First inaugural Japan NYC Startups Meetup

This past Wednesday, the Japan NYC Startups Meetup brought together 50 – 70 people in the New York tech community, including startups that either came from or wanted to launch in Japan. 

How it began

After finding out about this Meetup and joining the community, Masa Okunishi, a Software Engineer at ZocDoc, and Yu Imaoka, a Business Development Associate at iSi-Dentsu of America, Inc., immediately reached out to see if we could meet before their event. 

Masa and Yu were organizing the first meetup for the Japan NYC Startups community in New York and were looking for other startups in the area to join them. They described Japan NYC Startups as “a new global community focused on bridging Japanese and American technology ecosystems. We aim to help entrepreneurs and business leaders share their collective experiences and knowledge, thus strengthening their ability to work across the US and Japanese markets.”

This sounded like an excellent opportunity to meet other startups with similar interests and backgrounds, so I inquired about presenting Nulab and our products.

The night of the event

Yu and Masa started the event by introducing themselves and welcoming us all.

Here are the slides from our presentation:

We weren’t the only present there that night. The founder and CEO of OKPanda, Adam Gries, shared the stage with us. He introduced OKPanda as a language-learning mobile app that helps Japanese users learn English by virtually pairing them with language instructors in the Philippines to practice speaking, listening, and writing. Ironically, he had originally planned to launch OKPanda in South America but switched gears after seeing Japan’s larger market for English language learning.

We also ran into Jack from Conyac, whom we had met earlier that week. He pitched his startup’s crowdsourced translation services.

The night ended with more networking rounds, Brooklyn Lager, and yummy snacks courtesy of our co-organizers!

CacooUp NYC

Like the previous CacooUp held in Taipei, Taiwan, we also held our first CacooUp NYC on March 26! This will become a monthly workshop series but has the potential to become more.

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