Micoworks COO Yaegashi Ken on Leading a Series B Startup for 18 Months

Yaegashi Ken, COO of Micoworks, breaks down how he structured his first 18 months after a ¥3.5B Series B, covering role division, strategy frameworks, and the LINE-based market thesis.

• Micoworks raised ¥3.5 billion in a Series B led by global investors; Yaegashi joined as COO in June 2022 after roles at Accenture and Supership Holdings (10+ M&As as executive).
• CEO Yamada owns new businesses, Asia dev expansion, and fundraising; Yaegashi owns existing-business growth: sales, marketing, CS, strategy, and HR.
• Market thesis for joining: third-party cookie deprecation forces B2C companies to build owned customer channels; LINE dominates Asian markets and foreign CRM players like Salesforce deprioritize LINE feature development.
• COO time split: roughly 30% recruiting, 30% team management, 10-20% direct customer dialogue, 20-30% forward strategy; he kept customer time deliberately protected.
• Pre-joining preparation: read the CEO’s top 10 recommended books and reviewed approximately 200 pages of Yamada’s advisor meeting notes to internalize his decision-making framework.
• Strategy rule: avoid 1-to-1 feature-to-customer expansion, which creates feature debt used by only 1% of users; features must address needs shared by 95% of the target segment.
• Goal-setting uses three tiers — stretch (OKR), moderate (achievable baseline), and cash-commit (floor) — deliberately decoupled from individual performance reviews to prevent OKRs becoming mandatory targets.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube