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I'm building a company in Tokyo that I plan to scale to $1 billion. You might think it's insane or impossible, and you might be right. Only 10 other founders in Japan have done it. But we are going to document the entire process. See,
Michia Rohrssen shares his journey building a $1B company in Tokyo, documenting challenges, lessons, and startup culture in Japan.
Key Takeaways
- Building a $1B company requires clear systems, ownership, and scalable processes from the start.
- Experience and capital are valuable but must be paired with continuous learning and adaptation.
- Documenting the founder journey transparently can provide valuable lessons and inspiration.
- Tokyo and Japan present unique opportunities and challenges for startups and investors.
- Engagement with emerging technologies like AI gaming is crucial for staying ahead in innovation.
Summary
- Michia Rohrssen is building a new company, L7V, in Tokyo aiming to scale it to $1 billion.
- He previously sold a company for $110 million and is leveraging his experience and network in Japan.
- L7V focuses on investing in startups, building businesses from scratch, and acquiring companies.
- Media content is a foundational strategy to attract talent and investments.
- The video documents raw founder experiences, including successes, failures, and lessons learned.
- Michia emphasizes building scalable systems with clear ownership and processes from day one.
- He shares personal motivations, including a transformative experience with Richard Branson.
- The video includes insights into the Tokyo startup ecosystem and networking with entrepreneurs.
- Michia participates as a judge in AI gaming hackathons, highlighting emerging tech trends.
- The content aims to inspire and educate aspiring founders by sharing authentic behind-the-scenes moments.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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the thing is, I sold my last company for $110 million, starting from much less.
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And I'm starting over again in Tokyo with all the capital, connections, and experience I wish I had a decade ago. So how much harder could one after zero really be? This isn't going to be a vlog that just flexes my flashy lifestyle. What
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I want to really show you is the raw reality of being a founder. I want to share what's working, what's not, and every lesson I've learned so you can learn as well. But before I get into the now, first, I have to take
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you back. After I sold, I had it all. Everything I ever wanted, anything anybody could ever want. Beautiful wife, beautiful home, millions of dollars, all the time and freedom in the world to travel, live the good life forever. But between all the fancy dinners, adventures around the world, the truth is I
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wasn't happy. In fact, I was kind of bored. I had all the capital, network, energy, and potential anyone could ever ask for, and I wasn't doing anything with it.
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And then last year, I was invited to Richard Branson's private island along with a few other entrepreneurs and founders. And after a week of late nights and heart-to-heart conversations with one of the greatest founders of all time, I sat on this exact swing
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watching the sunset and decided enough is enough. It's time to build something truly amazing, but in a totally new way, the Richard Branson way, where work can be meaningful, good for humanity, and fun at the same time. And that decision brings us to
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today. Hi. Let me explain what we're actually doing here, why we're in Asia, why I now live in Tokyo, Japan, and what the whole point of all this is. So I'm building a company called L7V, stands for Level 7 Ventures, which is a throwback
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to my favorite game as a kid, Final Fantasy VII. L7V is essentially a collection of different, I would say, bets that we're making on categories and opportunities. So the first bet is we invest in businesses. So we're investing in opportunities that we
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think are really interesting. So generally early stage startups. The second is I'm actually building businesses from scratch, where I'm incubating an idea of funding it, hiring the team and actually building it out. And the third is just buying businesses outright. So L7B kind
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of holds all of those and it's headquartered in Man right here in Tokyo, Japan.
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Now this is sort of day one, day zero almost of building this business. And so a lot of what we're doing here actually comes down to this foundational layer that we're building, which is media. Media is what allows us to attract great talent
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and ultimately find investments. And so as you can see here, I have a videographer.
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I'll film him a bit for you guys. Nice to meet you. We've imported him from the lovely country of Canada, although he's lived in Japan for a few years now. And he's going to be helping us build really amazing media content to show
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you exactly what we're doing. Now, I want to give a full disclaimer, Ian's super experienced, I'm really experienced building businesses, we are not experienced working together, so we're learning as we go, we're literally figuring this out together. What that means is that these
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vlogs are going to be pretty raw. It's not my opportunity to just flex my cars, my house, my lifestyle on you guys, it's my opportunity to try to really give you a behind the scenes of what I'm building in Tokyo, the lessons that
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I'm learning as I'm building it, and the wins and the mistakes. There's gonna be a lot of mistakes that I make. My hope is that I can save you from some of those mistakes by me making them very publicly on camera and that
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you'll get a little inspired, that you'll see some of the wins that we have and you'll think maybe I can do that too because I'm not special. I'm just a guy who has had some luck in life, who works really hard and tries
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to share what I've learned. So that's what we're doing and thanks for being around.
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This is gonna be really fun. Okay, Mikhail, what's today? Today is day one, minute one of building a media team in Tokyo. So, I mean, for me, this is the most important time of a business because it's when
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you figure out these critical decisions that are going to set the direction of what we actually build and how we accomplish these big things that we want to set out to do. So today is systems planning, really starting with the goals. What do
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we want to achieve? And then critically, what are the systems that will actually allow us to achieve those goals without just making up on the go? We actually have to have systems that we implement day over day, week over week. Systems just need
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two things, which is basically first, they need owners. So we've gone through who owns what. My VP of engineering used to say we need one photo choke, which is pretty aggressive. Sorry, Ian, but that's the idea. It's like you have one person who
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owns this. It's their job to get it done. The second thing you need is actually what happens at each step. What are the systems? What are the checks and balances? And so we're literally going to go in and build a checklist for each
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step. what is actually happening to move it from step one to step two to step three and so on. As we build out the team, we can say which step is actually pulling us back from performing really well, and we can swap that
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name for a new team member that we hire. So even though it's only two of us, we're building out a system that will scale to hundreds of employees.
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Sweet like a flower and blue and I call you Alright, so tonight we're headed to dinner with a friend, Daniel Daylin. He's in town for two days and so we're doing a little get together with some entrepreneurs and creators. Just wanted to bring you guys along, show
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you a little bit of my life, the people I hang out with here in Tokyo and what it's like building in Japan.
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film is it filming yeah oh cool oh you don't even know it's all to tell you yeah yeah it's on that literally just happened like five minutes ago you know how we're applying to this supercell AI gaming accelerator yeah that's the big thing
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yeah yeah I have been asked by Google to be a judge on an AI gaming hackathon tomorrow and I'm on the panel with Jerry who's doing my final interview next Tuesday so I'm literally judging an AI gaming accelerator
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hackathon today with Google or tomorrow. Janice wants to come because she has FOMO. So she'll probably come. And the other thing, and this is a live, so you just give me your honest reaction. That's fantastic. Are you free tomorrow to shoot? I'm going
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to be there. Okay, cool. Yeah. So it's like, it feels like very insider trading because we're literally judging, like it's co-hosted by Supercell, the AI lab that we're applying to. I'm on the panel. That's pretty crazy. All right. We'll see you.
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Bring the camera, document it, and it will capture it for you guys. We'll see you there.
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We're at the Hackathon. All the people are building AI games. They've been spending since like 9 a.m. this morning building... In about 10 minutes, I'm going to go back in the back rooms. Teams are going to present to me one by one, one
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with another judge. We'll ask questions, get to see what's happening in gaming, what these teams put together in a matter of a couple of hours. Honestly, the AI wave and acceleration right now is crazy. So, excited to be here, excited to take part.
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It was a learning experience. A humbling experience too. Absolutely. All right, good luck. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
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That's why we built a game where your imagination is the only boundary. So the demos are really cool, but I think the bigger thing is what this means for you if you're building. It used to take something like maybe a couple
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of weeks to get an MVP of a project up. With AI coding and the way things are accelerating, you can actually build an MVP in one day. And so what that means for you is if you've thought about starting a startup or want
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to build something, like now is the time. I was thinking about a book. I'm rereading Elon Musk's autobiography or biography. And there's this moment where he has a decision to, I think, either go to Stanford or move to Silicon
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Valley. Or there's this moment where he has this decision to either go one direction or move to Silicon Valley. And I can't remember the two distinctions, but he talks to a mentor, he's like, what should I do? And he's like, listen, Elon, the
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internet wave only happens once in a lifetime. So you should go to Silicon Valley and build tech companies. I think right now we are in the midst of a very real AI wave I don't know when the next one, like the next technology
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is going to happen. And so I think you should be building right now. Like it's happening now. I'm in the room. I'm seeing what's possible. It's really silly, but I really liked this food robots project. So you can take a picture of your
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food and it automatically creates a robot, like 3D animated based out of your food.
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So like if you take a picture of shrimp tempura, it's like, you know, mussels are like tempura and it's like sword is like a shrimp tempura tail and stuff.
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and then you can actually fight against other food robots. And like in a matter of a couple of minutes, you can generate full 3D models from photos of food that actually fight and they have stats and everything. Like that would have taken weeks,
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if not months to build. There's never been a better time to be a builder.
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It's so cool. One thing that's been kind of funny for me as I started making content is learning that a lot of these business influencers think it's really cool to box, to fight. So they bring a cameraman to the gym and they go
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punch some bags or something. But then you watch it and you're like, you can't fight. It's just really obvious to people who know what they're doing.
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here just kind of catching up on my investment side of the business. So I thought maybe I'd walk you through like actually how we invest in L7B, what we invest in, some tips for you if you either want to raise from us or
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you're just an entrepreneur that's building a business. So first, what we invest in. Like really clearly, I think we invest in opportunities. And my number one tip if you're an entrepreneur who wants to raise capital or just wants to build something is finding
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great opportunities is honestly like 80% of the work. The execution and all that, It only really works if you have a great opportunity. So I define a good opportunity in four ways. First is a large market. I really think like you're just wasting
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your time. If you're chasing like a $10,000 a month business, even if you don't want to scale it, playing in a big sandbox, multi-billion dollar business just makes your life easier because you can take a very small sliver, still build something magical. Second,
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there needs to be a disruption, a chasm, something that's causing a new need in that market that hasn't existed previously. And the third thing is you need an insight on how to fill that chasm. So it could be that there's a new technology,
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there's a process that you know that you can apply from a different market to that market, but you need to personally know a way to actually solve that customer's problem. And the fourth thing, and this is sort of not unique to L7D, but
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it's really important to us and frankly not important to a lot of people, is it has to, what we call, move humanity forward. So move humanity forward just means that the space and the people in it that you're building Their life should be
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better by you insisting in building your business. So you can make a lot of money building gambling sites, now there's prediction markets, there's OnlyFans, like all these things.
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Lots of money to be made in that. Not money I'm interested in. I'm not really doing it for the money, so like the last thing I want to invest in is something that just makes me money and it's kind of just bad for
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humanity. Today's the big day. We're headed to the final interview for the Super Solid Celebrator.
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This is like the big moment that we've been working towards. Obviously, if we get in, it could fundamentally alter the trajectory of the business, of the game that we're building. This is something that we've been working for for like a full month straight,
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just heads down, grinding. And now we get to see if the hard work pays off or not. I was thinking about this morning, I'm not actually nervous about the interview. generally feel like I've just done everything I can to stack
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the odds in my favor. Over the last month, I've put in all the work.
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I know I've left nothing on the table, so whatever happens, happens. If we don't get in, we're gonna build this company either way, but if we do get in, it's gonna be epic. It'll make for great vlogs, and you get two free trips
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to Lapland, so yeah, I'm hoping we get in. We'll see how it goes. The ability to actually learn from Supercell is super interesting. I am both approaching this as someone who I think has a lot of experience building companies and
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legitimately no experience building gaming companies and I recognize that I'm a complete beginner and I just want to learn. Supercell being literally one of maybe four or five companies that have ever done this, I think it's super valuable to not only be a
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part of the Accelerator but to have a relationship with Supercell post Accelerator.
Topics:startupentrepreneurshipTokyoJapanventure capitalbusiness buildingfounder journeyAI gamingmedia strategyscaling business
