave you. So later on if you need to know why certain decisions were made or how the company was described in the articles of incorporation, you have no knowledge within the company. In other words, you lose the flexibility to cha